Which Republicans Might Defect?

The only (although not necessarily too implausible) reason that Trump would crater in November will be because of Republican defections.  If so, who are most likely to bolt?  The problem that many Republicans have with Trump is that he is not really a “conservative.” If he is the nominee, however, he will be the Repulican.  It follows that while “Republicans” will probably stay, “Conservatives” probably will not.

This will certainly cause even more confusion:  many people equate “Republican”and ” conservative,” as they also do “Democrat” and “liberal.”. Yet, these convergences are fairly recent developments.  Ideology and policy positions, compared to history, social relationships, and other forms of cultural ties traditionally mattered much more in defining partisanship–liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats were no less “partisan” than their more ” ideological” co-partisans.

The convergence came about because it became easier to sell a party on the basis of its policy and ideology based reputation:  in a sense, “symbolic” politics of a slightly different sort.  Democrats gotta do the Democratic thing, and Democratic things are liberal.  Naturally, this drew in the liberals into the Democratic Party without having to build the long term sociocultural relationship as per years past.

But something funny happened as parties gave in to symbolic politics:  the conservatives, who were not necessarily “Republicans,” decided that they should own the Republican Party and hijack its machinery to advance a “conservative” agenda. (somewhat similar developments took place in the Democratic Party, first with the liberals asserting themselves in 1970s and 1980s, then the centrists taking over in 1990s, but Democrats were more “conservative”–as in resistant to change–due to the complexity of their coalition compared to the Republicans’). The latest incarnation of this conservative hostile takeover attempt of the Republican Party has taken the form of Cruz candidacy.

In other words, Cruz supporters are not real Republicans.  They are conservatives who would support the Republicans only as long as they are conservative.  If Republicans are no longer conservative, as will be the case with Trump candidacy, they have little reason to stick around.

This may lead to even stranger coalitions:  will Clinton be supported by a mixture of liberals (via the Democratic Party) and extreme conservatives who previously backed Cruz?  Perhaps.  One might be tempted, were that to materialize, to say that Trump ran to the left of Clinton and that former Cruz backers simply chose the true conservative–Hillary Clinton.  Actually, there is certain amount of truth to that characterization, but in highly mind screwy fashion.  These are truly interesting times! (Not necessarily in a bad way.)

 

 

 

 

Why Democrats Should Worry about Clinton, Part X.

This polling result has been making rounds in the Twitterverse, about how much Sanders supporters don’t like Hillary Clinton much.

Looking under the hood, at least without having full raw data, reveals that the negativity towards Clinton is relatively small among partisan Democrats, but quite high among Independents.  What might surprise some is that the young voters are actually somewhat less likely to view Clinton negatively than the older–although the difference is quite small.  We also know that a chunk of Sanders supporters are not Democrats in their partisanship.

It is possible that Sanders draws VERY disproportionately among the Democrats who view Clinton negatively–in fact, it is quite likely.  However, it is also likely true that the many Independents that he draws are even more hostile to Clinton.  The Democrats who view Clinton negatively will probably vote for Clinton if she is the nominee–they are, after all, Democrats.  But will the Sanders supporters who dislike Clinton and are not Democrats stay in?  It seems improbable.  How many of them are there and whom do they favor if not Sanders?  For that, we will need the breakdown of the respondents’ favorability among the Republicans conditional on their dislike of Clinton and like of Sanders.  I have the hunch that support for Trump among them will be high.  But we need raw data for that….

The Mean and the Variance, or the Mode and Heterogeneity

A quick note.  A common refrain that we hear about this campaign season is how Trump’s supporters are angry blue collar whites and Sanders’ supporters are young liberals.  While they are no doubt true with regards to their modal base of support, i.e. their most common supporter, it is hardly likely that they are all that common.  I’ve been guestimating, based on rough extrapolations from exit polls that Sanders’ support is roughly 1/3 liberal, 1/3 young voters (probably larger, since the young and the liberal supporters of Sanders overlap quite a bit), and 1/3 blue collar whites who may not be especially young or liberal.  Trump seems to be drawing at least 1/2 his support from more conventional Republicans of all stripes, even if the blue collar working class whites seem to make up the biggest chunk of his supporters.

Many people mistake the average for the only.  This gets worse when we are speaking of modes for categorical data.  Even if, say, 45% of Trump’s supporters are made of working class whites, it leaves 55% who are not.

Reverse Bradley Effect and Trump?

Bradley effect is the term given to a bias commonly found in controversial polling results: respondents overstate their support for the “politically correct” answer.  The “Bradley” refers to former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, an African American whose polling results indicated much greater support than he got in the closely contested 1982 California governor’s race.  In 2016, the politically correct answer on the Republican side is “not Trump.”  Is Trump’s support understated in the polls?

To be fair, there is little clear evidence that Trump is affected by the Bradley Effect, or, in his case, a Reverse Bradley Effect so far in the primaries:  his support does not appear to have been understated in the polls compared to his actual votes against other Republicans. What makes me wonder is, for all the talk about how many establishment Republicans hate Trump, how many of them will actually desert him to vote for Hillary Clinton?  Is there a good way to estimate this?

Why Democrats Should Worry…

The primaries so far have exposed Hillary Clinton as a dangerously weak candidate for the general election on the basis of her inability to win over the kind of voters that Sanders has been drawing:  the young, the liberals, and the “missing white voters.”  The young and the liberals in the Sanders coalition have been drawing disproportionate attention, as they are consistent with the characterization of Sanders as the “unrealistic hippy” candidate. This blind spot, if it continues, will cost the Democrats dearly in November, although, this, in turn, will almost certainly ensure that Clinton has sewn up the Democratic nomination.

Nate Cohn at New York Times has been excellent in identifying the kind of demographics are drawn to both Sanders and Trump.  In a badly titled but insightful article today, he identifies why the upcoming primaries do not favor Sanders as much as people think. The statement is:  “These states aren’t as bad for him as those in the South, but they force him to confront his two weaknesses: diversity and affluence.”  The young and the liberals may make up much, probably a majority of the Sanders coalition, but the third leg that provides his coalition with the potential winning edge, are the working class “missing white voters,” the same demographic drawn to Donald Trump (although those drawn to Trump may be older and more racist.  Interestingly, this New Republic article points out that this disparity holds true even among the young demographics:  state schools are pro-Sander s but elite private schools are not.)   This is not a good combination for the Democrats:  there is no chance that, if the liberals and the young turn out in November at all, they will remain in the Democratic camp.  The same cannot be said for the “missing white voters.”  Their natural landing spot is with Trump in November, if he has secured the GOP nomination.

Free Trade and Politics

This is a brutally honest if a bit deliberately blunt summary of how free trade became the political issue in 2016.  Let’s be honest:  free trade works, if you are concerned only with the aggregate size of the economic gains.  The commonly used international econ textbook draws the analogy between trade and technology:  both make for more output of relatively scarce goods at a lower cost in relatively more abundant goods.  So more wealth was created than the wealth that was destroyed.  The conveniently forgotten fact, that Dean Baker reminds us, is that the created wealth and destroyed wealth happen to belong to different people.  (This is not just true of trade:  the word “sabotage,” as Star Trek reminds us, came from workers displayed by machines using their wooden shoes to wreck the machinery.)

Notice that this reiterates the argument that Marx had originally made in The Capital:  capitalism, coupled with industrialization, has been wonderful–it created so much more wealth than anything that came before.  But it also ensured that most of the newly created wealth wound up in the hands of the owners of capital, while most of the price was paid for by the labor and, later as industrialization proceeded, the petit bourgeoisie.  This misallocation of resources led to a society wide instability–the inherent contradiction of capitalism, as Marxists call it–that leads to capitalism’s downfall.

Observe that, all his political preferences, which was obviously in favor of revolutions, there is nothing inherently normative about Marx’s politic0-economic arguments.  If he had access to the tools of modern economic theory, I suppose he would have complemented his wordly argument with elegant agent-based models derived from forest fire models.   Certainly, two of the people who understood the essence of Marx’s argument and translated their understanding to real policymaking had no sympathy for the kind of politics the latter advocated:  Otto von Bismarck and Theodore Roosevelt.  Both these politicians, inherently conservative in their overall political outlook, nevertheless saw that the power of the capital and the wealth it generated was not something that could or should be easily cast aside.  But, unless those who lost out were given due compensation, the buildup of the stress would tear the society apart.  The solution they adopted was a form of socialism, adapted to fit the cultural and political environments of their country, not so much to undermine capitalism as much as to save it from its own self-perverting tendencies identified by Marx.

More than a century after Bismarck and Teddy Roosevelt, the same problems have reemerged.  The development of the technology has drastically increased the “productivity” of the capital (although a lot of this productivity, I suspect, comes from enhanced ability to extract surplus from consumers rather than actual productivity gains), while increased trade has made a lot of goods “cheaper” to produce, generating vast wealth for relatively few.  At the same time, both processes have created many who have paid disproportionate share of the cost.  Not unlike a century before, many who “won” are quick to give themselves credit for “hard work” and eagerly, even giddily, kick those who lost to the curb.  Some things just don’t change.

There is precious little recognition of the threat from social unrest and instability that these dislocations are causing.  Instead, those who are harbingers of the problems to come are deemed as cranks and bigots, all the easier to ignore the depth of the instability.  The solution, at least a partial one, to these problems is not to stop free trade, take money out of elections, or to build a big beautiful wall, but to address the more fundamental problem:  the inequality in the distribution of the costs and benefits of the technological change and the free trade.  A tax on the “capital,” defined loosely, to compensate the losers is hardly a new proposal:  this shows up in every econ textbook as the means of making free trade (and presumably, technological change) Pareto improving.  In practice, nobody seems to ever practice it, except possibly for that allegedly “socialist” chancellor of Imperial Germany.  Perhaps someone should actually put the textbook solution to work.

Where is the Iron Chancellor when we need him?

The Missing Black Voters.

NYT has a perceptive op-ed piece that still has gigantic blinders on.

The article, in a nutshell, makes an oft-repeated point:  that the support from African-American electorate for Democratic politicians, especially establishment politicians like Hillary Clinton, is immensely important electorally, yet they are very poorly served in terms of policy.  Indeed, the well-to-do white liberals are very averse to offer policy that confer real long term benefits to African-Americans in the long run at relatively low monetary cost such as housing vouchers.

This has an exact parallel on the Republican side:  the so-called “missing white voters.” Working class whites, in the past few decades, have steadily swung in their electoral support to the Republicans, yet their interests are seldom reflected in the policy choices of the latter.  Indeed, the Republican Party is overtly contemptuous of the poor whites.

The NYT piece is wrong in thinking that this neglect has been costless for the political establishment:  in both cases, the parties have been suffering a serious if subtle penalty for their choices–these marginalized voters are “missing” from the electoral process. The key characteristic for the “missing white voters” is that they are, literally, missing:  their turnout is significantly below average.  The same problem holds for the African-American vote, as their turnout has been significantly lower.  The word from the political practitioners is that this problem is far more apparent if the variations in turnout among different subdemographics among African-Americans are considered:  the older, church-going, and female African Americans actually have fairly high turnout while the younger, oft-male, undereducated and impoverished Blacks do not.  Indeed, much has been made of how younger African American activists have a serious bias against political participation.  The former demographic has relatively obvious means through which they can be mobilized–their social networks, particularly their churches.  The latter do not.  They need some proactive reason to turn out. (As far as I know, detailed quantitative studies are lacking, or at least, researchers have not paid closer attention to how turnout rates vary specifically among different subsets of African Americans.  It is known that regular participation in religious activities, for example, elevates turnout a lot.  I have the hunch that the effect would be even greater among African Americans, given the prominent role of African American churches in promoting political activism, but no empirical study seems to pop out in google scholar searches.)

The turnout problem is often seen as a moral problem that contributes to the malaise for various populations, not necessarily the symptom.  Usually, people try to address it by moral hectoring supposedly aimed at raising turnout.  I think this is a serious mistake. Ordeshook and Riker famously argued that voting is irrational.  While making too much of this is silly, it should remind us that active political participation is not the natural state of mankind.  People need some motivation other than their favorite cause winning because their individual votes will have no singular effect on bringing about that outcome.  For all the missing voters, this motivation is lacking.  This is manifest in the raw deal that they are getting from the political establishment, both materially and psychologically.  To insist that this can be countered by mere propaganda without even pretense of seriousness is, quite frankly, insulting.  I cannot fault the young African American activists for turning their backs on political participation.

Some of the blame may be due to the top political leaders, such as President Obama because they did not “inspire” enough.  As someone who never bought into the “inspirational” BS, I think this argument is also unfair.  In addition to the facile attitude that turnout is merely a moral problem, this also ignores that top national political leaders have to play politics for a broad coalition, and even more than the “missing white voters,” who are themselves considered too much trouble for the political insiders to bother seriously catering to, these “missing black voters” make up an even smaller share of the electorate:  even if half the African-American population might belong to the working class, their share of the electorate is no more than 6-7% at most and mostly concentrated in areas where electoral politics are not especially competitive.  From the perspective of the average politician, they are even less valuable than the missing white voters with potential for more trouble.  It is not surprising, then, that vote suppression tactics that often target African Americans unfairly are not vigorously resisted.

I do think that the younger African American activists are making a mistake by downplaying politics, but the kind of politics that they can play are at the level of localities, not national.  Local politics typically feature low turnout:  a relative handful of votes can swing outcomes one way or the other.  Their ability to mobilize voters can be used as bargaining leverage with local politicians, or perhaps they can swing their support behind some “reformers” who could make some changes on small scale.  Perhaps they are already engaged in this endeavor without having been noticed much–but if they have not, they should start organizing in this direction as soon as possible.  Even at the local level, of course, the challenges will be immense:  establishment politicians will have all sorts of tools at their disposal, some fair and legal, others semilegal or downright illegal and quite foul:  many heavily minority-populated cities are notoriously corrupt for good reason.  But this is where they can actually make a real difference, not in national politics–at least not yet.

Ohio

Well, I didn’t see that coming.

Looking at the exit polls for the Democratic side, one thing stands out fairly immediately: youth turnout was considerably lower–had the young (18-29) demographic turned out at the same rate as Michigan and voted at the same rate as those did show up did, Sanders would have picked up about 4%, more or less: the resulting 46-53 outcome, roughly, is probably something more consistent with what I’d have been expecting, perhaps. Sanders really had to have a few more votes than that, though, and that was not going to materialize. I’ve been told that most of big Ohio universities were on spring break–but then, so was MSU last week. On the whole, this is a reminder that, if you rely on low propensity voters, they are liable to surprise both pleasantly and unpleasantly. Being an insurgent candidate, drawing only on the voters abandoned by the mainstream, is a risky proposition.

On the Republican side, an interesting dynamic is developing: Kasich makes no sense as a “serious” candidate. He has no real chance of winning the nomination. His mission is just one thing: deny both Trump and Cruz the outright nomination and force a brokered convention where the Republican insiders can choose someone unexpected. This is a most dangerous game that the Republican insiders are playing: deny both of their top two primary vote-getters the nomination by skulduggery. I wonder if that sort of lawyer trick will fly–between Trump and Cruz, they command support from between 2/3 to 3/4 voters, probably. They already distrust the Washington establishment and its dirty tricks. Could the Republican Party possibly survive this sort of trickery? Ironically, they will return to the scene where their “crime” will have been given legs for the convention. This is going to be too “fun” for its own good (in the worst way possible.)

PS.  The Democratic tally got closer as more votes got counted.  Higher youth turnout might have boosted Sanders votes to perhaps 48%, which would be closer to what I expected.  All in all, the actual numbers are not too far off of expected figures, although he fell a few percents off what he did in Michigan–and more in Ohio.

Clinton deserves much credit for bringing out her supporters efficaciously, but exit polls show her weaknesses persist:  inability to expand beyond the Democrats.  How this will translate should she face Trump in November is unclear, given the latter’s own obvious issues.  Still, her coalition seems dangerously vulnerable to precisely a candidate like Trump.

First, Hang All Lawyers…

Faced with the specter of Donald Trump nomination alleviated by the possibility that he might not have an outright majority, people, Republican and otherwise, are coming up with increasingly creative and dangerously undemocratic ways to rig the Republican convention, seemingly with a glee.  This is a perilous development.

Party insiders are powerful because they control the rules and are able to bend and contort them to suit their agenda.  However, this is also precisely why they are distrusted in the first place.  If taken too far, such antics will invariably destroy their ability to manipulate the agenda through means legal and semilegal as well.  People will abide by the rules lawyering only so far as they trust the rules in principle in the first place.  If they do not give credence to the rules, then all the rules in the universe will have been reduced to nothing but scraps of paper.  Not only will the rules lawyering be disallowed, but all guarantees, rights, and prerogatives that were originally spelled out in the rules will also have become moot as the very foundations of the rules will have lost all credibility.  Once they played fast and loose with the rules too often, or are even suspected of having done so, they will not be able to credibly commit to keep their hands off because there is nothing that will credibly guarantee their words once their audience believe that they will concoct some legal rabbit out of hole with which to play a stupid lawyer trick.

“Audit the Fed” is a popular cry among many those who distrust the government.  That the Fed is in fact audited routinely does not matter to them.  They probably don’t know how exactly the Fed is organized or the details of what it really does–this is not a knock on them, as central banking is really quite complicated and the Federal Reserve was deliberately designed in a less than straightforward manner in complex political bargain that denied complete government control over the central banking system.  They do know, however, that the Fed is very powerful and has a great deal of influence on their livelihood.  They also know that they cannot trust the people who run the Fed and that they are justifying their actions in a complete legalistic-financial lingo that make absolutely no sense to them–i.e. the Fed insiders are engaged in rules lawyering to justify the actions that harm them.  The ignorance of those who distrust the Fed only furthers their distrust:  they don’t really want the Fed audited:  they want the Fed effectively dismantled because they cannot trust Fed as it currently operates.  The great irony is that if the Fed is completely reconstituted exactly as it is, but with a cast of characters and some supernumerary rules changes (that do not affect its central banking functions) that enhance its credibility, there is no reason to expect that this distrust continue.

Institutional manipulation can only be a short term solution.  Too much rules lawyering is precisely what got the party insiders so distrusted in the first place, which in turn fueled the rise of people like Trump.  If the insiders try to rules lawyer their way out of it, there will be no more GOP, and deservingly so too.

Talking with the Press about the Working Class

This reminds of being dumbfounded when I was reading a book by Lynn Vavreck, who is normally a very astute observer of elections. The passage that shocked me was “most people learn about the state of the economy from reading/watching news.” (paraphrased). That was news to me: both from personal experience and researching how different income cohorts have measurable differences in perceived inflation (food and energy prices, normally excluded from CPI, figure especially heavily in perception of the economy by the working class), that kind of blind spot is hard to fathom. But I suppose self perpetuating upper professional class must do what a self perpetuating upper professional class must…

Working-Class Perspectives

Over the last three months, I have done interviews with and provided assistance to dozens of national and international reporters about various working-class issues, including the American Dream, manufacturing, education, the recession, displaced workers, local and international trade, and, of course, white working-class voting patterns.  A few weeks ago, George Packer, staff reporter for The New Yorker, was a visiting scholar at the Center for Working-Class Studies, doing research on book project, and he spoke as part of our annual lecture series. So, obviously, I have been thinking a lot about journalists and reporting on the working class.

Packer titled his lecture, Do Journalist Care About the Working Class? His response was basically, “No!” He argued that the American public is more concerned about celebrity and success stories that often reinforce the American Dream.  While job loss affects people of all classes these days, readers seem more interested in…

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