Brendan Nyhan

Yesterday the Senate defeated Tom Coburn’s amendment to kill the National Science Foundation’s political science program — which had my colleagues up in arms — by a 62-36 vote that broke down largely along party lines:

To understand the vote breakdown better, we can use this graphic, which was automatically generated by Royce Carroll using the Lewis-Poole Optimal Classification estimates for the 111th Senate:

Each senator is placed at their estimated ideal point in the ideological space. The diagonal cutting line, which represents the best-fitting line dividing yes from no votes in the space, indicates that the vote reflected both the primary ideological division between the parties (in this case, cutting “wasteful” government spending) and the second “social issues” dimension (feelings toward pointy-headed academics?).

For a different perspective, here are regional breakdowns of the vote from Govtrack.us with both a standard US map and one that is deformed to give each state equal area:

Note to Senator Coburn: This post was not funded by the NSF.

Update 11/9 7:02 AM: Stanford’s Simon Jackman posted this graphic portraying the relationship between estimated ideal points along the primary ideological dimension* and the Coburn vote (click the graphic for a larger version):

It’s especially useful for distinguishing the senators whose votes are not well-explained by their estimated ideal points in the first dimension.

* Jackman’s estimates come from the Clinton-Jackman-Rivers algorithm for scaling roll call votes, which differs slightly from the Lewis-Poole algorithm used to produce the circular graphic above.

Underscoring a point I’ve made several times in the last week, Alan Abramowitz, a respected political scientist at Emory University, has a new analysis showing that the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial results are not predictive of midterm election seat changes:

[T]he results of the previous year’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey did not predict the results of the midterm elections. Not only is the estimated coefficient for the Virginia/New Jersey election variable small and statistically insignificant, but it is in the wrong direction: the better Republicans did in Virginia and New Jersey, the worse they did in the subsequent midterm election.

A forthcoming paper in Legislative Studies Quarterly (via John Sides at The Monkey Cage) finds that changes in partisan control of House seats in special elections is predictive of general election outcomes. In the current context, these results suggest an environment that is slightly more favorable to Democrats due to the pickup in NY-23 (the only partisan change in a House special election this electoral cycle).

In reality, of course, Democrats will have a tough time in 2010 — I fully expect them to lose a significant number of seats. But contrary to the media hype, the Virginia and New Jersey results don’t provide much information about what that outcome is likely to be.

Wall Street Journal, 11/3/09:

Republicans Are Poised for Gains in Key Elections
Outcomes in New York, New Jersey and Virginia Are Unlikely to Forecast Much About National Races in 2010, History Shows

Republicans appear positioned for strong results in three hard-fought elections Tuesday. But isolated, off-year contests aren’t always reliable indicators of what will happen in the wider federal and state races held in even-numbered years.

Wall Street Journal, 11/4/09:

Republicans Win in Key States

A Republican sweep in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday shifted the political terrain against President Barack Obama only a year after his historic election.

PS For the record, the WSJ was right the first time. Despite what the press will tell you, a handful of off-year elections don’t tell us much about the “political terrain” facing Obama and the Democrats. As Matthew Yglesias points out, we have these things called “polls” that we can use to measure people’s political beliefs and opinions. Perhaps we should consider using those instead.

Update 11/4 11:41 AM: Dave notes in comments that the first story includes a similar passage about the election potentially revealing “much tougher political terrain,” which I missed:

A Republican sweep in Tuesday’s key contests would at minimum show that Democrats face much tougher political terrain than they did a year ago.

I’m not sure what that means (the metaphor of “political terrain” is not well-defined) but it seems to contradict the lede of the story, which states that off-year elections are not reliable indicators. The point remains that the ledes of the two stories are in tension (if not in direct contradiction).

It’s also worth noting note the contradiction between the election “show[ing]… political terrain” (11/3) and the results actually “shift[ing] the political terrain” (11/4). Maybe it’s time to retire the metaphor, which lets reporters vaguely suggest that things have changed without specifying how.

Update 11/4 8:49 PM — Eric Boehlert at Media Matters has a virtually identical item on the AP’s election coverage:

The AP on Tuesday:

To be sure, it’s easy to overanalyze the results of such a small number of elections in a few places. The results will only offer hints about the national political landscape and clues to the public’s attitudes. And the races certainly won’t predict what will happen in the 2010 midterm elections.

The AP on Wednesday:

To be sure, each race was as much about local issues as about firing warning shots at the politically powerful. But taken together, the results of the 2009 off-year elections could imperil Obama’s ambitious legislative agenda and point to a challenging environment in midterm elections next year.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

As TNR’s Jon Chait points out, Frank Rich’s column about GOP infighting in New York’s 23rd Congressional district is full of nasty rhetoric comparing the GOP to murderous regimes, cults, etc.:

[T]he real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada… [T]his pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field…

…[T]he right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama…

…To the right’s Jacobins, that’s cause to send [GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava] to the guillotine.

…The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch

…Though [Beck, Palin and their acolytes] constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode.

…It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down.

Rich has little basis for this hateful rhetoric. His objection is that conservatives supported a third party challenger to a moderate Republican candidate in NY-23 (the moderate, Scozzafava, has since withdrawn and endorsed the Democrat in the race). But as Chait points out, this is normal political behavior:

Some GOP hacks appointed a relative moderate to represent a district that could probably sustain a much more conservative representative, and conservatives are trying to elect a more right-wing alternative. What exactly is the problem here?

Chait then asks an excellent question — would Rich feel the same way if the shoe were on the other foot?

[S]uppose this was a solidly Democratic district, and party bosses put forward an anti-stimulus, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights nominee. Would Rich really oppose a liberal campaign to elect a more like-minded representative? Would he employ such virtiolic metaphors? There’s a lesson here about making a moral cause out of a procedural argument you’re not prepared to back in opposite circumstances.

It turns out that we have a reasonably good comparison case — Ned Lamont’s 2006 challenge to Joe Lieberman. Lieberman isn’t “anti-stimulus, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights,” but he, like Scozzafava, is far more moderate than his party’s base. And yet Rich somehow wasn’t quite as worked up about Lamont’s challenge back in 2006 — indeed, Rich described the reaction to Lieberman’s primary defeat as a “hysterical overreaction”:

[T]he death rattle of the domestic political order we’ve lived with since 9/11 can be found everywhere: in Americans’ unhysterical reaction to the terror plot, in politicians’ and pundits’ hysterical overreaction to Joe Lieberman’s defeat in Connecticut, even in the ho-hum box-office reaction to Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.”

… Mr. Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut Democratic senatorial primary has been as overhyped as Mr. Stone’s movie. As a bellwether of national politics, one August primary in one very blue state is nearly meaningless. Mr. Lieberman’s star began to wane in Connecticut well before Iraq became a defining issue. His approval rating at home, as measured by the Quinnipiac poll, had fallen from 80 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in July 2003, and that was before his kamikaze presidential bid turned “Joementum” into a national joke.

The hyperbole that has greeted the Lamont victory in some quarters is far more revealing than the victory itself. In 2006, the tired Rove strategy of equating any Democratic politician’s opposition to the Iraq war with cut-and-run defeatism in the war on terror looks desperate. The Republicans are protesting too much, methinks. A former Greenwich selectman like Mr. Lamont isn’t easily slimed as a reincarnation of Abbie Hoffman or an ally of Osama bin Laden. What Republicans really see in Mr. Lieberman’s loss is not a defeat in the war on terror but the specter of their own defeat. Mr. Lamont is but a passing embodiment of a fixed truth: most Americans think the war in Iraq was a mistake and want some plan for a measured withdrawal. That truth would prevail even had Mr. Lamont lost.

A similar panic can be found among the wave of pundits, some of them self-proclaimed liberals, who apoplectically fret that Mr. Lamont’s victory signals the hijacking of the Democratic Party by the far left (here represented by virulent bloggers) and a prospective replay of its electoral apocalypse of 1972. Whatever their political affiliation, almost all of these commentators suffer from the same syndrome: they supported the Iraq war and, with few exceptions (mainly at The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard), are now embarrassed that they did. Desperate to assert their moral superiority after misjudging a major issue of our time, they loftily declare that anyone who shares Mr. Lamont’s pronounced opposition to the Iraq war is not really serious about the war against the jihadists who attacked us on 9/11.

That’s just another version of the Cheney-Lieberman argument, and it’s hogwash. Most of the 60 percent of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq also want to win the war against Al Qaeda and its metastasizing allies: that’s one major reason they don’t want America bogged down in Iraq. Mr. Lamont’s public statements put him in that camp as well, which is why those smearing him resort to the cheap trick of citing his leftist great-uncle (the socialist Corliss Lamont) while failing to mention that his father was a Republican who served in the Nixon administration. (Mr. Lieberman, ever bipartisan, has accused Mr. Lamont of being both a closet Republican and a radical.)

In other words, ideological challenges to moderate candidates are a bad thing… except when they’re not.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board goes back to the future in the fight against health care reform with this remix of Betsy McCaughey’s false claim about the Clinton health care plan:

ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.

But unlike McCaughey, whose claim that people would not be able to purchase health care services outside the Clinton administration’s proposed system of managed competition was demonstrably false, the WSJ is making a slippery slope argument that can’t be disproven. Nonetheless, it’s absurd. Does anyone outside the WSJ think that “all medicine” in the US will be rationed?* Note that doing so would require government to bar people from privately contracting for medical services. That is extremely unlikely to happen regardless of whether the health care plan in Congress passes or not.

Later in the piece, the WSJ goes on to make the point that cost controls on spending in Medicare and the public option are inevitable:

As Congress’s balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can’t regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.

It’s certainly also possible, as the WSJ implies above, that similar limitations will be placed on regulated private health insurance plans at some point in the future. However, these scenarios still fall short of supporting the claim that health care will have been “nationalized” or that “all medicine will be rationed via politics,” both of which imply total government control of the health care sector.

Lamar Alexander is the latest elite to push the golden age of bipartisanship meme:

The No. 3 Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who attended one session with the president, recalled that in the 1960s, when he was a Congressional aide, Democrats and Republicans worked together on civil rights. He said he saw no possibility of a bipartisan health bill.

“White House officials don’t want one or don’t know how to do one,” Mr. Alexander said.

First, as I’ve noted many times before, the bipartisanship of mid-century was a historical aberration driven by conservative Democrats who remained in their party due to the history of race in the South. After the parties realigned on race, the system returned to the norm of party polarization. As appealing as bipartisanship may seem to centrist pundits and minority party legislators, it came at a very high cost.

In addition, the issues are fundamentally different. The civil rights debate was bipartisan because civil rights split the party coalitions. By contrast, health care is an issue that aligns with the dominant cleavage between the two parties. In a more partisan era, there’s no reason to expect either party to pass major domestic policy legislation in a bipartisan fashion.

Update 11/2 10:36 AM — Matthew Yglesias expresses similar thoughts:

This is very confused, starting with the fact that Alexander started working as a Senate aide in 1967 by which time the main civil rights debate was over. Then any competent observer of American politics should realize that it’s no coincidence that the bipartisanship of the civil rights era vanished in the post-civil rights age. It was the debate over civil rights itself that created the unusual bipartisanship of mid-20th century America.

Combining conspiracy theorizing with 1980s board games, Glenn Beck used Connect Four (!) on his show yesterday to illustrate his claims about radicals in the Obama administration:

Beck, who has a penchant for bizarre visual aids, previously boiled a fake frog on his show:

Other visual aids have included wild chalkboard scrawls and arboreal metaphors of supposed left-wing conspiracies:

Personally, I welcome this move toward using classic board games. Maybe Beck can analyze Obama’s naval strategy using Battleship? Counter-insurgency tactics using Stratego? The possibilities are endless…

Sarah Palin continues to post gruesome poll numbers for a supposedly serious presidential contender. The latest CNN poll found that only 29 percent of Americans believe she is qualified to be president. That number represents a significant decline from perceptions of her qualifications during the campaign, which were already terrible.

Indeed, perceptions of Palin’s qualifications are unprecedented among presidential/vice presidential nominees and major presidential contenders in recent years. From Joe Biden to George W. Bush, no one has been perceived as less qualified since Dan Quayle and Ross Perot. The Palin-Quayle parallel, which Jon Chait nailed soon after her nomination, is particularly striking. Each was a surprise VP pick who sparked initial enthusiasm but later became widely perceived as incompetent.

To illustrate the point, here’s a comparison of poll results measuring perceptions of Palin and Quayle’s qualifications based on time elapsed since their initial convention speeches*:

Though Quayle served as vice president for four years (and got a small bump in the Gulf War period), he could never overcome the perception that he was not qualified to be president. I expect Palin’s trajectory to be very similar.

Update 10/30 1:26 PM: Credit where credit is due — Phil Klinkner raised the Palin-Quayle parallel back on August 30, 2008, citing a Rasmussen poll.

Update 10/31 10:48 AM: In the post above, I didn’t make explicit what happened to Quayle after his tenure as vice president. For those who don’t know, he withdrew from the presidential race in 1996 and declined to run in 2000. Though he gave various reasons for his decisions to withdraw, the fundamental problem was his perceived lack of qualification to be president. Palin may run in 2012 or 2016 — the base likes her more than it did Quayle — but she will face the same obstacles that he did in trying to mount a successful campaign.

* The polls that were included used national adult and registered voter samples with binary qualified/not qualified questions.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Via Matthew Yglesias, I’m thrilled to see that the Associated Press sent blind climate data to four independent statisticians to see if there has been a cooling trend in recent years. (Answer: No.)

The next step is to consult with statistical experts on a whole variety of other topics, including whether three off-year elections can tell us anything meaningful about President Obama’s political standing, whether a single poll can provide convincing evidence of a shift in public opinion, and whether trend stories based on a handful of anecdotes (i.e. “chubby is hip”) have any basis in fact. I can’t wait!

Following up on his comments during the campaign, Rush Limbaugh is invoking ugly cultural stereotypes that infantilize black men in his comments about President Obama, who Limbaugh has repeatedly described as a “boy” and as a “man-child”:

Limbaugh calls
Obama “this little boy, this little man-child president.” While
discussing what he characterized as Obama’s “attacks” on Fox News and “ambush”
of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Limbaugh said: “People are finally standing up
to this little boy, this little man-child president, whose primary — I think his primary job,
if you will, in life has been leisure.” [Premiere Radio Networks’ The
Rush Limbaugh Show, 10/27/09]

Limbaugh on
college “thesis” he said Obama wrote: “[T]his little boy in college”
had “disdain” for Constitution. During discussion of a report about
a “college thesis” Obama had purportedly written, which later was revealed to have been fake, Limbaugh
claimed: “And this
little boy in college, writing about [the Constitution] with utter disdain, and
he still shares those same feelings.”
[The Rush Limbaugh
Show, 10/23/09]

Limbaugh says that with
digitized health records, “little man-child” Obama would be able to “blackmail you” and “deny you
treatment.” Warning that the digitization of medical records
would let the government “blackmail” patients and deny them treatment, Limbaugh
asserted, “Every day, this little man-child reaches out and grabs something
else.” [The Rush Limbaugh Show,
6/18/09]

On Beck, Limbaugh calls Obama a “full-fledged
man-child narcissist.” Appearing on Fox News’ Glenn Beck, Limbaugh stated of Obama: “The
man’s a pure, full-fledged man-child narcissist who has to make everything about
him. And while he’s talking about protecting us and defending us and so forth,
the Federal Reserve yesterday
came out and said the economic forecast for the rest of the year is
even worse.” [Glenn Beck, 5/21/09]

Limbaugh: “[T]he little boy president went out there and
did something absolutely ignorant and stupid.” Referring to Senate
Democrats’ plan to block funding for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center until a decision was made
about where to put the detainees, Limbaugh stated: “I tell ya, this is cover for
Obama, ’cause the little boy president went out there and did something
absolutely ignorant and stupid, and he’s got to be covered for it now.”
[The Rush Limbaugh Show, 5/20/09]

Discussing Obama,
Limbaugh suggests Dems, media believe “you can’t criticize the little black
man-child.” On his radio show, Limbaugh
asserted of attacks by Sen. John McCain against then-Sen. Barack Obama: “[S]ee,
there are Democrats — the drive-bys” — a term Limbaugh uses to denote the
national media — “are just so upset with these so-called ‘ferocious attacks.’
These have been benign. Even the Britney Spears/Paris Hilton ad was funny. It was benign.” He
later added: “It’s — you know, it’s just — it’s just we can’t hit the girl. I
don’t care how far feminism’s saying, you can’t hit the girl, and you can’t —
you can’t criticize the little black man-child. You just can’t do it, ’cause
it’s just not right.
It’s not fair. He’s such a victim.” [The
Rush Limbaugh Show, 8/20/08]

These statements are part of a long history of racially inflammatory remarks by Limbaugh, who nonetheless is embraced by many conservative elites and treated respectfully by numerous prominent media figures.