Author: Justin

bookmark_borderTaxonomy of Indecision

Posted on by Justin

(This is the second in a series of articles about undecided voters)

Who are all of these Undecided Voters? I’ve so far come up with four types. I’m open to expanding or narrowing the list.

I’m not an undecided voter, but I play one on television / Attention Whores

Once ever four years, the world turns to these undecided deciders. These self-styled last true men (and women) enjoy the sense of power and the possibility that the candidates for the Most Powerful Job in the World are vying for their personal vote. In the end, they’ll probably write in Mickey Mouse or Homer Simpson and think themselves witty or clever with their little act of civic protest.

 

Fish or Cut Bait? / Indecisive people make indecisive voters

These voters can’t decide what to cook for dinner, or even if they’re hungry. What chance do they have of picking a President?

 

Just Fooling Themselves / Republicans and Democrats in Denial

If you looked at these voters’ record, they consistently pick one party or the other. They’ll tell you they are Independent and they look down on partisans as they believe party membership is for the sheeple. They’ll often misquote George Washington as saying the US shouldn’t have political parties.

 

Too Busy, but know they should Care

They can barely find time to sleep, let alone think about the election. (The ones who show up in focus groups are actually Attention Whores.) They know they should be engaged, and they really want to be good citizens, but they just don’t have the time. So they rely on mass media to inform them. On that basis, can you really blame this group for being undecided?

bookmark_borderBinders Full of Libya

Posted on by Justin

I have been quiet about the second 2012 Presidential debate for several reasons. First, I agree with Lawrence O’Donnell that picking a winner is difficult. That being said, I do have some thoughts on the debate and what it means.

I thought it was a good debate. I certainly enjoyed watching it. The questions could have been better, but you can only work with what you get in a forum like this.

Romney let his inner asshole out to play, and was a bit too aggressive with the moderator, but sometimes that plays well at home with voters. It comes across as asshollery to most of us, but to a substantial minority it looks like strength. “He made the President sit down and wait his turn.” “He didn’t take any guff from the moderator.” “He caught the President in a lie about calling the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi a terrorist attack.” (Even though everyone agrees he lost that point when he got bogged down in the word used.)

Professor Obama showed up. If you believe in 11-Dimensional Chess, which I don’t, then you can see the first debate as the ultimate rope-a-dope approach. The same Romney showed up for the second debate. Against a real opponent – Professor Obama instead of Uncle Fluffy – his approach was much less effective.

This was a make-or-break moment for the President. He needed to reassure his base that he still wanted the job. I think he did that. He also needed to reframe Romney as an out-of-touch Plutocrat. The jury is still out on whether he managed this or not.

On the topic of Libya and the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens, I thought Romney had a good point. The Administration dropped the ball on this, and the President is rightly criticized for his handling. The argument that Congress cut funding for embassy security holds no water for me. If it is a priority, you have to fight for it. the Administration did not. In the aftermath, it was several days before it was clear that the reports of demonstrations at the Consulate preceding the attack were incorrect. The Administration is rightly criticized for either not knowing this or for not being clear about it.

Romney screwed this one up, however, by focusing on whether the President said the magic words “terrorist” or “terrorism” in his Rose Garden speech. The real criticism is the handling of the following weeks. Romney missed his chance to raise this issue when he thought he’d caught the President in a lie. Incidentally, I think Paul Ryan in the Vice Presidential debate did a much better job of pinning the issue on the Administration than Romney’s Gotcha! tactic did.

I’m looking forward to the third and final debate. Perhaps the topic of climate change will finally put in an appearance. It is a national security issue, after all.

bookmark_borderWhen Undecided Voters Attack!

Posted on by Justin

(This is the first in a series of articles about undecided voters)

I’ve been thinking about undecided voters a lot this week. I really want to know what makes them tick.

I think Thomas Frank got close to the problem in What’s the Matter with Kansas? Frank describes a disconnect between what people identified as their concerns and their own interests. For instance, a voter who is concerned about their job and the economy will not vote for the candidate that would best help on that issue because they don’t see the issue as being a political issue. In other words, they lack the vocabulary to talk about their needs and concerns in a productive way.

I believe undecided voters, on the whole, are in a similar situation. They lack the ability to ask the questions they really want answered, and instead get bogged down in minutia. Take, for example, today’s story about Katherine Fenton, the woman who asked about gender equality in the workplace at the Presidential debate the other night. In an interview with Salon.com’s Irin Carmon, she said she wasn’t satisfied with either candidate’s answer. She wanted specifics, you see; not what they’ve done before. If you accept, however, that past acts reveal priorities, then you know Mitt Romney will probably have women in his cabinet, and that President Obama will probably champion and sign legislation leading to mor equal pay between men and women. Both candidates were admittedly short on policy specifics, but you can get those from a position paper. Debates are where candidates tell you who they are as people.

The kicker for Ms. Fenton, however, was that $16 trillion dollars is “a huge figure” and that made her inclined to fire President Obama. Here we see the disconnect. This is what the candidates are running against.

bookmark_borderHow To Read a Poll

Posted on by Justin

I’ve been citing this piece from Kevin Drum for years (I thought it was from his CalPundit days, but the version I found tonight is from The Washington Monthly): Margin of Error.

The idea of a “statistical tie” is based on the theory that (a) statistical results are credible only if they are at least 95% certain to be accurate, and (b) any lead less than the MOE is less than 95% certain.

There are two problems with this: first, 95% is not some kind of magic cutoff point, and second, the idea that the MOE represents 95% certainty is wrong anyway. A poll’s MOE does represent a 95% confidence interval for each individual’s percentage, but it doesn’t represent a 95% confidence for the difference between the two, and that’s what we’re really interested in.

This is some wonky statistical stuff, but you have a responsibility to understand it if you are relying on polls to tell you what the state of this race – or any race – is.  Numeracy is nearly as important as literacy.

Part of being numerate is understanding your tools.  This technique works for individual polls based on sample error, but is not appropriate for polls of polls, like Pollster or RCP, which have their own internal rules and checks on margins of error.  Those polls have their own set of problems.

bookmark_borderCalling a Liar a Liar

Posted on by Justin

Hunter always tells it like it is. He has long been one of my favorite commentators, and he offers up another bit of “what the hell?” today, this time about the Wall Street Journal‘s latest whining about their hurt fee-fees:

Calling a liar out for being a liar is also common and, we must point out, the morally correct response to actual lying, an approach followed by teachers, juries, nuns, our greatest philosophers and most of the rest of the civilized planet. When I catch my child in a lie, I would not be impressed by her declaring that me pointing it out is just like what Hitler would have done. However, my child is also intelligent enough to recognize a non-sequiter when she sees one, which has already permanently disqualified her from working for Fox News or writing a column for the Wall Street Journal.

There’s more over at Daily Kos.

bookmark_borderJoe versus the Wonkcano

Posted on by Justin

That was some show, right?

Joe Biden always delivers, and Paul Ryan held his own. Regardless of the pre-debate spin, it was clear that these men are seasoned debaters. If nothing else, they demonstrated an ability to deftly pivot from the question asked to a talking point they wanted to deliver.

I’d privately observed that both candidates had their own challenges, more personal than political, in this debate.

  • Ryan needed to avoid condescending to the female moderator.
  • Biden needed to keep his cool.

In other words, “Biden needs to keep his shirt on. Ryan needs to avoid telling Martha Raddatz to make him a sandwich.”

I think both candidates easily cleared that low bar.

To be sure, Biden was assertive and interrupted Ryan frequently, but no more so than Romney did last week. In a political debate at this level, this sort of thing is de rigueur. Anyone feinting shock that Joe Biden was mean either has never seen Joe Biden debate before or has such thin skin that they should consider a career in something other than politics.

The most telling part of last night’s debate was Paul Ryan’s abject refusal to provide specifics on the Romney-Ryan tax plan. This was it, the big night. Here he was, before the biggest audience he’s had since the GOP convention, and this is what he gave us:

RYAN: Different than this administration, we actually want to have big bipartisan agreements. You see, I understand the…

RADDATZ: Do you have the specifics? Do you have the… Do you know exactly what you’re doing?

RYAN: Look—look at what Mitt Romney—look at what Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill did. They worked together out of a framework to lower tax rates and broaden the base, and they worked together to fix that.

What we’re saying is, here’s our framework. Lower tax rates 20 percent. We raised about $1.2 trillion through income taxes. We forego about $1.1 trillion in loopholes and deductions. And so what we’re saying is, deny those loopholes and deductions to higher-income taxpayers so that more of their income is taxed, which has a broader base of taxation so we can lower tax rates across the board. Now, here’s why I’m saying this. What we’re saying is, here’s the framework…

We want to work with Congress—we want to work with the Congress on how best to achieve this. That means successful. Look…

RADDATZ: No specifics, again.

RYAN: Mitt—what we’re saying is, lower tax rates 20 percent, start with the wealthy, work with Congress to do it…

RADDATZ: And you guarantee this math will add up?

RYAN: Absolutely.

Raddatz was asking for some nitty-gritty, wonky stuff. But the nitty-gritty matters, especially when it involves federal tax exemptions and deductions. And Paul Ryan is the “details” guy in the GOP. He’s supposed to be the wonky one, the one who gets turned on by a spreadsheet. To say “congress can decide” is an abject abandonment of the President’s role in recommending and suggesting policy by setting the political agenda. (US CONST Art. II, Sec. 3, cl. 2.) While it is true that all such legislation must originate in the House of Representatives, and it is refreshing to see someone defer to the Constitution, as a practical matter it doesn’t work that way. “The President proposes and Congress disposes” goes the political chestnut. A President Romney would have the responsibility to propose certain cuts to the Congress. He has a responsibility to tell the American people what those would be before they elect him President, not after. Paul Ryan missed his opportunity to do that last night.

Onward to the Town Hall! A roomfull of “undecided” voters… what could possibly go wrong?

bookmark_borderThe Beltway Debate

Posted on by Justin

The more I think about last night’s debate, the madder I get.

Mostly, I’m mad at Jim Leher. He should join MacNeil in retirement. His befuddled demeanor and lack of stage presence allowed Romney to walk all over him. Romney, for his part, refused to acknowledge that the debate should be moderated at all. He told Leher what was going to happen, and then did it. This may look like bold leadership to some, but it came across as bullying entitlement from where I was sitting.

Obama wasn’t any better. He was listless, his answers were rambling, and he didn’t seem to want to be there. If he’d checked his watch, the transformation would have been complete!

But beyond all that, I blame Jim Leher for asking asinine questions. Here’s a little-known fact about the deficit and the national debt: outside the beltway and local Tea Party meetings, no one cares about the deficit or the debt. It just isn’t a consideration. In the abstract, everyone knows the national debt will eventually be a bad thing (although a growing economy will make it less painful to pay off than our politicians like to scare us into believing). As a practical matter, the deficit and the debt have nothing to do with our everyday lives.

What do people care about?

  • Housing (credit is still effectively frozen for people without pristine credit and/or extensive wealth)
  • A real discussion of gun violence
  • Ongoing, systematic voter disenfranchisement, including voter ID requirements and polling place/time shenanigans
  • Women’s healthcare (birth control and abortion)
  • The rising cost of a higher education
  • The nonexistent job market
  • Climate change

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure you can make your own list at home. Nothing was asked in these categories in more than a cursory way, and yet these are all domestic issues that the American people care about. For some reason, they weren’t even on Jim Leher’s radar. Maybe one of the moderators will ask a question about climate change in the National Security debate, but this was pretty much the only chance to get into these things before election day.

This was a Beltway Debate, pure and simple. The pundits surely slept well last night, with visions of cat food dancing in their heads.

Next Up: A “town hall” style debate, with a room full of people who claim they haven’t made up their minds yet. More on why (or how) someone can still be an undecided voter later…

bookmark_borderWhat’s Your Relative Voice?

Posted on by Justin

Andrea Seabrook presented the first episode of her new podcast, DecodeDC, today. (You should also check out her blog of the same name.) She explored how the U.S. House of Representatives got to have 435 members and why it has been that size since 1910. It is well worth a listen even if you aren’t interested in the wonky underpinnings of How Stuff Gets Done.

What she didn’t get into and that I find fascinating is how the number of representatives changes the relative political power of individual citizens. In other words, how does the Connecticut Compromise allocate political influence? And what is the impact of that allocation?

I started plotting out the numbers this afternoon, plugging 2010 U.S. Census population data by state into a a spreadsheet, along with the total number of Representatives and Senators from each state. I still need to adjust my model to account for the differences between Senators and Representatives, and I need to decide if I should break things out by individual congressional district (I’m leaning toward “no” because each citizen in a state will have the same score across all intrastate congressional districts. I’m also making the decision to stick with a pure numbers analysis and am disregarding many of the things that make Congress “tick,” including such things as committee assignments, which party is in power, seniority, and the clout of individual members.

In a sense, I’m rehashing the debate that led to the Connecticutt Compromise, but I believe it is still relevant. We live in a Republic after all, not a Democracy, and we should each be aware of what our relative political influence is. I hope to have a tentative chart by the end of the weekend.

bookmark_borderSome Things Go Beyond Politics

Posted on by Justin

Just catching up on the news after a busy day. A couple of observations…

I mourn Ambassador Chris Stevens, and my thoughts are with his family, friends, and coworkers. I also mourn for the people of Libya, who will likely bear the brunt of any retaliation or punishment for his death.

By all accounts, Ambassador Stevens was a good man, a career foreign service officer who cared deeply for Libya and for the Libyan people. I fear the reprecussions of his death will be felt for years to come. No one should take this lightly. The death of an ambassador is a mercifully rare thing. The last death was in Afghanistan in 1979, when newly-appointed Ambassador Adolph Dubs died in a gun battle after a thwarted kidnapping attempt. Prior to that, only four other sitting US Ambassadors have been killed. (This in and of itself is a tribute to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, who by all accounts did all they could for Ambassador Stevens.)

Relatedly, today was a test of Presidential fitness for Mitt Romney. Next to sending American men and women into combat as Commander-in-Chief, how you handle a foreign policy crisis is the most important work a President can do. Mitt failed his test today. Instead of seizing the opportunity to appear statesmanlike and to stand with President Obama, Governor Romney decided to seek political advantage.

I shouldn’t feel the need to blog about this incident in a political context. But we’re in the middle of the election “silly season” and some candidates can’t help but put their worst foot forward – straight into the mouth.

bookmark_borderCold Fusion’s Ignominious Return

Posted on by Justin

(For whatever reason, this December 2011 interview with Mitt Romney is making the rounds of the internet this week.)

Romney sat down for a rare on-the-record interview with a panel of editors from The Washington Examiner. In the course of the interview, he was asked to comment on science policy. Among other statements is this nugget:

Mitt Romney: I do believe in basic science. I believe in participating in space. I believe in analysis of new sources of energy. I believe in laboratories, looking at ways to conduct electricity with — with cold fusion, if we can come up with it. It was the University of Utah that solved that. We somehow can’t figure out how to duplicate it.

What makes this comment so egregious is that it betrays Mitt Romney’s genuine lack of scientific litteracy.

The Science is Clear

This is what University of Maryland Professor Bob Parks wrote in his What’s New newsletter on March 24, 1989, the day after Cold Fusion was announced:

The remarkable report from the University of Utah that researchers had achieved deuterium fusion in an electrolysis cell was initially provided only to the Financial Times of London and the Wall Street Journal. From what little is known, the claim seems to be that deuterium ions from heavy water diffuse into the lattice of a palladium cathode at sufficient concentration to fuse. Palladium is well known for its ability to take up large quantities of hydrogen. Indeed, solid-state storage of deuterium in metals such as titanium and scandium is standard practice in nuclear weapons, where dihydrides and even trihydrides do not result in fusion. Whatever the technical merits of the Utah claim, however, serious questions of scientific accountability will certainly be raised. The press statement is devoid of any details that might enable other scientists to judge the strength of the evidence.

From day one, the skeptics were on to the scam. In the months and years that followed, numerous good faith efforts were made to duplicate the Utah results. None suceded. None even came close. In scientific circles, everyone moved on. The Romney campaign seems to have never received the news.

There’s really no excuse for any educated person to trot out cold fusion as a scientific breakthrough in 2011, when Romney made these comments.  Even if he was just riffing, there is no excuse for floating such claims. No excuse. None. Pons and Fleischmann have been so thoroughly and publicly discredited one would have to live in a bubble and be fed a steady diet of lies to think they accomplished anything other than a mid-range hoax. (I’ve seen more believable perpetual motion machines at antique machinery shows.)

Perhaps more inexcusable is that the editorial board of the Washington Examiner didn’t call him on his bogus claim.

How could this happen?

Unfortunately, Mitt Romney isn’t alone in his scientific illiteracy. In his 1997 book The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan made reference to the American public’s scientific literacy. Presumably relying on the work of Jon Miller, he wrote that approximately 5% of Americans understand enough basic science to make sound policy decisions about it. Looking at Miller’s actual studies, it appears that Sagan was close. The actual percentage in 1988 was 10%. Today, wer’re only marginally better off.

As of 2008, Miller says we’ve managed to raise that number to 28%. An astounding feat, a nearly three-fold increase in less than a generation, but still woefully short of where we need to be.

I have no doubt that Romney meant well, and being able to tout the accomplishments of a couple of scientists from a state he holds near and dear had to have felt good, but he got it wrong. Somewhere along the way, Mitt Romney failed to pick up a basic education in science. This isn’t entirely unexpected. Our last president to be scientifically literate was Thomas Jefferson.

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