Sometimes I am rude on Facebook

Posted on December 14, 2012 by

So, um, hi.

Yeah, I haven’t posted since the election. Sorry about that. I don’t even have a really good excuse for that; I just haven’t felt compelled at all to post. That kind of changed today, as the world went insane, and I ended up spewing forth with a rant on a friend’s Facebook wall today.

It started because he quoted that famous Ronald Reagan quote which says,

We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

That got a lot of thumbs up from his fellow conservatives, and another friend suggested that this is the kind of crisis that would be used to implement authoritarianism, and then I decided to reply and, well, just look:

FacebookRant_GunsReagan

Yeah, so not very polite, but oh well. I’ve written before about this specific Reagan quote and how much it bothers me.

If you’re having a hard time reading the image in that small font, here’s what I wrote:

There’s never been a bigger abdication of responsibility in the history of our country than Reagan’s words here. Every one is responsible for their own actions, but we are also collectively responsible for the society we create. 

Conservatives claim to believe in personal responsibility but whenever something like this happens they refuse to look at how their own actions may have in any way contributed to this tragedy. Are we adequately funding mental health facilities? Are we willing to have a serious discussion on how to protect society within the bounds of the 2nd amendment, how to fulfill the “well-regulated” portion of the text, or do we instead demagogue any attempt to address these issues, accusing anyone who would seek to ban certain types of weapons or create waiting periods of being authoritarians, accusing people trying to find solutions within the framework of the constitution of just wanting to take away our guns, lying about their motives to win the next election?

Whenever something like this happens conservatives refuse to hear even the most benign ideas for prevention. Could we limit the size of clips? No, authoritarianism. Could we have a waiting period for buying guns? Tyranny! Could we do background checks on people when they buy a gun? Big brother! Can we better identify people who are mentally ill, and treat them before they hurt other people? Nanny state! We can’t afford it!

Each individual is accountable for his actions. Absolutely true. And each conservative who refuses to even discuss this issue in a helpful way or without accusing the other side of opportunistically using a crisis “to implement authoritarianism” is accountable for impeding any useful prevention.

Instead of looking inward at what the policies that have been pushed by the ghouls at the NRA, you guys want to fall back on the comforting words of Ronald Reagan, and tell yourselves that you share no blame whatsoever for what has happened. That’s what that quote is all about. It’s about covering your own sorry asses. Because deep down, you know. You know that your actions and the people you choose to support and all the stupid posts attacking Bob Costas for even daring to talk about gun culture is part of why no politician would even dare to bring up meaningful legislation that could have prevented this. 

Have fun on congratulating yourselves for not actually pulling the trigger. The man who pulled the trigger deserved to be held fully accountable for his actions, absolutely. He is 100% responsible for his own actions. You’re right about that. But blame is not a zero-sum game. There’s plenty to go around.

I’m just so angry about today. I’m simply not in the mood for bullshit from these people. Not today.

Posted in Crime, Guns | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

2012 Election Post-Mortem

Posted on November 7, 2012 by

So, first, I’ll get the obligatory crowing out of the way.  Barack Obama won re-election last night, and if the margin in Florida holds, I’ll have correctly predicted the outcome of every single state.  I’ll take some credit for this because I made the call back in May with the polls in Florida going against me, and stuck with it on Monday even though the polls hadn’t quite caught up to my prediction.  However, I obviously can’t take too much credit; I owe most of my prescience to the outstanding work of Nate Silver, whose model had a roaring success last night.  He was effusively praised on both MSNBC and Fox News last night, which leads me to believe we’ll only see him rise to greater and greater prominence in the mainstream media over the next two election cycles.  We’ll almost certainly never see him endure the kind of dismissal he got in the media over the past couple weeks.  Obviously, this is a positive development.

With that out of the way, what does President Obama’s re-election, and the margin of his re-election, mean?  The obvious story that everyone is going for today is that this will lead to a reckoning in the Republican Party, which will face a huge battle over where they go from here.  Unlike normal media nonsense, I think this question is absolutely appropriate, and I see no way the Republicans could or would avoid such a national argument.

That the GOP failed so spectacularly in defeating this president should be a matter of truly grave concern for conservatives everywhere.  President Obama has won re-election despite an unemployment rate of 7.9% and persistent trillion-dollar deficits.  President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is truly despised by the right and regarded with only tepid enthusiasm by the left.  In the midterm elections of 2010, Obama’s party suffered one of the most stunning and crushing defeats in recent electoral memory.  If you had presented this election to me or most other political observers as a hypothetical, I would confidently reply that the incumbent was headed for a true wipeout defeat, something akin to the resounding rejections suffered by Jimmy Carter or Herbert Hoover.

This election shows that the GOP had two huge problems in this election.  The first is a long-term problem that Republicans must address if they wish to continue to be a viable national party: the changing demographics of the country.  Simply put, the Reagan Coalition is no longer a viable group for the purposes of winning nationwide elections.  Republicans can no longer afford to cater exclusively to suburban and rural white men, it just won’t work anymore.  Hispanics, African-Americans, and women are the biggest growth groups in the electorate, and they all lean hard Democratic.  Additionally, Republicans face the challenge of age: the incoming generation of voters is simply hostile to many of the GOP’s signature issues.  The American electorate is becoming more urban and more diverse in race, gender, and sexual orientation.  The changing demographics have been particularly important in turning formerly Republican Mountain West states – Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada – into a key part of Obama’s Electoral College “firewall.”  In my estimation, Arizona could well join those states in the blue column next time around, and there are even rumblings that Texas may become competitive in the near future.  This has to be extremely concerning to Republicans.

The second problem, of course, was Mitt Romney himself.  Rick Santorum famously said that Mitt Romney was the absolute worst person the Republicans could have chosen to prosecute the case against President Obama.  I think that’s a bit of hyperbole – for instance, Ron Paul or a similarly libertarian candidate would have been beaten even more soundly than Romney was – but it’s basically true.  Here’s what I said about Romney back in February,

I’ll start with why the cynic should like Mitt Romney: I just don’t see how he can win a general election under normal circumstances.   Romney’s “electability” argument has always been predicated on the idea that he can pull in independents the way no other Republican can.  That might be true (although recent polling has cast doubt on that assertion), but there must be a great deal of concern about Romney’s ability to drive conservative voters to the polls.  Romney’s team has consistently argued that antipathy toward President Obama will do their turnout work for them, but as Democrats who remember 2004 can attest, mere hatred of the President is not enough to unseat him.  You have to have a candidate who is generally inspiring, somebody that party loyalists are actually excited to go out there and work and organize for, not just an opposing candidate they want to vote against.  You would think that everyone would have learned this lesson in 2008, but apparently not.  As I’ve been noting since this blog began, GOP turnout in contests held in blue or battleground states has been significantly down this cycle, despite a competitive nomination race and professed loathing of President Obama.  Romney’s deficiencies in the eyes of conservatives must be considered a major part of this.

Furthermore, Romney is incredibly vulnerable to a host of populist arguments that President Obama has already begun making.  Romney is the consummate 1%er, the guy Mike Huckabee once famously said “looks like the guy who laid you off” and who, by his own admission, “likes firing people.”  He has consistently demonstrated a complete lack of any ability to relate to normal people.  And of course, there is the standard perception of Romney as the unprincipled, flip-flopping, twisting-in-the-wind career politician who stands for nothing besides his own election prospects.  The playbook against Romney is both obvious and obviously effective.

In retrospect, I hit this directly on the head.  Romney’s image as the guy who fired your dad, his “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” editorial, and especially his comments about the 47% doomed him in Ohio, the most important state in this election.  He was unable to hit Obama hard on Obamacare, one of the President’s most vulnerable areas.  And, perhaps most importantly, he failed to motivate conservative voters.

If I may engage in some more prognostication, I think Republicans are likely to spend more of their energy dissecting the problems of Mitt Romney rather than addressing the structural  demographic problems their party faces.  I think the voices that will say Mitt Romney’s problem was that he wasn’t conservative enough will win out, it’s simply a less painful path than acknowledging the reality that their party has drifted too far right and must turn left on a host of issues from immigration and health care to women’s rights, marriage equality, and the environment.  If I am right, the Republicans will have made a grave mistake, and the inevitable collapse of the Reagan coalition will be made all the worse.

—

Another point on the need of Republicans to come back to the political middle:  ever since the whipping the Democratic Party took in the 2010 midterms, political observers (including the authors have this blog) have been convinced that the Democratic party would likely lose control of the Senate, regardless of the outcome of the Presidential election.  Instead, with the re-election of Jon Tester in Montana and the election of Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Democrats have actually increased the size of their caucus from 53 to 55.  Additionally, with the election of Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, Chris Murphy in Connecticut, and Angus King in Maine, the liberal wing of the US Senate will be as strong as it has been in quite some time.  In particular, trading Joe Lieberman for Chris Murphy in Connecticut is a huge upgrade for party unity.  By far, the most important factor in Democrats keeping their majority has been the inability of Tea Party-backed candidates to win state-wide Senate elections in any but the reddest of states.

—

There’s one more point I’d like to make about last night.  Four states – Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington – delivered victories for marriage equality, the first time in history that gay marriage has been validated in statewide popular votes.  Elsewhere, Massachusetts joined the 17 states before them who had authorized medical marijuana, a similar measure failed in Arkansas by just 2%, and Washington and Colorado voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use.  Maryland voted to legalize gambling.  To me, these results indicate that the old “culture wars” are close to being over, and liberals have won.

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Final Prediction Series: inuyesta

Posted on November 5, 2012 by

Just over five months ago, when Wiesman and I published our initial predictions for the outcome of this election, the only thing we differed on was whether the President would win Florida.  Today, we still differ only on whether the President would win Florida.  My official map:

332 Electoral Votes for Barack Obama

Five months ago, I gave the following rationale for giving Florida to Obama:

1. I predict Obama’s popularity will continue to improve as election season wears on.  The economy will continue to improve (barring some natural or man-made catastrophe), and it will become increasingly clear that there is only one adult in this race and he’s not from Massachusetts.  In particular, I think the debates are going to be particularly kind to President Obama.  Furthermore, if the Ron Paul devotees have anything to say about it, Mitt Romney won’t be enjoying the post-convention bump that Republicans typically experience.  Add all this together, and I think Obama can pencil in an extra 1-3% on top of his current poll numbers in all the swing states.

2. Florida is not Mitt Romney’s sort of state.  If you’ll remember, Romney won the incredibly important Florida primary by flooding the state with a torrent of negative attacks on Newt Gingrich.  Romney enjoyed a 5:1 spending advantage over Gingrich in that race and though he won by 15 points, turnout was down by over 300,000 voters, a 15% decrease in turnout in a state whose population has grown by nearly 3% in the same period. As the exit poll data showed that night, this is not a state in which the conservative base is particularly enamored of Mitt Romney and presidential elections are all about turning out your base.

3. Demographics.  I suppose this could be folded into “Florida is not Mitt Romney’s sort of state,” but it’s important enough to get its own header.   Florida has the largest population (17.3%) of elderly citizens in the United States, which is significant both because older voters have higher turnout than other age cohorts and because Republicans in Congress have been lining up behind Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which would slash Social Security and Medicare.  Obama has already been hammering this plan as “social Darwinism,” and we can expect his attacks on the Ryan budget to intensify as Election Day draws nearer.  I expect senior citizens to be highly mobilized in this election, which can only bode poorly for Romney in Florida.  It is also worth noting that Florida has large Hispanic, African-American, and Jewish populations that should also be in Obama’s camp, although Wiesman was correct to note that GOP voter suppression acts of late may be successful in limiting the effect of those groups.

4. I’m just a homer.  Goes without saying.

Certain of the predictions underlying my call of Florida have gone better than others.  As I expected, economy has continued to improve, Romney did not get very much of a post-convention bounce (although this may have had more to do with Clint Eastwood’s chair than disruption by the Paulites), and the President is generally more popular than he was back in May, to the tune of an extra 1.8% in the RealClearPolitics average of his approval rating.

What I did not count on, however, was the dominating performance Romney put on in the first debate, which really set back a lot of the progress I anticipated.  On October 3rd, the night of the first debate, Obama was riding high: 538 was giving him an 86.1% chance of winning and giving him an average of 319.3 electoral votes.  I don’t see a way to look at old projections for individual states, but I distinctly remember mocking Wiesman as Obama took the lead in the Florida polls (a 2 point lead, according to RCP) and even started to trend toward taking back North Carolina.  Nine days later, that lead had almost completely disappeared, Romney had his biggest polling average lead of the campaign in Florida, and Obama has been scrambling back ever since.

So, that’s where we are.  As Wiesman said in his post, 538 is putting Obama’s chances in Florida at 45%.  I am less confident now than I was in May, but I still believe that 45% shot will come through and Obama will prevail in Florida.  Here are my reasons:

1. Florida is trending Obama’s direction.  Obama’s peak in Florida came in the wake of the Democratic convention, with the president capturing a lead of 3.2 points in the RCP average.  Nine days after the first debate, he hit his nadir, with Romney ahead by 3.2 points in the same measurement.  Since then, Obama has closed the gap to 1.8 points, with increasingly favorable polls coming in all the time.  I think this reflects Florida’s fundamental identity as a 50/50 state that shifts with the political winds.  The winds are pushing in Obama’s direction, and I believe that bodes well for him there.

2. The demographics in Florida remain in Obama’s favor.  Just as I said back in May, Florida has large populations of elderly and minority voters that should be highly motivated to turn out for Obama.   In May, I reasoned that the Ryan budget would be a big factor in this motivation.  I think that still holds, but the leaked video of Romney’s comments about “the 47%” is even more powerful with those groups.  Obama has been running ads invoking those remarks incessantly, and it has proven a powerful political weapon.

3. I’m a homer.  As true as ever.

Despite the above, I’ll not be surprised if Florida does go the other way.  As Wiesman said, there’s no telling what effect all the voter suppression tactics pushed by the Republican leadership in Tallahassee will have, and it’s certainly possible that Romney could win “legitimately” too.

Where I disagree with Wiesman is in his assessment of the “worst-case scenario.”  If Wiesman’s read of the situation is to be believed, the worst Obama can do tomorrow night is winning with 281 electoral votes.  Though I applaud Wiesman’s optimism – and would invite him to extend that optimism to the president’s chances in Florida – the fact of the matter is that the worst-case scenario is much worse than that.  Here is the worst-case scenario, as I see it.

This is my nightmare

Here’s what this map represents: Romney wins Florida, wins the close races in Virginia, Colorado, and Ohio, rides a recent uptick in the polls in New Hampshire, and pulls out an almost unthinkable comeback in Pennsylvania.  In order for this map to come to fruition, two things would have to be true: the polls would have to be severely missing in their likely voter models, and the GOP’s voter suppression tactics would have to be more effective than most people are giving credit for.

I don’t think that this is at all a likely state of affairs, but I don’t think Wiesman has the right of it in saying that Obama cannot lose.  The polls and expectations of neutral observers are in Obama’s favor, but we don’t have to go far to find examples of the polls and expectations being wrong: Harry Reid keeping his Senate race in 2010, Obama’s victory in Indiana in the 2008 general election, Hillary Clinton’s shocking comeback in the 2008 New Hampshire primary…the list goes on.  As Nate Silver said in a post this weekend,

We’ve about reached the point where if Mr. Romney wins, it can only be because the polls have been biased against him. Almost all of the chance that Mr. Romney has in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, about 16 percent to win the Electoral College, reflects this possibility.

…

The state polls may not be right. They could be biased. Based on the historical reliability of polls, we put the chance that they will be biased enough to elect Mr. Romney at 16 percent.

Now, 16 percent – or 13.7%, as the 538 model now pegs Romney’s chances – is not much.  To analogize to poker, it’s about the chance that a pair of Aces will be beaten by King-Queen offsuit if those hands go all-in before the flop.  But as a poker player himself, Wiesman should understand that King-Queen will sometimes crack those Aces, and sometimes it will happen at the worst possible time.

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Predicted Winner: Obama (and Some Nerds)

Posted on November 5, 2012 by

Below you will find my prediction for the 2012 Presidential Election. I should point out that, like Wiesman, my prediction is based almost entirely on the incredibly great work of Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium and Nate Silve at FiveThirtyEight.

Because I fancy myself as a rational thinker, if I didn’t have such transparent and good quality analyses at my finger tips I wouldn’t even be posting a prediction. I detest the notion that I can gauge the micro-trends in Wisconisn or Nevada from my seat in Springfield, which is exactly what professional pundits get paid to do. It makes me sick to think that people are paid large sums of money to discuss the state of the race using pseudo statistics, anecdotes, and gut feelings.

In many ways the race for the White House has become boring to me. It’s been played out, I have no use for the low information back-and-forth, and I’m especially tired of the never ending series of gaffegates, or whatever we’re calling them now. The media has literally shit the bed this election, and I hope we will see some fundamental transformation over the coming years (that’s a bigger topic).

However, what I am interested in is the rise of the nerds. Being a nerd myself, I have a special affinity for guys like Sam Wang and Nate Silver. They saw the problem I just described and decided to do something about it: they solved it. In the grand scheme of Science Things, the problem that they’ve solved is incredibly simple. That’s not to say that they do a poor job or anything — their work is excellent — but let’s be honest, averaging polls, drawing economic correlations, writing monte carlo sims, and correcting for past bias, etc is not exactly curing cancer or putting a man on the moon.

But, just because it’s not a difficult problem doesn’t mean the solution can’t have a major impact. No doubt, there’s upheaval on the horizon. And while I’m just throwing predictions around right now, I’d wager that the rise of nerds in the media might just be a turning point in American journalism that will make its way into text books.

For now, the end result is that guys like Joe Scarborough squirm in their seats and try to justify their pointless existence. Nothing would make me happier than for Nate Silver, Sam Wang, et. al to nail the election and then imagine every member of the punditocracy taking a hard look in the mirror and thinking about one thing: obsolescence.

Imagine a world in which we didn’t have to speculate about the impact of faux controversies in a media cycle driven heavily by political operatives acting as objective, learned analysts. Ahhh, paradise.

Anyway, back to this election thing. Here is my predicted map (h/t 270towin):

Yes, I basically just went through PEC and 538, picked the states that had a ~70+% chance of going to a certain candidate, and assigned them to that candidate. Not very sophisticated. FL is the only true toss-up on both analyses. I gave it to President Obama based on early voting turnout, and the fact that I believe somewhat counterintuitively that voter suppression efforts by Florida GOP will backfire by making a frustrated electorate excited to vote IN YOUR FACE Rick Scott. Whoa sorry, got a little excited there for a second. As I was saying, I believe Florida can easily go either way, but since this is a prediction I’m picking my states and going with it.

Finally, like a good scientist I should point out that as much as I would like it to be true, an Obama win or loss will not vindicate the nerds. I certainly hope they “win” in the public’s eyes by perfectly calling every state/race, but I know that in a scientific sense this would be evidence supporting a potentially successful method, not definitive proof of one. Romney still has a chance (albeit a small one), and anyone that’s ever studied math or played cards will tell you that a small chance is still a chance. A chip and a chair, as they say. What will come from this, though, is a full objective post mortem of polls and methods, and I’m really looking forward to that.

Maybe the public will even tell know-nothing pundits that they don’t want to hear from them anymore. A nerd can dream, can’t he?

VOTE!

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My final prediction for the 2012 Presidential Election

Posted on November 5, 2012 by

Well, here we are, one day to go. Way way back in May I posted my “official” prediction for the 2012 presidential election. I’d like to point out that this prediction was made before Nate Silver started posting his projections over at fivethirtyeight.com this year, and before I had even heard of the excellent work by Sam Wang. This prediction was made (with the help of 270towin.com) based on what state polling was saying at the time:

My prediction back in May, Obama wins with 303 EV.

LOL. Boy was I naive. I guess I was allowing my enthusiasm for the president cloud my thinking and affect my analysis of which states he could win.

So many things have happened since May. We had the pick of Paul Ryan, Todd Akin getting all sciencey about pregnancy and rape, the RNC with Clint Eastwood debating a chair, the DNC with the Big Dog being the Big Dog, the first debate debacle, the VP debate comedy show, the town hall debate smackdown, horses and bayonets in the third debate, Richard Mourdock getting all theological about pregnancy and rape, and finally, Hurricane Sandy.

Yep, things have really changed. So, with all that in mind, I’ve updated my map to reflect what I think the results will be tomorrow:

My prediction today, Obama wins with 303. Yeah, same picture.

As you can see, I’ve basically thrown everything on its head and come up with a completely different victory scenario for the president, except for the fact that everything is exactly the same.

I really struggled with Florida. Silver has it as a 55% chance for a Romney win in Florida, and I can’t really argue. Silver and Wang have the luxury of not doing predictions; they simply publish probabilities. As any gambler knows, a 55-45 chance of victory means you’re going to lose quite often (in fact, 45% of the time, ldo) and so it would be no surprise whatsoever if the president is able to win Florida tomorrow night.

Here’s what I wrote back in May on Florida:

I give Florida to Romney partly because the state government down there has been very aggressive in “purging” the voter rolls of potential Democratic voters, and because the DOJ doesn’t seem inclined to intervene. But there are other reasons to think this will be a Romney state as well. President Obama is not popular there.

I’d change that somewhat. I think President Obama just might be (barely) popular enough to win Florida, but Governor Rick Scott has restricted early voting from what it was in 2008. There simply aren’t enough polling locations and poll machines in Florida to handle the demand to vote there. I’m not sure why this isn’t a major national scandal. Some people are waiting over 8 hours in line to vote, and those lines are primarily in precincts with minority populations.

I have no idea, none, what the effect of that bad governance in Florida will have on the share of the vote for the candidates. I’d really like to see some empirical data. Obviously long lines have some effect on GOP voters as well as Democratic voters. I don’t know if these effects are “priced in” to the likely voter models. But with all that in mind, and because this is a prediction and not just a probability, I’m going to stick with my May prediction that Florida goes to Romney.

Nothing else really changes. North Carolina still seems like a close loss and Colorado and Virginia still seem like close wins. I’m more confident of Ohio now than I was in May, but it will still be close.

The above map(s) are my official prediction, but let me qualify them with best-case and worst case scenarios for the president. Here is what I think is the best-case map for Tuesday evening:

Best-case scenario, Obama landslide of 347 EV.

And here is the worst-case scenario, as I see it:

Worst-case scenario, Obama wins with 281 EV.

As you can see, I think the president will definitely win tomorrow night. If Mitt Romney wins the presidency tomorrow night, it will be because all the state polling has been systemically biased towards the president. There is simply no way that the current polling could be accurate and produce a Romney victory. For example, in the last 10 polls listed on Pollster.com for Ohio, 9 of them show a lead for the president, and one (Rasmussen, naturally) shows a tie. Zero out of the last 10 show a lead for Romney. In the last 30 polls for Ohio, Obama is winning in 26, Romney is winning in two, and two are tied. That’s not a dead heat; it’s not a tie. Obama is ahead in Ohio and therefore is heavily favored to win re-election.

I’m not suggesting that a Romney victory is impossible, but if that is what happens, it will mean that there is something definitely wrong with the polling. It will be a huge deal. It will either mean that polling has a major systemic flaw that has been introduced this year, or it will mean that something is wrong with our voting system, in that it has failed to reflect the electorate this year.

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Your weekly presidential address for November 3rd, 2012

Posted on November 3, 2012 by

Good morning.

I know, I know. I’ve been terrible with keeping on top of these weekly addresses. I haven’t posted one since August 18th! Terrible. To be fair, I’ve been pretty terrible at posting at all lately. Work has been crazy and with two small boys, home is always crazy. Oh, that’s okay, it’s not like there’s anything important going on in politics, right?

Anyway, I wanted to make sure I posted this particular presidential weekly address because it will be the last one before the election. Remember these weekly addresses are not campaign videos; they are official government business. But of course they are political, and this one will be the last weekly address that the president makes before he finds out whether he will be re-hired or not.

The president asks for all Americans to pitch in to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy. He doesn’t say it, because he doesn’t have to, but the last week has clearly demonstrated the competence of the president and his administration, and illustrates to everyone that competency matters. Believing that government has a role in society matters. Putting the right people in charge of FEMA matters. Believing that it is important to stop the rise of the oceans that is a result of Global Warming matters; it shouldn’t be a joke in a convention speech.

Here’s a video made by someone who was obviously very happy about that Romney joke in his convention speech. I wonder if they all think it is so funny now?

To be clear, it is not appropriate to suggest that Global Warming was definitely the cause of Hurricane Sandy, a 1,000-mile diameter storm hitting the US East Coast in late October. It is also not appropriate to suggest that every home run that Barry Bonds hit was due to steroids. It is appropriate to point out that when even a normal storm hits our coastal cities, those cities are in significantly more danger if normal sea level is now a couple feet higher.

As readers of this blog know, I have been a big proponent of the show Up w/ Chris Hayes since its debut last year. After Romney’s speech where he delivered that hilarious joke about rising oceans, Chris Hayes was visibly upset, saying that he knows engineers who were working at that very moment to keep Manhattan from flooding due to rising sea levels and violent storms. This caused this kind of reaction from the right wing:

One of the commentators on the panel (sorry, can’t remember his name, I think he might be with HuffPo) was so incensed that he launched into an explanation of how engineers in NYC were working as he spoke on how to protect the subways from rising oceans.  That part of the discussion was comedy gold.

Comedy gold. I wonder if William Jacobson, Associate Clinical Professor at
Cornell Law School, still thinks that rising oceans and flooded subways are comedy gold?

There are two likely candidates to become the next president. Neither has focused enough on global warming, but one thinks global warming is a serious issue; the other sees it is a punchline.

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November jobs report, last in our series and a good one

Posted on November 2, 2012 by

Well, we’ve reached the end of this series that I started back in March. This was all inspired by a blog post by Nate Silver who suggested that the employment situation would be one of, if not the, most important factors in determining President Obama’s chances of victory. Silver proposed a “magic number” of 150,000 jobs per month, by which we could determine whether the president is a favorite or an underdog for re-election. Later, he also proposed a more optimistic number of 75,000 jobs per month, while Ezra Klein proposed 200,000 jobs per month as the break-even point.

Today’s report was a very good one, as the economy added a more-than-expected 171,000 jobs in October. Also, the previous two months were revised up to 192,000 and 148,000 from 142,000 and 114,000, respectively. Here is how our final graph looks:

 

As you can see, according to the graph and Silver’s prediction, Obama is a slight favorite to win re-election, which also happens to be essentially what all the pollsters show. If you agree with Silver’s “super optimistic” line, then Obama is more heavily favored.

I’ve said this with almost each one of these reports but I need to repeat it here: the argument here isn’t that voters will be checking these jobs numbers and then deciding how they feel about the president. No, the argument is that the job numbers are information on the health of the economy, and the health of the economy will determine how voters feel about the president. People seem to forget that each month, which leads to embarrassing tweets from guys like Jack Welch about Chicago cooking the numbers.

At any rate, the prediction made by Silver about how the jobs reports would reflect the president’s chances seems to have been borne out by all the latest polling, which indicates that the president is a clear favorite to win re-election by a small margin.

With each of these posts about the BLS reports, I have received messages or emails from conservative friends with objections to one thing or another. Early in the year, some conservatives insisted that Gallup’s numbers were more reliable because they were not seasonally adjusted. That talking point has died since Gallup shows a lower unemployment rate than the BLS. In fact, yesterday’s Gallup unemployment report pegs unemployment at 7.0% without seasonal adjustments. Where are my conservative friends who favor Gallup now?

Last month, my skeptical friends understandably asked how the unemployment rate could drop by 0.3% while only adding 114,000 jobs. This month they will (also understandably) be confused how adding 171,000 jobs results in an unemployment rate increase of 0.1%. The answer is that there are two different surveys producing the two different numbers. The jobs numbers are a result of polling businesses, while the unemployment numbers are a result of polling actual households. Last month’s drop of 0.3% was probably a bit of an outlier, and this month’s number is a small correction. (Also, the actual amount of the increase was 0.08%. Rounding! How does it work?)

The other oft-repeated (and valid) criticism of the jobs record is that the rate is dropping because of decreased participation in the workforce. That has been true in some previous months, but it is absolutely not true this month. Workforce participation increased by 578,000, which is a good sign. Previously discouraged workers have re-entered the workforce. This is real recovery; slower than we’d like, but real.

Mitt Romney released a statement that tried to accentuate the negative aspect of the report:

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill,” Mr. Romney said. “The jobless rate is higher than it was when President Obama took office, and there are still 23 million Americans struggling for work. On Tuesday, America will make a choice between stagnation and prosperity.”

Aside from appearing to be rooting against recovery, Mr. Romney’s statement is just not factually true. The economy is recovering, whether that is inconvenient for him or not. I guess you can’t really blame him for looking so hard for the empty part of the glass; he’s running for office, for Pete’s sake.

So will this latest report have any effect on the election? Probably not. It’s not really out of the range of expectations, and it more or less cements the existing perception as to the direction of the economy. President Obama remains a favorite to win on Tuesday, by a small margin.

I’ll take it.

Previous report here. First in the series here. “Super Optimistic” line explained here.

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