The following graph comes from Up With Chris Hayes of data from the AFL-CIO. Part of this is just that America is a racist country. But another big part of this is the result of Republican efforts to stop Democratic leaning voters. It is disgusting.
I just read Andrew Gelman’s excellent Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State. You have to like statistics, because it’s kind of a dry read. But the data! I can boil down the information in the book in one surprising sentence, “Rich vote Republican, poor vote Democrat, and this divide is most extreme in red states.” Knowing this makes me happy and changes the way I look at politics on the whole.
It makes me happy to know that the poor in Mississippi are not deluded dolts who vote against their best interests. And I feel we share a common cause. Increasingly, I am annoyed by the lack of coverage of this fact and the lack of general reporting that is informed by it.
This morning on Up with Chris Hayes, there was a lot of talk about minority voting—especially Latino voters. Avik Roy, of course, was on the panel to act as an apologist for the Republican Party. And at one point, Lorella Pareli pandered to him by noting that Latinos were church going people and that they were naturally a Republican constituency. Chris Hayes countered her on this point by noting the opinion polls that show that Latinos really do share opinions that put them firmly in the Democratic coalition.
The problem I find with all of this is that we ought to stop even talking about race when it comes to voting paterns. Yes, the Republicans are a racist party. Yes, there is a great deal of racism in this country and we need to do something about it. But if explicit racism disappeared and Republicans stopped being explicitly racist, minority voters would still not rush to vote for them. Minority voters are poor. They vote the way poor people vote. They vote Democratic.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about the Republican meme that they are not for equality of outcomes but rather equality of opportunity. This is the biggest load of horseshit I have ever heard. Even if all children went to the same schools and did not inherit any property from their parents, rich children would be at a distinct advantage over poor children. There are so many ways that this is manifested, but let me give you one example: Solamere Capital. This is Tagg Romney’s venture capital company. Would a poor child have the necessary contacts to start that? No.
It’s a real hoot that the Fox News crowd have been screaming that the poor vote for people who will give them stuff. As a factual matter this is not true because the rich get more “free stuff” than the poor. See, for example, the 2008 financial crisis. But as Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State makes plan: all voter categories vote for politicians who will give them what they want. Whether that “stuff” is unemployment insurance or a low marginal tax rate doesn’t much matter.
What the Fox News crew are worried about is that the poor really will become as selfish as the rich always have been. And they should be. Republican policies have greatly expanded the numbers of poor. And if those poor get organized, things could be very bad for the Republican Party and even the “New” Democratic Party. Obama won this election 51%-48%. But of those qualified to vote who did not, Obama was the preferred candidate 54%-38%. The Democratic Party has policies that the vast majority of Americans agree with. The Republican Party does not.
Afterword
Here is the most important graph from Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State. This is from the 2004 election. Red are states where Bush won and blue are states where Kerry won. Note that Kerry won in Mississippi with the poor:
Update (21 November 2012 2:12 pm)
I don’t like Chris Matthews. When MSNBC was conservative, he was conservative. Now that they are liberal, he is liberal. But he has nonetheless been making a lot of sense recently. He just had a big debate on his show about what is wrong with the Republican Party. His conclusion: it’s the policies, stupid.
Over the years, I have seen the leaders of many regions call for separating themselves from the mother country. But this is always rich regions wanting to take their money and run. For a while Scotland wanted to leave the United Kingdom because they liked all their oil money, thank you very much. True to form, America does everything assbackwards.
Hardin County Texas Republican Party treasurer Peter Morrison is floating the idea that he doesn’t want to live in a democracy. Okay, he doesn’t put it like that. Instead, he claims that since he didn’t manage to force half the country to have to put up with his chosen candidate, he shouldn’t have to put up with theirs. The logic doesn’t really work, but so what? He’s a Texan!
Morrison is calling for an “amicable divorce.” How amicable? As amicable as any husband who refers to his wife as a maggot. I swear I’m not making that up.
What I find most interesting is that these calls for secession always come from the south or Alaska: areas that get a lot more from the federal government than they pay in. To be fair, Morrison’s home state of Texas gives a lot more than it gives. For every dollar of taxes, it gets 85 cents back. But it is part of a broader southern move. Back in 2010, Tennessee Representative Zach Wamp was calling for secession over Obamacare.
The issue of how much money a state gets back for the taxes it pays in is not real, of course. The truth is that the biggest determinant of this difference is the age of the population. Older citizens get Social Security and Medicare. These are very expensive programs that are paid for exclusively by younger citizens. The issue instead is that people in “red” states tend to think of themselves as autonomous: they send all this money to the feds and receive nothing for it. This just isn’t true. (A better case can be made for states like Delaware and New Jersey that get less than half the money back that they pay in.)
A lot of liberals would like to see the south secede. But the truth is, it would be a very bad thing. I’m not talking about the conservatives. I’m more than willing to let them experience the truth of their situation. The problem is that there are a lot of liberals who live in these states. It is wrong for us to abandon them to the likes of Rick Perry.
What’s really funny about Morrison’s little article is what it shows about the Tea Party mentality. They’ve convinced themselves of their talking points. Obama isn’t just a politician who differs with them on the issues: he is a man dedicated to destroying the United States. To quote John Dickinson (in 1776 anyway), “If you have grievances, and I’m sure you have, our present system must provide a gentler means of redressing them short of revolution!”
Of course, I’m not really sure what Morrison and his ilk are on about. I suspect that they are a good deal closer to the President’s policies than I am. But even granting that these people have real rather than imagined grievances, how can secession be the answer? Liberals have lived through decades during which presidents—Republican and Democrat—have pushed our nation ever to the right. Yet liberals do not call for secession.
Update (12 November 2012 4:57 pm)
David Atkins over at Hullabaloo presents us with the following table that indicates that Texas does a little better by the Fed than the data I have. It changes from year to year, but this table is really interesting:
Conservatives really think they gotcha when they point out that humans breathe out CO2. Ha!
Humans do not create carbon when they breathe. They cycle carbon. We are part of the global carbon cycle. You probably learned about this in grammar school. Plants take in CO2 and release O2. We take in O2 and release CO2. And on and on. Cycle carbon? Yes! Create carbon? No!
Under normal circumstances, there is a set amount of carbon in the air. This carbon spends time as plant material and animal material and in the air as CO2, but it is just part of this global cycle. For each carbon atom that takes up residency as part of a plant, another carbon atom that used to be part of a plant is released into the air. It’s a beautiful system.
It is only when we rip large amounts of sequestered carbon—usually in the form of hydrocarbons (oil, coal, natural gas)—that we add to the total carbon in the atmosphere. And this is why the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing.
People who claim that humans are creating CO2 by breathing are offensive. I don’t say this just because they are denying the science. I say it because they are accusing scientists of being idiots. The idea that thousands of climate scientists have spent their whole lives studying this stuff without noticing such an obvious thing is repugnant. You can tell that the people who talk about this stuff are almost giddy to have found such a clever retort to the scientists. It’s a lot like Bill O’Reilly’s proof of God, “Why is the moon there? Huh, smart guy? And while you’re at it, why is the sky blue? And sometimes red? No one can answer these questions!”
It’s important for liberals to understand how this works. I assure you that eventually, you will run into this argument. It’s sad that these arguments even have to be made. For most things we simply yield to the experts. “I’ll believe that guy who has spent his whole life studying it,” is a very good approach to take. Unfortunately, your crazy Fox News watching uncle doesn’t accept information from those highly biased scientists who sometimes make over a $100,000 per year just to make Al Gore wealthy. Repeat after me, “We cycle carbon, we don’t create it…”
Whenever I watch Rachel Maddow mix drinks, I get the idea that she doesn’t do it much. It’s kind of cute. She likes to pretend she is this serious drinker, but just look at her! She is so white bread it almost makes me despair. But you gotta love her!
You have to forgive her, I think. After all, she is married to Alan Greenspan. But Andrea Mitchell is getting the vapors over General David Petraeus. Rachel Maddow asked if she was sure that the affair was the real reason he resigned from the CIA. She was! David Petraeus?! Why he’s an American hero! Anyway, a man like him? Young women must be throwing themselves at him all the time. But the man cannot tell a lie and he doesn’t even chop down cherry trees.
And the la-hand of the Freeeeee!
And the hoooome, of thhhhhe, braaaave!
And the crowd goes wild! What a sad day for the United States. Another American hero brought down. And after those meanies at Move On called him “David Betray Us”![1] This is unthinkable!
My take on it is a little different. First, I think Move On was correct: like any military man of that level, Patraeus was a political hack who was about as familiar with the truth as I am with moon exploration. Second, David Petraeus is a powerful and famous man. Of course he’s gonna get a little young tail. Ms. Broadwell is a hottie. I think Petraeus is showing a lot of taste. She’s not so young that the relationship is creepy, and she’s a writer and that means she’s smart. If Paula Broadwell needs a shoulder to cry on, I’m available. Just saying.
Most important, from a broader perspective, this whole thing doesn’t make sense. I don’t buy that Petraeus is such an honorable man that this caused him to step down. Instead, I figure he thinks that if he steps down, the controversy will be over next week. And he’s probably right. This also sets him up to publish a tell-all memoir in the next two years that will get him a 7-figure advance.
Meanwhile, this little scandal will do nothing but improve Broadwell’s reputation. I mean, she’s the woman who bagged the American hero. I’m sure Andrea Mitchell is so jealous that… Oh my! She’s got the vapors.
[1] Here it is. Click on it if you can’t quite read it.
Update (9 November 2012 8:12 pm)
Here is the clip from The Rachel Maddow Show:
You remember how I’ve spent much of the last year ranting about how unserious Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are about dealing with the budget deficit? My main argument: you don’t start a discussion of the budget deficit by making it worse. Tax cuts may be a great idea, but that’s a different issue. You just aren’t being serious if you say, “I want to cut the budget and the first thing I’m going to do it reduce revenue and increase spending.” And that is what both of these guys have said.
It isn’t just partisan Republicans who do this. Remember Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the two Very Serious gentlemen who have been screaming that the sky is falling for the last many years? Two years ago, they had their deficit reduction committee, which came up with a plan that the committee wouldn’t vote for. (Eventually, Simpson and Bowles released their own report that journalists erroneously refer to as the the committee report.) That plan started with—Wait for it!—a reduction in the top marginal tax rate.
But wait! Isn’t Erskine Bowles a Democrat? Yes he is. But he’s not that into it. Or perhaps better: so what? Being a Democrat doesn’t mean you are liberal; it only means you aren’t a complete freak. It is better to think of Bowles as a board member of Morgan Stanley. Not only is that true, but it gets at the heart of who he is and what interests he has. Let me go a little deeper.
Why does anyone care about the deficit? The government must borrow money to finance the deficit. If the economy were not depressed, this government borrowing would reduce the amount of money available to businesses for their own projects. Given that there would be more demand for this money than the supply, interest rates would go up. This is not the situation now and probably for the next couple of years. But eventually, the federal deficit could make the cost of doing business more expensive.
What’s more, it could cause inflation, and if you are a follower of the Austrian school of economics, you just know it will. And this seems to include Erskine Bowles. Two years ago, he claimed that within two years interest rates would skyrocket. It is two years later and interest rates are two percentage points lower than they were when Bowles went all Chicken Little on us. So Bowles was completely wrong. And you know what that means to the fools in media: he’s a genius!
The more important point here is not just that Erskine Bowles is an idiot; it is that people like him care about the deficit because they fear it will cause the rentiers (the owner class) to make less money than they normally would. Certainly, this could also affect workers. But mostly, the deficit is just a concern of the 1% and all their apologists in Very Serious media (who are all pretty much in the upper class).
Fiscal Cliff!
Today, in a Washington Post OpEd, Erskine Bowles argues, Make a Deficit Deal Now. Jonathan Chait dismantles the argument. First, Bowles goes full tilt Chicken Little again by claiming, “Going over the fiscal cliff would mean allowing a massive and immediate cut to nearly every major government agency and activity, including those vital to our national security or economic growth.” Chait minces no words, “That is totally false.”
The whole phrase “fiscal cliff” is a bad one. If we don’t stop the tax increases and budget cuts by the first of the year, nothing happens suddenly. In fact, the government can pass another tax cut and make it retroactive so that there is no tax hike at all. So all this hysteria makes no sense, unless…
Unless these people are worried about something else. And they are. The truth is that the Democrats have great leverage in his battle—especially if they are willing to push the fight into next year. If the Republicans want to keep the top tax rate from going up by 4.6 percentage points to the still ridiculously slow 39.6%, they must get a deal done this year. If they wait until next year, they will have no hope. This is why Erskine Bowles wants to pretend that we must make a deal now. Now! Now! He even makes the preposterous claim that not making a deal now will help the Republicans:
This is simply not true. As Chait notes: who is it that is pushing for a deal now and is so afraid of the fiscal cliff? It’s not the Democrats. It’s not President Obama. It is Morgan Stanley trustee Erskine Bowles. It is the Wall Street Journal. What does that tell you?
Afterword
I have heard word that Erskine Bowles may replace Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. This may just be wishful thinking on the part of conservatives. Anyway, I’m not sure that Bowles would necessarily be any worse than Geithner. The problem with Bowles being named Treasury Secretary is that it would be a very bad symbolic move. Just as bad, it would mean that Obama would be continuing to surround himself with the very people who caused the financial meltdown. It would be nice to think that Obama has learned something these last 4 years. But I’m not counting on it.
Update (9 November 2012 10:27 am)
Sign the petition against Erskine Bowles as Tresury Secretary.
Matt Taibbi has been writing some strange things recently. On election day, he wrote that it was going to be bad regardless of who won. Later that night he admitted that the evening was actually pretty good. Like a lot of us progressives, I think it was just nerves. He wanted to reassure himself that even if Romney had won, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
And he was right, as long as the Democrats had managed to keep control of the Senate. Of course, there was a question about this. If the polling on the presidential race was so wrong as to allow Romney to win, couldn’t it have also been wrong about the Senate races? Anyway, a Romney presidency would have been a very bad thing, but I doubt it would have caused the cities of America to burn. (At least at the beginning of his term.)
Today brings another curious article by the great Mr. Taibbi, Hey, Rush Limbaugh: ‘Starting an Abortion Industry’ Won’t Win You Female Voters. He spends most of it making fun of Limbaugh, which is always worth spending some time on. Taibbi is at his best when he’s being a total asshole.
Finally, however, he gets to his real point which is that a big part of the Republican Party’s problem is its attitude:
This is certainly true, but I don’t think it is a primary reason why minority voters tend to vote Democratic. Republicans have a much more fundamental problem going forward besides their hatred of pretty much everyone other than white Christian men. The poor vote overwhelmingly for Democrats—even in most red states. (I plan to be writing more about this in the coming days.) Over the past 30 years, the Republicans have pushed policies that moved wealth from the poor to the rich. Thus, there are more and more poor people and less and less rich. This more than anything that anyone is talking about is the reason that the Democrats will continue to strengthen their electoral position.
We will see if the Democrats manage to screw this up by “moving to the center.”
Best line: “Like my books, every box of Ayn Bran is unnecessarily long.” This comes via Digby:
It bothers me that supposed liberals don’t see how they assure long term defeat by accepting the conservative framing of issues. The Republicans, by moving very far to the right, still get conservative policies even when Democrats win. The ACA—Obama’s signature healthcare reform—is far more conservative than what we would have gotten from Richard Nixon. Most recently, I’ve noticed this kind of conservative framing on MSNBC.
The best example of this comes from Rachel Maddow. Understand: I really like Maddow. She holds good progressive positions and her circuitous story structures are delightful. But she makes a major mistake when reporting on reproductive rights: she sets the fight over abortion exceptions rather than the rights themselves. This isn’t to say that she doesn’t believe that women ought to have the right to control over their own bodies; I know that she does. But she spends too much time (rightly) ridiculing those who want to force rape victims to carry the resulting pregnancies. And this says to the world: this is the battle line. But it isn’t. And Rachel Maddow knows this.
Another excellent example comes from Lawrence O’Donnell. On his 25 October 2012 show, he did a segment: “CEOs to Congress: OMG, fix the deficit!”[1] In it, he calls for tax increases and spending cuts, as though the spending cuts are a given and ain’t it great that financial types are finally calling for a very slightly less regressive approach to the problem.
I understand that the argument can be made for spending cuts. The problem with O’Donnell’s argument is that he is yielding the liberal ground and fighting the battle entirely on the traditional conservative ground. Up through the 1970s, conservatives supported tax increases and spending cuts to deal with deficits. Now liberals are claiming that if Republicans will act as they did a few decades ago, it is a major victory. It isn’t.
There are lots of very good ways to deal with our debt problem. As Dean Baker writes, if we got our healthcare system to cost as much as Germany (for example), we would have government surpluses as far as the eye can see. I recommend eliminating the Social Security tax cap. There are many other ideas. But we are lost as long as we dance in the streets at the thought of getting the smallest sacrifices from Republicans.
On reproductive rights, the problem is even worse. As much as I hate the “no exception” anti-choice people, at least their beliefs are logically consistent. I’ve written about this before, On Hating Women:
So the “rape exception” framing of reproductive rights is even worse than the extremist position. We should make the extremists define their position so that normal people can see what they are really calling for. That is my opinion. What is certain is that if we draw the battle line at exceptions, the best we will ever get are those exceptions. I don’t find that acceptable.
I hope that in the future our liberal friends at MSNBC and elsewhere will think about these issues. Shows such as The Rachel Maddow Show and The Last Word define liberal opinion as much as they reflect it. This is a war of ideas, and too often liberal commentators seek to win the battle (this election) and lose the war (better policy).
[1] Note the framing in the story headline: the deficit is a problem. But Obama has cut the deficit by a third. Why isn’t the headline “Cut Deficit Faster”? It would appear that not even O’Donnell knows the deficit has been cut, even though he certainly does.
I don’t think the “crazies” of the GOP are any different, policywise, from the mainstream, they’re just a bit more uncouth. They shriek instead of dogwhistle, say what they actually think instead of speaking in code.
—Duncan Black, Taken Over By The Crazies
Okay California, you get to keep your fucking death penalty. The repeal proposition failed with 46% of the vote. I just want to say for the record that you people disgust me. Let me describe a conversation I recently had. It explains how you think—in as much as you do think.
I asked a friend if he was going to vote for Proposition 34. He is in favor of the death penalty, but I figured that the financial case against it might appeal to him. After all, his main argument for the death penalty is that he shouldn’t have to pay to feed the bastards for the rest of their lives.
Hell no! He wasn’t voting to get rid of the law. He told me we should just line up the bastards and shoot them. I counted that regardless of what he thought we should do, what we do do is let them rot on death row for years and that this costs much more than just letting them live out their natural lives.
For reasons that still do not make any sense to me, he then told me that we should just line up the bastards and shoot them. I figured it was best that I take a different approach. So I noted that innocent people are often exonerated before we kill them. I suggested that he would not be in favor of killing innocent people. He said he was not.
Good. In that case, why not let these people just serve life in prison? He responded that he did not want to pay for them to do that.
So the circle was closed. And we went around it again. And again. Then I stopped. I couldn’t take it any more.
I’m sure it wasn’t that my friend was that confused. He was just searching for an argument to justify what all of you 54% feel deep inside you. This is the ejaculatory release of killing these bad people. You all get off on the thought of lining up the bastards and shooting them.
All I can say is enjoy this feeling while you can. Because one day we may become civilized like most advanced countries rather than the way we are: like Iran and Saudi Arabia. Make no mistake: the joy you get out of this barbarism makes you less just, not more. And if you consider yourself a Christian: shame on you.
But at least you get to keep your fucking death penalty. For now.
Monday evening, Nate Silver released his final predictions for the presidential race. The most remarkable aspect of the prediction was that Florida, which two weeks earlier had been solidly in Romney’s favor, slipped into a slight lean towards Obama. How slight? Silver predicted that Obama would win Florida by 0.022 percentage points. Earlier that day, I predicted that Florida would go to Obama, based upon the clear trend that had been evident the previous two weeks. Regardless, I predicted even odds that Obama would get 332, 303, or 294 electoral votes. Right now, we aren’t sure which way Florida will go—just as Silver predicted. But we do know that Obama won re-election with either 332 or 303 electoral votes.
I don’t bring this up to show how smart I am. In general, all I did was follow Nate Silver’s work and understand it more than most people. For example, I heard a lot of people claim that they thought Obama would win 313 electoral votes because that was the average prediction that Silver released. But that number was extremely unlikely. What was much more helpful was the electoral vote distribution that indicated that Obama had a 20% chance of getting 332 votes, 16% chance of getting 303 votes, and 13% chance of getting 345 votes. Here it is:
As you may recall, Dean Chambers of Unskewed Polls, predicted a 359-179 vote Obama loss. I went over to his website this morning and it is like a ghost town. But I noted that he had updated his prediction. As of Monday, he had Romney winning by the much less ridiculous margin of 275-263. What does that mean? It means in the end he abandoned his claim that the polls were skewed and went along with them, but gave the benefit of the doubt to Romney in Ohio and Florida.
Needless to say, this is not science; this is partisanship. We saw the same thing throughout the right wing echo chamber. George Will predicted Romney would win 321 votes. Dick Morris predicted 325 votes. What was most interesting about these conservative predictions was how extreme they were. While liberals were mostly predicting modest Obama wins (290 and 294 were the most common), conservatives were all predicting blow outs. The reason for this seems to be that conservatives had to assume that the polls were systematically wrong. In order to predict an Ohio win for Romney, they had to predict that a number of other unlikely states would go for him too. Thus the 321, 325, and 359 predictions.
It isn’t just Nate Silver who did well last night. Drew Linzer of Votamatic had been predicting a 332-206 Obama win for weeks. What all this means, of course, is that as always the polls were right. The models were better than the straight polling averages because they took parameters like trends into account. Real Clear Politics, for example, had Romney up in Florida by 1.5% on Monday. Even still, a simple poll average was enough to predict 49 out of 50 states. There were no surprises last night in the presidential race.
The bottom line here is: don’t mess with the nerds. They may be boring. They may be unfathomable. But they have special Nerd Powers. You’d be foolish to play poker with them. And masochistic to publicly challenge their splendid statistical models of the real world.
Update (7 November 2012 5:48 pm)
Dean Chambers mans up and admits he was wrong. I’m impressed, actually.
