Mississippi Blues: The emerging Democratic majority

Mere seconds after the polls closed on election night, the national networks shaded Mississippi and its six electoral votes deep red. Mitt Romney’s victory in the Magnolia State was a foregone conclusion. Neither presidential candidate spent time or money there, and none of the state’s Congressional races looked to be competitive. Had the unfortunate images of Ole Miss students burning an Obama-Biden sign not cropped up on Twitter that night, the political press would have ignored Mississippi completely.

For good reason. Mississippi has supported only one Democratic nominee in the past half-century. Jimmy Carter’s Southern drawl and Baptist bona fides carried Mississippi’s electoral votes (by a hair) in 1976. But ideology trumped regional loyalty by 1980, when Mississippi swung to Ronald Reagan, and neither of Mississippi’s neighbors Bill Clinton or Al Gore could bring it back. By 2012, even a quarter-billionaire Mormon Yankee could sweep the state easily.

The state’s Republican Party was built from scratch upon the disaffection of segregationist Democrats after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Mississippians who had held a century-long grudge against the party of Lincoln flocked to Republican nominee Barry Goldwater in 1964 after his vote against that year’s landmark Civil Rights Act. Goldwater won over 87% of those able to cast a ballot — which, notably, only included one in 15 voting-age African Americans. Despite the solid opposition of Mississippi’s black minority, Republicans can still count on the Goldwater coalition to carry them to victory. Bush won 86% of Mississippi’s white vote in 2004, McCain won 88% in 2008, and Romney carried 90% in 2012.

Republicans should be frightened, then, that Mississippi was one of the few states that gave Barack Obama more of its vote in 2012 than in 2008. The shift (0.5%) was hardly tectonic, but compared to Obama’s 3-point decrease nationally, it was significant. The GOP’s margin of victory has now shrunk in the last three cycles, down from Bush’s 20-point win over Kerry in 2004. Among the 24 states that Romney carried, Mississippi’s 12-point margin was the sixth-slimmest.

National Democratic strategists have focused their attention on flipping states with growing Latino populations, such as Arizona, Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina. No surprise then that Mississippi, only 3% Latino, has been excluded from the conversation. Taken with its location at the buckle of the Bible Belt, and a blue Mississippi is unthinkable for many inside and outside the state.

I’m here to tell you that it will happen — and soon. I predict that Mississippi will be a swing state by 2024. But regardless of when, this November’s results foreshadow an inevitable Democratic ascent.

The reason has more to do with age than race. Here is a graph of each candidate’s performance by age group in Mississippi (darker) compared to his performance nationally (lighter). The lines show the percentage of the vote each candidate received by age group; the bars represent the share of the candidate’s total votes that each group composed:


Source: CNN exit polling data

As we can see, the national and state performance generally tracked each other quite well, with Mississippians of each age group voting roughly 5 percentage points more conservatively than their national counterparts. The exception is the over-65 group, which delivered a whopping 78% of their votes to Romney — roughly 20 percentage points more than their peers nationwide.

Take them out of the electorate, and the race between Obama and Romney becomes much tighter:

Age Group	Share of Total U-65 Electorate	Obama U-65 Vote Share	Romney U-65 Vote Share
18-29	22.09%	12.15%	9.50%
30-39	20.93%	9.84%	10.26%
40-49	24.42%	10.26%	14.16%
50-64	33.72%	15.17%	18.21%
Total Vote	100%	47.42%	52.13%

Had seniors voted in line with their succeeding generations of Mississippians, at about 5 percentage points more Republican than the national average, Romney would have carried the state by 8 points instead of 12. A solid victory, but hardly a landslide.

That older voters are more conservative is no revelation; across the nation, they are more likely to be white, more likely to live in rural areas, and more likely to attend regular church services. So why are Mississippi’s seniors more conservative than their national counterparts? Mississippi’s history offers the best explanation. A 65-year-old Mississippian would have likely graduated high school some 47 years ago, in 1965. The vast majority of Mississippi’s public schools were not desegregated until 1970, which means that each of the over-65 voters came of age during the height of Jim Crow and Southern resistance to integration. Studies show that the political zeitgeist during one’s formative years often has a lifetime effect, so while the racial attitudes of many (but not all) in this group have evolved with the changing times, their political persuasions have not. Obama likely received no more than 1-2% of the vote among Mississippi’s white seniors.

This argument is supported by the radical shift in the political attitudes of the 50-64 age group, who vote nearly identically to the national average. Most of those voters graduated from integrated schools in the 1970s, and they are — relative to their national peers — the most progressive cohort of Mississippi voters. (While we should be warned about reading too closely into any numbers based on a small sample size, such a shift would follow the literature about the effect of school integration on social attitudes. The schools of the 1970s South were the most racially-mixed of any in American history.)

Clearly, these data show that Mississippi’s 21st century GOP hegemony relies upon a narrow and overleveraged sliver of the electorate. Nearly 20% of Romney’s votes came from the over-65 set, compared to only 7% of Obama’s. On the other hand, millennial voters provided nearly one-quarter of Obama’s votes in Mississippi, compared to only 15% for Romney:

Age Group	Share of MS Obama Vote	Share of MS Romney Vote
18-29	23.83%	14.65%
30-39	19.29%	15.82%
40-49	20.11%	21.85%
50-64	29.75%	28.09%
65+	7.02%	19.59%

This vote distribution is not unique to Romney. Each of the past three Republican candidates has depended on roughly the same pattern:

Meanwhile, the distribution of Democratic voters provides a much healthier prognosis for future election cycles:

These graphs should trouble Mississippi Republicans. Unless they can make inroads with younger voters, their political base will — as callous as it sounds — die off.

What would happen once the current over-65 cohort is replaced by younger, more progressive voters? By maintaining each age group’s weight in the electorate and voting preferences, I can generate this projection for 2024, when almost every voter will have entered the next age bracket and a large number of the over-65 voters will have dropped out of the electorate:

Election 2024
Age Group	Share of Vote	Democratic Vote	Democratic % of Total Votes Cast	Republican Vote	Republican % of Total Votes Cast
18-29	19%	55%	10.45%	43%	8.17%
30-39	18%	55%	9.9%	43%	7.74%
40-49	21%	47%	9.87%	49%	10.29%
50-64	29%	42%	12.18%	58%	16.82%
65+	14%	45%	6.3%	54%	7.56%
Total Vote	100%		48.7%		50.58%

The Republican candidate would prevail, but by a margin similar to Romney’s 2012 victory in the battleground state of North Carolina. Factor in a large margin of error, and Mississippi would be a tossup.

This (admittedly crude) analysis obviously rests on several assumptions. First, it assumes static composition and preferences of the electorate. Evidence from the past three presidential elections suggest that the age distribution of Mississippi voters has remained relatively stable, and there’s no reason to believe it wouldn’t be similar in future cycles. Even if the baby boom generation skews the electorate modestly, it would stand to benefit the Democrats — remember, today’s 50-64 year-olds voted almost exactly like their peers nationwide:

Age Group	2004	2008	2012
18-29	20%	19%	19%
30-44	29%	31%	29%
45-64	39%	38%	39%
65+	13%	12%	14%

Preference across age groups has also remained relatively consistent. As you can see from the below graph, John Kerry’s performance was similar to Obama’s within each cohort. (The small differences in their performance are likely statistically insignificant due to the small sample sizes used in the polls.) What’s important is that Democratic support among millenial voters in Mississippi appears to be the rule rather than the exception.

I also assume that a Democratic voter in 2012 will vote Democratic in future elections. There is inherent difficulty in recording changes in individual voter preference over time, but many studies have shown partisan loyalty to be quite strong throughout one’s lifetime. And contrary to conventional wisdom, little evidence suggests that voters get more conservative with age. One of the most frequently-cited studies on the topic, a 2007 paper published in the American Sociological Review, found that voters may actually become more liberal as they grow older. Older voters tend to be more conservative than younger ones because they came of age in more conservative eras, not because their views changed over time. By the same token, Democratic support among youth is not guaranteed. Prior to Kerry and Obama, Democrats rarely enjoyed a significant advantage among young voters. The durability of the lead among millenials gives us reason to expect it to persist.

There are also several reasons why I feel that this projection underestimates the Democrats’ potential. Mississippi, as with the rest of the country, is growing more diverse. It is among a handful of states whose child populations are over 50% non-white. Given the inelasticity of the black vote in Mississippi, this should increase the Democratic vote share among the rising cohort of 18-29 year olds. White Mississippi youth have also shown a higher propensity to vote Democratic — about 20% — in recent cycles.

The reconstruction of the party organization in Mississippi should also improve Democrats’ chances. As it stands, the state party is both financially and politically bankrupt. Republicans have only faced token opposition in recent years: Democrats struggle to field candidates for statewide offices, much less win them. The political apparatus should be rebuilt as progressive politicos and donors nationwide take notice of their rising chances in Mississippi. An aggressive effort to organize and mobilize Mississippi Democrats could boost turnout by several percent.

I expect Republicans to argue in response that Democrats overperformed in 2008 and 2012 because Obama drove record levels of black turnout. They may have a point. Exit polls in 2004 showed that Mississippi’s electorate was 65% white, compared to 62% in 2008 and 59% in 2012. They could also point to the fact that McCain and Romney did not energize Mississippi’s social conservatives to the same degree that Bush did. Indeed, Romney only received 3,000 more votes than Bush in 2004, while Obama received 83,000 more than Kerry. Obviously Obama had an impact on turnout, but we will not know until 2016 — when presumably the Democrats will nominate a white candidate* — the full measure of his presence on the ballot.

This rebuttal only changes the time frame of my projection, not its conclusion. Minority turnout in 2012 merely erased the white turnout advantage from previous elections. Non-white Mississippians voted in equal share to their proportion of the general population (41%). The racial turnout gap may reemerge in future elections, but thanks to Mississippi’s growing minority population, it will only delay the inevitable Democratic ascent.

The biggest assumption, of course, is that the Republican Party will not reposition itself to win the support of the “Obama coalition”: young voters, female voters, and minority voters. In the political marketplace, parties possess the same competitive incentives as companies to adapt to the demands of the public. Dwight Eisenhower won the White House after five Democratic terms by embracing a more activist federal government; he used it to build the interstate system and enforce Brown v. Board of Education. Bill Clinton rebranded himself as a “New Democrat” after 12 years of Republican rule and implemented strict work requirements for welfare while deregulating Wall Street.

But I question the current Republican Party’s ability to modernize its positions in the near term. Their response to changing demographics have thus far been purely defensive: attempting to suppress the minority vote through photo ID requirements and discouraging Latino population growth through draconian immigration laws. (While political self-preservation was not the stated intention of these efforts, it most certainly weighed into the consideration.) Now, Mississippi’s Republican governor has declared his intention to deny Medicaid coverage to 600,000 predominantly-black Mississippians that Obamacare would have covered. In doing so, he is rejecting $23 in federal aid for every $1 required of the state. These positions will only damage the Republican Party’s standing among the constituencies it must attract.

In a strategic sense, losing Mississippi — and, in turn, its dependence on the Solid South — might actually be a blessing for the national GOP. As long as they are beholden to Southern social conservatives, Republicans will exacerbate the age gaps that have emerged on issues such as gay rights, reproductive rights, scientific inquiry, and marijuana decriminalization. They could afford to lose Mississippi in the name of creative destruction: six electoral votes in exchange for national relevance among a rising generation of voters. As it stands, the Republican base is too old, white, and Southern. That may have been good enough to win Mississippi in 2012, but it won’t be for much longer.

- JKM

__________

*Though who predicted in 2004 that a black Illinois state senator named “Hussein” would be nominated four years later?

An important message to Obama supporters

Listen up, dejected liberals. President Obama’s debate performance was bad, but it wasn’t that bad. Yes, he seemed unprepared, perhaps even a little nervous, and that contrasted poorly with an aggressive Mitt Romney who appeared to have tried caffeine for the first time. But the president didn’t say anything that we haven’t cheered him on for saying before. Most of it was actually pretty eloquent. Don’t believe me? Go back and read the transcript. The substance was there. You might even appreciate some of the president’s “zingers.”

No doubt the president erred in what he didn’t say, namely “47 percent.” We’ve tried to explain this lapse in a number of ways: fear of looking unpresidential, exhaustion, altitude sickness… Whatever the cause, the president squandered a open-goal opportunity to publicly shame Mr. Romney. After all, isn’t that what we wanted? We’ve already made up our minds about this election. So have most people. What we craved was an auto-da-fé, exposing Mr. Romney as a liar and heretic on national TV.

Let’s be honest, though. We don’t really care what the president did or didn’t say. We’re upset that he lost on style. Liberals love to congratulate ourselves for emphasizing fact over flash, but we swoon when our commander-in-chief swishes three-pointers and sings Al Green. Truth be known, he’s always had this other side to him, the “Uncle Fluffy” side, the one that wears mom jeans and plays golf (not that well, either.) We found the president’s avuncular alter ego somewhat endearing until it took the stage last week in Denver. Ninety minutes later, we were left wondering why Superman suddenly looked so much like Clark Kent in contacts and a leotard.

So that’s that. It’s over. Time to move on. Do you know how many people watched the debate? 67 million. That sounds like a lot, but it’s roughly half the number of people who will vote in November. And the half who watched were the ones that follow this stuff closely, e.g. anyone reading this blog. How many disinterested voters could persevere through the 40-minute discussion of tax policy that began the debate? No, what they paid attention to was the post-debate soundbites and spin, and our indignant hysteria turned an event many predicted — history tells us that the incumbent president usually loses the first debate to the challenger — into Agincourt. Just look how public opinion has shifted: focus group responses were roughly split during the debate, while post-debate instapolls gave a plurality to Romney. A week later, almost 80 percent of Gallup respondents credited Romney with the victory! The most lopsided debate in history!

Do you think that most people rewatched the debate, took it under careful consideration, and changed their minds? Or did the reaction from Obama’s base color their perceptions? The fact is, the president lost the bout on points; he only got knocked out after he left the ring. Our panic has become self-fulfilling, and it needs to stop. We still have the advantage on electoral math, on campaign organization, on the issues, on money. Romney’s bounce in the polls is receding, and the topline economic data is looking so good that Republicans are accusing our side of manipulating it. And, though you may have forgotten after the past week of left-wing Chicken Little-ing, we also have the better candidate: the one who passed universal healthcare, saved the auto industry, repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, cracked down on Wall Street, stuck up for financial consumers, rebuilt our roads, invested in education and green energy, capped auto emissions, expanded Pell Grants, enacted fair pay, eased student loan and credit card repayment, ushered undocumented young people out of hiding, ended the war in Iraq, signed an arms reduction treaty with Russia, deposed a dictator in Libya without committing American troops, ramped up international pressure on Iran, and killed Osama bin Laden. And he did all this while facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and turmoil in the parts of the world where you least want it.

Here’s the deal, fellow liberals. If this fear and loathing feels familiar, it’s because we’ve been through it before. Remember when the left revolted over the public option? When we said Obama sold out to Wall Street? To the neocons? When he didn’t repeal DADT fast enough? When he didn’t prosecute the Bush folks over torture? Come to think of it, when he didn’t torture the Bush folks? When he compromised on the stimulus, and the tax cuts, and the Grand Bargain? On each of those, the loudest boos came from the president’s left. We were so upset with the pace of change that we didn’t show up to the polls in November 2010, then we blamed Obama for getting “shellacked” by the Tea Party. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

And yet Obama has more enemies than he can count. They call him a Muslim and a socialist. They demand to see his birth certificate, and then accuse him of forgery when he produces it. They say he apologizes for America and intentionally weakens our power. They are willing to ruin the good faith and credit of the United States government just to defeat him. His enemies want to roll back all of the accomplishments of the last four years, often for no reason other than spite: for Obama, for gays, for undocumented immigrants, for unions, and for the rest of the 47 percent “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

Throughout all of this, President Obama has remained remarkably, almost impossibly, cool. Now, we — his supporters — are upset because during the debate he played it… too cool? Angry liberals are demanding that the president be more like us, when really we should be more like him. Keep calm. Focus on the big picture. Seek common ground. Only fight when there is none. In other words: No Drama.

But for those of you out there who still want this campaign to show a little more grit, a little more passion, a little more temerity — you may just be in luck.

Joe Biden is on tonight.

Meanwhile, in the bizarro world…

The jobless rate dipped to 7.8 percent this month — unambiguously good news for President Obama and the country in general. The plunge (three-tenths of a percentage point) occurred due to an increase in employment and not, as in several previous months, the discouragement of those looking f0r work. That’s how every credible news outlet reported the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ numbers this morning.

But, as has become a Jobs Day tradition of mine, I moseyed over to the Fox News website to see how the news was playing in the No Fact Zone. They didn’t disappoint.

First, at 9:21 AM Central Time:

Psychologists might find this an instructive case study in cognitive dissonance. Obama’s socialist tyranny is supposed to be destroying jobs, not creating them. When presented with evidence that contradicts this ideological framework, Fox’s first reaction was to ignore the new information. It simply did not register in their coverage. By 9:30 Central (two hours after the data’s release), every credible news outlet had devoted banner headlines and extensive analysis to the jobs report — just as they do every month. Fox instead decided to play Where’s Waldo? (Hint: To find their jobs story, look at Joe Biden’s outstretched left arm, then draw an imaginary line from his index finger to the sidebar. Squint. It’s there.)

Then, after a few hours of cognitive reappraisal, they changed their coverage. Here’s the webpage at 12:38 PM:

Fox neutralized the conflict by challenging the veracity of the new information. When the data conflicted with their preconceived worldview, they decided to reject it. Disregarding the fact that they had gleefully trumpeted BLS statistics in down months (see below,) today Fox saw reason for disbelief. After all, it’s too suspicious that an economy that has been growing for 30 consecutive months would all of a sudden create 114,00 jobs a mere 34 days before the election (and on the heels of Obama’s tepid debate performance.) Of course, Fox News can’t maintain their gossamer veneer of credibility and explicitly accuse Obama of manipulating the numbers. So they just ask the leading question, “Is the number real?” then let others provide the desired answer during round-the-clock TV coverage. Isn’t that right, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch?

Cognitive dissonance captures all of us at some time or other. What sets Fox News apart is how oblivious they seem to their own biases. No new revelations can erode the certitude of their ideological predispositions. Most of us combat the effects of our prejudices through a healthy process of skepticism, introspection, and reevaluation. Fox News eschews such reflection. In Freudian terms, the rational ego and moralizing super-ego should step in to check the excesses of our gratification-seeking id. But Fox News’s ego and super-ego resigned and went to CNN a long time ago. All they are left with is id.

Note the schadenfreude on September 7th, when only 96,000 new jobs were announced:

And the month before, when a strong 163,000 new jobs were announced despite an increase in the unemployment rate:

Just like the economic recovery, we don’t have a series of independent data points about Fox News’s bias. We have a trend.

It’s flagrantly obvious that Fox News has been cherry-picking their economic coverage to portray the president in the worst-possible light. They are not held to the same ethical standards as, for instance, the employees of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who would lose their jobs or worse — face prison time — for reporting fraudulent information.

I choose to subscribe to the cognitive dissonance explanation, that they just don’t know any better, as a charity to the good faith of the employees at Fox. The competing theory is much more insidious: namely, that they are deliberately manipulating the information they report for partisan gain. But who would possibly be that callous?

Right, Fox? 

Political Reads, but not necessarily for the AM

Tyler has been dispatched to an undisclosed location the past couple of days, meaning the task of assigning a reading list falls to me. I’m going to do things a little differently. Instead of scouring the web for the most incisive political analysis and commentary, I’ve chosen to highlight a couple of recent books on my own reading list:

The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns by Sasha Issenberg

Labeled the “Moneyball” for politics, The Victory Lab explores the hidden world of campaign data crunching and microtargeting. It may be reassuring (or perhaps not) that while the surface of our campaigns seems to be more vapid than ever, they have never been more sophisticated on the inside. Issenberg describes the personalities and processes that revolutionized modern electioneering in the same way that Bill James and Billy Beane challenged the old baseball orthodoxies. The leader in the movement has been a fellow Mississippian, Hal Malchow, who — following Beane’s transformation — went from gut-driven political consultant to iconoclastic prophet of empiricism. An example, from Issenberg’s 2010 New York Times Magazine cover story on the subject:

Over the past few days, thousands of Democratic-leaning voters nationwide — including the young people, minorities and unmarried women who were a crucial part of Barack Obama’s 2008 coalition and whom the party is desperate to rouse again on Tuesday — received a message in their mailboxes that effectively said: we’re keeping an eye on you. The mailers are the handiwork of Hal Malchow, a political consultant who is acting on a theory that first intrigued him four years ago. Before the 2006 Michigan gubernatorial primary, three political scientists isolated a group of voters and mailed them copies of their voting histories, listing the elections in which they participated and those they missed. Included were their neighbors’ voting histories, too, along with a warning: after the polls closed, everyone would get an updated set.

After the primary, the academics examined the voter rolls and were startled by the potency of peer pressure as a motivational tool. The mailer was 10 times better at turning nonvoters into voters than the typical piece of pre-election mail whose effectiveness has ever been measured.

…..

The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do and Don’t Matter by Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien

Unlike Issenberg, who approaches his subject as a journalist, The Timeline of Presidential Elections is the product of extensive academic research by a pair of political scientists, Oxford’s Wlezien and Columbia’s Erikson. They compiled every poll taken in the six months prior to the past 15 presidential elections in order to answer the age-old poli sci question: do campaigns actually change the outcome of elections? Considering the billions(!) of dollars and years(!!) of attention that we devote to our quadrennial elections — not to mention the innovations that I just told you to read about — it would be a shame if we found out that the outcomes were merely the product of exogenous circumstances (e.g. the unemployment rate). Luckily, Wlezien and Erikson tell us that campaigns do have some effect… but only some. From their 2002 article in the Journal of Politics on the same topic:

Our examination of presidential election polls indicates that campaign events, broadly defined, do have meaningful effects. We have seen that the polls can move quite a lot during campaigns, especially during the late summer, in the period surrounding the conventions. The variance decreases substantially leading up to the election. We have also seen that on average, more than half of the variance in the polls during the fall campaign is the result of sampling error. Real change in preferences remains and at least some meaningful portion carries over to Election Day: late polls predict better than early ones, and the improvement in predictability is most pronounced over the last 100 days of the campaign. Indeed, it appears that the relatively small movement that occurs late in the campaign matters most. This is interesting and important.

…..

Put together, what do these two books tell us about this election? While no analysis should be taken as gospel, neither will inspire much confidence in the Romney camp. The Obama campaign got a head start on the new empirical tactics, and they have built the field capacity to contact and turn out their targets in key battlegrounds. And Wlezien and Erikson’s data show that no candidate in 60 years has overcome a deficit this close to Election Day. Just as distressingly, Romney’s three final bullets — the debates — have little statistical effect on whom voters choose at the polls. There’s always the possibility that Romney could make history, but the odds are looking increasingly long.

Dialogue of Rivals: the Makers vs. the Moochers

Jake: Tyler, I’m going to go ahead and assume you don’t agree with Mitt Romney’s comments that 47% of Americans will support Barack Obama because they want free stuff from the government. I’m going to assume that you know that most people who do not pay federal income taxes still contribute payroll or other federal taxes, and that many of those who don’t are retirees, students, or active duty military. And I’m going to assume that you know that the others, the least advantaged among us, do not pay federal income taxes because of a succession of Republican-led policies, from the Earned Income Tax Credit to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.

So given those assumptions, what is your take on the content of Mitt Romney’s comments? Have we gotten a substantive glimpse of his worldview, or is this just an example of the campaign-season triviality for which you spare no disdain? Finally, what, if any, impact will this have on the final 49 days of the campaign?

Tyler: First, this, which you originally showed me.

To your first two questions, I’ll quote David Brooks’ column from today:

“Sure, there are some government programs that cultivate patterns of dependency in some people. I’d put federal disability payments and unemployment insurance in this category. But, as a description of America today, Romney’s comment is a country-club fantasy. It’s what self-satisfied millionaires say to each other. It reinforces every negative view people have about Romney.  Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of cartoonish government-hater. But it scarcely matters. He’s running a depressingly inept presidential campaign.”

We both are aware of the ridiculousness of his comment; and if we’re not, the analyses by The Tax Policy Center, The Hamilton Project and The Tax Foundation evidence the absurdity.  Wonkblog’s Brad Plumer also has some descriptive charts here and here.  The electoral impact, however, is less clear.  Dylan Matthews noted:

“Now, granted, many of the non-filers in red states vote Democratic. As Columbia’s Andrew Gelman and others have shown, those making less are likelier to vote Democratic regardless of whether they live in a red or blue state. But in terms of the electoral college, many of the states Romney is taking for granted, and some of the states he’s working hardest to win, have the highest populations of “takers” he derided as part of the Democrats’ base.”

 I actually think Romney’s strategy is captured in that quote.  The GOP has gotten progressively (pun intended) more anti-government recently AND has remained strong in red “taker” states.  I think Romney’s strategy is to go after richer states.  Plus, as the analyses above show, people actually do pay taxes.  Perhaps hearing that 47% of people are takers will make what is actually almost everyone say, “I’m not supporting those damn moochers.  I’m voting for Romney.”  Very few people will actually think Mitt is talking about them; this s especially true when you look at the working age population.

I think this is a bad strategy, though.  Not only doesn’t it make Mitt sound out of touch and unsympathetic, it also doesn’t really help him that much if he’s trying to go after payer states.  According to Matthews’ analysis, there are 17 toss-up electoral votes from payer states and 29 from takers (including Florida).  Even if he’s relying on people feeling like payers no matter what and the retiree crowd staying in his column, he is still risking more than his reward would likely be (his best chance for a reward is Virginia).  He has now opened the door for attack ads in every middle class swing state.  Plus, it’s just SO irksome.  I don’t think these are his actual sentiments, but, as usual with Romney, I think they’re his political sentiments.

So where do you think Mitt falls?  What’s the source of this strategy?

Jake: Here’s the thing. Mitt IS talking about me. I’m a graduate student, so I didn’t pay any income taxes last year. I also support Barack Obama. According to his formula, that makes me one of those folks who are ”dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing.” This wasn’t just a misstatement. Unlike, say, the “you didn’t build that” quote, Romney’s point is indisputably clear, and I disagree that voters won’t feel singled out by it.

I think Mitt gets hurt on two levels. First, this has become a valence election, in which the candidates are being judged on competence
rather than policy. Game theoretic models usually suggest that happens when the two candidates offer similar platforms. While there is a gulf between the policy agendas of the candidates this year, neither has gotten specific on the stump. (Side note: Obama has presented
detailed plans on deficit reduction, tax reform, infrastructure
investment, energy, immigration, and so on, but he has not highlighted
them during the campaign.) That ambiguity increases the importance of valence, or how much voters trust each candidate to fulfill the duties of the office. It’s possible that Romney won’t lose much support over the content of his comments, but he undoubtedly looks less competent in their aftermath. Romney used to be sold as the disciplined, polished CEO who could bring his business skills to the White House. After a Griswold-esque foreign trip, an amateurish convention, his offensive shoot-from-the-hip Libya statements, and now this, Romney is getting killed on the valence scales. He better start rolling out some darn good policy — and soon!

Second, even if he puts out the fire, every day spent scrambling the
damage-control hoses is a day closer to Barack Obama’s second term.
Obama held a consistent two-point lead in the national polls prior to
the RNC, and he has expanded that up to five points due to his
post-DNC (i.e. post-Clinton speech) bounce. More troubling for Romney
is that Obama consistently carries 48-50% in those polls — comprised,
one would assume, mostly of welfare queens. That means Romney has to
a) peel away the 2-3% of persuadable voters who declared Obama in the
past week and/or b) win nearly all of the remaining undecideds. Both
are extremely unlikely at this point, as the new book The Timeline of
Presidential Elections tells us, and they are impossible unless he
regains the offensive. And I don’t mean “offensive” in the sense of
insulting over 150 million Americans.

But you asked about the strategy, and, well, I don’t think there is
one, at least not behind these comments. For the first time in
history, we might have actually heard Mitt Romney say something
sincere. I mean, here’s a subject that he’s an expert in. Entitlement?
Mitt Romney pulled himself up by his father’s bootstraps, to
Cranbrook, to Harvard, to Bain Capital, to the governor’s mansion.
Victimization? Nobody decries the wrath of the “liberal media” more.
His campaign’s response to flagging poll numbers has been accusations
of deliberate bias on the part of the pollsters to oversample
Democrats. Dependency? He negotiated a $10 million FDIC bailout to
keep Bain afloat in 1990. And as for not paying income taxes? Only
0.82% of his earnings last year were subject to federal income taxes.
So when Mitt Romney talks about these issues, I’m willing to take him
at his word.

What do you think about the general state of the campaign? And can you help me flesh out the Romney makers vs. takers strategy? I thought he was running because people wanted jobs, and he knew how to create them. Now it seems like he’s saying that people (47% of us) don’t want to work, and now he’s going to force them to.

Tyler: I think Mitt is talking about you as well.  When I refer to “working age,” I am basically excluding students.  My point is that students and other non-tax filers are a very small percentage of the population in reality,so offending them doesn’t have a big impact.

To your comments on valence and your questions about strategy I refer you to this poll and this Politico article.  I think Mitt is running an electoral math based campaign out of necessity.  In 2008 Obama was able to successfully run a broad unifying campaign, but Romney has a different set of circumstances.  I think his new strategy will be to work on swing state swing voters however possible.  The 47% comment may work in Virginia and New Hampshire (maybe North Carolina to some extent).  I think this strategy will ultimately fail because comments and planks intended for one state or demographic will offset in other places and with other groups.  It also creates a sense of incompetency, to your point.

So here’s my question for you, from a political (i.e. not policy or ideology) standpoint, what would you recommend Romney do in this final ~6-7 weeks?

Jake: At this point in the campaign, the electoral dynamics have been set.
Changing them with only six weeks left would be unprecedented. Still,
he’s got to try.

Based on the standard electoral game theory model I mentioned earlier,
in which voters judge candidates along two axes, valence and policy,
Romney should introduce a series of detailed policy proposals targeted
at the median voter. That would be the only way to counteract his
valence deficit. The problem is that Obama already holds the middle
ground on most issues, and decreasing the distance between their
positions would theoretically increase the effect of Obama’s valence advantage. It
would also alienate Romney’s right-wing base and further sap voters’
confidence that he could hold a consistent position on anything.
Frankly, he missed several opportunities to move to the center, first
after the primaries, then with the VP choice. That window is long gone.

He still has the debates, of course. They give Romney an opportunity to
restore the veneer of competence that he has savaged over the past few
weeks. Just standing on the stage with the sitting president will make him look, for lack of a better word, “presidential.” He obviously thinks this is his best opportunity, because he has stayed off the stump recently in order to prep. I expect him to be aggressive, in part
because he is the underdog and in part because the best defense is a
good offense. When challenged, Romney gets squirmy and makes mistakes
(“I’ll bet you $10,000!”) Obama handles the pressure much better, but
Romney must pummel him on the economy if he has any chance.
Unfortunately for Romney, history tells us that debates never change the outcome of
elections. Even if he wins all three decisively (unlikely as that may
be,) he’d probably just end up in the same boat as John Kerry.

But perhaps we’re discounting what’s happening on the ground, where elections are really fought. Campaigns recall that cliched iceberg metaphor. The vast majority of their work is taking place out of sight of the national
horserace media. I wouldn’t say Romney’s running a swing state strategy,
but rather a swing ZIP code strategy. Romney has employed pretty
sophisticated microtargeting efforts to tailor appeals to voters in
critical subregions. Those voters are subject to specific direct mail
pieces, internet ads, and small-market TV spots. And Romney’s field
operation, while small, has an active presence in many of these areas.
He’ll have plenty of money to continue to target these voters, and
maybe they can help him overperform in swing states. The problem is
that those appeals only work on the margins. He has to close the gap
in the top-line polls for them to prove decisive, and right now he’s losing in every swing state that Obama carried in 2008 (save your home state of North Carolina.) Without expanding the map in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, Romney must draw an inside straight to win. And right now he’s holding a 7-2 offsuit.

My point here is that none of these options has a high chance of success. His last, best
hope is that the economy goes into freefall. Maybe he can organize his
plutocratic friends to do a mass walkout, “Atlas Shrugged”-style. Then
all the moochers will realize how much they need the makers, thus
ensuring a Romney victory and saving the country from Obama’s
socialist tyranny!

Whaddya think about that strategy?

Tyler: As long as I get invited to Galt’s Gulch.

I think you are right to say Mitt missed his opportunity to control
his own destiny.  I have been hoping, perhaps in vain, for a
Republican candidate to fight for the middle ground of the policy
spectrum.  It just isn’t a part of the party’s mainstream at the
moment, which is unfortunate for everyone.

Jake: Let me go ahead and say it then: Craft 2016!

Tyler: Actually 2024 is my first year of eligibility… Not that I’ve memorized that.

Jake: Just hide your birth certificate. Nobody will ever ask for it.

If Obama is so bad, why not tell the truth?

Every credible news outlet, plus Fox News, has now called out Paul Ryan for the blatant lies at the core of Wednesday’s nomination speech. Here is Ezra Klein’s factual scorecard of the speech and the follow-up account of his exhaustive-yet-futile search for something Ryan said that was empirically true.

Singing from the same hymnal, Mitt Romney accepted the GOP nomination last night by rehashing his own thoroughly-debunked, well, bunk: the apology tour, Obama’s weak stance on Iran, his abandonment of Israeli and Eastern European allies, the robbing of Medicare, no job creation… All lies, all intended to distort the president’s record.

Romney and Ryan have sincere policy disagreements with the president, and I’m sure they feel like their course would be better for the country. So if Obama is wrong, why must they fabricate lies in order to attack him?

The answer, of course, is that it’s easier to defeat a quasi-American socialist tyrant who simultaneously lacks the capacity for strong leadership than a likable, center-left pragmatist whose decisions took out bin Laden and Quaddafi, saved the auto industry, cut business taxes and regulations, and paved the way for consistent job growth. (All while guaranteeing over 30 million more Americans health insurance.)

Come to think of it, if I were running against that record as a plutocratic corporate raider with more offshore bank accounts than charisma, I would probably lie about my opponent, too.

Mistaken Priorities

Priorities USA, an Obama-supporting SuperPAC, recently launched this ad implicating Mitt Romney in the death of the wife of a laid-off steelworker, Joe Soptic. By Soptic’s own telling, his family lost their health insurance when Bain Capital closed his Kansas City plant in 2001. His wife couldn’t afford to visit the doctor, so by the time they discovered her cancer, it had advanced to terminal Stage 4. (As the late Christopher Hitchens was fond of saying of his own Stage 4 prognosis, “There is no Stage 5.”) She died weeks later.

The fired workers from Romney’s private equity dealings have become familiar subjects in Obama ads, but this latest Priorities USA spot — produced without the president’s knowledge — took the attack to an excessively morbid level. What the ad portrays as a simple cause-and-effect (cause: Romney fires the steelworker; effect: his wife dies) is anything but. Mrs. Soptic died six years after her husband’s layoff, and for at least one year she was covered by her employer’s insurance. It’s not even clear that Romney was involved in the decision to close the plant, which happened after he had left his day-to-day duties at Bain to run the Salt Lake Olympics (though his campaign has never been able to clarify the extent of his involvement during those years.)

The Romney campaign has every reason to be outraged. Priorities USA took a legitimate critique about the human cost of Romney’s business practices and turned it into a scurrilous personal assault. Priorities should pull the commercial and apologize for the insinuation that Romney’s actions were responsible for Mrs. Soptic’s death.

They should then recut the ad to make the point they missed the first time: Mrs. Soptic died because of the policies that Mitt Romney supports. Not the universal health plan he enacted as governor (as Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul helpfully pointed out) but rather the retrenchment in coverage he would support as president: no insurance mandate, no free preventative care, no one-stop online insurance marketplaces, no subsidies to purchase private coverage, no Medicaid expansion, no ban on abuses such as the denial of coverage for preexisting conditions or lifetime expense caps… All are included in the Affordable Care Act, which Romney has pledged to repeal as his first act of office.

An estimated 45,000 Americans die annually from lack of health insurance, which, not coincidentally, is 45,000 more than the combined total of every other industrialized country in the world. The ACA, when fully implemented, will extend coverage to most of the 44 million Americans without insurance, like the Soptics, and prevent the denial of care for the rest of us.

Mitt Romney’s opposition could not be more emphatic. Even taking him at his word — not always the easiest thing to do — to replace the ACA with his own plan, tens of millions of Americans would be left without insurance. Romney led the nation by implementing universal coverage in Massachusetts. He shares no such goal for the country; the plan on his website makes no mention of universal care or the expansion of access. Any decrease in the ranks of the uninsured would come indirectly through his vague promises of “increasing efficiency” and “lowering costs.”

Perhaps Romney thinks that’s good policy. He definitely thinks it is good politics. Regardless of one’s opinion of the ACA, fewer Americans will have health insurance without it. Some of those Americans, like Mrs. Soptic, will die as a result. Mitt Romney may not be personally culpable, but his policies certainly will be.

Pulling an LBJ

In the midst of a tight campaign for Congress, Lyndon Johnson famously told an aide to leak to the press that his opponent, a pig farmer, had been having sexual relations with his swine. The aide was appalled and asked LBJ if it was true. “Of course not,” Johnson replied. “I just want to see the bastard deny it!”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s allegations about Mitt Romney’s tax avoidance feel Johnsonesque in many ways. The accusations, damaging if true, are based on unsubstantiated hearsay that would never pass muster in a court of law. It’s likely that even Reid himself doesn’t believe them.

But he still likes watching Romney deny it!

Like a good boxer, Reid — once an amateur fighter himself — flashed his jaw, inviting Romney to take a swing while Reid set up a devastating counterpunch. Mitt leapt at the opening created by Reid’s comments, calling for Majority Leader to “put up or shut up.” But Reid never claimed to have any evidence other than chatter from a former Bain investor. Reid’s riposte trapped Romney in the corner where Democrats want him, defending his own refusal to “put up” the documentation.

I wrote in this post that until Romney submits his tax returns for public review, his opponents will have carte blanche to tar him with wild speculation and innuendo. Repeated often enough — as Reid’s claims have been — and they will take the semblance of fact. This is why many people still think there are death panels in the healthcare law and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (For the Fox News viewers reading this, both are false.)

Romney continues to hope that he can hang on the ropes long enough to be saved by the bell, but the past few days of political sparring have reinforced the inevitability of the returns’ eventual disclosure. Until then, Romney’s delay will only give more credence to the outlandish allegations of Reid and others.

In other words, the best thing that Romney can do for the Democrats is to keep on denying it!

Giving up the game

We all knew that Fox News was going to try to spin this month’s jobs numbers against President Obama. A quick check of their website this morning shows they were, for the most part, on message : “Wrong-Way Growth!”… “Jobless Jumps!”… “Obama Grateful!”…

None of those headlines, of course, bear much relationship to fact. The economy grew in the right direction by 163,000 jobs in July, including 172,000 new private sector jobs. That total beat most analyst expectations, but job growth did not keep pace with new labor force entrants, thereby causing the slight uptick in the unemployment rate (from 0.08217 to 0.08254 — not so much a “jump” as a rounding up.) And Obama’s statement on the report never connoted gratefulness or satisfaction. Here were his actual words:

This morning, we learned that our businesses created 172,000 new jobs in the month of July.  That means that we’ve now created 4.5 million new jobs over the last 29 months — and 1.1 million new jobs so far this year.  Those are our neighbors and family members finding work, and the security that comes with work.

But let’s acknowledge, we’ve still got too many folks out there who are looking for work.  We’ve got more work to do on their behalf — not only to reclaim all the jobs that were lost during the recession, but also to reclaim the kind of financial security that too many Americans have felt was slipping away from them for too long.

But rebutting every lie and deception put out by Fox is about as productive as trying to audit Mitt Romney’s Swiss bank accounts. Luckily one headline writer saved me the trouble: “Stocks Leap as U.S. Job Growth Heats Up” (highlight mine.) Didn’t the banner headline just say that joblessness jumped? That the economy was shrinking? If so, why would the stock market — that pure expression of American capitalism — think that job growth was heating up?

Maybe because they know not to trust Fox News. That, folks, is what’s called giving up the game.

How does Britain feel about socialized medicine?

Choreographed socialism (via The Guardian)

Proud enough to celebrate the National Health Service during the Opening Ceremonies of the London Olympics.  For all of the right-wing hysteria about the perils of socialized healthcare, the NHS is not only an extremely popular institution in Britain, but it is an inextricable part of the social fabric. It’s that success — the contributions of what founder Aneurin Bevan called, “the most civilized achievement of modern government,” — which was on display for the world tonight in London.

I wonder what Mitt Romney, who was in the audience, thought of it.