In 2012, Democratic candidates for the Wisconsin state legislature received more votes than Republicans in November but won just 39 of 99 districts.From here.
Showing posts with label 2012 election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2012 election. Show all posts
31 January 2017
Gerrymandering Still A Problem
28 December 2012
Fiscal Cliff Timebomb Still Ticking
It is a Friday which is the second to last business day of 2012.
A host of taxpayer friendly provisions of the Internal Revenue Code expire Tuesday (most of which were tax cuts made while George W. Bush was President that were given expiration dates in order to comply with Congressional budgeting rules). A 2011 deal on the federal budget deficit mandates automatic major federal government spending cuts as well in 2013, only a few of which (apparently among them the Defense budget) have been modified in subsequent legislation.
Transfer Tax Expiration
As of this post, Congress has not taken action to address these matters, which are collectively known as the fiscal cliff. This is particularly relevant in the case of gift and estate taxes: "In 2010, after a year in which the estate tax was zeroed out altogether, Congress passed a law that set the estate tax at 35% and exempted all estates under $5 million, adjusted for inflation. That law expires in January 2013 when the exemption will fall to $1 million and the tax will rise to 55%." The expiration of transfer tax cuts is particular partisan, since, by definition, it involves tax cuts for rich people who haven't earned what they are receiving. Republican calls to repeal the transfer tax system entirely have been replaced by efforts to make the generous provisions of the transfer tax laws in 2012 permanent.
Estate tax reforms are also more time sensitive. If Congress doesn't reach a deal by Monday, people will die in 2013 and be subject to the less generous transfer tax laws unless Congress changes them retroactively, a prospect that grows more faint as each day passes. In contrast, while income tax rules govern transactions taking place in 2013, (almost) no one is required to file a tax return paying taxes on those 2013 transactions until April 15, 2014, leaving Congress plenty of time to make retroactive changes that have no impact on anyone but tax professionals and business transaction planners.
Prospects For A Deal By Year End Are Modest
The President has offered to preserve the tax breaks for taxpayers making less than $250,000 a year and made some spending proposals. Congressional Republicans discussed, but apparently have failed to pass, a counterproposal that would preserve tax breaks for taxpayers making less than $1,000,000 a year and some different spending proposals. Neither side in the negotiations have indicated that a deal is imminent or outlined the terms of a deal seriously being considered by both sides. This is a game of chicken that most conventional wisdom had assumed would produce a deal and hasn't.
A week from now, the winners of the 2012 elections will be sworn in, but this doesn't change the partisan balance of power in Congress or the Presidency, although it does slightly shuffle the deck by bringing new players into the discussion. Mostly, however, the 2012 elections were not kind of moderates, so the party leadership the controls the flow of bills in the House and Senate respectively may take an even harder line.
Not A True Crisis, But A Serious Moment
Public opinion polls indicate that Republicans will pay a higher price than Democrats for failing to reach a deal on the fiscal cliff.
A resolution of the fiscal cliff is not "must pass" legislation that would trigger a constitutional crisis. The tax laws that will take effect are laws that the United States managed just fine under during the Clinton administration. Everyone knows what the laws will be if no action is taken. The changes will increase tax revenues and reduce government spending. This will reduce the $1,327 billion a year federal budget deficit by an estimated $560 billion dollars a year (which is about 42% of the current federal deficit), and this is what a significant number of Americans want.
The government will not shut down if Congress doesn't reach a fiscal cliff deal. Also, nothing prevents Congress from reaching new deals in 2013 and even making changes to the tax code retroactive.
But, a failure to act will leave a pall of uncertainty over a wide variety of transactions whose tax treatment may be the subject of ongoing discussions and over any plans based on federal spending that faces automatic cuts. Where Congress will not act, it should make this clear immediately to reduce uncertainty.
This sudden shift in the federal government's public finance policies could (according to Keynesian economics) slow down a tepid recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression that followed the financial crisis of 2007, or even trigger a double dip recession before we have fully recovered from the last recession.
The Details
Key elements of the specific elements of the fiscal cliff are discussed here.
Tax Increases
Some highlights are the tax changes other than those in estate and gift taxes are as follows:
* The earned income tax credit will become much less generous.
* A temporary cut in the employee share of Social Security tax rates to 4.2% from the usual 6.2% will expire.
* "People earning more than $50,000 would face an increase in the tax rate on capital gains to 20 percent, from 15 percent. Dividends, which are currently taxed at a 15 percent rate, would also be taxed as ordinary income, with the top rate rising to 39.6 percent. . . . the Affordable Care Act ["Obamacare"] applies a new surtax of 3.8 percent on capital gains for wealthy Americans, pushing the top capital gains rate up to 23.8 percent."
* "Singles who make over $200,000 and married couples who earn over $250,000 would see their tax brackets rise from 33 percent and 35 percent to 36 percent and 39.6 percent, respectively."
* The exclusions from the Alternative Minimum Tax which currently impacts 4 million to 5 million taxpayers with annual incomes between $200,000 and $1 million will expire, causing it to apply to 31 million taxpayers.
The total tax increase will be about $400 billion a year (an increase of about 16%).
The estate and gift tax changes are very abrupt and rather arbitrary. While the 2012 estate and gift tax rates and exemptions were extraordinarily generous, the 2013 transfer tax provisions will be more strict than those that Americans have grown accustomed to for many years.
I have very little sympathy for people who have lost the benefit of extraordinarily low and economy distorting low capital gains and dividend rates, and also have little sympathy for upper middle class and high income families seeing modest increases in their marginal tax rates at a time when the nation is running a large budget deficit.
The earned income tax credit rollback will affect a lot of people who are still struggling after the financial crisis, and the AMT expansion is also probably somewhat overbroad.
A number of alternatives to the scheduled tax provisions for 2013, such as the taxation of some municipal bond income, limitations on the mortgage interest deduction, and limitations on the state and local tax deduction, make better sense than some of the tax changes that are scheduled to take effect.
Spending Cuts
On the public spending side:
* "more than 40 percent of the nearly 5 million Americans [i.e. 2 million people] who have been unemployed for more than six months will lose benefits at year's end."
* Defense spending must be cut by $55 billion a year for each of the next ten years. In 2012, this part of the budget was $716.3 billion, so the cut is about 7.7%.
* non-Defense discretionary spending must be cut by $55 billion a year for each of the next ten years "in everything from infrastructure to schools, to public health and homeland security." In 2012, this part of the budget ws about $655 billion, so the cut is about 8.4%.
* Payments to Medicare providers will be cut by 2% in 2013, an $11 billion cut.
But, "Social Security, Medicaid, supplemental security income, refundable tax credits, the children's health insurance program, the food stamp program and veterans' benefits are excluded from the cuts scheduled under the cliff. The White House has also said that military personnel would be exempt from the cuts."
The impact on the long term unemployed will be harsh, although some if it may be mitigated by migration to federal and state welfare programs.
The non-Defense discretionary spending cuts are probably steeper than can be made without really dire cuts to critical federal government services and programs. The Defense discretionary spending cuts are less catastrophic since they can mostly be dealt with by partially delaying new major military procurement programs muting the impact on operations, but are still deep.
Bottom Line
Most of the provisions of the fiscal cliff are quite tough but most are not horrible and address a genuinely big federal budget deficit by dealing with unduly lenient Bush era tax cuts, temporary tax code provisions meant to be temporary, and by putting pressure on federal spending.
Congress and the President would be best advised to use the fiscal cliff status quo as a baseline to tweak, rather than undoing it on a wholesale basis. At least partial relief for the unemployed, EITC receipients, some of the people newly subject to the AMT, and more urgent aspects of non-defense discretionary spending programs are the areas most in need of tweaking. But, on balance, we are right to end a long era of debt financed tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, which makes up the largest share of the fiscal cliff.
A host of taxpayer friendly provisions of the Internal Revenue Code expire Tuesday (most of which were tax cuts made while George W. Bush was President that were given expiration dates in order to comply with Congressional budgeting rules). A 2011 deal on the federal budget deficit mandates automatic major federal government spending cuts as well in 2013, only a few of which (apparently among them the Defense budget) have been modified in subsequent legislation.
Transfer Tax Expiration
As of this post, Congress has not taken action to address these matters, which are collectively known as the fiscal cliff. This is particularly relevant in the case of gift and estate taxes: "In 2010, after a year in which the estate tax was zeroed out altogether, Congress passed a law that set the estate tax at 35% and exempted all estates under $5 million, adjusted for inflation. That law expires in January 2013 when the exemption will fall to $1 million and the tax will rise to 55%." The expiration of transfer tax cuts is particular partisan, since, by definition, it involves tax cuts for rich people who haven't earned what they are receiving. Republican calls to repeal the transfer tax system entirely have been replaced by efforts to make the generous provisions of the transfer tax laws in 2012 permanent.
Estate tax reforms are also more time sensitive. If Congress doesn't reach a deal by Monday, people will die in 2013 and be subject to the less generous transfer tax laws unless Congress changes them retroactively, a prospect that grows more faint as each day passes. In contrast, while income tax rules govern transactions taking place in 2013, (almost) no one is required to file a tax return paying taxes on those 2013 transactions until April 15, 2014, leaving Congress plenty of time to make retroactive changes that have no impact on anyone but tax professionals and business transaction planners.
Prospects For A Deal By Year End Are Modest
The President has offered to preserve the tax breaks for taxpayers making less than $250,000 a year and made some spending proposals. Congressional Republicans discussed, but apparently have failed to pass, a counterproposal that would preserve tax breaks for taxpayers making less than $1,000,000 a year and some different spending proposals. Neither side in the negotiations have indicated that a deal is imminent or outlined the terms of a deal seriously being considered by both sides. This is a game of chicken that most conventional wisdom had assumed would produce a deal and hasn't.
A week from now, the winners of the 2012 elections will be sworn in, but this doesn't change the partisan balance of power in Congress or the Presidency, although it does slightly shuffle the deck by bringing new players into the discussion. Mostly, however, the 2012 elections were not kind of moderates, so the party leadership the controls the flow of bills in the House and Senate respectively may take an even harder line.
Not A True Crisis, But A Serious Moment
Public opinion polls indicate that Republicans will pay a higher price than Democrats for failing to reach a deal on the fiscal cliff.
A resolution of the fiscal cliff is not "must pass" legislation that would trigger a constitutional crisis. The tax laws that will take effect are laws that the United States managed just fine under during the Clinton administration. Everyone knows what the laws will be if no action is taken. The changes will increase tax revenues and reduce government spending. This will reduce the $1,327 billion a year federal budget deficit by an estimated $560 billion dollars a year (which is about 42% of the current federal deficit), and this is what a significant number of Americans want.
The government will not shut down if Congress doesn't reach a fiscal cliff deal. Also, nothing prevents Congress from reaching new deals in 2013 and even making changes to the tax code retroactive.
But, a failure to act will leave a pall of uncertainty over a wide variety of transactions whose tax treatment may be the subject of ongoing discussions and over any plans based on federal spending that faces automatic cuts. Where Congress will not act, it should make this clear immediately to reduce uncertainty.
This sudden shift in the federal government's public finance policies could (according to Keynesian economics) slow down a tepid recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression that followed the financial crisis of 2007, or even trigger a double dip recession before we have fully recovered from the last recession.
The Details
Key elements of the specific elements of the fiscal cliff are discussed here.
Tax Increases
Some highlights are the tax changes other than those in estate and gift taxes are as follows:
* The earned income tax credit will become much less generous.
* A temporary cut in the employee share of Social Security tax rates to 4.2% from the usual 6.2% will expire.
* "People earning more than $50,000 would face an increase in the tax rate on capital gains to 20 percent, from 15 percent. Dividends, which are currently taxed at a 15 percent rate, would also be taxed as ordinary income, with the top rate rising to 39.6 percent. . . . the Affordable Care Act ["Obamacare"] applies a new surtax of 3.8 percent on capital gains for wealthy Americans, pushing the top capital gains rate up to 23.8 percent."
* "Singles who make over $200,000 and married couples who earn over $250,000 would see their tax brackets rise from 33 percent and 35 percent to 36 percent and 39.6 percent, respectively."
* The exclusions from the Alternative Minimum Tax which currently impacts 4 million to 5 million taxpayers with annual incomes between $200,000 and $1 million will expire, causing it to apply to 31 million taxpayers.
The total tax increase will be about $400 billion a year (an increase of about 16%).
The estate and gift tax changes are very abrupt and rather arbitrary. While the 2012 estate and gift tax rates and exemptions were extraordinarily generous, the 2013 transfer tax provisions will be more strict than those that Americans have grown accustomed to for many years.
I have very little sympathy for people who have lost the benefit of extraordinarily low and economy distorting low capital gains and dividend rates, and also have little sympathy for upper middle class and high income families seeing modest increases in their marginal tax rates at a time when the nation is running a large budget deficit.
The earned income tax credit rollback will affect a lot of people who are still struggling after the financial crisis, and the AMT expansion is also probably somewhat overbroad.
A number of alternatives to the scheduled tax provisions for 2013, such as the taxation of some municipal bond income, limitations on the mortgage interest deduction, and limitations on the state and local tax deduction, make better sense than some of the tax changes that are scheduled to take effect.
Spending Cuts
On the public spending side:
* "more than 40 percent of the nearly 5 million Americans [i.e. 2 million people] who have been unemployed for more than six months will lose benefits at year's end."
* Defense spending must be cut by $55 billion a year for each of the next ten years. In 2012, this part of the budget was $716.3 billion, so the cut is about 7.7%.
* non-Defense discretionary spending must be cut by $55 billion a year for each of the next ten years "in everything from infrastructure to schools, to public health and homeland security." In 2012, this part of the budget ws about $655 billion, so the cut is about 8.4%.
* Payments to Medicare providers will be cut by 2% in 2013, an $11 billion cut.
But, "Social Security, Medicaid, supplemental security income, refundable tax credits, the children's health insurance program, the food stamp program and veterans' benefits are excluded from the cuts scheduled under the cliff. The White House has also said that military personnel would be exempt from the cuts."
The impact on the long term unemployed will be harsh, although some if it may be mitigated by migration to federal and state welfare programs.
The non-Defense discretionary spending cuts are probably steeper than can be made without really dire cuts to critical federal government services and programs. The Defense discretionary spending cuts are less catastrophic since they can mostly be dealt with by partially delaying new major military procurement programs muting the impact on operations, but are still deep.
Bottom Line
Most of the provisions of the fiscal cliff are quite tough but most are not horrible and address a genuinely big federal budget deficit by dealing with unduly lenient Bush era tax cuts, temporary tax code provisions meant to be temporary, and by putting pressure on federal spending.
Congress and the President would be best advised to use the fiscal cliff status quo as a baseline to tweak, rather than undoing it on a wholesale basis. At least partial relief for the unemployed, EITC receipients, some of the people newly subject to the AMT, and more urgent aspects of non-defense discretionary spending programs are the areas most in need of tweaking. But, on balance, we are right to end a long era of debt financed tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, which makes up the largest share of the fiscal cliff.
17 December 2012
Reversions To The Dominant Party Model?
In political science, one of the lesser known, but not that uncommon, bits of middle ground between a true multiparty political system and a one party state is a "dominant party system."
In a dominant party system, there is more than one legally recognized political party and it even wins minor individual political races now and then, but a "dominant party" always wins in a long standing pattern that persists for decades.
Three of the most common examples are the Democratic party in the American "Solid South" from the end of Reconstruction (after the U.S. Civil War) through the 1950s, and PRI in Mexico for a roughly eighty year period, and the LDP in Japan from the establishment of an representative democracy after World War II until quite recently.
Each of those examples of dominant party systems ended. Starting in the 1960s, the "Solid South" was supplanted by a competive Republican party (at least in federal elections), along with "Dixiecrats" and more liberal Democrats. The main opposition party to the PRI took control in Mexico. And, the LDP stumbled in the face of competition from an upstart party to the left of them in Japan (the "Liberal Democratic" party in Japan is actually its more conservative major political party).
But, political realignment seems to have almost run its course in the American South, threatening to make the Republican Party a reincarnated dominant party of the region with a new name. And, this fall, both the PRI in Mexico and the LDP in Japan have been resoundingly restored to power by voters.
Of course, any viable two party system assumes that there will be some alternation of political power at new elections. The conventional wisdom is that once a dominant party system lapses for a bit that the political system in question is no longer a dominant party system. But, what if we are instead seeing a "relapse" in to long term dominant party systems in three regions that have been long accustomed to operating that way with only recent and brief interruptions. Does that bode ill for the political future of the places that are experiencing it?
In a dominant party system, there is more than one legally recognized political party and it even wins minor individual political races now and then, but a "dominant party" always wins in a long standing pattern that persists for decades.
Three of the most common examples are the Democratic party in the American "Solid South" from the end of Reconstruction (after the U.S. Civil War) through the 1950s, and PRI in Mexico for a roughly eighty year period, and the LDP in Japan from the establishment of an representative democracy after World War II until quite recently.
Each of those examples of dominant party systems ended. Starting in the 1960s, the "Solid South" was supplanted by a competive Republican party (at least in federal elections), along with "Dixiecrats" and more liberal Democrats. The main opposition party to the PRI took control in Mexico. And, the LDP stumbled in the face of competition from an upstart party to the left of them in Japan (the "Liberal Democratic" party in Japan is actually its more conservative major political party).
But, political realignment seems to have almost run its course in the American South, threatening to make the Republican Party a reincarnated dominant party of the region with a new name. And, this fall, both the PRI in Mexico and the LDP in Japan have been resoundingly restored to power by voters.
Of course, any viable two party system assumes that there will be some alternation of political power at new elections. The conventional wisdom is that once a dominant party system lapses for a bit that the political system in question is no longer a dominant party system. But, what if we are instead seeing a "relapse" in to long term dominant party systems in three regions that have been long accustomed to operating that way with only recent and brief interruptions. Does that bode ill for the political future of the places that are experiencing it?
12 December 2012
Small Tent Republicans
Reagan, himself a former union president, performed well electorally in part because he won over blue collar Democrats who were union members, the "Reagan Democrats" to his party. But, the legacy left by his decision to fire striking air traffic controllers more profoundly influenced his party.
Frontal attacks on union power in Wisconsin, Ohio and this week, Michigan, have been actions that emphatically say that unions and union members are not welcome in the Republican party.
Republicans have already made entirely clear that people who aren't Christians are welcome in their party. And, Republicans have done a pretty good job of telling people who aren't white, or aren't straight, that they aren't welcome in the Republican party either.
Unions may make up a declining share of the voting public. In Michigan, a union stronghold, only about one in six workers is in a union. Union members have also tended to favor Democrats since times immemorial. But, Republicans had been making bigger inroads with union members in recent elections than with almost any other traditionally Democratic constitutency.
Do Republicans really need to alienate the large number of working class white Christian union members who would otherwise have supported them, kicking one more large group of people out of their already small tent?
Romney's failure to win critical states like Ohio and Michigan, despite the fact that Michigan is the state where he was born, and that Republicans have managed to control state legislatures in both states, more than anything else, can be boiled down to one critical misstep during the financial crisis. Romney urged the federal government to let General Motors and Chrysler, icons of the old industrial, union dominated economy and a major source of regional jobs, die.
The 1950s that Republicans want the country to return to, at least in terms of social issues, was one build by big manufacturing companies with heavily unionized workforces.
But, Republicans have included unions in the handbasket they think that the nation is going to hell in, along with abortion, birth control, gays, fiat money, feminism, secularism, Muslims, immigrants, taxes, government regulations, welfare recipients, blacks, newspaper reporters, professors, science, drugs, terrorism, government involvement in health care, public employees, public lands, mass transit, the metric system, soccer, gun control, and art house movies. Republicans are convinced that global power is still about how many battleships you own, but they abhore foreign aid.
At the end of the day, Republicans seem to be working hard to confine themselves to a small tent. They have a coalition that can still consistently win majorities in Southern states and on the Great Plains. And, when voters turnout is low and their candidates aren't affilicted with foot in mouth disease, they can come close to attaining majorities nationally. But, in politics, the secret to getting elected is to have a lot of friends, and the Republican party seems intent on unfriending large parts of the American public as fast as it can.
Is Wisconsin proof that union busting doesn't hurt Republicans politically?
Suffice it to say that I expect Republicans could lose ground in Michigan in 2014, and probably in other places where unions have any power as well, as a result of their action. Or, not.
One of the undercovered stories of the 2012 election is that Republicans paid almost no political price for the union busting actions they took in 2011 which sparked huge protests and a series of recall elections.
In 2010, Democrats lost the Governorship, a U.S. Senate seat, the State Treasurer's office, and a net two seats in Congress, four state senate seats (costing Democrats their majority in the state senate), and thirteen state house seats (costing Democrats their majority in the state house). Democrats clawed back a narrow majority in the state senate in midterm recall elections. But, when the dust settled after the November 2012 election, Republicans were in almost the same dominant position that they were in after the 2010 election.
Republicans retained majorities in both houses of the state legislature. They had just one less state senate seat than they had after the 2010 election, and had one more state house seat (at the expense of the sole indpendent in the state house in 2010). Democrats held onto their other U.S. Senate seat and cast their electoral college votes for President Obama, but ultimately, Republican elected officials at the state level paid no price for their union busting in Wisconsin, despite the fact that the 2012 election had higher turnout since it is a Presidential election, than the 2010 election, a factor that should have favored Democrats.
Ohio Republican also gained control of the state's government in 2010.
Michigan Republicans were swept into control of state government in 2010, the same year that Republicans made inroad in Wisconsin.
Yet, Michigan Republicans tellingly waited until after they had an opportunity to see if Wisconsin Republicans paid a political price for their union busting before acting themselves. They concluded, probably rightly, that Wisconsin Republicans paid a short term political price for their move, but that less than two years later, voters seemed to no longer care. So, they decided to go ahead with an anti-union law of their own and passed it as quickly as possible so that any outrage over their actions would have a full twenty-three months to die down before voters rendered their verdict on them.
While unions are relatively strong in Wisconsin compared to most states, they are far more influential in Michigan. So, the electorate in Michigan may be less forgiving there. And, Republicans lost four state house seats in 2012.
Frontal attacks on union power in Wisconsin, Ohio and this week, Michigan, have been actions that emphatically say that unions and union members are not welcome in the Republican party.
Republicans have already made entirely clear that people who aren't Christians are welcome in their party. And, Republicans have done a pretty good job of telling people who aren't white, or aren't straight, that they aren't welcome in the Republican party either.
Unions may make up a declining share of the voting public. In Michigan, a union stronghold, only about one in six workers is in a union. Union members have also tended to favor Democrats since times immemorial. But, Republicans had been making bigger inroads with union members in recent elections than with almost any other traditionally Democratic constitutency.
Do Republicans really need to alienate the large number of working class white Christian union members who would otherwise have supported them, kicking one more large group of people out of their already small tent?
Romney's failure to win critical states like Ohio and Michigan, despite the fact that Michigan is the state where he was born, and that Republicans have managed to control state legislatures in both states, more than anything else, can be boiled down to one critical misstep during the financial crisis. Romney urged the federal government to let General Motors and Chrysler, icons of the old industrial, union dominated economy and a major source of regional jobs, die.
The 1950s that Republicans want the country to return to, at least in terms of social issues, was one build by big manufacturing companies with heavily unionized workforces.
But, Republicans have included unions in the handbasket they think that the nation is going to hell in, along with abortion, birth control, gays, fiat money, feminism, secularism, Muslims, immigrants, taxes, government regulations, welfare recipients, blacks, newspaper reporters, professors, science, drugs, terrorism, government involvement in health care, public employees, public lands, mass transit, the metric system, soccer, gun control, and art house movies. Republicans are convinced that global power is still about how many battleships you own, but they abhore foreign aid.
At the end of the day, Republicans seem to be working hard to confine themselves to a small tent. They have a coalition that can still consistently win majorities in Southern states and on the Great Plains. And, when voters turnout is low and their candidates aren't affilicted with foot in mouth disease, they can come close to attaining majorities nationally. But, in politics, the secret to getting elected is to have a lot of friends, and the Republican party seems intent on unfriending large parts of the American public as fast as it can.
Is Wisconsin proof that union busting doesn't hurt Republicans politically?
Suffice it to say that I expect Republicans could lose ground in Michigan in 2014, and probably in other places where unions have any power as well, as a result of their action. Or, not.
One of the undercovered stories of the 2012 election is that Republicans paid almost no political price for the union busting actions they took in 2011 which sparked huge protests and a series of recall elections.
In 2010, Democrats lost the Governorship, a U.S. Senate seat, the State Treasurer's office, and a net two seats in Congress, four state senate seats (costing Democrats their majority in the state senate), and thirteen state house seats (costing Democrats their majority in the state house). Democrats clawed back a narrow majority in the state senate in midterm recall elections. But, when the dust settled after the November 2012 election, Republicans were in almost the same dominant position that they were in after the 2010 election.
Republicans retained majorities in both houses of the state legislature. They had just one less state senate seat than they had after the 2010 election, and had one more state house seat (at the expense of the sole indpendent in the state house in 2010). Democrats held onto their other U.S. Senate seat and cast their electoral college votes for President Obama, but ultimately, Republican elected officials at the state level paid no price for their union busting in Wisconsin, despite the fact that the 2012 election had higher turnout since it is a Presidential election, than the 2010 election, a factor that should have favored Democrats.
Ohio Republican also gained control of the state's government in 2010.
Michigan Republicans were swept into control of state government in 2010, the same year that Republicans made inroad in Wisconsin.
Yet, Michigan Republicans tellingly waited until after they had an opportunity to see if Wisconsin Republicans paid a political price for their union busting before acting themselves. They concluded, probably rightly, that Wisconsin Republicans paid a short term political price for their move, but that less than two years later, voters seemed to no longer care. So, they decided to go ahead with an anti-union law of their own and passed it as quickly as possible so that any outrage over their actions would have a full twenty-three months to die down before voters rendered their verdict on them.
While unions are relatively strong in Wisconsin compared to most states, they are far more influential in Michigan. So, the electorate in Michigan may be less forgiving there. And, Republicans lost four state house seats in 2012.
03 December 2012
Why Was Colorado Presidential Polling So Off?
In the polling data provided to [The New Republic] by Mitt Romney's chief internal pollster Neil Newhouse, Romney has a 2.5 point lead on President Barack Obama in Colorado over the weekend before Election Day. As you know, the President won Colorado by almost 5.5 points. The range of explanations offered by Newhouse in this story vary from Latino voters (which while significant, don't fully cover the spread), over-reliance on self-identified "highly likely voters," and the perils of polling on a Sunday. Each one of these, the story goes, unintentionally helped contribute to the false sense of optimism projected by the GOP going into Election Day.From Colorado Pols.
Needless to say, an 8 percentage point gap is far outside the margin of error for any decent poll. Romney's internal polling was similarly biased in other swing states.
President Obama's internal polling was widely credited with being far more accurate nationwide in a data driven, technically flawlessly executed campaign was criticized for being too numbers driven.
Nate Silver at the New York Times sponsored 538 blog, who maintained a comprehensive running list of Presidential race surveys prior to the 2012 election did better, predicting an Obama win in the end in Colorado, but by a much smaller margin than the 5.5 percentage points by which Obama ultimately won Colorado. Since he relied upon multiple polling operations rather than just one, his underestimate is even more notable as it should be robust to poll specific methodology mistakes.
The bottom line is that the pollsters don't have good explanations for why they screwed up, although problems with their estimates of likely voter demographics based on off year turnout in 2010 and ignoring the impact of President' Obama's get out the vote effort (particularly in key swing states like Colorado) seem to be among the most likely culprits.
An inability to accurately poll Colorado is a particularly troubling thing for someone trying to predict electoral college winners as Colorado is a bellwhether state. It was the marginal state that pushed President Obama over the top to an electoral college majority in both 2008 and 2012. Indeed, one could accurately have determined the winner in both elections simply by looking at Denver's first ring suburbs like Araphahoe and Jefferson counties, which is where the median voters in Colorado live.
16 November 2012
Moderate Republicans Vanishing
Just ten years ago, in the 108th Senate, there were 10 Democrats with DW-Nominate scores between −.3 and -.2 (the more negative, the more liberal), and 8 Republicans with DW-Nominate scores between .2 and .3 (the more positive, the more conservative). And there were 6 Democrats between −.2 and 0 and 7 Republicans between 0 and .2, which is probably a better reflection of what we mean by truly moderate Senators (again, with all of this measuring the distance of Senators from their colleagues past and present based on their voting records).
In the upcoming Senate, we have to do some extrapolation because we don’t have DW-Nominate scores for those who are new to the Senate (and the DW-Nominate constant scores for the House cannot simply be applied to the Senate). But Boris Shor at the University of Chicago did some calculations, about the ideologies of the Senate candidates based on their votes (where applicable) or their stated positions via VoteSmart, and as it turns out it seems pretty clear that the new Republicans in the 113th Senate are at least as conservative as the median Senate Republican in the 112th. And for my purposes, all that matters is that these new Senate Republicans will not be among the most liberal members of the Republican Senate caucus. In light of the numbers and everything we know about them, I’m willing to make that assertion about Ted Cruz, Jeff Flake, and Deb Fischer, three of the most conservative Republicans running for Senate seats this past election. The Democrats are trickier, in that there are four new Senators who will caucus with the Democrats (including Angus King) who might be among the most conservative Senate Democrats: Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, Angus King, and Tim Kaine. In light of Donnelly’s very moderate voting record (almost perfectly the midpoint between Republicans and Democrats, according to Shor’s numbers), he in particular looks like he will be among the most conservative Democrats, but others in this group might also end up being quite moderate. To avoid making unwarranted assumptions, in the numbers below I put only one of these four, Donnelly, between −.2 and 0, and the remainder more than −.3 away from 0. If I am wrong in placing these four, that still doesn’t change the number very much. And, more importantly, it doesn’t change the really interesting and striking story — the dramatic drop in the number of moderate Republicans.
Here are the numbers for the new Senate:
Democrats between −.3 and -.2: 12
Democrats between −.2 and 0: 5
Republicans between .3 and .2: 3
Republicans between .2 and 0: 1
From here
Thus, ten years ago there were 8 somewhat moderate Republicans and 7 very moderate Republicans in the Senate, and 10 somewhat moderate Democrats and 6 very moderate Democrats in the Senate.
Now there are roughly similar numbers of moderate Democrats, but only 3 somewhat moderate Republicans (down by 5) and only one very moderate Republican (down by 6).
11 November 2012
Hope For Immigration Reform?
Many commentators have interpreted a failure of Republicans to win over Hispanic voters as a key factor in Mitt Romney's defeat in last week's the Presidential election and called for openness to more liberal immigration policies as a targeted way of addressing this problem without wider reforms in the party's message. In particular, Republican leaders in Congress appear to have agreed and are preparing to embrace immigration liberalization.
Immigration is an issue that has split both political parties.
Democrats are split between those who feel that liberal immigration policies embrace its broad non-white demographic makeup and is a last front in the effort to end racism, and those who are worried about immigrants making the job market tighter for working class Americans in the Democratic party's self-proclaimed role as advocate for those who are less well off. (Democratic politicians, for example, tend to be strongly against economic policies that facilitate the offshoring of jobs.)
Republicans are split between those who see cheap labor and free immigration as natural extrapolations of a generalized Republican committment to free market economics, and Republicans who are xenophobic, racist, and who feel that the erosion of the economic well being of white blue collar men over the last several decades is mostly due to Hispanic immigration.
President Obama has tread carefully, advancing the relatively timid reform of the DREAM Act, first legislatively, and when that bill stalled in Congress, via an executive order related to immigration law enforcement that Romney had pledged to continue into his administration.
The DREAM Act would have offered a path to a green card and eventual citizenship to undocumentated immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children (and hence made no personal decision to break immigration laws), without criminal records, who are pursuing higher education or military service. This is the low hanging fruit of immigration reform, targeting a population fully assimiliated to U.S. culture who appear to be on track to be "makers" rather than "takers" in their contributions to society, whose presence is a fait accompli and calls upon the etiquette of "present company excluded" to avoid more generalized condemnation lodged by xenophobes against immigrants.
But, President Obama has not managed to rally a political consensus around a broader reform of U.S. immigration laws, despite its attractiveness as a potential engine for sustainable and fundamental economic growth.
I am a strong supporter of a more liberalized immigration policy, and hope that regardless of whether Republican Congressional leaders are actually reading the tea leaves correctly, that this election may move this one issue forward a little.
Immigration is an issue that has split both political parties.
Democrats are split between those who feel that liberal immigration policies embrace its broad non-white demographic makeup and is a last front in the effort to end racism, and those who are worried about immigrants making the job market tighter for working class Americans in the Democratic party's self-proclaimed role as advocate for those who are less well off. (Democratic politicians, for example, tend to be strongly against economic policies that facilitate the offshoring of jobs.)
Republicans are split between those who see cheap labor and free immigration as natural extrapolations of a generalized Republican committment to free market economics, and Republicans who are xenophobic, racist, and who feel that the erosion of the economic well being of white blue collar men over the last several decades is mostly due to Hispanic immigration.
President Obama has tread carefully, advancing the relatively timid reform of the DREAM Act, first legislatively, and when that bill stalled in Congress, via an executive order related to immigration law enforcement that Romney had pledged to continue into his administration.
The DREAM Act would have offered a path to a green card and eventual citizenship to undocumentated immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children (and hence made no personal decision to break immigration laws), without criminal records, who are pursuing higher education or military service. This is the low hanging fruit of immigration reform, targeting a population fully assimiliated to U.S. culture who appear to be on track to be "makers" rather than "takers" in their contributions to society, whose presence is a fait accompli and calls upon the etiquette of "present company excluded" to avoid more generalized condemnation lodged by xenophobes against immigrants.
But, President Obama has not managed to rally a political consensus around a broader reform of U.S. immigration laws, despite its attractiveness as a potential engine for sustainable and fundamental economic growth.
I am a strong supporter of a more liberalized immigration policy, and hope that regardless of whether Republican Congressional leaders are actually reading the tea leaves correctly, that this election may move this one issue forward a little.
Religious Diversity On Rise On Congress
The U.S. House of Representatives has two new members who don't identify as Christians (and lost one) as a the result of last week's election, the U.S. Senate also has two new members who don't identify as Christians. Defining what these members do believe is rather more complicated. Mormon's meanwhile, have been common on Capital Hill for a while.
From the New York Times, Mark Oppenheimer, "Politicians Who Reject Labels Based on Religion" (November 9, 2012) via Gene Expression.
Notably, all but one of the five non-Christians discussed in the New York Times story hail from the Western U.S. (as do a many of the Mormons in Congress).
Also, notably, prejudice against a candidate's religious beliefs was not a particularly important factor in any of these candidate's races, nor was it a particular important factor in the Presidenital race (some accused President Obama who was secular in his youth and converted to Protestant Christianity as an adult, of being a Muslim, and some villified Romney for being a Mormon, but neither attack had much influence on voters).
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, is a Mormon; there have been Mormon members of the cabinet; and there are 15 Mormons in Congress. . . .
For the real underdog story in the elections this year, you have to look further out on the margins of popular respectability. Consider the half-Hindu yoga practitioner just elected to Congress from Hawaii. Or the new Buddhist senator. Or the two religiously unaffiliated women headed for the House and the Senate. . . .
Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat and an Iraq war veteran who won a seat in the House from Hawaii, is the daughter of a Hindu mother and a Roman Catholic father. She calls herself Hindu, a first for a member of Congress. But it is not quite that simple. “I identify as a Hindu,” Ms. Gabbard wrote in an e-mail on Thursday. “However, I am much more into spirituality than I am religious labels.” “In that sense,” she added, “I am a Hindu in the mold of the most famous Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, who is my hero and role model.” Ms. Gabbard wrote that she “was raised in a multicultural, multirace, multifaith family” that allowed her “to spend a lot of time studying and contemplating upon both the Bhagavad-Gita and the teachings of Jesus Christ in the New Testament.” Today, her spiritual practice is neither Catholic nor traditionally Hindu. “My attempts to work for the welfare of others and the planet is the core of my spiritual practice,” Ms. Gabbard wrote. “Also, every morning I take time to remember my relationship with God through the practice of yoga meditation and reading verses from the Bhagavad-Gita. From the perspective of the Bhagavad-Gita, the spiritual path as I have described here is known as karma yoga and bhakti yoga.”
Ms. Gabbard won the Congressional seat of Mazie Hirono, who just became the first Asian-American woman elected to the Senate. Ms. Hirono is a “nonpracticing Buddhist” who “considers religion a personal matter,” a spokeswoman said. She is thus the first Buddhist (sort of) in the United States Senate.
Representative Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, just elected to the Senate, also does not discuss her religiosity. John Kraus, a spokesman for Ms. Baldwin, said that while she was baptized Episcopalian, that term no longer describes her religiosity. She prefers “unaffiliated,” he said.
The atheist and secularist movements are excited by the possible election of Kyrsten Sinema as a Democratic congresswoman from Arizona. (Votes are still being counted, but she is ahead.) Although raised a Mormon, Ms. Sinema is often described as a nontheist — and that suits the activists just fine. A blogger for the Secular Coalition for America wrote Thursday that while he was still dispirited by the loss of Representative Pete Stark of California, an open nonbeliever, he was “emboldened” by the apparent victory of Ms. Sinema, “an open nontheist.” Her nonbelief, the blogger, Chris Lombardi, wrote, “was not used to slander her as un-American or suggest that she was unfit for office.” But a campaign spokesman rejected any simple category for Ms. Sinema. “Kyrsten believes the terms ‘nontheist,’ ‘atheist’ or ‘nonbeliever’ are not befitting of her life’s work or personal character,” the spokesman, Justin Unga, said Thursday in an e-mail. “Though Sinema was raised in a religious household, she draws her policy-making decisions from her experience as a social worker who worked with diverse communities and as a lawmaker who represented hundreds of thousands.”
From the New York Times, Mark Oppenheimer, "Politicians Who Reject Labels Based on Religion" (November 9, 2012) via Gene Expression.
Notably, all but one of the five non-Christians discussed in the New York Times story hail from the Western U.S. (as do a many of the Mormons in Congress).
Also, notably, prejudice against a candidate's religious beliefs was not a particularly important factor in any of these candidate's races, nor was it a particular important factor in the Presidenital race (some accused President Obama who was secular in his youth and converted to Protestant Christianity as an adult, of being a Muslim, and some villified Romney for being a Mormon, but neither attack had much influence on voters).
07 November 2012
Puerto Rico May Seek Statehood
A majority of voters in the predominantly Spanish speaking Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, who are U.S. citizens subject to federal law, who have considerable autonomy and don't pay most U.S. taxes on Puerto Rican source income, but have no representative in Congress and no say in the Presidential election, have voted to seek to become a U.S. State in a non-binding referendum. Puerto Rico does send a "resident commissioner" to the U.S. House of Representatives, but the commissioner does not have a floor vote.
Congress must approve the addition of any new state to the United States and is not required to seek or follow the input of residents of territory outside any U.S. State. Congress could foist independence on an unwilling Puerto Rico, make it a U.S. state despite local opposition, or change the relationship between Puerto Rico and the rest of the U.S. without consulting Puerto Rican officials.
The results are somewhat ambiguous due to the structure of the referendums. About 46% of people favor the status quo of Commonwealth status, which is greater than the percentage who favored sovereign free association if there was a change in status. Independence does not enjoy much support at all. It appears that many of the people who voted for statehood would actually prefer the status quo. In a straight up or down vote on the question of whether Puerto Rico should become a U.S. state or retain the status quo, it appears that the outcome would be close to 50-50 because some of the people who don't want to status quo to continue favor independence or greater autonomy for Puerto Rico, rather than closer ties to the United States.
Given this lack of clarity, it seems likely that Congress will not act to make Puerto Rico a U.S. state and will instead retain or slightly tweak the status quo.
Implications of Statehood
The addition of Puerto Rico as a state would give it two Senators and roughly six representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as about eight electoral votes, who would very likely be reliably democratic in their partisan leanings.
Puerto Rico's residents have much lower incomes than residents of other U.S. states, potentially wrecking havoc on tax code formulas and means testing regimes designed to fit the range of personal income in U.S. states (under the current U.S. tax code without special rules for Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth might be entitled to more refunds than its residents pay in taxes).
Puerto Rico would also be the only U.S. state in which the dominant language was not English, something that goes to the identity of the United States as a whole.
Democratic and Colonial Theory Context
Almost all of the other substantial U.S. possessions, and the most populous possessions of its developed world peers left over from the colonial era either have the equivalent of statehood status or are independent nations. Many U.S. possessions, such as the Philippines, were granted independence in the last half of the 20th century. But, Puerto Rico doesn't want independence. Presumably, the fact that it doesn't is a sign that even without democratic participation, being part of the United States has real value.
Both Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, however, pose fundamental problems of democratic fairness by denying vast numbers of mostly low income U.S. citizens, in each case more than the populations of some U.S. states, who just happen to be overwhelmingly non-white, any representatives in the federal legislative process to which they are subject, and leaving their home rule regimes subject to modifications at the whim of a distant Congress in which they have no say. D.C., which is monothically Democratic, does have a say in Presidential elections, but Puerto Rico lacks even that. Other U.S. territories have populations far less than any U.S. state and collectively have fewer people than a single Congressional district.
Given the clear partisan impact of giving either Puerto Rico or the District of Columbia real political power, it seems unlikely that either approach would be approved by a U.S. House of Representatives controlled by Republicans absent some sort of national drama.
All significantly populated U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have democratic home rule powers substantially similar to those of a U.S. state and non-voting representation in Congress, although without constitutional protections for those arrangements.
Some of the main proposals to improve the situation in the District of Columbia include:
* giving it status as a tax free zone as a consequence of its lack of representation like Puerto Rico - District of Columbia license plates already sport the motto "taxation without representation";
* forming a U.S. state out of all of the District of Columbia except the core area where the White House, capital and most federal office buildings are located (presumably the constitution would then be amended to deprive this tiny federal area of its electoral votes after the rest of the District receives statehood treatment);
* restoring the portion of the District of Columbia that could have received statehood to Maryland from which it was ceded (i.e. retrocession) - something already done wit all or most of the territory ceded by Virginia;
* amend the U.S. Constitution to give the District of Columbia representation in the House and Senate as if it were a state without giving it actual statehood status (this option could also be applied to Puerto Rico).
The two-part referendum asked whether the island wanted to change its 114-year relationship with the United States. Nearly 54 percent, or 922,374 people, sought to change it, while 46 percent, or 786,749 people, favored the status quo. Ninety-six percent of 1,643 precincts were reporting as of early Wednesday.
The second question asked voters to choose from three options, with statehood by far the favorite, garnering 61 percent. Sovereign free association, which would have allowed for more autonomy, received 33 percent, while independence got 5 percent.
President Barack Obama earlier expressed support for the referendum and pledged to respect the will of the people in the event of a clear majority.
It is unclear whether U.S. Congress will debate the referendum results or if Obama will consider the results to be a clear enough majority.
Congress must approve the addition of any new state to the United States and is not required to seek or follow the input of residents of territory outside any U.S. State. Congress could foist independence on an unwilling Puerto Rico, make it a U.S. state despite local opposition, or change the relationship between Puerto Rico and the rest of the U.S. without consulting Puerto Rican officials.
The results are somewhat ambiguous due to the structure of the referendums. About 46% of people favor the status quo of Commonwealth status, which is greater than the percentage who favored sovereign free association if there was a change in status. Independence does not enjoy much support at all. It appears that many of the people who voted for statehood would actually prefer the status quo. In a straight up or down vote on the question of whether Puerto Rico should become a U.S. state or retain the status quo, it appears that the outcome would be close to 50-50 because some of the people who don't want to status quo to continue favor independence or greater autonomy for Puerto Rico, rather than closer ties to the United States.
Given this lack of clarity, it seems likely that Congress will not act to make Puerto Rico a U.S. state and will instead retain or slightly tweak the status quo.
Implications of Statehood
The addition of Puerto Rico as a state would give it two Senators and roughly six representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as about eight electoral votes, who would very likely be reliably democratic in their partisan leanings.
Puerto Rico's residents have much lower incomes than residents of other U.S. states, potentially wrecking havoc on tax code formulas and means testing regimes designed to fit the range of personal income in U.S. states (under the current U.S. tax code without special rules for Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth might be entitled to more refunds than its residents pay in taxes).
Puerto Rico would also be the only U.S. state in which the dominant language was not English, something that goes to the identity of the United States as a whole.
Democratic and Colonial Theory Context
Almost all of the other substantial U.S. possessions, and the most populous possessions of its developed world peers left over from the colonial era either have the equivalent of statehood status or are independent nations. Many U.S. possessions, such as the Philippines, were granted independence in the last half of the 20th century. But, Puerto Rico doesn't want independence. Presumably, the fact that it doesn't is a sign that even without democratic participation, being part of the United States has real value.
Both Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, however, pose fundamental problems of democratic fairness by denying vast numbers of mostly low income U.S. citizens, in each case more than the populations of some U.S. states, who just happen to be overwhelmingly non-white, any representatives in the federal legislative process to which they are subject, and leaving their home rule regimes subject to modifications at the whim of a distant Congress in which they have no say. D.C., which is monothically Democratic, does have a say in Presidential elections, but Puerto Rico lacks even that. Other U.S. territories have populations far less than any U.S. state and collectively have fewer people than a single Congressional district.
Given the clear partisan impact of giving either Puerto Rico or the District of Columbia real political power, it seems unlikely that either approach would be approved by a U.S. House of Representatives controlled by Republicans absent some sort of national drama.
All significantly populated U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have democratic home rule powers substantially similar to those of a U.S. state and non-voting representation in Congress, although without constitutional protections for those arrangements.
Some of the main proposals to improve the situation in the District of Columbia include:
* giving it status as a tax free zone as a consequence of its lack of representation like Puerto Rico - District of Columbia license plates already sport the motto "taxation without representation";
* forming a U.S. state out of all of the District of Columbia except the core area where the White House, capital and most federal office buildings are located (presumably the constitution would then be amended to deprive this tiny federal area of its electoral votes after the rest of the District receives statehood treatment);
* restoring the portion of the District of Columbia that could have received statehood to Maryland from which it was ceded (i.e. retrocession) - something already done wit all or most of the territory ceded by Virginia;
* amend the U.S. Constitution to give the District of Columbia representation in the House and Senate as if it were a state without giving it actual statehood status (this option could also be applied to Puerto Rico).
A Thousand People Informed
In the month prior to the election, approximately one thousand people in Colorado turned to this web site for information about the state ballot issues and judicial retention elections on the 2012 ballot in the state. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly 2.7 million votes cast this year, but many of these individuals may have influenced others who sought their input. This is considerably less than the number of people who turned to this blog for similar advice in 2010 and 2011, no doubt as a product of my less active posting this year.
Colorado Put Obama Over The Top
If you arrange the states that gave their electoral votes to President Obama in order of how close the race was in each state, and strip away states that he didn't need to win a majority (as opposed to in order of the time of day when a race was called, in which case the prize goes to Ohio), it appears to me that Colorado where Obama won 51.2% to 46.5% (a margin of 4.7 percentage points, quite a bit more than state pollsters had predicted before the election) was the state that pushed President Obama over the 270 electoral vote threshold.
Florida (0.6 percentage points and 29 electoral votes), Ohio (1.9 and 18 electoral votes) and Virginia (3.0 and 13 electoral votes) all had closer races, but in hindsight, President Obama would have still won 272 electoral votes without them. President Obama won the other swing states, New Hampshire (5.7 percentage points), Wisconsin (6.7), Iowa (5.6) and Nevada (6.6), by wider margins than he did in Colorado.
The wide margin for President Obama in the marginal state makes a repeat of the 2000 election which was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Bush v. Gore, impossible.
Cross posted at Colorado Pols.
Florida (0.6 percentage points and 29 electoral votes), Ohio (1.9 and 18 electoral votes) and Virginia (3.0 and 13 electoral votes) all had closer races, but in hindsight, President Obama would have still won 272 electoral votes without them. President Obama won the other swing states, New Hampshire (5.7 percentage points), Wisconsin (6.7), Iowa (5.6) and Nevada (6.6), by wider margins than he did in Colorado.
The wide margin for President Obama in the marginal state makes a repeat of the 2000 election which was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Bush v. Gore, impossible.
Cross posted at Colorado Pols.
06 November 2012
The Results
Colorado voters have voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use (although the federal law banning it remains in place for now), to urge their legislators to enact a campaign finance reform constitutional amendment, and to reform the state's civil service system. Most local measures to raise tax reveneus or issue new bonds have passed. Washington State voters have also voted to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, while voters in Oregon have defeated a similar measure. Measures legalizing gay marriage have passed in Maine and Maryland and another is likely to pass in Washington State. A measure to ban gay marriage is likely to fail in Minnesota. California voters are on track to repeal its harsh "three strikes" law, but will retain its death penalty.
The Democrats have regained control of Colorado's state house, while retaining control of the Colorado's state senate. Colorado's governor is also a Democrat. The Republican Secretary of State is facing simultaneous criminal and ethics commission investigations.
President Obama has won a landslide victory in the electoral college (it looks like he will win 332 electoral votes out of 538 - Nate Silver at the 538 blog was on the money), despite a fairly close popular vote that will narrowly favor the President when the dust settles. He has won Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, New Hampshire and Iowa. It appears that he will win even Virginia and Florida. The results mostly follow long standing regional trends.
Democrats have improved their position in the U.S. Senate but Republicans continue to control the United States House of Representatives. All of Colorado's incumbent members of Congress have been re-elected. Redistricting in light of the 2010 census, in the end, didn't matter much.
Overall, Democrats and liberals have overperformed expectations this election. The television stations are attributing it to demographic change. President Obama was very strong with African-American voters, with Hispanic voters, with young voters, with non-Christian voters, with women. Republicans have alienated almost everyonoe except older Christian white men. Social conservative Republican candidates, particularly those who made out of touch statements about rape, performed particularly dismally. Republicans cannot improve their performance without a bigger tent.
The next four years will almost surely shift the federal judiciary to the left. Colorado's Democrats now hold all the levers of power in the state. President Obama has the status quo on taxes, spending cuts, and health care all well positioned to give him leverage in the big legislative battles that he will face over the next four years.
The grown ups are in charge. The future looks bright, but hardly blinding.
UPDATE on November 7, 2012: Massachusetts legalized medical marijuana. The medical marijuana movement has reached critical mass, particularly in blue states, and it is going to be hard for President Obama who was at first tolerant of this after his 2008 election to continue the backsliding that we've seen in the last year or two.
Will Governor Hickenlooper consider pardoning some of the small number of people in Colorado prisons serving terms of marijuana offenses that would not have been crimes in the wake of Amendment 64's passage? Will President Obama, who has granted fewer pardons than any other modern President, be more liberal in pardoning people now that he doesn't have to worry about ever running for public office again?
Democrats have gone from lagging in the Colorado State House by 32-33 to having a 36 to 38 seat majority there. They have added on Colorado Senate seat going from a 20-15 majority to a 21-14 majority. Mark Ferrandino of the second House District, an openly gay man, will be the next Speaker of the Colorado State House. A civil unions bill is almost certain to be the law in Colorado no later than August of 2013.
The incumbent margins of victory in the 3rd and 7th Congressional Districts in Colorado was large enough to strongly discourage future challengers. Both of these races had been expected to be much closer, given their partisan makeup after redistricting.
Republican incumbent Mike Coffman's lead over Democrat Joe Miklosi in the 6th Congressional District with 79% of the vote counted, was 3.8% (and may get a bit closer when the dust settles, although a Miklosi victory would be exceedingly unlikely) which reflects a much more even partisan balance in the district after redistricting. Mike Coffman is, together, with John Suthers (Colorado's Republican Attorney General), one of the strongest Republican candidates in the state, while Miklosi is comparatively green. Coffman had chosen a much more moderate course in Congress that he could have in his extremely safe pre-redistricting seat that was previously held by anti-immigration gadfly Tom Tancredo. And, Coffman has had the benefits of incumbency. Coffman will likely attract an able Democratic challenger in 2014 and should the 6th Congressional District become open because Coffman is tapped by the GOP to run for Governor or U.S. Senate, this seat would be very vulnerable to flipping to the Democrats. This remains one of the most competitive seats in the nation. On the other hand, Miklosi's strong showing is in part a product of the fact that 6.2% of voters in the 6th Congressional District voted for one of two conservative leaning third party candidates.
The 56 seats that the Democratic caucus will hold in the U.S. Senate in 2013 will minimize the amount of bipartisan compromise that Democrats need to get President Obama's judicial nominations to up or down votes despite potential filibusters. (Votes on the merits on President Obama's nominations of all kinds are almost certain to confirm his nominations with that kind of secure majority in the U.S. Senate.)
The House v. Presidential v. Governor's Race Gap
The biggest indication that Democrats in Washington should not be overconfident is that Republicans have still retained firm control of the U.S. House, despite ever seat being contested this year after redistricting. While Obama is on track to win 329 of 538 available electoral votes if Florida, in which he is leading, ultimately supports him. But, Democrats hold a much smaller percentage of the 535 seats in Congress. Democrats held 53 of 100 U.S. Senate Seats (including independents who caucus with them) and Republican led in the House by 242-193 going into the election (2 seats were held by independents). The current tally is 56-44 in the U.S. Senate (a gain of three seats of the Democrats), and 233-193 with 9 seats too close to call in the House (a likely pick up of about four seats, well short of the 25 needed to attain a majority).
By the metric of combined House and Senate seats in Congress, Republicans lead roughly 282-253. Add three to the Democratic column for DC to conver the Congressional tally to an electoral vote metric, and Republican legislative race performance in 2012 was equivalent to 76 electoral votes better than Romney's performance. The popular vote in the Presidential race was also quite close (about 50.3% for Obama v. 48.1% for Rombey), although even if there was a national population vote rather than an electoral college, it wouldn't have been close enough for a recount and the outcome would have been the same. Still all sorts of factors can shift the vote by just 2.2 percentage points. A better, more moderate, GOP Presidential candidate facing a less competent campaign effort that President Obama's could have won this race, particularly given the weak economy.
One way to explain the disparity is that the Republicans have a lot of members of Congress in their core territory who are very conservative and who have majority support in many of their own districts, but who are not electable nationwide. This hyperconservativism can be solved in more moderate districts by running more moderate candidates. But, anyone who has to make it through the GOP primary process is pulled so far in that direction that the few Republicans who are electable nationwide are hard pressed to win the nomination without impairing their moderate image.
Also, Democrats are highly concentrated in a small number of urban areas, while many Republican members of Congress are elected from suburbs where they are a majority, but not a dominant majority. Democratic overall numbers can win statewide races, but Democrats aren't spread evenly enough to win their fair share of Congressional races.
When the overall partisan balance in the nation is quite even, differences in demographic distribution and the issue of a national v. local political image can result in split control of the government.
The national v. local balancing effect that allows Republicans to better match candidates to particular races also explains how Republicans gained ground in Governor's races this year, despite losing the Presidency, losing ground in the House and losing ground in the Senate.
UPDATE TWO (November 7, 2012 p.m.): The U.S. Senate tally after the election is currently Democrats and independents 55-Republicans 45 (one race previously called for a Democrat has moved to the GOP column as more returns have been reported). Democrats need to convince 5 out of 45 Republicans to break ranks in order to overcome a filibuster threat.
The U.S. House of Representatives tally after the election is currently 234 Republicans, 194 Democrats, and 7 too close to call. As far as I can discern, the unofficial tallies in six of the seven races show a Democrat winning (AZ-9, CA-7 CA-36, CA-52, FL-18, NC-7) and in one of the races a Republican winning (AZ-2). There is also one race in Louisiana (LA-3), presumably counted as part of the 234 Republicans where no candidate won a majority and there will be a later runoff election between the top two candidates, both of whom were Republicans. Thus, the likely final split in the U.S. House of Representatives will be 235 R-200 D, with Democrats picking up 7 seats. For Democrats to win in the House, they must convince the Republican leadership to bring an issue to the floor and then must convince 18 out of 235 Republican members of Congress to break ranks.
This implies that Republicans preformance in federal legislative races is the equivalent to 280 electoral votes (adding 3 to the Democrats for DC), which is about what Romney would have had if he had managed to win Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Colorado and New Hampshire, which could have happened if about six percent of the people who voted for Obama had switched their votes to Romney instead. This is roughly the amount by which Romney underperformed (or alternately that Obama overperformed) relative to the baseline of legislative elections.
Regional Trends
The six New England states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island), combined, have not a single Republican in the twenty-one U.S. House of Representatives seats allocated to these states, and only two out of twelve Republican Senators: Susan Collins of Maine, who is arguably the most moderate Republican in either house of Congress (although still to the right of almost all Democrats in the House or Senate), and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who is more typical ideologically of Republicans but has a thin voting record having served in the Senate for only two years so far. New England also also elected two independents to the U.S. Senate (one is Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-styles Democratic Socialist, and the other is Angus King of Maine, a self-styled independent whose stated policy positions on specific issues is closer to the Democrats than to the Republicans). None of New England's electoral votes went to Mitt Romney in this election.
Neither the Mid-Atlantic States (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware) nor the District of Columbia cast a single electoral vote for Mitt Romney either. One of the ten U.S. Senate seats in the Mid-Atlantic states is held by a Republican (Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania). There are a number of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives from Mid-Atlantic states, however (26 out of 66). Delaware's one representative is a Democrat. One of Maryland's eight representatives is a Republicans. Six out of twenty-seven of New York's representatives are Republicans (four of these are "upstate"). Six out of twelve of New Jersey's representatives are Republicans. And, thirteen out of eighteen of Pennsylvania's representatives are Republicans. A number of Mid-Atlantic Republicans tend towards the moderate wing of their party.
The percentage of voters who are white is very steady (about 1.5 percentage points less per year), which posed deep long term issues for a Republican coalition built almost entirely on white voters.
The Democrats have regained control of Colorado's state house, while retaining control of the Colorado's state senate. Colorado's governor is also a Democrat. The Republican Secretary of State is facing simultaneous criminal and ethics commission investigations.
President Obama has won a landslide victory in the electoral college (it looks like he will win 332 electoral votes out of 538 - Nate Silver at the 538 blog was on the money), despite a fairly close popular vote that will narrowly favor the President when the dust settles. He has won Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, New Hampshire and Iowa. It appears that he will win even Virginia and Florida. The results mostly follow long standing regional trends.
Democrats have improved their position in the U.S. Senate but Republicans continue to control the United States House of Representatives. All of Colorado's incumbent members of Congress have been re-elected. Redistricting in light of the 2010 census, in the end, didn't matter much.
Overall, Democrats and liberals have overperformed expectations this election. The television stations are attributing it to demographic change. President Obama was very strong with African-American voters, with Hispanic voters, with young voters, with non-Christian voters, with women. Republicans have alienated almost everyonoe except older Christian white men. Social conservative Republican candidates, particularly those who made out of touch statements about rape, performed particularly dismally. Republicans cannot improve their performance without a bigger tent.
The next four years will almost surely shift the federal judiciary to the left. Colorado's Democrats now hold all the levers of power in the state. President Obama has the status quo on taxes, spending cuts, and health care all well positioned to give him leverage in the big legislative battles that he will face over the next four years.
The grown ups are in charge. The future looks bright, but hardly blinding.
UPDATE on November 7, 2012: Massachusetts legalized medical marijuana. The medical marijuana movement has reached critical mass, particularly in blue states, and it is going to be hard for President Obama who was at first tolerant of this after his 2008 election to continue the backsliding that we've seen in the last year or two.
Will Governor Hickenlooper consider pardoning some of the small number of people in Colorado prisons serving terms of marijuana offenses that would not have been crimes in the wake of Amendment 64's passage? Will President Obama, who has granted fewer pardons than any other modern President, be more liberal in pardoning people now that he doesn't have to worry about ever running for public office again?
Democrats have gone from lagging in the Colorado State House by 32-33 to having a 36 to 38 seat majority there. They have added on Colorado Senate seat going from a 20-15 majority to a 21-14 majority. Mark Ferrandino of the second House District, an openly gay man, will be the next Speaker of the Colorado State House. A civil unions bill is almost certain to be the law in Colorado no later than August of 2013.
The incumbent margins of victory in the 3rd and 7th Congressional Districts in Colorado was large enough to strongly discourage future challengers. Both of these races had been expected to be much closer, given their partisan makeup after redistricting.
Republican incumbent Mike Coffman's lead over Democrat Joe Miklosi in the 6th Congressional District with 79% of the vote counted, was 3.8% (and may get a bit closer when the dust settles, although a Miklosi victory would be exceedingly unlikely) which reflects a much more even partisan balance in the district after redistricting. Mike Coffman is, together, with John Suthers (Colorado's Republican Attorney General), one of the strongest Republican candidates in the state, while Miklosi is comparatively green. Coffman had chosen a much more moderate course in Congress that he could have in his extremely safe pre-redistricting seat that was previously held by anti-immigration gadfly Tom Tancredo. And, Coffman has had the benefits of incumbency. Coffman will likely attract an able Democratic challenger in 2014 and should the 6th Congressional District become open because Coffman is tapped by the GOP to run for Governor or U.S. Senate, this seat would be very vulnerable to flipping to the Democrats. This remains one of the most competitive seats in the nation. On the other hand, Miklosi's strong showing is in part a product of the fact that 6.2% of voters in the 6th Congressional District voted for one of two conservative leaning third party candidates.
The 56 seats that the Democratic caucus will hold in the U.S. Senate in 2013 will minimize the amount of bipartisan compromise that Democrats need to get President Obama's judicial nominations to up or down votes despite potential filibusters. (Votes on the merits on President Obama's nominations of all kinds are almost certain to confirm his nominations with that kind of secure majority in the U.S. Senate.)
The House v. Presidential v. Governor's Race Gap
The biggest indication that Democrats in Washington should not be overconfident is that Republicans have still retained firm control of the U.S. House, despite ever seat being contested this year after redistricting. While Obama is on track to win 329 of 538 available electoral votes if Florida, in which he is leading, ultimately supports him. But, Democrats hold a much smaller percentage of the 535 seats in Congress. Democrats held 53 of 100 U.S. Senate Seats (including independents who caucus with them) and Republican led in the House by 242-193 going into the election (2 seats were held by independents). The current tally is 56-44 in the U.S. Senate (a gain of three seats of the Democrats), and 233-193 with 9 seats too close to call in the House (a likely pick up of about four seats, well short of the 25 needed to attain a majority).
By the metric of combined House and Senate seats in Congress, Republicans lead roughly 282-253. Add three to the Democratic column for DC to conver the Congressional tally to an electoral vote metric, and Republican legislative race performance in 2012 was equivalent to 76 electoral votes better than Romney's performance. The popular vote in the Presidential race was also quite close (about 50.3% for Obama v. 48.1% for Rombey), although even if there was a national population vote rather than an electoral college, it wouldn't have been close enough for a recount and the outcome would have been the same. Still all sorts of factors can shift the vote by just 2.2 percentage points. A better, more moderate, GOP Presidential candidate facing a less competent campaign effort that President Obama's could have won this race, particularly given the weak economy.
One way to explain the disparity is that the Republicans have a lot of members of Congress in their core territory who are very conservative and who have majority support in many of their own districts, but who are not electable nationwide. This hyperconservativism can be solved in more moderate districts by running more moderate candidates. But, anyone who has to make it through the GOP primary process is pulled so far in that direction that the few Republicans who are electable nationwide are hard pressed to win the nomination without impairing their moderate image.
Also, Democrats are highly concentrated in a small number of urban areas, while many Republican members of Congress are elected from suburbs where they are a majority, but not a dominant majority. Democratic overall numbers can win statewide races, but Democrats aren't spread evenly enough to win their fair share of Congressional races.
When the overall partisan balance in the nation is quite even, differences in demographic distribution and the issue of a national v. local political image can result in split control of the government.
The national v. local balancing effect that allows Republicans to better match candidates to particular races also explains how Republicans gained ground in Governor's races this year, despite losing the Presidency, losing ground in the House and losing ground in the Senate.
UPDATE TWO (November 7, 2012 p.m.): The U.S. Senate tally after the election is currently Democrats and independents 55-Republicans 45 (one race previously called for a Democrat has moved to the GOP column as more returns have been reported). Democrats need to convince 5 out of 45 Republicans to break ranks in order to overcome a filibuster threat.
The U.S. House of Representatives tally after the election is currently 234 Republicans, 194 Democrats, and 7 too close to call. As far as I can discern, the unofficial tallies in six of the seven races show a Democrat winning (AZ-9, CA-7 CA-36, CA-52, FL-18, NC-7) and in one of the races a Republican winning (AZ-2). There is also one race in Louisiana (LA-3), presumably counted as part of the 234 Republicans where no candidate won a majority and there will be a later runoff election between the top two candidates, both of whom were Republicans. Thus, the likely final split in the U.S. House of Representatives will be 235 R-200 D, with Democrats picking up 7 seats. For Democrats to win in the House, they must convince the Republican leadership to bring an issue to the floor and then must convince 18 out of 235 Republican members of Congress to break ranks.
This implies that Republicans preformance in federal legislative races is the equivalent to 280 electoral votes (adding 3 to the Democrats for DC), which is about what Romney would have had if he had managed to win Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Colorado and New Hampshire, which could have happened if about six percent of the people who voted for Obama had switched their votes to Romney instead. This is roughly the amount by which Romney underperformed (or alternately that Obama overperformed) relative to the baseline of legislative elections.
Regional Trends
The six New England states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island), combined, have not a single Republican in the twenty-one U.S. House of Representatives seats allocated to these states, and only two out of twelve Republican Senators: Susan Collins of Maine, who is arguably the most moderate Republican in either house of Congress (although still to the right of almost all Democrats in the House or Senate), and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who is more typical ideologically of Republicans but has a thin voting record having served in the Senate for only two years so far. New England also also elected two independents to the U.S. Senate (one is Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-styles Democratic Socialist, and the other is Angus King of Maine, a self-styled independent whose stated policy positions on specific issues is closer to the Democrats than to the Republicans). None of New England's electoral votes went to Mitt Romney in this election.
Neither the Mid-Atlantic States (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware) nor the District of Columbia cast a single electoral vote for Mitt Romney either. One of the ten U.S. Senate seats in the Mid-Atlantic states is held by a Republican (Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania). There are a number of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives from Mid-Atlantic states, however (26 out of 66). Delaware's one representative is a Democrat. One of Maryland's eight representatives is a Republicans. Six out of twenty-seven of New York's representatives are Republicans (four of these are "upstate"). Six out of twelve of New Jersey's representatives are Republicans. And, thirteen out of eighteen of Pennsylvania's representatives are Republicans. A number of Mid-Atlantic Republicans tend towards the moderate wing of their party.
The percentage of voters who are white is very steady (about 1.5 percentage points less per year), which posed deep long term issues for a Republican coalition built almost entirely on white voters.
Denver Post Getting Eager On Amendment 64
Have the Denver Post's political reporters been smoking weed in anticipation of marijuana legalization now that polls favor the passage of Amendment 64 in Colorado?
Otherwise, it is hard to explain the following statement on the front page of the paper's "Nation & World" section (Page 17A) today in a story attributed to David Lightman of the McClatchy Newspapers:
Hello! On what bizzaro world was this written? First of all, as Colorado returns have shown this year and every year, Republicans lead in early voting.
More importantly, a big turnout almost always favors Democrats whose voters are less reliable. This is why Republican operatives consistently work hard to suppress voter turnout, while Democrats consistently cry foul over these practices. The higher the voter turnout is today (which is election day), the more likely it is that Romney will do poorly.
How can anyone who regularly follows and reports on politics be so wrong? And people say blogs are unreliable.
Otherwise, it is hard to explain the following statement on the front page of the paper's "Nation & World" section (Page 17A) today in a story attributed to David Lightman of the McClatchy Newspapers:
Conventional wisdom says Democrats tend to dominate early voting, while Republicans do better on Election Day, so a big turnout could mean a big day for Romney.
Hello! On what bizzaro world was this written? First of all, as Colorado returns have shown this year and every year, Republicans lead in early voting.
More importantly, a big turnout almost always favors Democrats whose voters are less reliable. This is why Republican operatives consistently work hard to suppress voter turnout, while Democrats consistently cry foul over these practices. The higher the voter turnout is today (which is election day), the more likely it is that Romney will do poorly.
How can anyone who regularly follows and reports on politics be so wrong? And people say blogs are unreliable.
05 November 2012
Deadlock
Late tomorrow night, the election returns are likely to leave us with a political landscape very much like the one we already have right now. A marathon election campaign, longer than almost any other in the world, and decennial redistricting, will do little to change to allocation of political power.
President Obama will probably be re-elected. Democrats will probably retain a thin majority in the U.S. Senate, but not a filibuster-proof lead. Republicans will probably retain a thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, although their majority will probably be very thin. The U.S. Supreme Court (whose members are appointed for life) will continue to have a 5-4 conservative majority.
Although Romney probably won't win, the balance of power in Washington D.C. that must be surpassed to accomplish anything new will remain in territory where he is comfortable, with the handful of remaining moderate Republicans in Congress and moderately conservative judges like Justice Kennedy.
By 2014, the economy should have pretty much rebounded, so a mid-term election boost to the Republicans is likely to be modest, if there is one.
President Obama will be in a good position to protect his signature policy accomplishment, "Obamacare", which mostly uses tax incentives to buy health insurance and expanded Medicaid eligibility to bring about near universal health care, an area where the United States has lagged for decades behind the rest of the developed world. He can veto any outright effort to repeal the law, although the budget process could be used to underfund it.
A status quo in which many tax breaks that President Obama has promised not to renew for the affluent expire at the end of this year gives him considerable leverage in negotiations over tax policy as well. Congressional Republicans will have to choose between tax policies that are second best in their opinion that Democrats will agree to implement, and a status quo that is from their perspective even worse but would arise without their involvement.
For policy wonks, this means a return to the grindstone of uncontroversial technocratic proposals that can win bipartisan support, incremental change, regulatory and enforcement oriented initiatives, court battles, moderate budgetary tweaks, and state and local government level initiatives. Major new federal spending programs, bold new substantive federal legislative reforms, and sweeping federal tax code changes unless some crisis opens the door for action in some particular policy domain.
There is also considerable room for movement politics. Efforts with a long term goal of changing public opinion may look like an attractive place to devote political resources at a time when the formal instruments of governmental action are immobilized. In recent years, efforts to change public opinion about gay rights, marijuana legalization, intellectual property laws, and mass incarceration have all made considerable progress.
When President Obama's next term ends in 2016, Obamacare will have mostly taken full effect, greatly reducing the ranks of the uninsured, controlling health care costs, and removing the "fear of the unknown" factor that has dogged it politically so far. U.S. troops will have been withdrawn from Afghanistan by then. The financial crisis will be forgotten and a new recession will likely not yet have taken hold. Progress on defense spending, health care spending, and collecting taxes from the affluent will have taken some of the edge off the budget deficit. Gay rights struggles that were once controversial will have become a fait accompli. The gun control measures that mobilized Tea Party conservative in 2008 will not have materialized. There is a decent chance that President Obama will have managed to replace one of the conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, shifting the balance of power back to the liberal wing of the court for the first time in a very long while. An inability to enact major partisan legislation will leave few polarizing issues for Republicans to attack Democrats with effectively.
Republicans first instinct, after seeing a moderate Republican from New England defeated, will be to argue that it was not conservative enough in 2012. But, by 2016, the Republicans may be hungry enough for some kind of power to moderate that feeling and to recognize that they need a transformative figure who can create a bigger tent for the grand old party. If it doesn't, they will become politically irrelevant.
President Obama will probably be re-elected. Democrats will probably retain a thin majority in the U.S. Senate, but not a filibuster-proof lead. Republicans will probably retain a thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, although their majority will probably be very thin. The U.S. Supreme Court (whose members are appointed for life) will continue to have a 5-4 conservative majority.
Although Romney probably won't win, the balance of power in Washington D.C. that must be surpassed to accomplish anything new will remain in territory where he is comfortable, with the handful of remaining moderate Republicans in Congress and moderately conservative judges like Justice Kennedy.
By 2014, the economy should have pretty much rebounded, so a mid-term election boost to the Republicans is likely to be modest, if there is one.
President Obama will be in a good position to protect his signature policy accomplishment, "Obamacare", which mostly uses tax incentives to buy health insurance and expanded Medicaid eligibility to bring about near universal health care, an area where the United States has lagged for decades behind the rest of the developed world. He can veto any outright effort to repeal the law, although the budget process could be used to underfund it.
A status quo in which many tax breaks that President Obama has promised not to renew for the affluent expire at the end of this year gives him considerable leverage in negotiations over tax policy as well. Congressional Republicans will have to choose between tax policies that are second best in their opinion that Democrats will agree to implement, and a status quo that is from their perspective even worse but would arise without their involvement.
For policy wonks, this means a return to the grindstone of uncontroversial technocratic proposals that can win bipartisan support, incremental change, regulatory and enforcement oriented initiatives, court battles, moderate budgetary tweaks, and state and local government level initiatives. Major new federal spending programs, bold new substantive federal legislative reforms, and sweeping federal tax code changes unless some crisis opens the door for action in some particular policy domain.
There is also considerable room for movement politics. Efforts with a long term goal of changing public opinion may look like an attractive place to devote political resources at a time when the formal instruments of governmental action are immobilized. In recent years, efforts to change public opinion about gay rights, marijuana legalization, intellectual property laws, and mass incarceration have all made considerable progress.
When President Obama's next term ends in 2016, Obamacare will have mostly taken full effect, greatly reducing the ranks of the uninsured, controlling health care costs, and removing the "fear of the unknown" factor that has dogged it politically so far. U.S. troops will have been withdrawn from Afghanistan by then. The financial crisis will be forgotten and a new recession will likely not yet have taken hold. Progress on defense spending, health care spending, and collecting taxes from the affluent will have taken some of the edge off the budget deficit. Gay rights struggles that were once controversial will have become a fait accompli. The gun control measures that mobilized Tea Party conservative in 2008 will not have materialized. There is a decent chance that President Obama will have managed to replace one of the conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, shifting the balance of power back to the liberal wing of the court for the first time in a very long while. An inability to enact major partisan legislation will leave few polarizing issues for Republicans to attack Democrats with effectively.
Republicans first instinct, after seeing a moderate Republican from New England defeated, will be to argue that it was not conservative enough in 2012. But, by 2016, the Republicans may be hungry enough for some kind of power to moderate that feeling and to recognize that they need a transformative figure who can create a bigger tent for the grand old party. If it doesn't, they will become politically irrelevant.
02 November 2012
Libertarians Dislike Romney On Foreign Policy
Many libertarian leaning conservatives at the American Conservative are so concerned about Mitt Romney's hawkish attitudes towards foreign policy that they prefer Obama in the Presidential race.
01 November 2012
538 Sees Obama Closing The Deal
Nate Silver's 538 blog, hosted by the New York Times, is my go to site for compilations of poll data together with statistically sound analysis of what it means in the 2012 election. Silver's summary of all of that information about the Presidential race in all fifty states and the district of Columbia, as of midnight last night, six days before the election is concluded, is shown above.
In that summary, based on six separate analysts who comprehensively analyze state polling, Colorado, Virginia and Florida stand out as the closest three races in the country. Colorado and Virigina both favor Obama by 1.0 percentage points and 0.9 percentage points respectively, while Florida favors Romney by 0.6 percentage points. The next two closest states also lean towars President Obama: Iowa by 1.7 percentage points and New Hampshire by 2.1 percentage points. In every other state, one candidate or the other has at least a 2.4 percentage point lead and all six analysts as well as Silver agree regarding who is favored to win in those states.
The only other state leaning toward Romney that is even remotely in play in North Carolina, where Romney has a 2.4 percentage point edge. Romney leads by 7.0 percentage points in the next closest state, Arizona.
These are not the marginal states that President Obama needs to win the election, however. As Silver explains:
You can see that the various projections strongly agree with another, for the most part, in making “calls” about individual states. The only state where different sites show different candidates ahead right now is Florida, where Talking Points Memo gives Mr. Obama a nominal 0.2-percentage point lead while the others (including FiveThirtyEight) have Mr. Romney slightly up instead. There are also four states — New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado and Virginia — in which some methods show an exactly tied race while others give Mr. Obama the lead. . . .
Mr. Obama’s lead in the Electoral College is modest, but also quite consistent across the different methods. The states in which every site has Mr. Obama leading make up 271 electoral votes — one more than the president needs to clinch victory. The states in which everyone has Mr. Romney ahead represent 206 electoral votes. That leaves five states, and 61 electoral votes, unaccounted for — but Mr. Obama would not need them if he prevails in the states where he is leading in the polls.
The marginal state is actually Ohio, which the seven analysts, including Silver, see Obama leading in by a margin ranging from 2.0 to 3.0 percentage points.
After Ohio, the next closest states in which Obama leads are Nevada (3.2), Wisconsin (3.5), Pennsylvania (4.9) and Minnesota (6.0).
The most recent polls in a race less than a week from election day are a particularly accurate measure of what the voters will ultimately decide.
30 October 2012
One More Week Until The Election
Let it end. Soon.
In 2008, the election was exciting high drama. This time around, the campaign is serious snoozeville with extra helpings of irritation and disingenuity. Wonkish debates over how tax and public finance and regulatory proposals of candidates overpromise or wouldn't work are important, but that doesn't make them exciting.
The Tea Party zealots and birthers have retreated to their caves to make way for the country club Republicans who are out in force campaigning for Romney. The progressive idealists who walked the streets for Obama in 2008 have been replaced by triangulating pragmatists and party loyalists.
The debates were tame and both candidates have deemphasized social issues and foreign policy. Nobody but op-ed writers is talking about the influence that this election might have on the make up of the Supreme Court. Nobody has articulated a new vision for American foreign policy and anti-terrorism policies, with the distinctive elements of Obama's agenda in 2008, like a promise to shut down the prison in Guantanamo Bay unfulfilled and forgotten. The pitched battle over "Obamacare" that dominated the political discussion in the 2010 election evaporated not long after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the law to be constitutional.
Now that President Obama is running for re-election, the historic moment in which our nation elected its first African-American President is long past. Most of the people who care about the fact that Romney is a Mormon are Evangelical Christian Republicans who distrust him because of this fact.
The down ticket races, even the hard fought ones that could change the balace of power in state and federal legislative bodies, haven't been much more interesting. Most of the ads could fit any generic Republican or Democrat. Most of the ads that aren't, haven't been very persuasive.
If it weren't for a Republican primary fight for CU Regent involving a candidate who lied about having a graduate degree and then belittled the notion that anyone might care about that fact in a CU Regent race, this election season might have been entirely devoid of memorable political moments.
Go vote and go home.
In 2008, the election was exciting high drama. This time around, the campaign is serious snoozeville with extra helpings of irritation and disingenuity. Wonkish debates over how tax and public finance and regulatory proposals of candidates overpromise or wouldn't work are important, but that doesn't make them exciting.
The Tea Party zealots and birthers have retreated to their caves to make way for the country club Republicans who are out in force campaigning for Romney. The progressive idealists who walked the streets for Obama in 2008 have been replaced by triangulating pragmatists and party loyalists.
The debates were tame and both candidates have deemphasized social issues and foreign policy. Nobody but op-ed writers is talking about the influence that this election might have on the make up of the Supreme Court. Nobody has articulated a new vision for American foreign policy and anti-terrorism policies, with the distinctive elements of Obama's agenda in 2008, like a promise to shut down the prison in Guantanamo Bay unfulfilled and forgotten. The pitched battle over "Obamacare" that dominated the political discussion in the 2010 election evaporated not long after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the law to be constitutional.
Now that President Obama is running for re-election, the historic moment in which our nation elected its first African-American President is long past. Most of the people who care about the fact that Romney is a Mormon are Evangelical Christian Republicans who distrust him because of this fact.
The down ticket races, even the hard fought ones that could change the balace of power in state and federal legislative bodies, haven't been much more interesting. Most of the ads could fit any generic Republican or Democrat. Most of the ads that aren't, haven't been very persuasive.
If it weren't for a Republican primary fight for CU Regent involving a candidate who lied about having a graduate degree and then belittled the notion that anyone might care about that fact in a CU Regent race, this election season might have been entirely devoid of memorable political moments.
Go vote and go home.
25 October 2012
Taxing Rich At Higher Rates Good For Economy
The centerpiece of Mitt Romney's domestic policy agenda, which he shares with most Republican candidates for federal office. Republican politicians like Romney have argued that reducing the top marginal income tax rates and, in particular, the top marginal capital gains tax rates, on the affluent will increase economic growth and create jobs.
There are all sorts of theoretical reasons why this is a plausible idea. But, the empirical evidence flatly contradicts this claim. To the extent that increasing top marginal marginal tax rate on income and on capital gains has any impact on economic growth, historically, higher top margial tax rates on the income and capital gains of the affluent promote economic growth.
From here citing Ethan Kaplan of the University of Maryland (via email) (emphasis added).
* The money paragraphs in the quoted material from a Forbes magazine article comparing capital gains tax rates and economic growth rates states (emphasis added):
Lowering top marginal income tax rates and top marginal capital gains tax rates has a decisive distributional effect, lowering tax burdens on the very most affluent Americans. But, it demonstrably does not encourage econmic growth and it does not creat jobs.
There are all sorts of theoretical reasons why this is a plausible idea. But, the empirical evidence flatly contradicts this claim. To the extent that increasing top marginal marginal tax rate on income and on capital gains has any impact on economic growth, historically, higher top margial tax rates on the income and capital gains of the affluent promote economic growth.
[L]ooking at the raw correlation between top marginal tax rates and growth can be helpful for getting a rough sense of the likely impacts of higher taxation on growth. One recent paper by Pikkety, Saez, and Stantcheva looks at the correlation between top marginal tax rates and growth and finds the growth is higher when top marginal tax rates are higher. . . .
A rise in the top marginal tax rate from 0 to 100 percent is correlated with a rise in per capita growth of 5.85 percentage points per year. One reason that this simple correlation might overstate the impact of the marginal tax rate on growth is that the top growth years were in the early 40s when the government was spending heavily and when the country was finally recovering from the Great Depression. If we look only at the post war period (after 1946), a rise from 0 to 100 percent in the top marginal tax rate is associated with an increase of only 2.69 percentage points of growth. Moreover, the statistical significance of the relationship becomes marginal, as the p-value rises from 0.017 to 0.122. On the other hand, if we look at the time period encompassing 1960 to the present, a rise in the top rate from 0 to 100 percent is correlated with a rise in per capita growth of 3.03 percentage points of growth per year, and the relationship becomes more statistically significant (with a p-value of 0.064 percent). Finally, if we look only at the years since 1980, a rise from 0 to 100 percent in the top marginal tax rate is associated with an increase in growth of 3.87 percentage points. In this case, the relationship is statistically insignificant (with a p-value of 0.392 percent), in part because the sample size is small.
While we cannot say that there is a robust significant positive relationship between tax rates and growth, it is still interesting that regardless of when we start the sample, higher top marginal tax rates are associated with higher not lower growth. Moreover, a narrative reading of postwar US economic history leads to the same conclusion. The period of highest growth in the United States was in the post-war era when top marginal tax rates were 94% (under President Truman) and 91% (through 1963). As top marginal rates dropped, so did growth. Moreover, except for 1984, a recovery year, the highest per capita growth rates since 1980 were all in the late 1990s, after the top marginal tax rate had been increased from 28% under President Reagan to 31% under the first President Bush and then 39.6% under President Clinton.
One possible reaction to this finding is that what matters more than the top marginal tax rate on income is the capital gains tax rate but growth has also been higher when the capital gains tax rate has been higher.*
So, what does this tell us? Of course, it would be silly to make the argument that increasing top marginal rates from 0 to 100 percent increased per capita growth by almost 6 percentage points per year. No doubt there are other factors that could confound the relationship between tax rates and growth. However, the changes in top marginal tax rates over the period are quite large so it seems likely that if raising top marginal rates did have a large negative impact on growth, we should be able to see it in the correlations. Thus, it also seems silly to argue that higher taxes on the rich have a large negative impact on growth, given that historically growth is, if anything, positively correlated with the top marginal rate.
From here citing Ethan Kaplan of the University of Maryland (via email) (emphasis added).
* The money paragraphs in the quoted material from a Forbes magazine article comparing capital gains tax rates and economic growth rates states (emphasis added):
If you read the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (or surf around the nether regions of Forbes.com), you may come to the conclusion that no aspect of tax policy is more important for economic growth than the way we tax capital gains. You’d be wrong.
The chart displayed above shows top tax rates on long-term capital gains and economic growth (measured as the percentage change in real GDP) from 1950 to 2011. If low capital gains tax rates catalyzed economic growth, you’d expect to see a negative relationship–high gains rates, low growth, and vice versa–but there is no apparent relationship between the two time series. The correlation is 0.12, the wrong sign and not statistically different from zero. I’ve tried lags up to five years and also looking at moving averages of the tax rates and growth. There is never a statistically significant relationship.
Lowering top marginal income tax rates and top marginal capital gains tax rates has a decisive distributional effect, lowering tax burdens on the very most affluent Americans. But, it demonstrably does not encourage econmic growth and it does not creat jobs.
23 October 2012
Obama Gets It On Navy
You mention the Navy, and the fact that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets . . . it's not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships.
- President Obama, Presidential Debate, October 22, 2012.
President Obama didn't come to his job as commander-in-chief as an expert on military policy. His background is as an anthropologist's son, a community organizer, a sharp law student, a law school professor, a respected Illinois politician first in the state legislature and then in the U.S. Senate, and finally, as President.
He didn't serve in the armed forces. As a Senator, military policy issues came before him, but he never made these issues his focus in that body.
Four years later, he's learned a lot and it shows.
The U.S. Navy's investment in warships is overkill.
The single greatest waste of money relative to military benefit in the U.S. military is its overinvestment in large naval surface combatants.
The United States has the world's largest fleet of war ships and for that matter, the world's largest military by almost every measure except number of men in uniform, where it is still among the largest. The United States Navy dwarfs any potential naval rival and realistically, in any major future naval conflict, the U.S. Navy would have allies who could bolster its naval resources further in any particular conflict. In the only live naval conflict at the moment, the fight to suppress pirates from Somolia, were even have Chinese naval allies.
This ships are incredibly expensive - updated versions of the proven 1980s destroyer designs that we are still purchasing cost something on the order of $1 billion each - and are expensive to operate. They unnecessarily put large numbers of crew members in harms way - new warship designs require about a third as many crew members to operate a comparable ship as they did in 1980s designs. Also, typically only about a third of the ships in the U.S. Navy are actually available for use in combat at any one time. And, redeployments of ships to a new conflict take place at about 20 miles per hour by a route considerably less direct than the crow flies.
In particular, almost every nation in the world that has a navy has deliberately chosen not to invest in large surface combatants: aircraft carriers, destroyers, and cruisers, or in nuclear powered submarines, in anything approaching the number of ships that the U.S. has chosen to purchase.
Few nations have more than two or three ships larger than a U.S. frigate (about 3,000-4,000 tons), and primarily invest in fairly small diesel-electric submarines (the higher end models have "air independent propulsion") for a fraction of the price of a nuclear attack submarine. Many nations devote a substantial proportion of their naval resources to "missile boats" a class of small (generally under 1,000 tons), fast, short range naval surface combatants that carry a small number of powerful missiles.
Moreover, the ships that the U.S. has aren't always strictly comparable to foreign warships that are commonly described as belonging to the same class. Most of the world's "aircraft carriers" are closer to the U.S. Marine Corps' "Harrier Carriers" than to the supercarriers of the U.S. Navy. The handful of Zumwalt class destroyers under construction at the moment at about 14,000 tons, are the size of World War II battleships.
These are not your father's warships.
The nature of large surface combatants and their strategic role has changed as well. In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, warships fought each other primarily with canons and then large naval guns, firing shells as much as sixteen inches thick distances of perhaps twenty-four miles. Destroyers focused on other surface combatants, while cruisers provided defense against enemy aircraft.
Now, almost all of the surface combatants in the U.S. Navy - destroyers, cruisers and frigates - serve essentially the same roles with similar weapontry. The naval guns, delivering shells of three or five inches in diameter perhaps a dozen miles, are backup weapons that are the bayonetts and swords of naval warfare. The primary armaments on a U.S. Navy surface combatant are large, powerful missiles - some for bombarding land based targets, some for destroying other warships, and some for destroying enemy submarines. Secondary armaments are smaller missiles designed to take on aircraft, incoming missiles, and soon, small missile boats. Almost all carry a military helicopter or two, which are particularly effective against submarines and small craft, as well.
The primary role of all of these surface combatants in the U.S. Navy is to escort U.S. supercarriers as part of aircraft carrier groups. They are supposed to find and destroy incoming surface combatants, submarines and missiles so that aircraft carriers don't have to. Their secondary role is to provide missile batteries in places where the U.S. doesn't have nearby Air Force bases (e.g. off the coast of Libya) and to dramatically "show the flag."
These trends are driven by a couple of key, largely technologiallly driven factors:
* Surface combatants are highly vunerable to attacks from swarms of missile boats, to high speed aircraft to high powered antiship missiles, to submarines, to sea mines. They are large, unmanuverable, slow targets that are hard to hide. Offensive technologies have largely overcome static defensive technologies (i.e. armor), and improved satellite and drone reconnaisance technologies have largely overcome naval stealth efforts for surface combatants.
* Missiles are more accurate at longer ranges and deliver more explosives to targets than dumb shells from naval guns, and given their accuracy there are few plausible scenarios where there are so many targets that the number of missiles carried is insufficient for a major military engagement. For example, there is no need to have a great many more anti-submarine missiles in any naval theater than there are submarines in the forces of potential adversaries.
Warplanes are better suited than ships to many modern surface combatant tasks.
In many cases, the jobs that are currently done by warships could be done by military aircraft that put far fewer people in harm's way (since they don't carry their support and maintenance crews on missions, nor the air crew's long term lodgings), are faster, are more manuveurable, more stealthy, can be more swiftly redeployed to another theater of combat, and can carry missiles and sensors that are similarly effective against enemy surface combatants, land based targets, and submarines.
One class of aircraft often proposed for this kind of task is often called a "cargo bomber" that would start from the foundation of existing commercial cargo aircraft. The Navy's new P-8 aircraft is also capable of serving in these roles. An investment in airborn refueling aircraft could extend the range of these aircraft to places far from where the U.S. Air Force (or Navy) has air bases. Cruise missiles also present plausible alternatives to the role of existing major surface combatants as little more than missile bases.
Of course, surface combatants also provide persistent sites for sophisticated sensors, but this could be accomplished with much smaller drone aircraft.
U.S. warships are filling new roles.
Of course, there are exceptions to this trend.
Aircraft carriers (rarely deployed with full complements of fighter jets) deploy fighter aircraft rather than missiles, although we are on the verge of transitioning to an era where a large share of these fighter aircraft will be unmanned drones. This capability remains relevant to projecting U.S. power across the world in places where the U.S. may lack local air bases.
The Marines have a number of ships that deliver Marines and their gear to distant locations and serve as off shore bases for them. They are particularly attractive for showing the flag off the shores of conflict ridden Third World countries with pitiful navies from which they can evacuate U.S. citizens and citizens of our allies, or intervene in small scale conflicts that threaten to destabilize friendly countries.
A number of new designs that have just entered naval service that do not merely support air craft carrier groups.
* The two or three Zumwalt class destroyers that are under construction give greater emphasis to a role supporting ground troops fighting in coastal areas with a powerful naval gun that fires guided artillery rounds that aren't quite full fledged missiles (the original design had called for a rail gun, but that technology wasn't ready for prime time when it was time to build the ships). They also reduce the radar and visual profile of the ship, although to call the design a "stealth" design, somewhat overstates its effectiveness. To some extent, these ships will be obsolete before they ever enter military service.
* A new class of Littoral Combat Ships, one of two designs that are about 3,000 tons each, lack both large missiles and a large naval gun and are faster the existing surface combatants. They have modules for a variety of missions from antisubmarine warfare, to locating and destroying sea based mines, to patrolling the seas and supporting ground troops. The extreme price advantage these ships had over prior surface combatants has turned out to be underwealming, however.
* A new class of ballistic missile submarines, converted from nuclear missile carrying submarines, used in the Libya conflict, is a way to deploy missiles without the vulnerabilities associated with surface combatants.
A proposed next generation surface combatant cruiser design would primarily serve a missile defense role, intercepting small numbers of nuclear missiles fired by rougue nations like North Korea or Iran.
Diplomatic and Strategic Alternatives.
There Are Few Major Naval Adversaries
The size of the U.S. Navy is largely driven by just a handful of foreign navies: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Conflicts with China and North Korea are plausible possibilities mostly along the Asian eastern coast from Taiwan to Japan. Iran is a naval threat pretty much exclusively in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf.
Russia is the only global naval power that is a potential adversary that like the United States has a meaningful "Blue Sea Navy." It is split between multiple military theaters (Arctic-Baltic, Pacific, Atlantic, Black Sea, Mediterranean). And, it hasn't really fully defined a mission for itself yet other than showing off Russian military power to the world.
Naval Weapons Should Be A Priority For Conventional Arms Control Talks
Diplomatic progress on limiting the small number of conventional weapons from these small number of potential adversaries in well defined geographic areas could dramatically reduce the need for U.S. military spending and military spending by U.S. allies, on naval forces. A treaty that is effective in limiting the use of submarines near the East Asian coast, or in the Persian Gulf, for example, could dramatically reduce the need to invest in naval forces.
We Should Look For Opportunities To Turn Potential Adversaries Into Allies.
So could progress in overall diplomatic relations with these nations that makes them no longer threats to the U.S. and its allies. For example, if a Chinese military invasion of Taiwan no longer becomes a plausible military scenario, perhaps because Taiwan agrees to accept a status similar to Hong Kong as an autonomous region within a modernizing and moderating China, then much of the justification for the size of the U.S. Navy and U.S. military presence in Japan collapses. Similarly, if the current regime in North Korea is replaced by a less militarized and embattled one that seeks unification with South Korea, another key justification for U.S. naval forces could be eliminated.
Increased economic ties with China and Russia in the post-Cold War era have already had this effect to a considerable effect. It is not clear, for example, whose side China would take if North Korea were to ramp up its use of military force, even though in the past, it was clear that China would back North Korea as a fellow communist nation. North Korea has not done a good job of maintaining strong ties to either Russia or China, both of which have progressed beyond early Cold War style communist regimes in the meantime.
Policy initiatives designed to change public opinion in places like China and Russia and even Iran (North Korea is a lost cause on this front) deserve more attention from U.S. diplomatic resources.
We Should Set Realistic Goals For U.S. Military Capabilities In Force-Size Driving Potential Conflict Areas
Likewise, considerable progress could be made by setting realistic goals about what the U.S. would hope to accomplish militarily in military conflict with these countries. For example, military plans based on securing regime change in China or Russia, or embargoing these countries, are unrealistic. More realistic goals for these regions would be (1) to protect both U.S. territories (Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa), and U.S. allies like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Phillipines from Chinese or Russian naval invasions, (2) to keep commercial shipping flowing in this vicinity of the Pacific Ocean and in the Persian Gult, and (3) to provide resources to address intermediate and long range missile strikes by nations like Iran and North Korea.
We Should Adopt Strategies That Rely More Heavily On The Naval Resources Of Local Allies
U.S. military planners also need to stop assuming that the norm will be that the U.S. takes naval action without the involvement of our allies in a particular region who also have naval forces. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Israel and the nations of Western Europe, for example, all have naval forces of their own that would be allied with the U.S. in any signficant future naval war.
19 October 2012
Creationist Politics
From Jude, in the comments:
My youngest child is 18 this year, so I have now officially created 3 additional voters[.]This is a kind of Creationist politics that I can support.
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