Tag Archives: Election 2016

The Clinton-Sanders Race in Historical Context UPDATED

January 14, 2016UncategorizedClinton, Election 2016, Election 2016, obama, Politics, Polls, Primary, SandersGreg Laden

I’m going to make this simple. The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks. Everything we are doing now is pre-Primary. Not one person has put pen to checkmark in a voting booth.

Once that process starts, everything changes. Suddenly there is more polling in downstream states. Starting before the first primaries, but then ramping up as we head towards states that matter (and no, Iowa and New Hampshire don’t matter despite what you may have been told). Same with campaigning. We’ve seen a few debates, there’s been a lot of speeches, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. And other things (fund raising, more endorsements, etc.)

I thought I’d start out a discussion on the historic context by producing the simple graphic above. This is the course of polling (from Real Clear Politics) for the Clinton-Obama race in 2008 up to about now in the process, along side the Clinton-Sanders race this year. The graphic is rough, I just threw it together, but it kind of speaks for itself.

But in case the meaning is not clear, it means this: The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks.

I made a new graphic to underscore the meaning of the graphic above. Here, I took the 2008 primary season and the 2016 primary season RCP polling data for the two main candidates and ROUGHLY scaled them together. That moment when everything changes for 2008 is about now, or about the beginning of the actual primaries. Will that be what happens this year?

How to do voting

November 9, 2015UncategorizedElection 2016, Election Fraud, Electronic Voting, Paper Ballots, Politics, PoliticsGreg Laden

The Days When Democracy In America Was Bogus

First, three stories. One comes from other sources, not verified, but everyone at the time (it is said) knew it to be true. Political operatives in the Boston area used to visit the train yards during the days and hours before a local mayoral election. They would round up the numerous “bums and hobos” (now known as homeless people) living in the train yards. Those interested, which appear to have been most, would accept a bit of cash and a broken comb. The cash was their payoff. The comb was broken in such a way that if you set it next to the paper ballot at the voting location, the missing teeth would indicate where to place your mark.

Second story: something I observed as a kid. I would be taken to the election site every year, the fire house on Delaware and Marshall in Albany New York, by one of the adults voting in our house, usually my grandmother. On at least one occasion, I observed a man sitting on a tall ladder, I assume supplied by the fire department. Here is how you voted. You would go up to a desk and give your name. The person at the desk would say your name out loud, and the guy on the ladder would look you up on a list. Then, you would go into the voting booth and pull the big red lever, which would close the curtain. The mechanical voting machine had one lever for each candidate, which were organized in columns. President, governor, mayor, various other candidates, stacked up, all of the candidates in one party per column. At the top of the column was the lever to “vote the ticket.” If you wanted to vote for all Democrats, you just flip the lever at the top of that column.

These levers were all visible to the guy on the ladder. That is why he was on the ladder. If you pulled the Democratic Party lever, you got a check mark next to your name.

Then, the next summer, you take your kid down to city hall to get a summer job. Or, you get pulled over by the cops for speeding or get a parking ticket. Or the tax assessors come to set a value for your home to determine your property tax. Or you call in a big pothole in front of your house, to get if fixed. If your name has the check on it, your kid gets the job, your traffic ticket is fixed, your taxes are lower, and your pothole gets fixed. There was a staff of ticket fixers up on the top floor of City Hall, in the tax assessors domain, correlating, mostly, parking tickets to checkmarks. And so on.

Third: I helped a bit with the recount of a major election a couple of years ago. I heard something interesting while doing that. A democratic official working on the recount noted that he was, years ago, in the US Navy, and had the job of collecting write-in ballots for a large unit (a destroyer or something). What they really did, he said, was to get the write-in ballots, get a few guys together, and write in all the votes, for as it turns out, the Republican presidential candidate. That man should be in jail, but instead, he is in charge of elections. (The fact that he switched party is meaningless.)

My point is simply this: In America, we have a long tradition of fixing the vote. How much votes are or have been fixed varies, certainly, across states and cities. I lived in a totally rigged city, with a political machine running things. I’m intimately aware of how that machine worked, because I was one of the kids who got the summer job, and this eventually put me in direct contact with the operatives. I saw the traffic tickets getting fixed, and so on. The other thing that varies across states and cities is the degree to which the citizens assume voting is always clean vs. assume it is often dirty, or something in between. But the two, how often voting is fixed and how much people assume it is or is not, are probably not very well correlated. The vast majority of Americans, I suspect, don’t think this is a thing we do in this country.

I hope, and there is evidence for this, that the blatant and systematic fixing of votes we saw in Depression Era Boston or Machine Era Albany, is a thing of the past. Our democracy was far more bogus back than than it is now.

Right?

We Are Still Doing Voting Wrong

Maybe, maybe not. But one thing a lot of people fear is that with electronic voting, the old days of comb- or ladder-assisted election fraud are coming back.

We are not doing voting right in the US. First, we have vastly different ways of doing it across states. It is highly unlikely that each state has special problems that require different approaches. Rather it can be assumed that one or two states do it best (though maybe not well enough) and all the other states are inferior. That should give pause.

We’ve seen enough messing around with electronic voting, or voting where machines are too much involved, to suspect this is a game-able system. A recent case in Kentucky underscores this problem.

For the gubernatorial race between Democrat Conway, Republican Bevin, and some other guy, the polls looked like this:

From Huffpo Pollster, looking only at likely voters in non-partisan polls, we have this:

So the race should have been close, with Conway likely to win.

Here is what happened.

Major reversals happen, and this could be that. Note that the other guy (Curtis) lost three points the final polling than in the predictive polls, so third party voters switching to a mainstream candidate could explain this. But, in down ticket races, the Democrats all did as expected in relation to the Republicans. Also, Kentucky tends to elect Democratic governors. So, this is not a 100% clear cut case of something gone wrong, but this is a race one would want to look at. Poll analyzer Richard Charnin has an analysis that certainly brings up questions. (See also this summary.)

We also know that the two major parties have differences in how often ballots are improperly counted, depending on the kind of ballot system used, such that more Democratic voter’s ballots are disregarded. This was obvious in the Coleman-Franken recount. In that case, Coleman won the election by a couple of hundred votes, which required a recount. After the recount, which was done very carefully and properly, Franken had won by an order of magnitude more votes. Most of that change consisted of Democratic voters messing up their ballots by accident. If you have a big tent party, there’s gonna be a few people in the tent who can’t draw a straight line (we use straight lines to pick our candidates in Minnesota).

How To Do Voting Right

I think we should reject electronic voting entirely. Casting an electronic ballot is asking for the vote to be hacked. Just don’t do that.

Machine assisted voting is a good idea. People will mess up a paper ballot quite often. If a machine was used to properly produce a paper ballot, the paper ballots could be checked for accuracy, would be devoid of confusing marks or other goofs, and be valid 99.99% of the time.

We could, of course, use basic counting machines to get a preliminary count of those ballots. This should be followed by an audit that verifies the overall processing of ballots and samples a subset of ballots in order to determine that everything went well. How large that sample is should be determined by the closeness of the vote.

Automatic recounts are normal for many districts, but the threshold to trigger a recount varies. That threshold should follow national best practices, and be larger than most thresholds currently are (a few percent at least).

In the end, the official ballots will be paper ballots with a low frequency of mistakes, which can be hand-and-eye recounted to verify the machine counts. In the event of a full recount, every ballot would be examined as per normal.

This is not hard. What I’m suggesting here is, as far as I can tell, the best way to do voting. Since write-in ballots would not be machine-made, adding a provision to send back bad ballots submitted prior to a certain date may be necessary, especially in states where a very large percentage of the votes are sent in.

I think the average citizen in the US is too trusting of how the system works. Well, really, most people either trust the system not at all, or assume there is not really any intentional election rigging. But election rigging has always been part of the voting process in the US, being a major factor at some times and places, and hopefully a minor factor most of the time in most place. But electronic machine voting provides yet another opportunity for both voter suppression and election fraud, and if more electronic voting is implemented, we should see more voter fraud. There is too much at stake, and people generally are not as trustworthy as we would like. We need a system that simply does not allow this to happen at all.

2016 US Presidential Election: Trump/Carson/Somebody vs. Clinton (polls)

November 5, 2015UncategorizedCarson, Clinton, Election 2016, Election 2016, Polls, Sanders, TrumpGreg Laden

The current polling as shown on the Huffpo Pollster, using only “likely voters” and “non partisan polls” shows that Trump and Carson are neck and neck and have been close for a week. Most of the other candidates are so low it is impossible to imagine any of them rising to a level of significance. On the other hand, there are still so many clowns in the clown car that it is hard to say. If eight or nine of the candidates dropped out over the next few weeks, it is possible that someone will rise up.

On the other hand, there is a thing about how the Republicans pick their candidate that may have a significant effect and cause neither Carson nor Trump to get the nomination. It works like this. There are many states (and/or Congressional Districts, which matters more in some states) where there aren’t that many Tea Bagger Republicans, but still a good number of delegates. States like New York could be sending a very large number of delegates who would never consider a Trump or a Carson, while states like Alabama might send a small number of delegates who are strongly in favor of the fringe candidates (like Trump and Carson, fringe in the sense of their, well, you know what I mean.) So, we’ll see. Frankly, we might not know what is going to happen in the GOP race until Super Tuesday or later.

In the Democratic Race, looking again only at likely voters and non-partisan pols, Clinton has been ahead of Sanders all along and her relative position has risen slightly. Hillary Clinton currently has a commanding and steadily growing lead over Sanders.

The Gop poll is shown above, the Democratic poll shown below.

Third GOP Presidential Debate: Who won, who lost?

October 29, 2015UncategorizedElection 2016, Election 2016, GOP DebateGreg Laden

The big loser in this debate was CNBC. The network chose to not let anyone who was not a subscriber see the debate live. Then, apparently, the moderators trivialized the debate and annoyed the debaters, who then attacked CNBC and the press in general. Then, today, when we look at the news stories about the debate, there are hardly any. Nobody seems to really care what happened last night.

Another loser was Ben Carson. I’ve come to think of the online unofficial polls as useful to indicate overall opinions, and to show how those opinions change (we can discuss another time why this is a valid consideration). If you look at a selection of online polls, which I’ve informally posted below, Carson is not winning, or even second. Other indicators had suggested Carson had surpassed Trump, or caught up. If these informal online polls continue to do a reasonable job of indicating overall opinions (as they have for several weeks now vis-a-vis presidential debates) then it appears that Carson’s rise over the last few weeks was a flash in the pan. This could be explained by the very strong social media push back against him as more has been learned about his background and strange thoughts.

People have been watching Carly Fiorina and Jeb Bush because, for various reasons, they could have taken off in this primary process. They didn’t. They lose too.

Who are the big winners? Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio had impressively large numbers in these informal polls, and given the brief snippets I’ve seen of them in the debate, they presented well (not that I agree with them on anything).

The real winner of course, is Donald Trump who trumped the others in these polls, and did so by continuing unwaveringly with his strategy. Every day that goes by we are more assured that Trump will be the heir apparent for this nomination entering the first primaries and caucuses.

On the Eve of GOP Debate, Only Two Candidates Matter

October 27, 2015UncategorizedElection 2016, Election 2016, GOP Polls, near eastern politics, Politics, TrumpGreg Laden

There will be a third GOP debate on Wednesday night. If you don’t have the right cable or satellite subscription, apparently, you are not welcome to attend. (Correct me if I’m wrong, in the comments section below.)

But who cares, really? It will be a low information event.

The debate will be split into two parts, lower and higher ranking candidates separately, but the debate involving the higher ranking candidates will include more of them, and only two have anything close to poll numbers that matter. Not that polls are everything, but if you are a candidate that has failed to break 10% ever, and for several weeks have had single digit numbers, you are not really a candidate. Time to suspend your campaign. (Suspend instead of leave the race because you never know if a bomb is going to drop on one of the leading candidates. Usually, hopefully, a political bomb, not an actual bomb.) So, Wednesday’s debate will be very low value in terms of information.

“What happened to Carly Fiorina?”, you may ask. This:

She had a bump, one time. I have no special analysis to offer here, but the bump may have been temporary for a number of reasons. Republicans don’t like women, we knew that, and she is one. Also, her history of not being a very good CEO may not have helped her argument that she’d be a good president because she was a good CEO. Also, getting caught in the lie wrt Planned Parenthood may have been a factor.

The graphic at the top of the post is made from the HufPo Pollster, and includes only likely voters and non-partisan polling agencies. This is why Carson and Trump are about even. If you include all polls and all respondents, Trump trumps Carson.

GOP Presidential Primary Polls

October 15, 2015UncategorizedElection 2016, Election 2016, GOP Primary, Polls, Republican PrimaryGreg Laden

Top candidates only, non-partisan polls only, likely voters only, graphic updated October 15th, most recent polls October 12.

Clinton vs. Sanders Polls US Democratic Primary

October 15, 2015UncategorizedClinton, Election 2016, Election 2016, Polls, Primaries, SandersGreg Laden

Clinton vs. Sanders, Likely Voters, Non-Partisan Polls only. Graphic last updated October 15th, shows polls through October 12th only.

Who Won The First Democratic Party Primary Debate?

October 14, 2015UncategorizedChafee, Clinton, Democratic Primary Debate, Election 2016, Election 2016, O'Malley, Primary, Sanders, WebbGreg Laden

Lincoln Chafee, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, Bernie Sanders, and Jim Webb faced off in the Facebook-CNN sponsored debate. Who won?

The individual who “won” is the individual whose poll numbers went up the most, and we don’t know that yet. But there are other ways to win, and other ways to talk about winning.

Winners

Barack Obama I am pleased to note that the candidates running for the Democratic nomination were not running away from the President. That proved to be a bad strategy for House and Senate Democrats during the last election, and we are not seeing it today. One of the questions asked during the debate was, “How would your presidency not be a third Obama term?” The ideal answer might have been, “Oh, it will be a third Obama term in many ways,” or even “My first term will be a second version of Obama’s second term.” No one said that, but some implied it, and it was clear that no candidate was trying to distance themselves from Obama. Within Democratic party politics, that is meaningful, and it was an endorsement of President Obama.

The Democratic Party I believe that there are people out there who were either Republicans or who were Independents who watched the GOP debates and then watched the Democratic debate and became Democrats. If you need to know why, you didn’t watch the debates.

Climate Change I am also please to note that climate change was a key issue in the debate, even if CNN did not try very hard to make it so. Many of the candidates mentioned climate change without prompting, and when climate change was brought up it was addressed. Most of the candidates had the “right” answer — that climate change is real, and important.

Martin O’Malley O’Malley is a climate hawk, and also, has a strong position on gun regulation. But, he is relatively unkown. Most democrats and progressives seemed to think he did well in the debate and he made a good impression. He is not likely to move out of the single digit zone, but he has become a factor. Many commenters are suggesting that he advanced into the possible VP slot because of this debate.

Bernie Sanders and Millions of Americans Sanders articulated his central position and did not falter or screw up in any way. Sanders supporters are able to say he won hands down, Sanders opponents can not say he did poorly. But something else happened here. Sanders made a point to a national audience that he has been making all along, which is very important. Like many idealist candidates before him, he has positions that can’t turn into reality because of strong opposition by the Republicans and because of Citizens United. Sanders’ answer to that is to agree, these positions will go nowhere. Unless… Unless millions of people show up outside the windows of the elected officials in Washington to scream at them. He’s right. Having that sociopolitical tactic acknowledged and part of his campaign would make Sanders the best candidate and an effective president if a) he wins and b) the millions of people actually show up. That prospect is now on the table.

Hillary Clinton Many commenters have noted that Hillary Clinton won the debate because she was the best debater. An example of her skill came when her ability to make good decisions was questioned vis-a-vis her vote on Iraq. Her answer was, essentially, that President Obama trusted her with the Secretary of State job, so what the heck? That and several other comebacks served her well. Clinton is a traditional fire and brimstone Democrat. Given a podium for ten minutes she can capture the crowd and bring everyone to a teary-eyed state of Progressive Frenzy with great skill. In the debating context, this is hard to do because the train just starts to leave the station when you get cut off. But on those few occasions when Clinton had the time, she got the train out of the station. Did you notice that? (In contrast, Sanders is a chunker. He has these great, fiery, hard as brick chunks of rhetoric he can slam into any conversation in less than 19 seconds. He showed that ability many times last night.)

Losers

International trade deals Sanders made the point that there have been no good international trade deals. Clinton, who was in on the early negotiations of the Trans Pacific Partnership threw the TPP under the bus. No one came to the rescue of international trade deals. It will be interesting to see if the Gops make this a point in the election. Their knee-jerk reaction will be to do so, but it will hurt them because nobody likes sending jobs and money overseas, and Romney has inoculated the voting populous in this area already.

Lincoln Chaffee Chaffee just did not come off well. Also, he was the only candidate repeatedly questioning everyone else’s ethics with the passive aggressive comment that HE was the one with ethics. Then he fell into the tiger trap by admitting that his 1999 Senate vote to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which he now sees as having been a bad vote, was made because he had no idea what he was voting for and had some personal problems and stuff. In all fairness, that was a conference vote, which is routinely near 100% even if more were opposed to the original bill, and he never had a chance to debate or vote against the bill earlier on. This is the Senator Problem, where the rules of the Senate are such that most experienced Senators can be singled out as having voted against something they are for, or for something they are against, unfairly. So, it may be unfair to write off Chaffee because of that one gaff. But it was more than just a gaff. It was more like digging a tiger pit for the other candidates then flinging oneself into the hole.

Guns Not every candidate was saying the same things about guns, but here’s the thing. The biggest differences between candidates were exposed in the light of very few issues, and gun regulation was one of those issues. But, it seems that at least within the context of the Democratic Party, the candidates are being judged on how anti-gun they are. Guns lose.

Benghazi and Email Scandals Benghazi was already hanging from the end of a taut rope, but still got beat up during the debate, along with Sanders’ remark that the Republicans need to take Hillary Clinton’s emails and shove them where the sun don’t shine. OK, he didn’t say that exactly, but that is what he, and everyone else, was thinking.

Wall Street Obviously.

So, who really won the debate?

Sanders or Clinton won the debate. The commenters I’ve read seem about evenly divided between the two candidates. However, on line polls are wildly supportive of Sanders over Clinton. Perhaps this means we have to say Sanders won the debate. I personally felt better about both of them after the debate, but it is hard to say if I felt more better about one or another.

Regarding the online polls, I’ve placed a bunch of screen grabs HERE so you can see how that looks. And, this brings up another interesting point.

Notice that I’ve avoided mentioning Jim web in the winners vs. losers sections. Personally, I thought he came off as a whinging wonk, not a potential president. Also, he’s wrong on several issues. Most commenters seem to feel the same. But if you look at those on line polls, oddly, Webb has surprisingly high marks in some of them. Overall, if we look only at the on line polls, Webb came in a solid third, even though most commenters are writing him off. Why?

By saying a Muslim should not ever be President, Ben Carson disqualifies himself to be President

September 20, 2015UncategorizedBen Carson, Election 2016, Muslim President, PoliticsGreg Laden

The second part of the first amendment requires separation of church and state, and elsewhere, the Constitution requires that there be no religious test for office. Ben Carson requires that there be a religious test for office. This is because Carson is, essentially, an Evangelical Christian, in the sense that he believes, as do many other Gops, that Christian belief and doctrine should be part of our governance and law.

In other words, Carson believes first in a higher power, God, to whom he owes primary allegiance and, critically, believes that the belief system that emerges from worship of that god should guide his actions and, if he is elected, governance. In other words, he is not inclined to separate his religious life from his job. But, if elected, he would take an oath to the US Constitution. By taking this oath with the equivalent of sworn belief to a different authority, his very first act of being president, the actual act of becoming president himself, will be an act of treason. You might as well just set up the impeachment proceedings in advance and get it over with.

Donald Trump Eats His Enemies

September 17, 2015UncategorizedDonald Trump, Election 2016, Election 2016, GOP DebateGreg Laden

Eating your enemies is a time honored method for winning. It is rarely used by American politicians or their supporters.

Here is how you eat your enemy. I’ll use a generalized example based on several events during the GOP debates.

Moderator: Mr. Trump, you’ve said ‘bla bla bla bla’. Alternate Candidate, what do you have to say to Mr. Trump about this?

Alternate: Yada yada yada.

Donald Trump: [smiling, nodding giving thumbs up] I agree with all that.

More typically, a politician in this situation would find a way to separate themselves form Alternate Candidate, playing off the moderator’s suggestion of a difference, even if there isn’t much of a difference. But Trump, instead, simply takes Alternate Candidate’s position and indicates, “That’s great.” Eating your enemy.

This might seem odd or counterproductive because it would seem to muddle Trump’s actual policies and make it easier to claim that he is being inconsistent. But that doesn’t matter, because Trump has a voracious appetite and he can eat that too.

Moderator: Mr. Trump, earlier you said ‘bla bla bla’ but when Alternate Candidate said ‘yada yada’ you agreed with him. How can that be?

Donald Trump: [nodding during question] That’s right, I agree with him, he’s a smart guy. What can I say?

See what he did there? He ate the moderator.

Now, take this whole theme and imagine it happening in the board room, with Trump as Chairman of the Board.

Board Member One: I totally disagree with Two. Two has it all wrong, and here’s why. Yada yada yada.

Donald Trump: Great idea, thanks for bringing that to the table.

Board Member Two: One is wrong, here’s what we should do. Bla bla bla.

Donald Trump: You’r totally right about that.

[one month later, at a second board meeting, Board Member One and Board Member Two are missing]

Donald Trump: [on being asked where One and Two are] Oh, I fired those guys.

Board Member Three: But you agreed with what they both were saying, even though they were saying opposite things.

Donald Trump: That was then, this is now, I can do that. What’s the next item on the agenda?

Board Member Three: [grimly] Mr. Trump, I think we should not move on until we’ve resolved this issue about One and Two and why they were fired even tough you …..

Donald Trump [interrupting] You’re fired.

This is not Trump the Chairman of the Board being random. It is Trump not taking sides or getting in a fight, but rather, eating his board members one by one. He’s not asking them to go along with his ideas, and he’s not really going along with any of their ideas. He’s just letting the conversation go and eventually making his own decisions. Meanwhile, he he munches on them for a while, then spits them out and lets them live (minus some juices and a bit of flesh). Then, when it comes time to make a decision, he just makes the decision, unencumbered by any prior positioning on his own part.

I have to say, it is a little like how an experienced professor operates a seminar. Don’t take a stand, let the seminar participants yammer on here and there, encourage everybody even if you are encouraging conflicting ideas. When a real conflict emerges, deflect and shift focus, and so on, letting ideas go and go. But then, at some point, near the end of the seminar, the professorial voice of wisdom emerges, perspective is imposed on the conversation, previously ignored or undervalued facts are foregrounded, and smart things are said. Since everybody got a chance to be both smart and stupid, less butthurt, and an interim quasi-consensus on the nature of reality is accepted, at least until the seminar adjourned to the Rathskeller, where things heat up again until everybody gets too drunk to remember what the heck they were arguing about.

So this is Trump’s modus operandus, but what is it for?

One of the main benefits in a debate format of eating your opponents, instead of merely trying to not let them touch you, or for you to seem like them, is the commission. The commission is the little percentage you get when your opponent says something, their supporters cheer and applaud, then you agree with it. You get a percentage.

On a stage with 11 antagonists, the one antagonist that gets to eat each opponent once or twice, maybe three times for some, gets a lot of small commission payments. If none of the other candidates are doing that, then there is one broker getting paid off with every transaction, regardless of how that transaction goes. Trump took a little piece of every one of those conversations. In the end, he went home with his pockets stuffed.

Also, eating your enemies while your enemies are busy eating their own young (the exact opposite strategy) may be pretty effective.

The conflict between Trump’s strategy and what usually happens, and what is expected, caused the post-debate pundits to “give” the debate to a wide range of different candidates, including but not exclusively Trump. After the first debate, informal on-line polls indicated that the majority of everybody else, everybody who is not a pundit, gave the debate to Trump. This is because the politically astute observers didn’t even know what they were looking at, since it is so unusual of a strategy. It turned out that these informal online polls accurately predicted the ensuing formal properly done polls. Trump moved forward in his lead after that debate.

It is too early to say if the same pattern will occur with the second debate, but there are early indications it is the case. Among the numerous commentaries by the usual pundits, Trump took the win for only a few. But among the few informal on-line polls I’ve seen, Trump may have actually done even better in this debate than he did during the first. We’ll wait and see what the formal polls show.

It isn’t really true that Trump is the only person out there who eats his opponents. I think he is the only one among the current crop of Gops running for the nomination. Bill Clinton could eat his opponent, and President Obama had been known to do it too. Neither is probably as good at it as Trump, though.

This is not, by the way, an endorsement of Trump. I’m merely placing some of what I’m seeing in an anthropological perspective. I actually think Trump could be a better president than most of the other Gops. This is partly because some of them are religious fanatics, the last thing we need running the US right now. Others are strong political ideologues, and the only ideologue I want to see in the White House among those running is Sanders (because we share most ideologies). Others are bought and paid for by various nefarious special interest groups. Many are combinations of the above. I can imagine Walker doing everything he can while in office trying to eliminate unions, because his main support structures seems to come from anti-union forces. I can see Trump sitting down and working with unions. Paul would be horrible on climate change because he doesn’t believe it exists, and if it does, there is no Libertarian answer to climate change. I can see Trump, not owned by the Koch Konsortium, perhaps (maybe) doing something about climate change because, after all, shifting to clean energy is a huge business opportunity (but see this).

By the way, being both a Democrat and a Republican (which is true for Trump) is also a way of eating your own young.

One final thought: The most poetic version of a Trump candidacy would be having Ross Perot as Vice-Chairman. I mean, Vice President. If you understand why that would be poetic, then you probably get Trump. If not, think about it.

FrankenTrump

August 27, 2015UncategorizedDonald Trump, Election 2015, Election 2016, Frankentrump, GOP, Politics, Tea PartyGreg Laden

The Republican Party and its handlers, including the right wing talk radio jocks such as Rush Limbaugh, and the bought-and-paid-for media such as FOX news, did not create the Tea Party. Michele Bachmann and a few others did that.* But once the Tea Party got going, mainstream conservative Republicans, including and especially leaders in Congress, went right to bed with it. The Tea Party gave Republican strategists an easy way to garner votes and support. This was especially easy to do because America decided to elect an African American president. Make no mistake. The Tea Party is pro-white, anti-everybody-else, and having an African American Democrat as president made defining issues and shaping rhetoric trivially easy.

It is a mistake to think that the Tea Party comes with a set of positions on various issues. It does not. Yes, the Tea Party tends to be libertarian, conservative, and so on and so forth, but really, it is philosophically inconstant and mostly reactionary. This has been demonstrated over and over again, as President Obama embraced various issues that were previously held by prominent Republicans, and those policies were immediately opposed. Because they were the policies of the Black President. The merit of a policy had nothing to do with opposition against it. They were President Obama’s issues, therefore the Tea Party was against them. And since the Republican Party was so rapt with the Tea Party, the GOP was against them.

This worked well. It gave the Republicans massive victories in a gerrymandered Congress. It meant that absurd excuses for leaders won elections, or if they did not, lost by only a few percentage points, when they should have been largely ignored by the populous.

The reason for even doing this is abundantly clear. An informal tacit (maybe) cabal of 1%ers and various regulation-loathing industries, most notably the petroleum industry, paid for the campaigns and managed lobbyists, the Republican leadership managed the elections, calling in the Tea Baggers each November. Add a little voter suppression, a little Swift Boating here, a healthy dose of Fear of Terrorism there, a wartime setting, and the Republicans, who hold policies that when asked most voters are actually against, became far more powerful than even Newt Gingrich and his Republican Revolutionaries could have hoped for.

But there is a catch and the GOP got caught.

An actual Republican running for, or serving in, office, can go only so far in supporting absurd policies. Established politicians reluctant to take the final “logical” plunge through the Tea Party’s looking glass were often “primaried” and sometimes pushed aside by the emerging Tea Party candidates. By keeping up a full court press to overthrow everything President Obama tried to do the mainstream Republicans held a central place in this game, but there was plenty of nibbling around the edges of their power structure. They went from leaders (sort of) to managers. Worldwide Wrestling Federation mangers.

Then, purity happened.

Imagine a candidate that has never run for office before, but has greater name recognition than all but a fraction of a percent of the entire panoply of politicians that make up any and all American parties. Imagine that this candidate has excellent media presence. Imagine that this candidate has no established policy related views. Imagine the candidate has an arguably good resume of successes, even if many of those successes are either unrelated to governance, or are tainted by equally impressive failures.

Mostly, though, imagine that this candidate is perfectly willing to make over the top statements denigrating non-white people, and at the same time, statements endearing to the anti-government, libertarian-trending right wing. Imagine that candidate is willing to say, again and again in the style of Dale Carnegie, that all of our elected officials are stupid. How stupid are they? They are so stupid that the Mexicans are smarter. They are so stupid that the Chinese are smarter. They are so stupid that people the right wing disdains, and other people the right wing fears, are smarter.

This is something mainstream politicians can’t say, because it would require saying it about themselves. But there is one candidate that can say these things.

I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.

And the point of this missive is not anything about Donald Trump. I don’t have to tell you about him, he’ll be happy to do that himself. The fairly obvious point I want to make here is that Donald Trump is, in essence, a creation of the Republican Party. And, he is the Republican Party’s worst nightmare.

Why is he a nightmare and not a darling of the GOP? For one reason I am certain is true and one reason I hope is true. What is certain: Trump obviates and invalidates every single Republican elected official (and the Democrats too). The less certain reason is that he can never win a national election, but in running for President as the nominated GOP candidate, he could bring down the party. Not that parties are easily, or really, ever, brought down (apparently). So maybe not all the way down, as in, “you’re going down, Republicans!” More like downish, relatively down, down and out, at least for a couple of election cycles.

And this is why I’ve decided to call The Donald by a new nickname.

FrankenTrump.

(CamelCase optional.)

Victor Frankenstein made a beautiful thing. He thought. And in the original text, he did. But I’m thinking more of the movies, where Shelley’s “The Monster” is known as Frankenstein (for some reason) and where The Monster is the hideous creation of a mad man who thought he could control and create life. But FrankenTrump is not life controlled or created. FrankenTrump is a distillation, an emergent entity, a possibly inevitable outcome of setting aside all efforts to govern or develop actual policy and do nothing but play politics, 100% of the time in every way possible, involving elected officials, the party itself, a good chunk of the press, and everything else that can be controlled. Victor Frankenstein melded this and that body part to make something he eventually could not control and that eventually became his ruin, after terrorizing the townspeople for a while. The Republican Party stitched together a lock-step party policy, a complex and insidious campaign of voter suppression, a panoply of pernicious pundits, an entire mega news organization, and piles of money, and created FrankenTrump.

And now they have to live — or die — with it.

More popcorn please.

*And for this I apologize. Back when Michele was still in the Minnesota State Legislature, I was one of her first targets, coincidentally having her son in my evolution class and apparently, at least according to him, inspiring her to introduce one of the first, if not the first, “academic freedom” bills ever. Sorry.

Trump, The Others, and A New Test of the Hypothesis

August 11, 2015Uncategorizedbush, Election 2016, Election 2016, Politics, Polls, Trump, WalkerGreg Laden

A couple of days ago I assimilated data from a bunch of on line polls where people could informally and unscientifically express their opinion about who won the GOP debate (the big boy debate only, with ten candidates). I suggested a series of hypotheses to isolate the idea that this sort of on line unscientific effort might reflect reality, with the idea of testing the results of those polls with upcoming formal polls.

Now we have a couple of formal polls to test against. I took the raw percentages for the ten GOP big boy debate candidates, recalculated the percentages, and came up with the standings of those candidates in the more recent scientifically done polls. The polls are by Bloomberg and WMUR. The former is national, the latter pertains to New Hampshire, which will have a key early primary. Here is the relevant graphic:

We see verification of Trump being in the lead. His performance during the debate was liked by a large majority, and he is the leader of the pack, still by a large majority, by those subsequently polled. What appears to be a drop is more a factor of the difference between asking who won the debate vs. who one would vote for.

There is a big difference, though, in the back field. Bush and Walker were in the lower tier of the back field in people’s response to the debate, but are moving into a shared second place.

So, two things. First, Trump is still winning, and really is winning, the GOP race. Second, unscientific online polls seem in this case meaningful. The polls initially gave uncannily similar (not random) results, and the application of a more scientific methodology verifies them.

I quickly add this. This is not a prediction of who will win the GOP nomination, or who will win the election for President.

Nate Silver makes some excellent points about this question in this blog post. The bottom line is that polling at this stage, or even well into the primary process, does not predict either outcome very well. But I think Silver also misses an important point. These polls are not meaningless. If you view them as having only one function, predicting primary or general election outcomes, they are useless. But they do something else.

Polling at this stage in a presidential race is not about who is going to be President. Rather, such information is a good indicator of what people are thinking, how the politics are operating, how campaigns are doing, what issues are motivating people, and all that stuff. If you see polls early in the process this way, they are interesting. If you want to know who will be on the ballot in November (next November, not this November) or who will win, then … well, no.

The #BlackLivesMatter Disruptive Activism

August 9, 2015Uncategorized#BLM, Activism, Black Lives Matter, Election 2016, Race and Racism, SandersGreg Laden

I have a few thoughts I want to float on the recent #BLM activism that involved, as of this writing, two takeovers of public events. One takeover was at a Netroots Nation event that included Bernie Sanders, the other at a Sanders rally.

First, I think it has to be understood that disruptive actions like this need to be carried out, and carried out more. Unless you can somehow convince me that there is a way to deal with violence in and against the African American community, widespread incarceration, habitual attacks by police on African Americans (and some others), etc. without civil disobedience, I’m going to stick with that. A disruptive action here and there will not leave much of a mark. It will be forgotten about. Sustained and well done disruptive activism is called for in the current situation. If it is only addressed to Bernie Sanders, it will fail, and if it doesn’t sustain through the entire election season, it will fail, in my opinion.

(Having said that, at some point security changes will make stage rushes impossible, and after that, it will all be protesting outside events. That has to be evaluated for effectiveness and a good strategy that works will have to develop. A small protest at every event will probably get ignored. A planned huge protest that does not end up being huge will backfire. A good number of very large outside protest will probably be effective.)

I don’t think either of the events, as far as I can tell, were done as well as one might like. At Netroots Nation, the #BLM activists gained the floor, and seem to have done well making key points. But they didn’t seem to have an exit strategy. An exit strategy would have gained them even more points and avoided some of the irrelevant conversations. An act of disruptive activism is always going to produce whinging and complaining about the act, but it is also good to try to have as much of the ensuing conversation as possible be about the point of the activism itself. It should be all about black lives, mattering, not about the #BLM movement’s tactics.

In the case of the Sanders rally, it appears to me that mistakes were made by both parties. The Sanders people tried to say that the #BLM protesters could take the mic after Sanders spoke. They should have just handed the mic over. On the other hand, it was not clear that the #BLM activists were prepared, both rhetorically and technically, to actually take over the rally.

In this sense, disruption may be a little like “awareness raising.” If either of those on its own is your goal, you won’t win. Those are only parts of a larger strategy, and both can actually have negative effects including the development of an inured public. In the case of going after an election campaign, the larger scale strategy might be to make sure that the problems we are seeing now, including racially motivated violence, mass incarceration, and the unthinkably horrible acts of an emerging police state, become part of the conversation for every campaign. Ideally a good percentage of votes will be gained or lost depending on a candidate’s, or a party’s, position on these issues.

Some people are complaining about the specific reactions of Sanders. I want to add an element to the conversation that I’ve not seen discussed. Normally this would be the kind of thing I’d bring up at an organizing meeting because it is a nuanced issue that a lot of people probably won’t react well to. But it is part of the reality of disrupting campaign events. But first a critically important digression.

The number one cause of death for African American males aged 15–34 is murder. Gun related deaths in the US are higher than anywhere else (not counting war zones, I assume) but for African Americans it is twice as high as white americans. If you are black and in America, your chance of being killed by some violent cause is 12 times higher than if you are black and living in some other developed country. And so on.

How often to cops brutalize, including shooting, African Americans? We don’t know. There are a number of reasons this is hard to figure out, not the least of which being that the US government has reduced, rather than increased, the quality and quantity of data collection, mainly since the NRA does not want easy access to information about gun injuries and deaths. Also the rate may be going up so available numbers may not reflect the present, or important trends. We know that African Americans are significantly overrepresented in the frequency of police shootings. That could be attributed to something other than racist police brutality. Poor communities may have a disproportionate number of African Americans as well as more crime, yadda yadda yadda. The real question is how much targeting do police do of African Americans, and how much more likely are police to shoot an African American rather than a non-African American (or a minority vs. a white person)? The answer to that is that police clearly target blacks, and are more likely to kill black Americans. We just don’t know the numbers. Frankly, the numbers don’t matter to the issue of whether this is something that has to be addressed.

This is nothing new. I first got involved in this issue when I was a teenager, and Keith Balou, 17, was shot in the back and killed by a state trooper in New York. Keith was one of several African Americans killed over the previous couple of years, and that instigated the rise of an organization called “Fight Back.” We had a huge conference in Chicago at which people related their own local stories. Obviously anti-black violence had been going on for centuries, this was just the new version of it. By the way, that was also at the time of one of the early first steps at militarizing the police. There used to be rules about how big a gun cops could carry. Keith was one of the first people, maybe the first, to be killed by a trooper using a .357 magnum, only recently issued to that particular police department.

My point here is that black lives have always mattered, of course, and have always been at risk. I think it is fair to say that this risk level has gone up in our post 9/11 terrified society, with the rise of an increasingly militarized police state. Things are getting worse.

So that’s the background, and that is why the #BLM movement exists, and why it is important.

But there is one detail about disrupting political rallies that should be remembered. I’m not saying don’t do it, but this is a factor that should be taken into account.

Several years ago I saw Jesse Jackson give a talk in Milwaukee. He was running for president. The talk was at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee student union. There had been rumors that someone was going to try to kill Jackson, so the security was tight. When Jessie went to shake everyone’s hand at the edge of the stage, a secret service agent stood next to him with machine pistol, thinly disguised as a handbag, pointed at the crowd. He was prepared to kill anyone who pulled out a gun. No one did, by the way.

Running for president is a bit dangerous. Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Kennedy, and George Wallace were shot while running for president. Franklin Roosevelt was attacked while president elect. Of the 44 individuals who have been president, four (nearly one in ten) have been killed, 16 have been seriously attacked, with, I think, ten attacked with guns or, in one case, a hand grenade. In other words, the chance of being attacked with a gun or explosive, credibly, with about a 50–50 mortality rate, if you are president, at least to one in four, depending on how you count each attack.

Over the last seven presidents, four or five, depending on how you count it, were credibly and dangerously attacked. Ford was shot at twice. Reagan was shot and seriously wounded. Clinton was fired upon in 1994, George W. Bush had a grenade tossed at him in Tblisi. There have been various attacks on Obama but I think that was mostly just people jumping over his fence.

What is the point of this? The point is NOT to say that we should feel sorry for presidential candidates, elected presidents, or ex presidents, at the expense of black lives mattering. This is where the nuance comes in. This is not zero-sum game. Too much ammunition for that to be the case. The point of saying all this is simple. If you are going to plan a disruption campaign against candidates, you have to assume that those you are going after will be freaked out. They were already freaked out. They’ve already had the conversation about whether or not to wear a bullet proof vest. They’ve already been held in the kitchen or some waiting room while tough looking scary people check to make sure their pistols are loaded and ready, their communications systems in place. If they were paying attention, they already know about the snipers positioned on nearby buildings, and they probably walked by the ambulance positioned near by to take them to the emergency room when the shot that changes their lives, or ends it, rings out.

As campaigns progress, Secret Service protection is eventually handed out, or increased. It may actually be impossible, as I mentioned above, to disrupt talks and rallies by going after the stage. Alternative strategies will have to be developed.

Meanwhile, be careful.

Added:

The Beginning of The End of [Donald Trump/Tea Party/Fox News] UPDATED

August 8, 2015UncategorizedDonald Trump, Election 2016, Election 2016, Fauxbate, GOP Debate, Megyn Kelly, PoliticsGreg Laden

Select one and only one. Or two if you like.

— see down below for update —
Megyn Kelly of FOX news went after Donald Trump, the apparent winner of the FOX-GOP Fauxbate. Donald Trump at first declared that he has no time to be politically correct. Later he proved that he does have time to be politically incorrect, when he seemed to imply that Kelly was out of sorts during the debate because she was having female problems.

This led a conservative organization to dump Trump from a keynote speakers spot. We see a crack in the armor form as Erick Erickson, who had invited Trump to speak, disinvites him at the same time that he makes it clear that this is not because Trump was “politically incorrect.” Rather, it was because Trump failed to follow common decency. That is a crack in the armor because political correctness IS common decency.

The right wing has created several monsters. The Tea Party, the philosophical leaders such as Rush Limbaugh, and a gaggle of candidates and elected officials who are far beyond the pale of anything acceptable in terms of civil liberties. And, among those monsters is Donald Trump, who combines the worst of the philosophical leaders with the worst of those seeking office.

And now even some of the conservatives realize that Trump is too much. But not too too much, because one does not want to admit that being politically correct is the right thing to do. This is called tripping over one’s own dog whistle.

What has to be remembered here, I think, is that Trump is the same as all the others, just less polished, more in your face, more direct. But somehow he strikes a nerve with those who created him.

The real issue here is not what Trump said. He didn’t say anything worse during the debate or in the aftermath (his remarks about Megan Kelly’s menstrual status, for example) than any of the elected officials who have chastised women who have been raped for having a problem with being raped.

The real issue is that he offended his keepers, FOX news. He is not respecting his role. The philosophical leaders are supposed to bully and threaten and set the tone, FOX news is supposed to spread the rhetoric to the masses. The masses, the Tea Party asses, are supposed to vote for the Republicans, and the candidates are supposed to, and are paid to, maintain policies that shore up the 1%.

By going after one of the FOX personalities, he has violated the internal order. Now, they are turning on him. What remains to be seen is how the masses, who believe they are acting independently, will respond to this. Will they fall in line and do what FOX says, dumping The Donald? Or will they see FOX’s attack on Trump as an offense, and turn on FOX?

First Test Of Hypothesis

An NBC Poll taken right after the debate tested voter opinions of the various candidates. This is also an online polls. The poll asks about more candidates than were in the Big Boy debate, but shows very little movement for trump (a slight increase, from 22% to 23%). A few other candidates have much larger numbers (but still one digit) which takes away from Trump’s total percentage (recalculated for just those in the second debate, Trump has 28%). The overall order of the candidates remains roughly the same, with Trump way out in front, and then two tiers. Rubio, Carson and Cruz are still in the upper tier, the other candidates in the lower tier.

So, I’m calling it, so far, failed to disprove. The concept remains standing. Trump is the candidate that is actually winning, as indicated by both scientific on line polls and the NBC poll.

Unscientific polls rocket Trump to way top spot.

August 7, 2015UncategorizedElection 2016, Election 2016, GOP Debate, Politics, Polls, TrumpGreg Laden

Trump went into the GOP debate last night with a roughly 20% poll standing. Everyone will tell you to ignore polls early in this race, they never predict the outcome of a primary or a general election. That, however, is a non sequitur. We do not look at early polls to predict the distant future. We look at them to help understand the present, and to get a handle on what might happen over the next few weeks. The meaning of the polls shifts quite a bit before the first primaries, then they meaning of the polls has to be re-evaluated after every primary. At some point the re-evaluations start to return an end result like “Candidates A and B are in a horserace” or “Candidate A is the clear leader.” After that, you can get caught on a boat with your mistress, or you can be killed, and that can change things, but not much else does. Democrats believe in the Dark Horse but no one has ever captured one to my knowledge. But up until that point, polls are useful, and meaningful, if done scientifically, but no, the fact that they don’t predict an outcome over a year in advance is not a surprise and does not mean they don’t have interest or utility.

But what about unscientific polls?

Well, they are not scientific and thus not worthy. However, over the last few hours, several non-scientific polls, and in this case I mean internet polls where anybody who happens on a site can vote, have come out asking who won last night’s GOP primary.

If a bunch of unscientific polls that all return the same result become scientific, or at least, believable? That is a hypothesis I’d like to test with the current polling. It seems to me that if informal web based polls from across a spectrum of political orientation (of the site, not the poll clickers … we don’t know who the poll clickers are) all show similar results, then they might mean something. So, here is the hypothesis. If several informal polls show a very similar result, we expect to see that result reflected in the first scientific polls that come out.

I got poll results from the following sources (shown in order from left to right on the charts):

Slate
Right Scoop
Fox 5
Drudge
Palm Beach Post
News OK

Sadly MNSNBC had a poll but it was fairly useless in the way it was conducted. Also, HT Politics had a poll with similar results as those above, but I found it after I’d made the graphs.

Trump was a clear winner in these polls.

Trump’s numbers ranged over several points, but are always higher than everyone else, and approached or met 50%. One hypothesis predicts that formal, scientific polls should have Trump as the front runner. Another hypothesis predicts that Trump’s numbers in a scientific poll should be between about 40% and 50%, give or take a few points.

The gaggle of low numbers is difficult to even see on this graph, so I made a second graph with everybody but Trump:

Here we see what looks to me like two tiers. Walker, Christie, Bush, Huckabere and Paul are all really low, while Cruz, Kasich, Carson and Rubio are all relatively high. Note how variable Cruz’s numbers are. But aside from Cruz, just as is the case with Trump, the results are fairly similar across the polls.

One hypothesis would then be that Walker will be shown as dead last in upcoming proper post debate polls. One could produce a number of other hypotheses as well, but it could get messy. Let’s try this hypothesis. Upcoming proper post debate polls will have a rank order statistically like this:

Trump
Rubio
Carson
Kasich
Cruz
Paul
Huckabee
Bush
Christie
Walker

An additional hypothesis should probably be made, that the rank order for all the non-Trump candidates will be as shown. (This avoids the problem of having such a large magnitude of difference between the first and second rank).

There is one poll that I know of that was conducted by pollsters. It is by One America News Network, a conservative news agency that bills itself as “credible” (which is funny, why would you have to say that if you were that?)

If we take this poll by itself, most of the above suggested hypotheses are smashed. Here is the result of the poll questions “who won the debate” and “who lost the debate.”

This poll asked questions of “Republican poll participants.” It shows Ben Carson beating Trump, and a lot less spread between leader and others than the on line polls indicated. Also, very few people thought Scott Walker, who was a big looser in the on line polls, had lost the debate. Generally, the rank order between this poll and the on line polls is different.

Reading the reporting of this poll, it looks a lot like a shill for Ben Carson. Details of the methodology are as follows:

Gravis Marketing, a nonpartisan research firm, conducted a random survey of 904 registered Republican voters across the U.S. Questions included in the poll were focused only on the top ten GOP candidates that participated in the 9 PM ET debate. The poll has an overall margin of error of +/- 3%. The polls were conducted on August 6, immediately following the GOP debate using interactive voice response, IVR, technology. The poll was conducted exclusively for One America News Network.

I should add that the agency reporting the poll is owned by the company that commissioned the poll. Gravis, the pollsters, are used at Real Clear Politics. So I’m on the fence about the legitimacy of this poll and eagerly await other results.