Regarding the GOP Data Warehousing Efforts

@GerryDales That's a rather incomplete view. Data "warehouses" have come and gone before. The change is this one is going to be in-house.

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) February 7, 2014

@GerryDales Well, it worked before.

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) February 7, 2014

Sometimes, 140 characters just isn't enough for a reply.

A cliche I hear in NFL broadcasts is that if a team has two first-string quarterbacks, then they really have none. Leaving aside the obvious counter-example of Joe Montana and Steve Young, it has more than a small grain of truth. It's overly glib, but I couldn't help but think that if the GOP has had data warehouses that have come and gone, they've really not had a good data warehouse.

Building out a robust data warehouse and the data mining operation to go along with it is a huge task involving many IT disciplines. The schema must be architected. The ETL (extraction, transformation, and load) processes must be built to populate the warehouse with data in usable form. The tools which will be used for querying must be deployed. The database must be tuned-- repeatedly, and iteratively. This is not a one or two month process. If, truly, there have been warehouses that have come and gone, then the wheel has been re-created several times over at a tremendous dollar cost and an even bigger lost mining opportunity cost.

An operation that is starting warehousing over at some cycle will fall behind another that built a robust warehouse and adapted it over time to integrate new data sources (hence a likely explanation for why what worked before has not been working recently) or to take advantage of the latest advances. That they are bringing it in-house, to give some more permanency to the warehouse and make its development an ongoing, iterative processes, shows that they have realized this and are making the right moves to rectify.

This is heartening news, as this is not the kind of race where if one falls behind, catching up is impossible. At the same time, it is not going to happen over night. While we are building over again, they are already mining while looking for ways to further enhance theirs. At least now we'll be running the race, rather than perpetually going back to the starting line.

I remain astounded, though, that this inefficiency existed for as long as it did.

NFL Prediction

I made the following prediction "in real life" halfway through this NFL season. While I can't "prove" online that I did, that's ok since it still requires a lot of things to happen.

• Peyton Manning would lead the Broncos to hosting the AFC Championship game.
• His team will end up facing his old team, the Colts, led by his replacement, Andrew Luck.
• The weather will be so cold and windy that passing the ball will be just about impossible in that game.
• Through no fault of his own, he'll get tagged again with not being able to win the big game, despite having won a Super Bowl in the past.

Note that I don't want this to happen despite Luck being my favorite non-Giant player; I like Peyton too much to root for that. It just feels inevitable.

Loathsome Reporting.

Let's compare and contrast some things from this article. First, the lead:

Hollywood star Brad Pitt’s Hurricane Katrina charity is coming under fire after more than two dozen homes that his organization built are rotting.

Now, a good way down:

Homeowner Verret says the wood on her home has already been replaced with yellow pine.
‘It didn’t take no time at all,’ said Verrett, who has been living in the home for just over four years.
‘It’s just like they said. If something’s wrong, they make it right. We are very happy with our Make It Right home.’

The closest they find to a real critic?

Homeowner, Gloria Guy, said her home had not been reconstructed yet.
‘They replaced a lot of houses but they ain’t replaced mine. They’re supposed to come pretty soon and do it.”

She's annoyed that, for whatever reason, she wasn't among the first helped? Helped for a second time?

But, you know, what does it matter. Pitt's an arrogant celebrity, right?

Pitt has said he gets ‘far too much credit’ for the charity’s rebuilding efforts

Oh, he's just saying that to avoid the blame. Right, Daily Mail? He deserves a headline like this:

Brad Pitt's Hurricane Katrina charity under fire after homes are 'ROTTING from the inside in New Orleans'

The capitalization there was a very nice touch. Jolly good show, jerks.

(By the way, I can very easily imagine Gloria Guy saying what she did not as an accusation but more of a lamentation; her saying that they're supposed to come as a statement of fact and not a statement of cyncism. My issue is not with her, but with the way the article was reported and written.)

Updated to add: And then these jerks came up with this.

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.