Directional Challenges

Scott Sumner (wisely) writes:

In this election Romney destroyed Obama in West Virginia, winning by around 27 points, his biggest margin east of the Mississippi.  A swing of 42 points from the 1996 election.  And Romney didn’t just win West Virginia, he swept the entire Appalachian region.  Meanwhile Obama won Virginia for the second time in a row.

West Virginia symbolizes the future of the GOP, while Virginia symbolizes the future of the Democratic Party.  Which party has a brighter future?

Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the pointer.

A vote for not voting?

From Adam Ozimek:

My goal isn’t just to convince people not to vote, but to convince them that they should not feel guilty about not voting or “being informed”. There are many ways to contribute to society, generate public goods, and generally increase welfare. Someone who is bored by economics but is great at convincing people to donate blood, build homes for the poor, tutor underprivileged children may serve society better by focusing on those things they do well. It’s not just volunteering either. If you are a brilliant and inventive scientist who is bored to death by policy, then just working extra hours, or maybe relaxing so you do your job better, may be the best way to contribute to society. A doctor who comes home and forces himself to read the New York Times out of a sense of obligation to “be informed” may contribute to society more by watching a movie, or just going to sleep.

Maximizing your contribution to society is a virtue, and sometimes the best way to do that is to ignore politics, policy, and economics and focus on what it is that you do best. We should celebrate, not shame, those with the humility and wisdom to recognize this.

This leaves the lingering questions, “how does one know if one should vote?”  It’s interesting that Ozimek seems to see a bigger risk in people voting who ought not vote based on their information than people not voting who ought to based on their information.  I think there is a legitimate case to be made for encouraging people to not be shamed by not being so interested in politics that they are ill informed to vote; but that could lead to a situation where more people on the margin do not vote that should than do vote that shouldn’t, which I see as a bigger risk.

Some Election Predictions

I want to start the week off with a quick listing of my opinion of the five most likely electoral college scenarios.

Scenario 1:  Obama wins 281 – 257

This essentially means that President Obama wins all of the swing states in which he is currently in the lead or tied except for Colorado and Virginia.  This scenario is the most likely as I see the election going.

Scenario 2:  Obama wins 290 – 248

This scenario is only slightly less likely than the first in my opinion.  This shifts Colorado, a state with particularly fickle polls, back into President Obama’s column.

Scenario 3:  Obama wins 303 – 235

The first two scenarios are notably more likely than the last three from my perspective.  This is the landslide scenario.  Romney is unable to pull Virginia here, which is the swing state that I think he is most likely to get but is not currently leading in the polls.

Scenario 4:  Obama wins 275 – 263

A nail-biter of a scenario in which President Obama loses Iowa (along with Colorado and Virginia) but still holds on, crucially, to Ohio and Nevada.  This scenario may spur flashbacks to 2000 and I could see some recounts happening if election returns seem close at all.

Scenario 5:  Romney wins 275 – 263

Ohio goes for Romney.  Unlike forecasters like Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight I don’t necessarily see a domino effect if a few swing states move to Romney.  By that, I don’t think a loss in one state indicates major miscalculations across the board.  With the campaign time and money that will be spent in swing states, especially Ohio, they could all move very independently.  Thus, Ohio moving to Romney does not guarantee moves by Iowa, New Hampshire, or Wisconsin.  I do think it is more likely than not that Romney pulls Colorado and Virginia, either of which would swing the election in this scenario.  This scenario would move up my list if this Friday’s Employment Situation release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reverses earlier indications of gains.

With all of this in mind, the returns I’m focusing on next Tuesday are (from East to West) Virginia, Ohio, Iowa and Colorado.  These states will determine the winner of the election.

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.

Why Vote? Cont.

Yesterday I posted a link and some quotes from Kevin Vallier’s post on the title subject.  Today I have my own take.  Why vote?  In one word, uncertainty.

Let me lay out my underlying assumptions:

1. Each voter prefers either Candidate A or Candidate B by some fraction.
2. Preference for a candidate is represent by P where P = 0 is complete preference for A and P = 1 is complete preference for B.
3. The exact preferences of other voters are unknown; thought there may be indications as to P’s average value among a population (i.e. polling, historical results, etc.).

To show how these assumptions should drive everyone to vote, I’ll use the two states I have called home in my life, North Carolina (current) and Mississippi (birth).

More after the jump.

Why Vote?

Kevin Vallier writes:

Jason Brennan’s excellent The Ethics of Voting dispatches a number of familiar arguments for a duty to vote and provides grounds for a duty to vote well or not vote at all. I’ve been mulling over an argument for voting that J doesn’t address (probably because it is crazy). But let me try to work it out and see what you think. It’s complicated, as the argument is based on Newcomb’s Paradox and resolving the paradox in favor of the “one-boxer” position. As such, I’ll call this The One-Boxer Argument for Voting. If you get to the end, I think you’ll find the conclusion interesting.

He concludes:

OK, so here’s my conjecture:

(1) If you are a voter whose inclination (i) to vote and (ii) to vote for either Obama or Romney is a reliable indicator of the outcome AND,

(2) If you have justified beliefs about (1) AND,

(3) If on your view, the outcome matters enough to exceed the disutility from voting, if you get net disutility from voting AND,

(4) If you have no countervailing moral reasons (not counted in your disutility) to vote, THEN:

(C) Despite the fact that you will have no causal impact on the outcome, and that you get mild disutility from voting, it is rational for you to vote.

To put it simply, if you have reason to think that your inclination to vote for your candidate is a bellwether for whether he will be elected, and you care a lot about the outcome, then it is rational for you to vote for your candidate, in the absence of countervailing moral reasons and despite the disutility you get from voting.

Economic Policies in 2012

The Economist‘s Money Talks this week looks at economic policy in the election.

Debates and Elections

The New York Times reports:

History shows that candidates have different ways to score through presidential debates: the forceful put-down, the surprising show of skill, the opponent’s fumble, superior post-debate tactics.  But it also shows that to fundamentally alter the direction of a campaign, a candidate usually has to accomplish all of those things.

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.