Publius's blog

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.

Promoted - a Republican insider frets about leadership.

Today's Examiner editorializes about a proposed ruling from the Bush White House's FCC regarding freedom of the airwaves. It's everything we fear the new Obama administration will do. Except it's coming from a Republican.

George W. Bush has not done much to help the Republican Party. His abysmal approval ratings are a big part of why we suffered so badly in congressional districts last Tuesday. Even in solid Republican districts, his approval ratings are in the 20s or 30s and it's been reported that the the right track/wrong track numbers in these districts are in the teens or even single digits. This administration from the beginning has refused to work with Republicans in congress or at the state level. In short, they've been arrogant bullies to their own people.

Now, let's look at the internal politicking taking place with the Republican leadership race for NRCC Chair. I don't have a dog in this fight. It would seem there certainly are areas where Tom Cole can improve. But will Pete Sessions be a better NRCC Chair? Don't know. Fundraising will be extremely difficult this next cycle (fewer members raising few dollars), as will candidate recruitment (who would want to run for congress when it's going to be tough raising money?) - the two big issues Sessions says he will improve if elected NRCC Chair. Fine. Good luck to whoever ends up in that job next year.

What bothers me most about the Chairman's race is that Boehner and the WHITE HOUSE (i.e., Barry Jackson, the guy who replaced Karl Rove last year) are running the campaign to elect Sessions as NRCC Chair.

Boehner, who refuses to accept any responsibility for losing more than 50 - FIFTY - House seats between 2006 to 2008, wants his own guy at the NRCC. So he's making phone calls to Members and putting the heat on them to vote for Sessions. And his partner in all of this is Jackson, who still has the weight of the White House behind him.

How exactly is this party going to move forward if everyone in leadership is hand-picked by Boehner and the Bush White House? How is that progress?

There won't be one single person in leadership who is independent of Boehner. Aside from the NRCC chairman's race, none of the seats is being contested. Boehner cleared the field and selected his own people.

And what will this yield? What should we expect from a leadership team hand picked by the same people who, as noted in today's Examiner piece, think so little of Republicans and our freedoms that they would allow the FCC to regulate the airwaves with community activists (what's to stop ACORN members will sit on the advisory boards)?

I'm at my wit's end.

You might think the Republicans in the House of Representatives would be itching to appoint a Whip successor who warned the party that it was losing its way, who challenged the party when it made error after discrediting error, someone who wasn’t helping to steer the GOP into the crushing defeats of 2006 and 2008.

But while Mike Pence is a fresh and positive face for the House Republican Conference, the Minority Leader and Whip positions are remaining status quo.  Republicans are right back where they were in 2006, when a Hill headline read, "GOP Keeps Team, Promises Changes".

While many people are questioning the wisdom of Boehner remaining in the Minority leadership, though, there's been less attention given to Eric Cantor's basically unopposed elevation to the Minority Whip position.  But why?

• Cantor has been Chief Deputy Whip since he was re-elected to his second term in 2002, one of the longest serving people in the disastrous House Republican leadership. 
• He initially opposed the pork-laden Highway Bill, but came around to support it, Bridge to Nowhere and all. 
• He boosted for the massive Medicare prescription drug expansion, against the protests of Jeff Flake, Mike Pence and other solid conservatives.  
• Cantor ridiculously blamed the failure of the first compromise bailout bill on Nancy Pelos giving a partisan speech, and voted for the nationalization of the American financial sector.
• Eric Cantor had numerous connections to Abramoff; Abramoff's Signatures restaurant even named a sandwich after Eric Cantor.

There are a few possibilities.

• Cantor was ineffective at stopping the damage that the House GOP was doing to itself.
• Cantor enabled the less savory elements of the House to continue dragging down the party brand.
• Cantor actively leading the House Republicans into their current state.

Many Republicans hold Eric Cantor in high esteem, and he does have some positive qualities.   But in what sense does Cantor represent "change"?

Rep. Cantor may have many fine qualities and he may be good on many (clearly not all) issues important to the Right—at least he opposed the Farm Bill. But despite all of that, he still managed to become a striking symbol of the status quo at a time when the GOP needs serious, thorough reform.

The deck chairs are being shuffled.  At least the Titanic went down after hitting only one iceberg.  Republicans seem determined to hit as many icebergs as possible on the way down.

Promoted - an insider speculates about today's news that Tim Mahoney paid off his mistress.

Today’s breaking news about Florida Congressman Tim Mahoney paying off his mistress for $121,000 begs a very important question: What did Rahm Emanuel know and when did he know it?

According to ABC News, which broke the story online earlier today, Congressman Rahm Emanuel knew (or had heard) about Mahoney’s affair last year and confronted Mahoney about it.

Senior Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives, including Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), the chair of the Democratic Caucus, have been working with Mahoney to keep the matter from hurting his re-election campaign, the Mahoney staffers said.

A spokesperson for Emanuel, said he confronted Mahoney "upon hearing a rumor" about an affair in 2007 and "told him he was in public life and had a responsibility to act accordingly." Emanuel's spokesperson said he had not had any further contacts with Mahoney on the subject and did not know the woman involved worked on Mahoney's Congressional staff until informed by ABC News.

So what…so Rahm had a conversation more than a year ago.  Big deal.

Ya, except that we know one thing about Rahm from his vociferous denials two years ago about his involvement in leaking the Mark Foley emails: Rahm is a habitual liar.

RealClearPolitics.com flashback:

For those keeping score, Emanuel denied knowledge of the [Foley] e-mails six times, and twice declared the source of the leaks was a Republican. As it turned out, the answer to Stephanopoulos’ first question concerning whether this was a Democrat dirty trick should actually have been ‘Yes.’

It stands to reason that Rahm Emanuel wanted to protect his investment in Florida’s 16^th Congressional District and wasn’t about to let Mahoney’s tryst undo all the damage Emanuel was able to do to Republicans in 2006. 

The question to Rahm is “What did you know and when did you know it?”  Only this time, tell the truth. 

The theory is that Mahoney could have laundered the $121,000 payoff through his media vendor back in March. (For those still keeping score, that’s a major violation of the law.)  Mahoney made a $150,000 campaign expenditure to his media consultant back in March.  According to the FEC, the money was reported for a “Media Time Buy.”  Except, no media time was ever purchased.  That’s a whole lotta money for nothing in return.  (Other than the silence of a woman scorned.)

UPDATE

Mahoney's media vendor has put out a press release.  You need to read this.  Below the fold.

There will be many sad and deplorable stories to come out of this bailout farce. One of them has been the brazen opportunism of the Labor Unions. The magnanimous bailout proposal from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was, in fact, just a rent-seeking wish list.   Take this proposal, for instance:

An Economy That Works for Everyone

Following the longest period of wage stagnation in American history, we are in an era of historic income inequality. Between 1980 and 2004 CEO pay went up 700% -- but American workers’ wages saw little change.

By enacting The Employee Free Choice Act at no cost to taxpayers, government has the opportunity to set a framework for the private sector to ensure we have an economy that works for everyone—not just those at the top. American workers should have the chance to freely choose whether to join together in a union at their workplace so they gain a voice on the job, wages that support a family, and better benefits.

Never mind that the "wage stagnation" is largely a myth (among many other things, wages are only one part of total compensation). The Employee Free Choice Act (aka: Card Check) isn't about "free choice", it is about lower barriers for Union organizers. It is far easier for them to pressure people, on the spot, to sign a card than it is to persuade workers to sign a secret ballot.

You might expect that the SEIU would lobby to tilt the playing field to their advantage, but the really shocking thing is this: the SEIU claimed removing the secret ballot would cost $0.00.

Of course, we know what they really mean: it won’t cost the government anything; the costs of this regulation would come out of someone else’s hide.

That is a bailout alright, but it had nothing to do with the subprime mortgage problem. It was a cynical ploy to get the government to bail out the increasingly desperate unions.

One month ago today, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece pointing out that the ironically-named Employee Free Choice Act actually makes it “more difficult for [Americans] not to join a union,” while states that resist this kind of regulation have higher growth in per-capita income, higher rates of job creation and lower unemployment.

This is far from an exception for the Unions.  Their ongoing lobbying for "green collar jobs" - which are generally just existing jobs that have been reclassified to benefit Unions - is a farce, as well;  the Texas Workforce Commission pointed out the many ways that is a charade in a recent report.

Unfortunately, Unions see their opportunity to conscript Americans workers and manipulate jobs into Union hands.  They know the stakes in 2008; that is why they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to elect their stooges.  The cost of this will not be $0.00.

A guest post from an anonymous insider on the Right.

In general, when Congress funds a specific product or program, companies engage in a competitive process to receive the money.  However, earmarks circumvent the process and allow Politicians to determine who gets the government funds.  Earmarks allow Politicians to fund their pet projects or provide benefits to companies which help fund their campaigns. 

For instance, General Motors has contributed $29,000 to Sen. Carl Levin's campaign.  In exchange, he earmarked $10 million dollars for them in the Department of Defense Appropriations Bill.  That's a substantial return on an investment.
 
Senator Levin apparently does not like the press he is receiving from his earmarking efforts (49 requests in this legislative cycle alone), so he has devised a scheme to cover up his activity - a scheme that threatens the entire fight against earmarks. 

I am reliably told that Senators DeMint and Senator Coburn are willing to go to war on this issue.

To cover up his activity, Senator Levin is attempting to place earmarks in committee reports instead of including them as part of the legislative language.  He did this by hiding some language in the Department of Defense Appropriations Bill which changes the way earmarks are viewed. 

Most senators don't bother to read legislative language and even fewer have time to read more extensive committee reports.  Under Senator Levin's cover up scheme, he can hide behind committee reports that are never voted on and talk out of both sides of his mouth by arguing that committee reports do not have the force of law.  What Levin will not tell you is that, because of the special language he slipped in, earmarks in committee reports do have the force of law.
 
Senator DeMint has an amendment (cosponsored by Senators Coburn and Burr) to strike the requirement that earmarks which have not been voted on in committee or otherwise be treated as law.  Senator DeMint attempted to offer his amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Bill on Thursday afternoon, but Senator Levin objected to even the right to debate the issue and would not allow Senator DeMint to introduce the amendment for consideration. 

Obviously, Senator Levin has something to hide.

If Senator DeMint is not allowed to offer his amendment, $5.9 billion in earmarks will be handed out at the taxpayers' expense without the benefit of any debate.

As the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Levin has the responsibility of writing the committee report and he can place anything in the report he chooses.  He has chosen to use his Chairmanship to the tune of $198 million.  And to cover it up so that the corrupt earmarking status quo would continue.

Senate Democrats promised more open government.  This is not it. 
 
Senator Levin announced on Thursday that cloture on the bill will be filed on Friday.  If cloture is invoked, America will suffer a $5.9 billion cover up.

[Promoted - this is written by an important ally on the Right who would prefer pseudonimity for now.  He makes a number of extremely important points - Jon Henke]

Four thoughts on how the GOP can renew itself online:

1.      Be motivated. People primarily point to the Left’s metrics of raising more money online, and generating bigger crowds for their issues, as the reason why they are ahead vs. The Right.  This is 1/2 of the problem.  It chiefly boils down to enthusiasm for engagement.  The GOP can be motivated if they once again return to their roots and adopt a message that resonates with the American People.  That message could very well be the Platform of the American People.  Remember, Moveon.org started because the left was angry over impeachment and then it waned and caught second wind after the Iraq War.  If we are motivated, money will be raised online to fight good causes and good causes excite people.

2.      Relocate & stop hiring partisan vendors.  Another 1/4 of the problem is a combination of bad technology, bad user experience and not being smart about looking ahead. Republicans should absolutely hire someone whose sole job it is to study and monitor the Online Left and study Moveon.org, the Huffington Post, DailyKos and BarackObama.com.   Republicans need good advice and good technology from the private sector.  Every Republican ought to learn what is happening in Silicon Valley and stop looking to Washington-based web consultants for the answer.  If Republicans are serious about winning back the web, they ought to look to Silicon Valley to learn from the private sector.

3.      Have a Long Term Approach to solving this big problem.  The RNC got #2 (above) right when they hired Cyrus Krohn, a Silicon Valley executive, to run the GOP’s site.  But, Republican political internet operatives, by nature, operate from one campaign to the next.  As bright as Cyrus is, he will be limited in executing his vision because of the rules of the RNC, which limit the RNC’s hiring contracts to no more than two years (the term of a chairman).  If the RNC was smart, they would give Cyrus (or someone in his capacity) a 5 year contract.  The GOP needs a long term Marshall Plan–like solution to solving the Digital Divide; an approach that lasts longer than just the next election cycle. That is the last ¼ of the problem.

4.      Historical trend. Add the above three together with simply looking at history.  Historically, the party out of power clings to the media of the day to try to balance that power deficit. The GOP clung to talk radio during the Clinton years, and the Left clung to the Internet during the Bush years.  So part of this is somewhat historical.  Its possible that a true catch up on the Internet will likely only materialize if the GOP completely bottoms out, which, if the last three special elections are any indication, may be sooner than we think.

In summary, here is a mathematical formula for where we are at today: NO ISSUES + BAD CONSULTANTS + MYOPTIC VISION + HISTORY = GOP NET DISASTER.