Brendan Nyhan

The subscription-only Hotline has a useful analysis of cumulative national and state-by-state vote totals by party for the House:

We all know ’06 was bad for the GOP. But the breadth of the Dem victory shows up starkly in a new Hotline analysis of the cumulative nat’l vote for House candidates.

— Dems won 54.1% of the two-party vote in ’06, much better than the GOP’s 52.5% win in ’02. That fueled Dem advantages in 27 states last year, compared to only 19 in ’02. Most importantly, Dems carried the net vote in several swing states (OH, PA, MI, NV, NH), some of which they hadn’t carried in more than a decade. Even in the reddest states, GOPers struggled to win more than 55% last year. They lost TN and NC outright. Also, Dems let only 10 GOPers go unchallenged in ’06, compared to 45 uncontested Dem seats.

— Heading into ’08, this is good news for a party whose WH nominee hasn’t carried a majority of the popular vote since ’76. In broad (and surprising) regions, vast numbers of Americans pulled the Dem lever last year. Was ’06 a blip of good Dem news? Or the start of a long-term improvement in the brand name “Democrat”?

They also had a nice overview of Iraq/2008 politics in yesterday’s lede:

As he tries to sell his Iraq surge plan, Pres. Bush needs McCain more than ever, a new Diageo/Hotline poll shows.

— The plan is widely unpopular, no matter who the author is. But the survey shows voters are more inclined to back a “McCain strategy” on Iraq than a “Bush strategy.” McCain aligned himself with Bush in ’04 to bolster his GOP creds; Now, Bush needs to cozy up to McCain to help sell the surge. Will McCain be open to that, considering the pitfalls of running as Bush’s ’08 candidate?

— For now, he can afford to take the risk; Despite Dems’ 18-point lead in an ’08 generic, McCain leads all 3 top Dems (Clinton, Edwards and Obama) in head-to-heads. The best Dem scenario? Edwards vs. Giuliani.

— Elsewhere in the poll: Pelosi’s fav ratings have doubled since 10/06; her unfavs have only inched up slightly. Nearly 1 in 5 GOPers give her thumbs-up. Also, slightly more voters view Congress favorably, for the 1st time since at least last summer. Another pol who’s popular these days: Lieberman. (Are you listening, Obama?).

Try to believe Newsweek pays Howard Fineman to write drivel like this (via Kevin Drum):

You knew Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in high school. At least I did. They were candidates in the student senate election. She was the worthy but puffed-up Miss Perfect, all poodle skirts and multicolored binders clutched to her chest. He was the lanky, mysterious transfer student—from Hawaii by way of Indonesia no less—who Knew Things and was way too cool to carry more than one book at a time. Who would be leader of the pack?

Presidential elections are high school writ large, of course, and that is especially true when, as now, much of the early nomination race is based in the U.S. Capitol. It is even more the case when the party in question, and here we are talking about the Democrats, is not sharply divided ideologically. They have a good chance in ’08 to oust the fading prep/jock/ROTC/Up With People alliance.

Actually, presidential elections aren’t high school writ large; they just appear that way when idiotic political writers reduce the candidates to caricatures and frame the election as a popularity contest between them.

I want to briefly revisit the subject of Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. A few weeks ago, I criticized a New York Times article that presented a misleading characterization of Carter’s use of the term “apartheid” in the title.

In that post, I didn’t comment directly the propriety of Carter’s use of the term “apartheid,” which he attempts to separate from the South African case by writing that “The driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa — not racism, but the acquisition of land.”

On reflection, though, I do want to object to Carter’s use of the term for the same reasons I object to Nazi analogies – it inflames rather than informs, bringing to mind powerful negative associations that operate outside of rational thought. Here’s part of what I wrote in the post on Nazi analogies:

The other problem with invoking the Nazis is that the negative associations associated with controversial persons, historical figures, etc. are activated outside of consciousness. In the political science and psychology literatures, this has been shown to happen immediately and automatically. Thus, someone raising the Nazis can trade on the negative associations attached to the Nazis even as they disavow the exploitation of those associations. The same applies with race, as in the 1988 Willie Horton ad, which activated racial considerations without specifically mentioning race (as Tali Mendelberg showed in an excellent Public Opinion Quarterly article).

As much as Carter may protest, he’s creating an association between Israeli and the racist South African government in the mind of his readers.

It’s a good thing the snow here delayed delivery of my New York Times, or I would started my day with this mental image:

Mr. Delahunt, a six-term congressman, is the least prominent of the four [members of Congress who live together] but perhaps the funniest. More to the point, he is the only one willing to sleep in the living room with a close-up view of Mr. Schumer slumbering a few feet away in his boxers.

From the Associated Press, my nominee for headline of the year:

Escaped Chimp Gets Snack, Cleans Bathroom

(AP) LITTLE ROCK, Ark. An escaped chimpanzee at the Little Rock Zoo raided a kitchen cupboard and did a little cleaning with a toilet brush before sedatives knocked her out on top of a refrigerator.

The 120-pound primate, Judy, escaped yesterday into a service area when a zookeeper opened a door to her sleeping quarters, unaware the animal was still inside.

As keepers tried to woo Judy back into her cage, she rummaged through a refrigerator where chimp snacks are stored. She opened kitchen cupboards, pulled out juice and soft drinks and took a swig from bottles she managed to open.

Keeper Ann Rademacher says Judy went into the bathroom, picked up a toilet brush and cleaned the toilet. Rademacher says the 37-year-old Judy was a house pet before the zoo acquired her in 1988, so she may have been familiar with housekeeping chores. Judy wrung out a sponge and scrubbed down the fridge.

It took a couple of tries, but the zoo sedated the chimp, who fell asleep on top of the refrigerator with half a loaf of cinnamon-raisin bread she had pulled out of the freezer…

Writing in the Atlantic, Clive Crook claims that “All of the administration’s tax cuts account for only about a quarter of the deterioration in the ten-year projected budget balance since 2001. The rest is outlays—on defense, and on everything else.” But that’s not right — according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Bush’s tax cuts represent 51 percent of the cost of legislation enacted since January 2001. Where did Crook get that figure?

The email template for messages to supporters from the John Edwards campaign includes a picture of the candidate at the top. What’s funny is that they have been changing the picture depending on the tone of the message — here’s happy John after he announced he was running:

And here’s serious John criticizing President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq:

I love that the campaign had him make different faces but the pictures are otherwise identical. Do you think they took more pictures to use in future emails? Wacky John? Miffed John? Angry John?

Update 1/17 2:59 PM: Given my attempts to get a non-weaselly picture in the sidebar, people have suggested that I start including my own mood-specific headshots with each post…

Update 1/18 7:56 PM: Ian Carey of the Junkiness website created a satirical preview of a future Edwards email.

With Barack Obama’s announcement yesterday that he’s creating a presidential exploratory committee, I thought it was worth comparing his voting record in the Senate with those of his rivals, especially given the hype about him being more liberal than Hillary, who has been very cautious. In particular, Obama opposed authorizing the President to use force in Iraq, while Clinton voted yes.

It turns out that UCSD political scientist Keith Poole just updated his DW-NOMINATE estimates of Congressional “ideal points,” the most widely used in the discipline, to include the 109th Congress (2005-2006), which Clinton and Obama both served in. (These estimates are created by scaling all the non-lopsided roll call votes over a series of Congresses and are therefore more reflective of a member’s overall voting record than interest group ratings, which are typically based on a handful of votes. Poole created the metric with Howard Rosenthal.)

Here’s how the distribution looks for the Senate:

As you can see, the parties are almost completely separated on ideology (the only overlap is that Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson rates as slightly more conservative than the former Republican senator Lincoln Chafee from Rhode Island, which isn’t clear from the histograms). The Democratic mean is -.428 (closest senator: Harry Reid) and the Republican mean is .458 (closest senator: George Allen). If we look at the estimated scores and rankings for the presidential contenders, it’s striking how similar some of the Democrats are — Obama and Clinton have the exact same estimated ideal point:

Obama -.496 (tie — 14th most liberal)
Clinton -.496 (tie — 14th most liberal)
Kerry -.489 (16th most liberal)
Dodd -.447 (20th most liberal)
Biden -.324 (34th most liberal)
McCain .376 (39th most conservative)

Obama, Clinton, Kerry and Dodd are all tightly clumped in a group that is slightly more liberal than the Democratic mean, whereas Biden is (surprisingly) somewhat more conservative than the party mean. By contrast, John McCain is to the left of the Republican mean — you can see why he’s running to the right.

Still, the most striking finding is that Obama and Clinton actually have voting records that appear to be very similar in their overall liberalism.

Update 3/23 9:41 AM: As a point of comparison, the estimated ideal point for John Edwards in the 106th-108th Congresses was a somewhat more moderate -.375, while Clinton’s was stable at -.496 for the 107th-108th (Obama only entered the Senate in the 109th).

[Note: These scores are constrained to stay relatively stable across a small number of Congresses.]

Spencer Ackerman points out that President Bush claimed with a straight face that “The minute we found out [Iraq] didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so” during his recent 60 Minutes interview — unbelievable:

PELLEY: You know better than I do that many Americans feel that your administration has not been straight with the country, has not been honest. To those people you say what?

BUSH: On what issue?

PELLEY: Well, sir . . .

BUSH: Like the weapons of mass destruction?

PELLEY: No weapons of mass destruction.

BUSH: Yeah.

PELLEY: No credible connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

BUSH: Yeah.

PELLEY: The Office of Management and Budget said this war would cost somewhere between $50 billion and $60 billion and now we’re over 400.

BUSH: I gotcha. I gotcha. I gotcha.

PELLEY: The perception, sir, more than any one of those points, is that the administration has not been straight with . . .

BUSH: Well, I strongly disagree with that, of course. There were a lot of people, both Republicans and Democrats, who felt there were weapons of mass destruction. Many of the leaders in the Congress spoke strongly about the fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons prior to my arrival in Washington, DC. And we’re all looking at the same intelligence. So I strongly reject that this administration hasn’t been straight with the American people. The minute we found out they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so. Scott, all I can do is just tell the truth, tell people exactly what’s on my mind, which is what I do.

Sadly, Scott Pelley, the 60 Minutes correspondent, didn’t follow up. But if he had read the newspaper back in 2003, he would know that Bush’s claim isn’t true. As Ackerman notes (and as we documented in All the President’s Spin), Bush actually claimed that we did find WMD in an interview with Polish TV on May 29, 2003:

Q But, still, those countries who didn’t support the Iraqi Freedom operation use the same argument, weapons of mass destruction haven’t been found. So what argument will you use now to justify this war?

THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.

It was flatly untrue that the US found WMD — Bush’s claim was false then, and his claim to have been honest about not finding WMD is false now. (It is even highly questionable whether the trailers had served as weapons labs. As we wrote in ATPS, “When fifteen experts from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and [State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research] gathered in June [2003] to analyze the evidence, only one agreed with the conclusion that they were most likely biological weapons labs.”)

And even though the President made a false claim about an extremely important issue on the highest rated news program on television, no critical coverage of it appears in Google News. None. Have we reached the point where presidential deception is no longer news?

As Atrios points out, polling suggests President Bush’s speech failed to overcome the public’s opposition to an increase in troop levels in Iraq:

President Bush’s address to the nation last week failed to move public opinion in support of his plan to increase U.S. troop levels in Iraq and left Americans more pessimistic about the likely outcome of the war.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, more than 6 of 10 people back the idea of a non-binding congressional resolution expressing opposition to Bush’s plan to commit an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq.

But we shouldn’t be surprised by this. As I pointed out back in February 2005 in the context of President Bush’s push for private accounts in Social Security, the evidence indicates that presidents and political elites can rarely move public opinion significantly in their direction through PR campaigns. But the myth of the bully pulpit persists because journalists are generally ignorant about political science or quantitative evidence more generally.

[Note: Presidents can raise the salience of an issue by putting it on the public agenda, but it’s much harder to change people’s minds about it.]