Dig a Little Deeper

The Wisconsin union rights debacle has raised a few eyebrows among the electoral-numbers crowd. Wisconsin has a fairly unique recall process for sitting elected officials, making eight Republican state senators vulnerable to a recall immediately:

(a) The qualified electors of the state, of any county, city, village, or town, of any congressional, legislative, judicial, town sanitary, or school district, or of any prosecutorial unit may petition for the recall of any incumbent elective official by filing a petition with the same official or agency with whom nomination papers or declarations of candidacy for the office are filed demanding the recall of the officeholder.

(b) Except as provided in par. (c), a petition for recall of an officer shall be signed by electors equal to at least 25% of the vote cast for the office of governor at the last election within the same district or territory as that of the officeholder being recalled. . . .

(s) No petition for recall of an officer may be offered for filing prior to the expiration of one year after commencement of the term of office for which the officer is elected.

(Excerpted by ThinkProgress)



The Swing State Project went one step further, creating a table of all WI state senators who could be recalled if constituents collected just north of 15,000 signatures in their districts. As usual, a fairly thoughtful exercise from SSP. The table includes each vulnerable senator's win margin in 2008. SSP goes on to highlight Dan Kapanke, the state senator who challenged incumbent US House Rep Ron Kind (WI-03) and lost in 2010. SSP notes that Kapanke only won his district in 2008 by 3%.

SSP concludes that Kapanke is perhaps the lowest hanging fruit for a recall effort, but there's a crucial data source that SSP has totally ignored: how Kapanke faired in his state senate district in 2010. While Kapanke had been an incumbent in 2008, it was only his first campaign as a sitting senator, and perhaps his campaign was not fully versed on using the resources of an incumbent. He also may have become more popular during his high profile campaign against Ron Kind. It's kind of hard to guess. On the other hand, the data is readily available:

It turns out that in the 2010 congressional race, Dan Kapanke lost his own state Senate district by almost 5,000 votes.

Joe MIller Needs A Better Lawyer

In a few hours, the State of Alaska will begin to count the write-in ballots from the midterm elections. Expect results to be reported by state house district. There are roughly 11,500 more write-in ballots than ballots cast for Republican Joe Miller, so he is understandably concerned with exactly how those ballots are counted, and for whom they will be counted. His also-Republican opponent, Senator Lisa Murkowski, ran as a write-in candidate, and the presumption is that the vast majority of the 91,000 write-in votes will have her name on them.

Miller is seeking every advantage he can get, especially in knocking out any misspellings or permutations of Lisa Murkowski's name. To this end, he is seeking an injunction against the Department of Elections for implementing their plan to count ballots this year. Specifically, he contends that the directions allow for counting misspellings of Murkowski's name and would 1) incorrectly include 'protest votes' of people who intentionally misspelled her name (because people would apparently do that in Joe Miller-land) in Murkowski's vote total and 2) violate state law requiring the write-in section to contain the candidate's name "as it appears on the write-in declaration of candidacy" to count for that candidate. Joe Miller's legal team thinks that "as it appears..." requires perfect spelling. They note that the legislature says that there can be "no exception" to the rule that the name must be on the ballot "as it appears on the write-in declaration of candidacy."

Obviously, "as it appears..." is a very harsh standard, but that is what is required by law. Miller's suit notes that a vote cannot be counted if there is any deviation between the name of the candidate on the ballot and the name as it appears on the declaration of candidacy, "no exceptions." Alongside with deviant spelling, reasons for rejecting write-in ballots must include deviation in ink color, deviation in the size or shape of every individual letter, deviation in the placement of the dot over Murkowski's 'i', deviation in line thickness, and deviation in writing implement. Lisa Murkowski's campaign to provide supporters with wristbands that displayed her name clearly was mislead; they should have provided self-inking stamps to their supporters with the exact image of her signature "as it appears on the write-in declaration of candidacy." Of course, the original form would have to have been stamped with one too. With the write lawyering, Joe Miller could whittle down Murkowski's vote share to a literal 0. I don't know why he's wasting time with these amateurs who just want correct spelling when the standard that he's advocating for requires far more.

Minnesota Majority Voter Suppression Tactics

In the absence any evidence that enough voter fraud exists in America to turn any election, conservatives are pouring money into "uncovering" instances of voter fraud. Last night, I was able to attend an event with one of the foot soldiers of the voter intimidation effort in Minnesota, the blogger over at Fightin' Words, North Star Tea Party Patriots Media Relations Director Walter Hudson. In prepared remarks, he identified two goals for his tea party group this year: elect judges and stop voter fraud. He willingly acknowledged that there is no evidence of wide-spread voter fraud; so it is incumbent on the coalition of Minnesota Majority, the North Star Tea Party Patriots, and Voters Alliance to manufacture that evidence. Conservative paranoid delusion holds that the 2008 Minnesota Senate race was stolen by fraudulent Democratic votes.

When pressed on exactly what the Minnesota Majority tactics would be, Mr. Hudson gave this answer:

1) His group would wear buttons asking elections officials to ID the wearer. A federal judge yesterday instructed that this counts as electioneering and could not be done in a polling place. 2) The group would be flagging any buses which delivered voters to the polls, as the conservative groups believe that buses of voters vote multiple times at multiple locations 3) Staffing a hotline to help document cases such as these.

Obvious problem with point #2 (explicated at 1:58 in the video) is that there is no obvious way to tell if a bus carrying "a bunch of voters" is engaging in double-voting. The Minnesota coalition of conservatives pursuing this "voter fraud" story will clearly presume that any organized group of voters is engaging in voter fraud. After all, the warrant for believing that voter fraud was being perpetrated by ACORN despite evidence of an absence was the fact that they were registering low-income voters.

Today On "Not My Job"

Come November 3rd, there's going to be a lot of declarations about what expected Republican gains in the House and Senate "mean." What is this election "about?"--it's a pretty stupid question, but not one that I am above engaging in. Of course elections are about many things to many people, and within the pundit class, asking it is simply a way of defining prestige. It is essentially a game of who will be the first to voice what becomes the consensus position.

On a more serious note, the election will certainly have concrete consequences for the American political agenda. But what matters most? Control of the House or the number of Republican seats picked up in the Senate? Does the party of the speaker or the number of seats that the majority controls matter more? To start answering these questions, I did the simplest possible test- is the number of major legislative accomplishments correlated with the President's party controlling more seats in the House and Senate. If we believe that "elections matter," we would expect to see a fairly strong correlation. Note: I am not a political scientist, hence the title of this post, but I do own a copy of Microsoft Excel and have statistical training.

The data represented in these graphs is the number of "Major Legislative Accomplishments" listed on Wikipedia for each of the 86th-111th Congresses, i.e. the ones in which we have 100 senators. Over the course of this period, the size of the House has held constant at 435 members with floor votes, with the exception of the 86th Congress, which included an extra two voting members to accomodate Hawaii and Alaska joining the Union. Wikipedia's number of legislative accomplishments is a useful tool here, as it suggests agreement among an informed public about what constitutes a major legislative moment. A more ideal model might involve asking a number of political scientists to quantify exactly how successful each Congress has been, but I can't think of a good reason that those numbers would substantially differ from the raw count of Wikipedia-listed accomplishments.

The number seats belonging to the President's party is directly correlated with legislative accomplishments in both chambers. This matches our intuition that elections have consequences even without reference to the fulfillment of liberal or conservative policy goals. In essence, if a voter wants more things to get accomplished, the rational thing to do is to vote for members the President's party.

The little "r =" numbers tell us how well correlated the numbers of legislative accomplishments is to the number of seats in each house. The Pearson's r for the Senate (.181) tells us that there may be a weak correlation, but the truth is that the relationship isn't statistically significant. Partisan possession of the Senate just doesn't have that big of an effect on how much Congress gets done. The better predictor is partisan make-up of the House. Pearson's r is .505 for the House, which is quite strong in social science terms. The probability of seeing this relationship purely by chance is about 1-in-120, so we can be pretty sure that the relationship is real.

The next question that presents itself is "is the relationship meaningful?" House partisan make-up may not determine the number of legislative accomplishments; they might be results of the same phenomenon, such as Presidential popularity or the economic situation. I would simply be delighted if someone would point me to (or perform) some research on the Presidential popularity possibility. However, the actual make-up of the Congress probably has better a priori explanatory power for what Congress accomplishes than an external consideration like Presidential popularity. As to an economic explanation, we expect high anti-incumbency voting during economic downturns, but the political need for Congressional action increases during these periods. The logic cuts the other way.

My regression model tells us that if Democrats lose about 53 seats in the House (which Nate Silver predicts is the median election night outcome), we could expect a still-above median 14.6 major legislative accomplishments in the 112th Congress. The median number of major legislative accomplishments for a Congress since 1958 is 12.

Is that a meaningful prediction? Probably not, and it certainly doesn't tell us anything about Congressional popularity, President Obama's popularity, the state of the economy, or any number of important questions for the 2012 elections. But it will tell us whether Congress is under or over performing its expected workload in the next two years--relative to a pretty crude expectation. Telling you how crude this projection is? That's somebody else's job.
Update: With only 10 districts not called on the NYTimes electoral map, we can make a final prediction: assuming 243 Republicans in the House (i.e. 192 Democrats) and a 53-47 Senate in the Dems' favor, expect about 14 major pieces of legislation in the next two years.

Health Care Legislative Tactics Doomed 2010 Democrats

The New York Times is out with a poll today from which they draw the conclusion that the demographic coalition that elected President Obama is splintering at the margins, turning Obama voters into Republican or non-voters. Certainly the data tell that story, but I think the more important story is the reason that voters give for abandoning the Democratic party after one of its most successful legislative sessions it has ever had.

The NYT article includes the anecdote gleaned from a post-survey interview of one voter:

Judy Berg, an independent from Morton Grove, Ill., said she voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 because she was “looking for a change,” adding, “the change that ensued was not the change I was looking for but something totally out of left field.”

What was the largest gap between the Obama's campaign sloganeering and the reality of the legislation passed into law? The stimulus package was a campaign promise. TARP was well-publicized and generally acknowledged as a policy that Obama would continue. Financial regulation was a centerpiece of speeches after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in early October 2008. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was a campaign promise, though honestly, nobody is talking about it. Similarly while President Obama has not made good on his pledge to end DADT or close the dubiously legal prison at Guantanamo Bay, most voters aren't driven primarily by these issues (not to mention the electoral alternative is demonstrably worse to anybody who is unhappy about the lack of progress).

Corporate Ads

I'd like to find a copy of this ad attacking Ron Kind(WI-03) ran in the Madison Market on CBS affiliate during 11:00PM CST show, in the first or second adbreak

I just saw this ad, the main complaint of which is that Ron Kind (WI-03) allowed the government to spend money wastefully. Specifically, they list some boilerplate about how the stimulus money was a waste because it didn't turn around the unemployment momentum, then a pure pork project: replacing broken windows on a building owned by the federal government.

In my neighborhood, when there's a building on your block with gaping holes in the windows, we call it a nuisance. Dilapidated buildings depreciate property values in the entire neighborhood. If that building were on my block, I would ask the owner to fix it up. If not to inhabit it, then at least to dress it up well enough to ensure that it will sell quickly. The incumbent's position is "fix buildings". He probably voted for a bill which included a line item like "Federal building maintenance- Replace Windows;" now he's being attacked for it. That's silly, because the logical outcome of this ad is that the challenger in the race would prefer to "not fix buildings." Who would put up such an obviously bankrupt ad?

Well, turned out it's one of those old post-Citizens United corporate speech money holes. I'm not really sure I got its exact name correctly because I can't find it on the web, and the voice said it really quickly. I think it was, "National Foundation of Independent Businesses." I found a National Federation Independent Businesses but I don't think it was it.

Rapid Response No-Nos

One of the biggest questions that arises in a political campaign is whether or not and how to respond to accusations. John Kerry was famously "Switft Boated" because he did not respond to allegations stemming from the three purple hearts he was awarded in Vietnam. Then-senator Obama's Philadelphia speech addressing race in America was considered a brilliant response to the Jeremiah Wright-themed attacks that Team Clinton had been throwing around.

Generally, it seems that as an attack is more squirrelly and weird, and doesn't quite click with the general public, it's probably best to ignore it. My case in point?: WitchDonnell.

The 1999 video of Christine O'Donnell isn't terribly damaging. It's weird and kind of off-putting, but not so bad by itself. Her ad in response to the allegation that, I gather from her response, ran 'she's a witch', in which she flatly denies the witch thing elevates the 'controversy' to a new level. Not only does it grant credence to the idea that maybe she really is a witch and is playing some quick defense, but there's nothing quite as un-senatorial as putting up an ad on TV that starts out with "I'm a Witch". Beyond that, in the youtube era, she looks a lot stupider than she really needs to because there are people with computers and an hour of time on their hands who just enjoy making people look stupid.

Of course, no one really cares about these little things except for political junkies. That is, until you put up an ad on tv that just begs people to search youtube for "O'Donnell Witch", which won't end well for her.

The Numbers of Islamophobia

Is there a political downside for the GOP for trading in Islamophobia?

The recent outbursts against a moderate Islamic center in New York City have crossed a qualitative line.  The somewhat coded Islamophobia of the Bush Administration has exploded into a full scale anti-Muslim campaign, with GOP heavyweights voicing opinions against building expressly moderate and modern Islamic centers and mosques.

Let's ground our instincts in some research.  GOP party identification was in a state of free fall between 2001 and 2007, as political scientists Matt Barreto and Dino Bozonelos report.  72% of American Muslims supported candidate Bush in the October of 2000, but that number had slipped to 7% in 2007.  Clearly the "War Against Islamic Extremism", the failures of the Bush administration to distinguish between loyal Americans and the enemy, and rampant discrimination damaged the Republican brand in muslim communities.

By 2008, 49% of American Muslims considered themselves Democrats; 8% reported a Republican affiliation, and 36% were independents.***

There is obviously very little room for Republican support to drop as a result of demonizing Muslims, but Democrats might be missing a big opportunity if they don't reach out to partner with local mosques to organize those voters.

Muslims who regularly attend religious services are not a highly concentrated constituency in any particular congressional district: Table at left is Dr. Shane Martin's (pdf) estimate of District-level concentration of practicing Muslims.  There are only twenty districts where there is predicted to be more than a marginal Muslim  presence in the electorate.

These communities are not decisive voting blocs in presidential-year elections, but if mobilized in an off-year, could provide a relatively large package of votes to Democrats who speak up for the values of openness and inclusion.

This estimate is also based on a survey which implies about 1.5 million practicing Muslims in America, so organizing these networks may have an outsized impact in mobilizing pockets of the other estimated 4.25 million American Muslims.

According to the estimates upon which the above table is based, NY-13 and VA-11 are the only competitive districts which have a muslim population > 2%. Both are lean Democratic with freshman representatives. The campaign managers in these districts might find that hiring an organizer to work exclusively with the Muslim community could pay off big in the hunt to get to 50%+1.

Even though other districts are not in play, candidates in NJ-08, CA-08, PA-02, PA-01, and NY-14 could use this opportunity to make fundraising asks and establish donor networks to funnel money to other Dems in trouble. American Muslims are better educated and wealthier than the general population. Masjid attending Muslims present a donor base which may be mobilized by sticking to the founders' principles.

The more outward displays of Islamophobia may have the effect of diminishing Muslim voting in a vacuum, but in cases where Democratic campaigns have the resources to reach out to these communities, a small investment could have a big impact.  In organizing mosque-goers, Democrats can offer American Muslims a voice in the political process and earn long-term allies as well as swing-district votes in 2010.

*** That is according to the CAIR poll which used a sample compiled of names that sounded Islamic- a more methodologically sophisticated Pew poll put the Party ID numbers at D 63% (including leaners), R 11%, I 26% NB: The twenty congressional districts with the highest estimated proportion of muslim voters follows in order of % Muslim (highest to lowest): NY-13 NJ-08 CA-08 PA-02 PA-01 VA-11 NY-14 NY-15 NY-08 NY-12 NY-10 NY-11 NY-09 NY-06 VA-08 GA-05 MI-13 MI-14 NJ-13 MD-08