Nate Silver

Nate Silver at the NYT's 538 blog is probably 50 IQ points brighter than I am, I being a dumb suburban mick lawyer. But I think he's wrong tonight

It isn’t surprising that the House Republicans approved Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which had been endorsed by their leadership. What was more remarkable, however, was the near-unanimity of the vote: just 4 Republicans dissented, while 2 others did not vote. (Democrats voted against the proposal 189-0).

Let me quote the great philosopher Wayne Gretzky. "The secret to my success wasn't skating to where the puck was, it was skating to where I thought the puck as going to go"

If one thinks political economics is a static field, then yes, voting for a massive restructure if Medicare so as to to bring the budget into balance is a big risk.   Certaintly anyone eager to benefit from Medicare now or in the foreseeable future will be made a bit uncomfortable with the GOP with this vote. (Let's omit the bald face fact Ryan's plan grandfathers in the 55 & over crowd; the DNC will still try to scare them).

 If 2012 is a "normal" election year Nate Silver is right: the GOP has taken a big policy risk for little obvious reward. ( Of course, one might argue keeping the country solvent is its own reward).  The problem is I don't think 2012 will be a "normal" year. Moreover, if it is a "normal year", Obama probably wins a relatively easy reelection and the GOP House is on their own, ala 1996.

So, what are the likely environmental conditions for 2012?

* Higher energy costs

* A deficit exceeding $1 trillion

* Fewer employed Americans than when Obama took office. (especially in Florida & the Rust Belt)

This is not a scenario for the Democratic Party to suggest President Obama should be rewarded with more supporters in Congress. It is a scenario where voters will want a new path out of the wilderness. 

Given that situation, is is a better gamble for the House GOP to run on what amounts to continuing the status quo, or to argue they are fighting for a materiallly different alternative that promises voters better results?

I would also posit that given that most senior citizen swing voters are blue collar whites, the President's yuppie persona gets in the way of rallying opposition to Republican proposals.   Damm all those bitter clingers.

As for the swing district Republicans, the lesson of 2006 was that no matter how hard the likes of Nancy Johnson and Linc Chaffee tried to extricate themselves from Iraq, deficits & Mark Foley, the Dems pulled them back in.   Why not stand together rather than lose through division. 

In addition, I've extrapolated this post based on what I think are conservative assumptions as to energy prices and the job market. A "black swan" event will in all likilihood, demolish what is left of Obama's credibility with swing voters. 

Sometimes the biggest gamble is to try and play it safe. We are in a time of extraordinary disaffection from government institutions and economic instability.  Running a traditional incumbents platform under these circumstances is probably the worst bet of all.

Well, we got this month's Barack Obama speech of the century last night, where as usual he had ascertained the solution to all our problems, which of course were blamed on just about everybody outside the venue of the speech.

Democratic Presidents since Truman have been uncomfortable warriors, probably because they are enamored of "nuance"; which is a very scarce commodity on a battlefield. In  last night's speech, Obama asserted Afghanistan was a vital concern and must be supported, he would approve a military surge there similar to the one he opposed in Iraq, and no matter what, we'd start pulling out  in the middle of 2011;  since the $2.5 billion/month expense (loose change next to the AIG bailout) was needed for something like ACORN.

Not once did the President use the word "victory"---and my word, this was a tailor made audience for the President to cross the Rubicon and embrace his constitutional role as Commander-in-Chief. Just couldn't quite look comfortable doing it.

I agree with the concept of what the President is doing because after 94 days he didn't have a better idea than his generals, and agreed to it. However, he's placed a big unnecessary burden on himself to placate either the Kool-Aid Left or his own vanity.

He's obsessed with international cooperation. The track record in Iraq suggests otherwise. Where US soldiers carried more of the fighting, they got better results. The multinational force in Afghanistan was less efficient. If 40,000 more troops were needed; better they all be American under a single command and ROE. The Euros have little stomach left for the fight anyway, why make them pretend.

He is going to do a Lyndon Johnson and micromanage the war based on milestones other than military success.  Tying further aid to whether the locals rid themselves of corrupt and incompetent local officials is a good idea.  Except in a war.   Perhaps the President could apply that concept to ACORN and his party's urban machines as a start. In a war theatre, making security gains enables political progress.  The President sees things differently, but much like Johnson, he is a partisan politician at heart eager to cut deals. 

Finally, as far as just kicking the can down the road and creating a huge future headache for himself heading into his re-election, well I can't improve on what Nate Silver said at 538.com

  Politically, this seems very risky: in the long run, there's much more downside to breaking the promise than there would be upside to keeping it. If nothing much has changed in Afghanistan and our troops aren't getting out 20 months hence, we can presumably expect some major blowback, especially from liberals -- a primary challenge from Obama's left flank would not be entirely out of the question.Of course, it may be precisely because the withdraw timetable is so risky politically that it is in fact credible; a credible withdraw deadline is almost certainly better than a non-credible one, but whether or not it's better than not setting a deadline at all, I don't know. I certainly do hope that Obama set the deadline to achieve policy goals and not to quiesce liberals -- if this was intended purely as a political move, it was probably short-sighted.

One way or another, there's a high probability Obama will be a military failure by the terms he defined for himself. If Afghanistan is not pacified by mid 2011, he will have to deal with failure by either breaking his promise to the Left or abandoning an ally to the tender mercies of the Islamofascists.  At that point Door #1 will be defined as "Quagmire" and Door #2 as "Cut  and Run".  And much as "victory" was not a word associated with Vietnam, Barack Obama will have painted himself into Lyndon Johnson's corner.

One final thing. Even if Obama "succeeds" he will have his opposition to the virtually similar Iraq surge thrown in his face, that in order to save his Presidency, he was forced to steal the military strategy of George W. Bush he denounced in order to gain office.   A success for America may yet be politically hollow for the chronically unhappy warrior.

Jon cited Nate Silver on Friday for the following proposition:

Looking at new Gallup data on partisan identification by age, Silver tried mapping it against the question: "who was President when you turned 18?" As it turns out, "the popularity -- or lack thereof -- of the President when the voter turned 18 would seem to have a lot of explanatory power for how their politics turned out later on".

Silver’s conclusion is based on an incredibly helpful publication from Gallup, which illustrates the net Democratic party identification based upon age. It concludes that the Democrats’ are the strongest among the baby boomers and (to a greater degree) Generation “Y”.

Silver doesn’t subject his hypothesis to any statistical testing, which is anomalous for him. Instead he breaks the Gallup chart down by Presidency, and provides a qualitative narrative of which Presidents were popular, which were unpopular, and to what degree the Democrats’ partisan advantage correlates with those Presidencies.

At the outset there are some problems with this. Silver’s years don’t match up with the given Presidencies. If you look at the chart closely, George W. Bush’s Presidency is longer than Clinton’s, Reagan’s, or Eisenhower’s – and it still doesn’t cover all the datapoints at the end of Gallup’s series. But Bush’s Presidency certainly felt longer than any of those, and the changes are minimal, so I guess Silver gets a pass here.

The descriptive data itself are more problematic. Silver alternates between (i) generalized descriptions of Presidencies over an eight year tenure, (ii) how Presidents are viewed today, and (iii) (his actual hypothesis) how President were viewed when the people turned 18. For an example of each:

(i) “Reagan, a highly successful President who was popular throughout most of his term and may be even more popular today, is associated with a considerably above-average amount of Republican support.”

(ii) “Johnson, whose complicated time in office is generally regarded today as having been an above-average Presidency, is associated with generally above-average levels of Democratic support.”

(iii) “Kennedy, who was very popular throughout his brief tenure in the White House, is associated with above-average levels of Democratic support. (You can almost see the spike in popularity among 64- and 65- year olds, who would have been about 17 when Kennedy took office.)”

All of these descriptions are problematic – Reagan was highly unpopular in the second and third years of his Presidency, when Republicans suffered the sixth-worst midterm election for any party since World War II – but this results in only a one-point increase in partisan identification for Democrats. Johnson’s Presidency may be viewed as successful today by some, but from May 1966 through 1968 his approval ratings never rose above 50%. Oddly, this period correlates with a jump in Democratic identification; likewise as Nixon becomes less popular the Democrats’ advantage declines. If (iii) is true, one would expect a downward spike for Ford, whose approval ratings were mired in the 30s and 40s for most of his very short term.

Subjected to statistical rigor, the popularity of the incumbent President when a voter turns eighteen has very little predictive value. If you take Gallup’s data regarding the Democratic affiliation of each age range of voters, and you regress it against the average Presidential approval rating for the year those voters turned 18 (for Republican Presidencies, use 100-[approval] so we’re always looking at how the Democratic point of view on a Presidency is viewed), and you get an r-square of .04 and a variable that just misses statistical significance at the 95% confidence interval.

To put it differently, if we chart the Democratic party ID advantage by the year that a voter turned 18, we get a chart that looks identical to Silver’s. If we superimpose the average annual approval rating for the year that voter turned 18 over that, and then add trendlines for each dataset, we get a chart that looks like this (I’ve divided the approval rating by 5 just to get the scale to line up; since this is a linear transformation it doesn’t matter):

If the correlation that Silver hypothesizes were present, the trendlines would move in tandem – as the approval of a Democratic (or disapproval of a Republican) President would correlate nicely with a spike in Democratic identification. As we already know from our r-square, this doesn’t really happen.

But, as you expand the age range, the correlation improves. If you average the Presidential approval for when the voter was 18 and 19, and regress it against the Democratic identification advantage, the correlation is about .08, and the variable is fully significant. As you keep adding on years, the correlation grows stronger, until you are averaging the Presidential approval ratings from when a voter was 18 until she was 32 (at which point the r-square is about .282 and the t-stat is 5.22. Every point increase in average Democratic Presidential approval rating over those years results in a .3% increase in Democratic affiliation. After that, adding years to the spread decreases the model’s predictive abilities.

If we revisit our chart, we come up with something that looks like this:

Note that now our trendlines are moving together nicely, with peaks and valleys roughly correlating.

Then, if we move the bottom end of the range backward, the model continues to improve. In other words, if we look at average approval rating where the voter is 17-32, 16-32, 15-32, etc., the model continues to improve. It reaches maximum efficiency at an r-square of .66. I’m ultimately skeptical of the strength of this model, because we know that things like race, gender, income, and parental partisan affiliation have an impact on a person’s id as well. It seems like this is explaining too much. Nevertheless, it seems that – as we may intuit – partisan identification is not determined precisely at age 18, but rather is a process that occurs over several years of a young voter’s life.

This explains one of the mysteries of Silver’s narrative. He writes that “Finally, we get to Truman and Roosevelt, where things seem to break down a bit. Truman is regarded quite favorably by historians today but was unpopular for much of his tenure; he is associated with average-to-slightly-below levels of Democratic support. [Note that here Silver is talking about contemporaneous views of the President versus modern views]. The numbers then bounce around a bit for FDR, perhaps because there aren't all that many people in their mid-80s and so the sample sizes are small.”

The Gallup data explain that the sample size never gets below 650, which is plenty of voters to tamp down statistical noise. What is probably going on is that a voter who turned 18 in the early 1940s came of political age in the late 1930s, when FDR was not particularly popular. They then went through a peak in FDR’s popularity during World War II, a trough in Democratic popularity through the Truman years, and a peak in Republican popularity under Eisenhower. Unsurprisingly, voters here are mildly, though not enthusiastically, Democratic (I don’t know that the data here are any noisier than for those who turned 18 in the 1950s and 1960s).

Ultimately, Silver’s main thesis is intact: Bush is likely to haunt Republicans for a generation, as the back-to-back successful Clinton Presidency and failed Bush Presidency have likely set younger voters on a pro-Democratic path that will endure. Of course, even voters who turned 10 in 1996 have not yet finished their partisan development, so if Obama’s Presidency takes a wrong turn, Republicans will have an opportunity to bend the trendline in Democratic ID back their direction.

Finally, we should note that “party identification” does not necessarily equal “voting.” If this were the case, Kentucky would be one of the most solidly Democratic states in the country. Likewise, the 45-59 demographic should have been a good one for Obama, but it wasn’t. Ultimately issues, candidates and campaigns matter, which could truly be the Republicans’ saving grace in the longrun.