My Political Take on Self Identification...

On my last post, I tried to present data without adding any interpretations that could be considered partisan. Here, there are no such qualms. Please note, however, that my certainty for these interpretations is far from absolute. Those who are curious as to how I personally would read the data, press on!

Again, here is the breakout of philosophical self-identification by party self-identification. Read this from top to bottom, meaning for all self-identified Republicans, 3% say they are liberal, 22% say they are moderate, etc.

	Tot	Rep	Dem	Ind
Lib	20%	3%	44%	15%
Mod	36%	22%	40%	46%
Cons	40%	74%	13%	36%
DK/NA	4%	1%	3%	4%

I noted in the last post how Republicans overwhelmingly call themselves conservative while Democrats are nearly as likely to call themselves moderate as liberal. I believe that this is a remnant of the Carter/Reagan years, when the liberal label was frequently used (to great effect) as a pejorative and the conservative label was used with pride; many Democrats abandoned the liberal label, and found political utility in “claiming the center” by calling their own views moderate. I also noted that Democrats are roughly 3 times as likely to call themselves conservative as Republicans are to call themselves liberal. This is also consistent with the above.

Second, here again is the breakout of party self-identification by philosophic self-identification.

	Tot	Lib	Mod	Con
Rep	26%	3%	16%	49%
Dem	31%	67%	34%	10%
Ind	34%	24%	43%	30%
Other	7%	5%	5%	8%
DK/NA	2%	%	2%	3%

While I do think that each of the potential reasons I offered in the last post (which was not intended to be an all-inclusive list) for these breakouts have some bit of truth to them, I think that a main reason so many self-identified conservatives are Democrats is stickiness to what they’ve always been. Conservatives, by nature, are slower to embrace change. I suspect that number, over time, will drop as the population ages, barring a sudden change (or evolution) by either or both of the main parties. I also believe that this cohort by-and-large does not think that the Republicans are too far to the right, but instead is too favorable to big business (which does not necessarily correspond to a left/right view of politics).

I would love to see a question on how respondents perceive each party (“too liberal”, “too conservative”, “neither too conservative nor too liberal” and then see the crosstabs there by political philosophy. I think that this would be illuminating towards a broad picture of how each party would best be served in terms of moving left or right in general.

But let’s look at the calculated approximate sizes of the cominations again:

Philosophy/Party	Pct
Con/Rep	19%
Mod/Ind	16%
Lib/Dem	14%
Mod/Dem	12%
Con/Ind	12%
Mod/Rep	6%
Lib/Ind	5%
Con/Other	4%
Con/Dem	4%
Mod/Other	2%
Other/Ind	2%
Other/Other	1%
Other/Dem	1%
Lib/Other	1%
Lib/Rep	1%
Other/Rep	0%

For giggles, let’s make some assumptions about the above:

• Con/Rep form the “base” of the GOP
• Lib/Dem form the “base” of the Democrats
• Some percentage of “Mod/Rep” and “Lib/Rep” will vote Democrat if the GOP moves too far to the right, and as such are “in play” but leaning Republican
• The same is true for “Con/Ind”
• Some percentage of “Con/Dem” will vote Republican if the Democratic Party moves too far to the left, and as such are “in play” but leaning Democratic
• Some percentage of “Mod/Dem” will vote Republican if the Democratic Party moves too far to the left, and as such are “in play” but strongly leaning Democratic (I realize I am not specifying a similar bucket on the GOP’s side; this is intentional and is due to the phenomenon of more Democrats calling themselves moderates and my suspicion that this is partly just due to an aversion to the liberal label rather than an indication of them being truly in play. In other words, a smaller percentage will jump ship)
• “Lib/Ind” and “Con/Dem” are likely Democratic votes, but more amenable to jumping ship
• The entire cohort that says their party is another (as opposed to not specifying) is not really in play
• Those that did not specify a party identification but did specify conservative will tend to vote Republican
• Those that did not specify a party identification but did specify liberal will tend to vote Democatic
• The balance is both in play, and just as likely to go either way

With these assumptions, we end up with something like this:

Republican Base	19%
More likely Republican than Democratic	19%
More likely Democratic than Republican	9%
Even more likely Democratic than Republican	12%
Democratic Base	14%
Neither	8%
Truly up for grabs	19%

This feels about right, if we keep in mind that the survey was taken at a time when the Obamacare website rollout fiasco was hitting hardest, and is likely a bit heavy on the GOP side of things. However, if this is really how things shake out, it looks to me like the Democrats actually have room to move to the left. Either way, it looks to me as though there is more benefit for the GOP to move towards the center than for them to do the opposite. As a libertarian leaning conservative (or is it vice-versa), this does not make me particularly happy, but it does appear to me to be the stronger political move.

Self-identification By Party And Political Philosophy

I have been meaning to get around to this since when the last Quinnipiac national poll came out earlier this month. In the crosstabs for the release, there were breakouts on many questions by party and/or by political philosophy.

My impression, gleaned from many discussions and from reading many news articles is that people frequently use “moderate” as a political philosophy interchangeably with “independent” as a party self-identification. If the overwhelming majority of moderates self-identify as independent, and vice-versa, then this is quite valid. But is it? And regardless of that question, I think it would be interesting to know how these self-identifications relate with each other.

Fortunately, I do not have to guess (much) as to this. While one cannot determine the approximate crosstabs for this from the official poll release linked above, the good people at Quinnipiac were willing to run crosstabs for this upon my request.

Before I get to the below, let me qualify my commentary by saying that I am well aware that this is one survey, and treating the numbers from it as absolutely correct is not my intention. I just do not want to continually be writing something along the lines of “according to this survey’s results” and “within this survey’s margin of error.” Also, Quinnipiac supplied me the margins of error for each crosstab; rather than reproducing them all, I’ll just say that they range from +/-3% to +/-4%. (Side note: they provided them to me to the second decimal point. However, due to the fact that the results were reported as whole integers, that is how I choose to represent the MoE. Significant digits!)

First, let me present the data they shared with me. First, here is the breakout of philosophical self-identification by party self-identification. Read this from top to bottom, meaning for all self-identified Republicans, 3% say they are liberal, 22% say they are moderate, etc.

	Tot	Rep	Dem	Ind
Lib	20%	3%	44%	15%
Mod	36%	22%	40%	46%
Cons	40%	74%	13%	36%
DK/NA	4%	1%	3%	4%

I am struck by how Republicans overwhelmingly call themselves conservative while Democrats are nearly as likely to call themselves moderate as liberal. Also, Democrats are roughly 3 times as likely to call themselves conservative as Republicans are to call themselves liberal.

Second, here is the breakout of party self-identification by philosophic self-identification. Again, read this from top to bottom.

	Tot	Lib	Mod	Con
Rep	26%	3%	16%	49%
Dem	31%	67%	34%	10%
Ind	34%	24%	43%	30%
Other	7%	5%	5%	8%
DK/NA	2%	%	2%	3%

From the above, a little math can give us rough approximations of the percentages for each combination. Granted, I cannot account for rounding error here, so by no means should one consider these to be absolute (both for this reason and for the caveats specified above). However, they should be close enough for government work in terms of this survey.

(Note above that Quinnipiac did not give an “other” option on the philosophy self-identification question. This makes sense as they are breaking the entire spectrum down into three buckets. There really is not an “other” for this purpose. Meanwhile, on the party self-identification question they did, which again makes sense as there are parties beyond Republicans and Democrats, so the Independent label is not a catch-all for those who gave an answer. For my purposes, I have rolled “don’t know/didn’t answer” into “other”, mainly because both the “other” and “don’t know/didn’t answer” buckets provide no information as to which breakout most closely applies.)

Lib/Rep	1%	Mod/Rep	6%	Con/Rep	19%	Other/Rep	0%
Lib/Dem	14%	Mod/Dem	12%	Con/Dem	4%	Other/Dem	1%
Lib/Ind	5%	Mod/Ind	16%	Con/Ind	12%	Other/Ind	2%
Lib/Other	1%	Mod/Other	2%	Con/Other	4%	Other/Other	1%

Putting these results into an ordered list:

Philosophy/Party	Pct
Con/Rep	19%
Mod/Ind	16%
Lib/Dem	14%
Mod/Dem	12%
Con/Ind	12%
Mod/Rep	6%
Lib/Ind	5%
Con/Other	4%
Con/Dem	4%
Mod/Other	2%
Other/Ind	2%
Other/Other	1%
Other/Dem	1%
Lib/Other	1%
Lib/Rep	1%
Other/Rep	0%

There are many different potential ways to interpret this. I have my own, but my purpose in posting this is not to advocate any particular political position; as such I will save that for a possible later post. Instead, my purpose in posting this is to provide context for interpreting poll numbers. I want to thank Quinnipiac for providing me details that they had not released as part of their publication of this survey, particularly April Radocchio, Tim Malloy, and whoever in their tabulations department who took the time to fulfill this request. Thank you very much!

On Congressional Approval in the Washington Post/ABC News Poll

The poll's write-up can be found here.

Let's start by putting some job performance numbers together:

Topic	Approve	disapprove	Net
Obama	43	55	-12
Congressional Democrats	34	64	-30
Congressional Republicans	24	73	-49

One more. The question: "Overall, who do you trust to do a better job coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years - (Obama) or (the Republicans in Congress)?" Obama and the Congressional Republicans tie at 41%.

How does this happen? Democrats approve of Obama, 76-21%. They approve of Congressional Democrats, 61-36%. But Republicans disapprove of Congressional Republicans more than approve; the approve-disapprove breakdown is 43-53%.

Clearly, Democrats as a whole are relatively happy with the tactics and substance of their political leaders. Republicans are not in theirs, albeit not uniformly. We can read tea-leaves to figure which directions the unhappy Republicans think the fix should come on the left-right continuum. In the Obama approval question, 13% of Republicans approve of Obama's performance.

While not definitive, combined with the 53% who disapprove of Congressional Republicans' performance, it appears as if there are significantly more Republicans who want their elected leaders to be more effective in opposition and/or move further to the right than want them to be less opposing/move further to the left. [Updated to add: The ratio there is approximately 4-1. As it happens, on the "who do you trust to..." question, there are 4 times as many GOPers who say "Congressional Republicans" that do not.]

Boehner and other Republican leadership may have been trying to get conservative groups to chill on their attacks on the GOP, and to get the infighting to stop. Or, perhaps they were deciding to engage in some infighting of their own. If the latter is the case, they may want to reflect on the wisdom of moving against a clear majority of their voters. If the former is, it is a worthy goal. They may want to re-evaluate the approach they took, because it did not work.

If the wave they want is to form, they are going to need to solve the puzzle on how to satisfy their party's right while losing less of their left. Despite the 4-1 ratio I mentioned above, that they are already losing 13% in the Obama approval question tells me that simply moving right won't do the trick (and moving left certainly won't). I suspect the answer is for both main factions within the GOP coalition to swallow their grumblings and start selling the GOP "brand" as a whole. This is not the time for a GOP internal war, as is currently being fought. When it comes to infighting for the GOP, the Wargames finale holds wisdom: the only way to win is to not play that game.

We Hate Them, But We Want Them. We Love Him, But Don't Want His Policies

I note the following in this NBC/WSJ poll:

Party	Total Positive	Total Negative	Difference
Democratic	36	44	-8
Republican	26	51	-25

Contrast those numbers to this from later in the same survey:

Preferred Party To Control Congress		Percentage
Democrats	42
Republicans	44

Fewer people like Republicans, but more want them in charge of Congress.

One can infer from this that the Democrats have done a much better job in making their core voters happy than the GOP has. If my Twitter feed is any indication, then yesterday's announced budget deal is going to make this dynamic even worse.

A separate tidbit from the survey worth calling out-- they asked people which of the following "best describes your feelings towards Barack Obama." The options and results follow; while they are interesting, I just love this question. I think it is a great combination of "job approval" and "personal favorability."

Perspective		Percentage
Like Obama personally, approve of most of his policies	36
Like Obama personally, disapprove of most of his policies	28
Dislike Obama personally, approve of most of his policies	2
Dislike Obama personally, disapprove of most of his policies	31

Taken together, this means that 64% of people think Obama's a swell fellow, yet 59% do not like his policies.

Put that in the form that the earlier approve/disapprove numbers were presented, and it would look something like this:

Perspective	Approve	Disapprove	Difference
Obama, personally	64	33	+31
Obama's policies	38	59	-21

If you were wondering why President Obama constantly gives speeches to try to sell his policies, wonder no longer. He's trying to leverage the former to improve the latter.

Added:

.@ThePlumLineGS @TheRickWilson A minority position is OCare works or just needs tweaks (40%). 57% say major overhaul or repeal. Big gap.

— Gerry Daly (@GerryDales) December 11, 2013

Repeal is a minority position. So is keeping ACA mostly intact. People want OINO.

On the younger cohort in the 2014 elections (and possibly beyond)

This is a case where I use this blog to basically go beyond 140 characters on Twitter. I probably should have "moved" here a lot earlier in the discussion I'm about to talk about.

These Harvard findings on young people aren't that surprising if you look back at the last Q-poll: http://t.co/YrJtixQaoK

— David Freddoso (@freddoso) December 4, 2013

If you click to David's tweet (after reading the article he linked, naturally), you will see a back and forth, mostly between @GWHistorian (a worthy follow) and me regarding a nit-pick I had with a phrase in David's piece. Always the pedant, I tweeted:

@freddoso Re: Q, despite slight GOP adv., unless the gap widens w<29 it won't matter if they turn out. Adv. not big enough to move needle.

— Gerry Daly (@GerryDales) December 4, 2013

That tweet was in reference to the following passage:

"Young voters, who trust the GOP over Obama by nine points on the economy, are now just slightly leaning GOP for the 2014 election. The challenge will be to turn them out, since they vote at such low rates."

Eventually, we agreed that blunting and advantage is always beneficial for whichever side had been on the short end.

However, there is one part to this that also needs to be considered. The younger cohort is one that Democrats have spent a lot of resources on turning out in the last few elections. If data show that the cohort is going to be a wash, then it would be a waste for a party to focus on them. A well-run party organization, which the Democrats have proven to be over the past several elections, will not make such a mistake.

It will be interesting to see if, as 2014's election draws near, there is as much visible effort being made on the youth vote as in 2006-2012. If not, one will probably be able to infer that their own internal polling is suggesting near-parity. It will also mean that they will have invested the freed resources elsewhere.

Interesting tidbit in the latest California Field Poll

I saw the latest Field Poll of California this morning, but did not have a chance to look at it until now.

The release itself only touches on 6 questions, and on most they don't provide crosstabs. The main exception to this is that they provided a lot of detail on those who disapprove of Obama's performance. From their write-up:

The latest Field Poll finds that while 51% of California voters approve of the President's overall performance, a growing proportion (43%) disapprove. This represents an increase of 8 percentage points in the proportion disapproving since July. While the growth in the number of Californians disapproving spans most demographic subgroups, some of the greatest increases have occurred among voter segments who have been among the President’s strongest supporters. This includes independent voters with no party preference (+16), Latinos (+16), union-affiliated households (+18), and women (+13).

Oddly, they didn't specifically call out the subgroup that had the greatest increase in disapproval: those with no more than a high school education. Let's rectify that:

Subgroup	Feb. Disapproval	Dec. Disapproval	Increase
No Party Preference	24%	40%	+16
Female	27%	40%	+13
Latino	18%	34%	+16
Union Affiliated	25%	43%	+18
High School Graduate Or Less	26%	50%	+24

The subgroups have, according to the methodology details, a margin of error of +/-4.5%¹.

I have no idea why they would have skipped over the subgroup that moved the most when mentioning the groups that had moved the most from a position of low disapproval. As the table above shows, they had comparably low disapproval to the other groups the commentary said "have been among the President's strongest supporters."

If we assume that the measured percentages are correct, then it would be interesting to know why that subgroup had the largest swing towards disapproval. One possible reason would be that those less educated may have taken the President (and other Democrats) at face value with his various Obamacare promises more than other groups did. Whatever the specific reason, it seems likely that it is Obamacare related.

Things to look out for in this regard: if polls from other states show this same erosion in this subgroup, or if other California polls have breakouts on other questions that might give more insight towards why this group in particular is souring.

¹ The methodology details in the release touch on two things I spoke about in this post made last week. They get a round of applause for including this explanation:

The maximum sampling error for results from the overall sample is +/- 3.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, while findings from the random subsample have a sampling error of +/- 4.5 percentage points. The maximum sampling error is based on results in the middle of the sampling distribution (i.e., percentages at or near 50%). Percentages at either end of the distribution (those closer to 10% or 90%) have a smaller margin of error.

They do not get a round of applause for stating the margin of error to one decimal point while reporting the results to the nearest integer.

Even when coming clean, lying liars lie.

Wow. Huffpo poverty article sensation yet another politicized hoax. http://t.co/vXtZViMVDv

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 3, 2013

I encourage everyong to read the article that J-Pod linked. In summary, Linda Walther Tirado wrote an essay about her being poor, and how it was a never-ending sinkhole from which there was no hope of escape. Some excerpts:

It’s that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be...

You have to understand that we know that we will never not feel tired. We will never feel hopeful. We will never get a vacation. Ever. We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor.

The linked article does a good job explaining how the whole thing was fraudulent, and mentioned how "Ms. Tirado came clean (sort of)."

You have to understand that the piece you read was taken out of context, that I never meant to say that all of these things were happening to me right now, or that I was still quite so abject.

Emphasis mine.

The linked article, and this article linked to by it, do a fine job spelling out the hoax and many of the ramifications of it. But I did want to point out that Ms. Tirado still was lying when she was coming clean. There is no way to square "I never meant to say... that I was still quite so abject" with "We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor."

I never meant to say exactly what I said in plain English.

But what else could you expect from someone who describes their political views thusly:

Depends on Where I Am
If I'm in Utah, I'm a pragmatic liberal. Outside Utah, my references get checked to make sure I'm not a GOP mole. I get Dems elected.

By lying about everything. She certainly makes a fine Democratic campaign consultant, if she is what she claims.

On CBS' Survey And The Repeal Question

In an update at the bottom of my last post, I mentioned that there was a point regarding current polling that was relevant to the discussion about Obamacare. As a back and forth with Greg Sargent had precipitated that post, I will use him again to set up this one.

Above all, commentators must never, ever, even entertain the possibility that the GOP repeal stance is also problematic.

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) November 26, 2013

(Before getting to the meat of this post, let me just mention that I do not think "repeal" is the GOP's prevalent position. Rather, "repeal and replace" is, at least as far as I can tell.)

While not completely certain, I suspect polling results like the following from the most recent CBS News survey feed perceptions like Greg's.

"Which comes closest to your view about the 2010 health care law? The law is working well and should be kept in place as is. There are some good things in the law, but some changes are needed to make it work better. OR, The law has so much wrong with it that it needs to be repealed entirely."
		Should be kept as is	Changes are needed	Needs to be repealed	Unsure/ No answer
		%	%	%	%
	11/15-18/13	7	48	43	2

Full survey results and the above table's HTML cribbed from here on PollingReport.com

A few things about this question and its results.

1) Let's say that one holds the position that healthcare as it existed prior to Obamacare needed to be reformed, that Obamacare had some good things in it (or at least had things in it trying to address valid problems), but that Obamacare was a big step in the wrong direction overall. How would one answer that question? Clearly not with the "should be kept as is" answer. But what about the other two?

If one took the "needs to be repealed" option as meaning "repeal, with no further action", then it seems likely that they would choose the "changes are needed" option, even though such a person might be completely open to the idea that the right approach is "repeal AND replace."

My point boils down to a criticism of the wording of the question. While the need to keep things quick and simple in survey scripts is a real imperative, adding a fourth option would not have complicated things much. The very next question, after all, had five answers. The survey would have given us more information, and therefore been a stronger survey, had the options been "Should be kept as is", "Should be kept with changes", "Should be repealed and replaced with other reforms", and "Should be repealed."

2) The collective national opinion matters less than the opinion in various states, and particularly in some states: the states where the coming political battles are bound to be most impactful.

To my mind, these include states where early polling shows that the 2014 Senate race is bound to be competitive, and states that can legitimately be considered as potential battlegrounds in the next Presidential election. To remove my subjectivity from that last part, let's use any state where neither Obama nor Romney took 55% of the vote. Between these two conditions, I come up with Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Almost by definition, these states will be "redder" than the rest of the country, as they are comprised of states where things were close (like the country overall) plus states where the Senator is from the party opposite to the state's general composition. Where Obama won the overall popular vote by 4 percentage points, and won states other than those listed by 8 percentage points, it was essentially a tie in these states (with Romney "winning" overall by just under 800k).

By no means am I suggesting that one "unskew" this CBS poll. I merely am making the case that it should be obvious that where the war will be fought, the numbers in the above likely would be more favorable to the Republican position than those numbers are. What we really need are polls of these states, in aggregate or (even better) individually.

Give us polls in these states, and poll questions with choices that can best capture the most likely stances of respondents, and we will have a much better view on just how problematic a repeal effort is politically.

Added: It would be quite helpful to understand what the changes those who answered that way had in mind. If the changes amount to tinkering around the edges, it would mean one thing. If the changes amounted to, in essence, gutting nearly all of the law, it would mean another. The former would probably want to exact a political toll on those pushing a repeal effort, where the latter would likely not. I suspect, however, that the additional answer to the same question would get towards this quite a bit.

A Sense of Urgency Regarding Obamacare?

To set this up, I need to reference an exchange I had with the Washington Post's Greg Sargent.

@ThePlumLineGS Not supporting the GOP repeal stance does not translate into Dems being safe from a potential wave election, no matter how...
— Gerry Daly (@GerryDales) November 27, 2013

@ThePlumLineGS And I am amused at your mischaracterization of my sense of urgency, and saying that I think the now implies the future.
— Gerry Daly (@GerryDales) November 27, 2013

@ThePlumLineGS I will write you a blog post later. Not that it applies beyond myself.
— Gerry Daly (@GerryDales) November 27, 2013

While Greg was glad to hear that I don't have any particular "urgency to reach decision about future right now", I am certain he does not share my reasons.

Before I get to them, however, I want to point out how there did not seem to be any reticence about rushing to a decision back when Obamacare was jammed through Congress, not even allowing the minority to have a chance to read the bill, and certainly not allowing the huddled masses a chance to digest it and express their opinions to their elected Representatives regardless of party. There was an opportunity, and Democrats rushed to take advantage of it.

Hence, they now reap what they sowed.

As for me, let's start with the part about having certainty about the future. I cannot fault Greg for not knowing my stock phrases-- I doubt he read Daly Thoughts back in the peak years; they were almost a decade ago and my peak audience, while pretty decent, still had me only at the middle tier of blogs of that time. One of my frequent phrases is the ever original, "Time will tell." I think it is nearly always the case that one is best served by an understanding that tomorrow's script is subject to revision, if not to a complete re-write.

That is not to say that I don't have confidence in how some things regarding Obamacare will play out. To use a recent example, when the "fixed by the end of November" assertion came down, I was quick to say "there is no freaking way." There was always a chance that I could be wrong, but because of my experience in software development I felt no need to temper my wording. The bigger risk was one that still may come to pass, where just some things get fixed and victory is claimed. Still, there was no way that the big issues could be fixed in that limited time with sufficient testing.

Similarly, there are some aspects of what's to come with Obamacare of which I am very confident. For large swaths of the middle class, costs will go up, not down. For nearly all young adults not on their parents' plans, costs will go up (unless they opt for the penalty). Simple math dictates both of these outcomes-- in order to expand the risk pools to cover everybody while limiting the rates for those in the highest risk pool, both are inevitable. And that's without even considering the fact that an entire new level of administrative overhead was just added to the mix. That overhead has costs as well, much to the approval of the SEIU.

How that will play out is where my confidence ends. Skilled politicians can turn lemons into lemonade. More importantly, unskilled politicians can turn fine wine into vinegar, and the Republicans frequently squander political opportunities. There may end up being enough positive instances to build support for Obamacare despite the higher costs and other adverse impacts. The GOP may decide to find the ten people in the entire country who actually believe what Democrats try to say the GOP as a whole believes regarding contraception, and nominate those for every competitive race in the land.

(Note: in actuality, my confidence does not really quite end there; I have definite opinions on how I think things will play out politically going forward assuming competent political handling by both parties. However, the drop-off in confidence from the above to these opinions is large, and this post is already getting longer than I wanted, so I will save those for another time or just keep them to myself.)

Which brings me to my lack of urgency. While I am uncertain as to what the future holds regarding the popularity (or even the political acceptability) of Obamacare, I am quite certain that, in the here and now, it is harming the Democratic party immensely. Given that I believe they are misguided in most aspects, why on earth would I have any need to rush things? Throw on top of that my natural inclination towards letting things play out a while to get a better feel for the lay of the land, and I am quite content with a deliberate approach.

The only thing that causes me pause with this is the knowledge that people are currently being hurt by the issues with Obamacare, both financially and in terms of unneeded stress. It is only natural and humane to want to help them, just as it was natural and humane to want to try and come up with ways to improve or reform the old health care system to aid and assist those who were out of luck under it. However, the experience of Obamacare should make plain to everyone that the last thing that is needed is to rush things, and that what really is needed is careful thought coupled with public deliberations and debate. Those are safeguards against implementing changes with significant flaws and little public support, and are needed to ensure the likely ramifications are generally understood by everyone. No nasty surprises are needed. Not ever, and especially not now.

Yet, there is a simple step that can be taken where the ramifications would be generally known: repeal.

As Greg likes to point out, there is not majority support for this option according to recent polling. There are two points to this I'd like to make:

1) Time will tell. The way things are playing out right now in terms of public opinion should undercut the confidence of those assuming that there will never be public support for repeal anytime in the near future.

2) Poll questions often are about mere summaries or distillations of things that are actually more complex and nuanced. Until such a time as the public comes to understand those details, and therefore account for them when asked the questions that don't spell them out, it can be a mistake to read too much into them. I find it quite plausible that a lack of support for repeal may mean a lack of support for "repeal, full stop" and not necessarily a lack of support for "reform, but using the old state of affairs as the starting point rather than Obamacare, hence repeal as a necessary step."

That last part happens to be what I recommend. See here.

Greg Sargent's opinion is that everyone needs to calm down and give things a chance to work. I think this is sound advice. Politically, the Democrats have cast their lot with Obamacare, and for the next several years that will be the case even if any portion of them turn on it now. They went all in, and now it's time to see cards, all the way to the river.

Added: As is my wont, I have made some minor edits since posting ("Ready, fire, aim!" isn't just a motto, it's a way of life). Also, there was a fairly important point regarding the current polling which I wanted to make, but (a) forgot to in my post-turkey day-after haze, and (b) decided against tacking-on after the fact since what I thought would be a three-paragraph post turned into the verbose prose above. I will make the forgotten point separately, later.

Added even later: Here's a post containing the point I had forgotten to make; namely that what is really important is public opinion in the states where upcoming political battles are going to be most contested.

The Five "R"s The GOP Should Embrace For a Successful Heathcare Politcal Strategy

If I were a GOP strategist, I would be advising they embrace these five "R"s as their talking points regarding healthcare. After all, who doesn't love some onomatopoeia?

1) REBOOT - Start with an easily understood computer reference, to allude to the massive failure that is Healthcare.gov. It also leads one to harken back to before Obamacare was passed, which is key since the Democrats are going to try to ensure that it, and not the way things were before, must be the starting point for any future negotiations. The Republicans need to move the playing field back.

2) REPEAL - The case needs to be made that in order to fix healthcare, Obamacare must be repealed since it moved things in the wrong direction.

3) RESTART with bipartisan negotiations, unlike when Obamacare was passed without a single Republican vote, due to their concerns being completely unaddressed; concerns that proved to be completely well founded.

4) REFORM healthcare the way it should have been done in the first place, with careful consideration, full deliberations, bipartisan compromise, and the will of the people having a chance to be felt by their elected representatives. This will be quite unlike the mad rush with Obamacare, where the Democrats abused the privileges of the majority to ascertain passage.

5) And finally, REPUBLICANS need your votes to make this happen. The GOP must make the case that they, and not the Democrats, be entrusted to ensure the process is started, followed correctly, and completed.

A Quick (And Probably Pedantic) Lesson On Correctly Interpreting Poll Numbers

On Twitter, @sqwerin noticed the following regarding Republican approvale of Obama in the recent Quinnipiac poll of Ohio:

THREE PERCENT? o_O

— Nakedly Political (@sqwerin) November 27, 2013

This seems to be a good time to make a few points about polls in general regarding the margin of error, at least one of which I don't think is commonly understood. But to get to a way to make that point more intuitively obvious, I have to start with a few other things. Please note that to some extent, this is pedantic since it involves considering certain reported results as being more precise than the reported margin of error. There really is no "harm" in thinking of things as being less precise (although, one of these points speaks to where there is less precision, so that part is a bit more important; that one is more commonly understood though).

But pedant is my middle name, so let's hop to it.

First, when a poll has breakouts among different subgroupings, the margin of error for those results is bigger than the margin of error for the entire survey. Using the poll linked above as an example, the overall sample has, according to Quinnipiac, a margin of error of +/- 2.7 percentage points. That is based on 1,361 registered voters in a state with ~9 million.

The number of Republicans, from which they measured the 3% approval referenced above, in the sample is obviously a fraction of the 1,361. This increases the margin of error. The universe of Republican registered voters is similarly much smaller than 9 million, and while that works to decrease the margin of error, it does so much less than the former does. To show this, let's assume that there are 450 Republicans in the sample but consider them pulled from a pool of 9 million. One can use this margin of error calculator, so as to not need to do the actual math, and see the margin of error is closer to +/- 5% than 2.7%. Change the universe to 3 million, and it does not move.

I believe that is fairly commonly understood.

Second, look at the results posted in the survey details. Everything is reported to the nearest whole integer. Reporting a margin of error to the first decimal point while using whole integers in the results does not make a lot of sense. The precision that would allow the margin of error to be 2.7% gets lost in the rounding to the nearest integer, and therefore it should be reported as +/- 3%.

I think that is not as commonly understood as the first point, but more commonly than the next one.

The margin of error in a survey is in reference to 50%, and the further away from that the results are, the tighter the margin of error is. Consider my assumption above, which resulted in a margin of error of +/- 5% for the Republican subgrouping. It should be obvious that there is no way for the 3% measured to really be 5 percentage points lower, since it is bounded at the bottom by 0%. What may not be as obvious, though, is that the plus side is also not as high as 5%. In fact, the further away from 50% the measured number is, the tighter the margin of error becomes. The reported number is more precise than the calculated margin of error. When the number is this close to zero, the margin of error is very small, even within a sample as small as the subsample of Republicans.

The last point does not really help much in interpreting the approval rating among Republicans, in that most people would get the implications of the reported number: there is little downside for Obama among Republicans in Ohio. But it has more relevance for the 34% in the full sample who approve of Obama's performance. I haven't done the math to figure out how much more precise the measurement becomes at 34%, but suspect that it would move the 2.7% reported margin of error to below 2.5%, which as mentioned above with the rounding effect above would more accurately be considered +/-2%.

When a survey has a sample size as large as Quinnipiac used here, none of this matters much. However, all three of these points can have their utility when looking at particular polls, especially ones where the sample is small.

On open letter to Penn State

Penn State has an adminstrator who thinks that someone linking to a Penn State page needs his approval.

To whom it may concern at Penn State: kiss my ass.

My Unorthodox Views on Pot Laws (And Licensing In General)

I wonder how many people are like me, and support general legalization and not the medicinal one (note: I don't hate sick people).
— Gerry Daly (@GerryDales) November 21, 2013

Since the above just screams to be misunderstood, let me explain a bit further.

My main objection to medicinal marijuana laws is that it is a bad idea to craft laws in a manner that leads to a general abuse of the law, which these laws do. In California, you can find plenty of businesses where you can basically walk in, answer a few (leading questions) to get a medicinal marijuana card from a "doctor", and go back downstairs to purchase the goods.

It's not so much the end users in that business that get to me, but the whole business model. It sets a precedence where there are doctors set up to basically make a sham of the profession and the licensing process. That is not good, and eventually will lead to abuses within the realm of issuance and enforcement.

To me, the better approach is to end that charade. Naturally, this would also take care of those who need it for medicinal purposes, essentially making it over-the-counter.

Updated after posting:

This article is about Obamacare, but it also tells a lesson about the downside to licensing fees. http://t.co/HKHMT5P7Ui

— Gerry Daly (@GerryDales) November 21, 2013

This feels related. In the article, it details how one woman is practically being forced onto Medicaid against her wishes. One part of her story is how she was trying to build a career as a realtor, but could not afford to renew her license.

"How has it come to this?" she asked in one of our several talks over the past few weeks about what was happening. When she was a working mother and I was young, she easily carried health insurance for our whole family. "How have I fallen this far?"

In 2011, she had to give up her real-estate license; as a newer agent, she did not stand to earn enough in the tough market to justify the fees to renew.

The licensing process is generally presented (and often starts) as a way of protecting customers from charlatans and incompetents. However, the ever-present pressures to increase inflows to public coffers, along with lobbying from established businesses wanting to limit their competition, often leads to situations like the above, which present barriers to people trying to raise themselves up from being poor, concurrently depriving the public from the competition that leads to lower prices and better service.

And don't get me started on the way traffic and parking laws are abused to create revenue streams.

In general, I believe that the only way to raise revenue for governments should be via taxes. While I understand the impulse to get those who want to engage in a certain practice or activity that is controlled by licensing to fund, at least partially, the cost of government administering the licensing program, the adverse consequences are too much.

The Point (Of My Twitter Feed)

For a long time I’ve considered doing a “What’s the point?” post. After all, as Steve Martin said, one probably should have a point.

Just like most people on Twitter, I like getting new followers. However, I think the way to really expand one’s follower base is to pick an approach and learn to do that very well.

You know what I think I do really well? The thing that I am the best at?

Simply being myself. I am good at being me.

The problem with that is that while I like increasing my followers, it really is not what my feed is about. Hopefully this does not come across as too narcissistic, but I am on Twitter to enjoy myself, and as such I tweet about whatever floats my boat.

Does that lead to my timeline being somewhat disjointed? Yes.

Does that mean that my timeline is not for everyone? Absolutely.

Does this limit my potential number of followers? Most likely.

Does that mean that you will end up unfollowing me as quickly as you followed (assuming that you did follow me)? That’s for you to decide.

I say things that are on my mind, and have conversations with people who are interested in those things. And I read what others say, and join in on conversations with them. That's what I enjoy on Twitter. Follower counts are nice, but I'm just here to enjoy myself, not get a new high score.

In general, here is what you are likely to find me tweeting about frequently on any given day:

• Political horseraces and polling. At one time, I had a moderately successful blog within this genre. My undergraduate degree was in Mathematics and Computer Science, and I enjoy number crunching. Some of my followers knew me from my site, and some of them are fairly well known within that avenue of punditry (and there is a non-zero percentage of them who will actually admit to that!) Had I made different choices, perhaps that’s what I would be doing now. No regrets, though, as I love the direction I went instead.
• Movies. This happens to be the direction I went. I work within that industry, not as part of the “talent”, but on the analytics side of things. I enjoy talking about movies, I enjoy reading about them, I enjoy trying to figure out how to sell them to people, and occasionally I enjoy actually watching them.
• Within this, since I really like my job, do not expect me to be 100% objective and definitely do not expect to hear me busting on my company's movies.
• Also within this, keep in mind that this is my own personal feed and your typical disclaimers about not speaking for 20^th Century Fox apply.
• Politics. The funny thing is—I hate politics. I am a big time cynic when it comes to the whole affair. Unfortunately for a person with that perspective, I cannot escape the realization that they are incredibly important. Every aspect of our lives is influenced by political dynamics. As such, various topics within politics (beyond polling and poll analysis) generally draw my interest, and if something draws my interest, I probably will end up offering an opinion.
• On this, if you really really really hate conservatives, then odds are you will really really really hate me. Sorry about that.
• I cannot figure out if I am a conservative-leaning libertarian or a libertarian-leaning conservative. I am also not sure it matters which is more accurate.
• General wisecracking. It is in my blood to be a wise-guy. I am more than aware of the fact that my “miss” ratio may be higher than the really funny people in the world and on Twitter. Sorry about that. I think I have my moments, though. Your mileage may vary.

On any given day, or even for many days on end, I may be doing a lot of any one or two of these and not a lot of the other.

Anyhow, hello. I guess the point is that I mainly do this for my own enjoyment and to just have some fun. Please keep in mind that I don’t take this all too seriously. If you enjoy my feed, then great! If not, then also great? Either way, at least now you know what to expect.

One last thing. The Yadi Molina thing? It came from this.

All the best,

Gerry

Bug, or a Feature?

One of the main reasons I set up this blog after having retired from Blogging years ago is that I often want to respond to someone on Twitter, but would need 1,400 characters instead of 140. Brevity, schmevity.

House leaders are so awful at basic politics is b/c they come from very safe districts. They may not have had a real race in years, if ever.

— DrewMTips (@DrewMTips) October 12, 2013

This feels true to me. But let me ask a Devil's Advocate question.

Is this a bug, or is it a feature?

At first blush it seems that it clearly is the former. However, consider it from the perspective of an originalist framework. The House was to be responsive to the people, and to be the closest facet of our system of governance to pure democracy. The Senate, on the other hand, was to balance this by being insulated from the push of the political winds by being appointed by legislatures, rather than by democratic vote. The 17th Amendment changed this dynamic.

If Twitter existed before the 17th Amendment, it is easy to imagine someone Tweeting "Senate leaders are so awful at basic politics because they may not have had to face a real election in years, if ever." That was by design. That current House leaders may have the same insulation may mean that the original conceptual balance between the chambers has been flipped. I am starting to think this part is true.

The Devil's Advocate question is, bug or feature?

Just a quick point about the WSJ/NBC poll that is blowing up Twitter right now

The poll's full results are here.

There is no sugar coating it- this is an ugly poll for the GOP, and I have no reason to doubt it. If anything I am about to write comes across as implying that it isn't quite bad, then that is a failure in my communication skills.

That out of the way, let me point out one thing.

Q10, which is the 'choose one, government should do more to help people' versus 'government is doing too much' showed a net 8 point swing towards the 'do more' side since the last time it was asked by these pollsters, back in June.

Where views of the parties swing depending on the political winds, underlying core beliefs tend to be more stable. This particular change suggests to me that the movement here was not so much a shift in the opinion of the electorate towards bigger government, but rather a shift in the enthusiasm of those called.

Stated differently, and perhaps more clearly (or perhaps not), that question makes me wonder if most of the movement came from adherents to a 'less government' philosophy have had their enthusiasm tempered, or from adherents to a 'more government' one being more enthused, or both. I am skeptical that ~4% of the adult population in June thought "small government is the bees knees" but now think "pump it up until you can feel it."

That is not to say it does not spell big trouble for the GOP, as I started off this post with. Having people who agree with your overarching political philosophy demotivated while those holding the opposite one are energized is a recipe for electoral slaughter. However, it is somewhat easier to rally your troops, or to have the other side lose momentum, than it is to convince a meaningful slice of the electorate that their entire view of the role of government has been wrong.

It's not a silver lining, but it is something. And it may be all Republicans can hope for, if other polls come out soon showing the same basic numbers, as I suspect will be the case.

And keep in mind that "somewhat easier" does not mean "easy."

Edited 10/12 to add: The same link above has the results of the same question going back more than a half a decade. You can see that there were instances where this measure swung significantly, and even stayed with the swing for a considerable amount of time. At first blush, that would seem to conflict with my assertion that "views of the parties swing depending on the political winds, underlying core beliefs tend to be more stable."

The word "tend" in that sentence is very important. Context matters. When that big swing occurred and showed some stickiness or duration, it was precipitated by, and during, the financial crisis that brought down so many banks and nearly the entire economy. It stands to reason that the answer saying to leave businesses (including financial institutions) alone would take a hit, and the answer saying to help people more would see increased support. The contextual circumstances hit right to the core of the question, which is not the case right now (at least, to my eyes).

Your mileage may vary. However, if one believes that the shutdown does lend itself to shifting views on this question, note that when Democrats started saying that the economy was recovering, the results of this question shifted back to where they had been prior.

Taking Cohn's Thoughts on Gerrymandering a Tad Further

Nate Cohn wrote an interesting piece today, Quit Blaming Gerrymandering for the Shutdown. I think the following excerpt gets to the gist of the piece.

Because the point of partisan gerrymandering isn’t to try and maximize the number of safe districts. The goal is to maximize the number of districts that are merely safe enough by packing as many of your opponents' voters as you can into a small number of extremely partisan districts while safely distributing the rest throughout your own districts. In this way, gerrymandering may actually increase the number of moderate Republicans.

This is true. However, it also is only half of it. But before I get to the other half of it, let me set things up by suggesting that just maybe the article and it's headline are a bit more balanced than what he would have preferred, if he had his druthers. I suspect this due to the way he tweeted a link to his piece.

Don't blame Republican extremism on gerrymandering http://t.co/JrM5mJSrae

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) October 4, 2013

When I put the article's headline and content together in context with that Tweet, I get more than a sneaking suspicion that Cohn blames the shutdown on Republican extremism. As is my wont, I quickly responded with playful snark, tweaking that slant.

@Nate_Cohn Does that mean we can't blame Democrat extremism on it, either?

— Gerry Daly (@GerryDales) October 4, 2013

As is also my wont, I then thought a bit more. You know the old adage, "Ready, fire, aim!" I realized that, while the mechanics of gerrymandering when redistricting is primarily under the auspices of one party would tend to exert pressure towards less pure ideology for the controlling party (for the reasons Cohn specified), the opposite is true for the non-controlling party. Since gerrymandering involves "packing as many of your opponents' voters as you can into a small number of extremely partisan districts," the effect on the opponents' party is to enable them to move away from moderate candidates. [edited after initial posting to add: Enable might not be a strong enough word. It might make such a move inevitable.] After all, these extremely partisan districts will want candidates who represent their extremely partisan worldview.

As often is the case, the quick snark was wrong. When one party controls redistricting and engages in gerrymandering, the resulting dynamics will exert moderating pressure on that party while simultaneously removing moderating pressure from the other party. Republicans controlled most of the last round of redistricting. Recent gerrymandering may not explain extremism from Republicans, but it sure can explain it from Democrats.

Expanding Upon Sean Trende's Thoughts on the Cotton/Pryor Senate Race

In a typically excellent article, Sean Trende looked at the Arkansas Senate race, where Republican Tom Cotton will be taking on the incumbent, Democrat Mark Pryor.

So how did Pryor win? First, he held down Hutchinson’s margins in the traditionally Republican parts of the state in the Northwest...

The problem for Pryor is threefold. First, a large part of the southern realignment has been generational, and it has hit the rural South especially hard in the past decade. If you were 5 years old when the Great Depression started, and spent your formative years with FDR in the White House, you would have been 77 in 2002...

Second, as the Democrats have moved toward a more urban, upscale coalition, and developed an agenda that caters to those groups, they’ve paid an increasing price with downscale, rural voters...

Third, and perhaps most important, running against Cotton in an off-year election is a strategic and demographic nightmare for Pryor...

There is a fourth reason, and it ties back to part of the first line I excerpted above-- the traditionally Republican parts of the state in Northwest Arkansas. This happens to be where I currently call home.

No, I am not the fourth reason; I do not move the needle, so to speak. But people like me are-- people who are growing the region. Northwest Arkansas is one of the fastest growing areas in the country (from 1990-2000, the sixth fastest growing, to be exact, and while I do not have the numbers to back it up, my perception is that it has not slowed down much since then, if at all).

I took a few minutes to look up some data from the Arkansas Secretary of State's website to put this in the proper context. In 1992, the two counties that have the bulk of the NWA population (Washington and Benton) comprised 9.6% of the statewide vote. In 2002, when Pryor beat Hutchinson, it was up to 11.6%. In last year's election, the tally was up to 14.1%. This recent trend is not certain to continue, but I expect it will, at least for a while longer.

I updated this article a short while after posting, to cut down on the excerpt of Sean's article. I am pretty sure he didn't mind the length of the excerpt, but I think this post works better shortened. Read all of Sean's rationale at the link.