Sunday, January 31, 2016
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Four Roads Out of Iowa For Republicans
Yes, I know: There’s an incredibly handsome orange-haired man from Queens sitting atop the polls. Donald Trump has a serious chance to win the Republican nomination — not words I’d have expected myself to be writing six months ago.1 Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, however, still have a shot to knock Trump off his pedestal. Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Chris Christie might have a chance too, although they’ll need a lot of things to break right for them.
The dominoes will begin falling after the Iowa caucuses on Monday night. It seems to me there are four basic narratives that could emerge from the state. (By “narratives,” I mean how the media, Republican party elites and the other candidates will interpret the results. Be warned: How the media responds is sometimes way more predictable than how voters do.) They depend, respectively, on whether Trump beats Cruz, and on how well Rubio does.
About Rubio: What it means to perform “well” is obviously a little subjective, but how a candidate does relative to his polls is usually a pretty good guide to the spin that eventually emerges. Recent Iowa polls have Rubio in third place, with a vote share in the mid-teens. If Rubio finishes in the low teens or worse, his performance is likely to be regarded as disappointing (he’ll also be at risk of falling behind Ben Carson or another candidate into fourth place). If he’s in the high teens or better, he’ll probably be regarded as having momentum, especially if he slips into second place. Our models also think there’s an outside chance — 7 to 10 percent, depending on which version you look at — for Rubio to win Iowa. That’s mostly out of an abundance of caution: Iowa polls are sometimes wildly off the mark.2 The scenarios below contemplate Rubio finishing in second or a strong third place, but not winning. Of course, there could be even crazier outcomes still — our models give Carson around a 1-in-100 chance of winning Iowa, for example — but the four cases we describe below are the ones we take to be most likely.
Road No. 1: Trump beats Cruz, and Rubio does well
This seems to be the result the cognoscenti are expecting. Betting markets give Trump a two-in-three chance to win Iowa; our models now have him favored too, although not by as clear a margin as the markets. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of talk, with some justification, that Rubio has “momentum” going into the caucuses.
No matter what happens, the first headlines that emerge from Iowa are likely to be about Trump. Depending on exactly how well Rubio does, however, the conventional wisdom could congeal into anticipating a two-man race between Trump and Rubio. Perhaps that’s the matchup Republicans deserve. Rubio and Trump offer the two clearest visions for what the Republican Party’s future might look like: a forward-looking but emphatically conservative party in Rubio’s case, a populist-leaning and perhaps radically changed one in Trump’s.
It’s also the matchup that Republican “party elites” seem to want. By mounting an anti-Cruz campaign in Iowa, they were necessarily helping Trump, perhaps on the theory that another candidate could emerge to defeat Trump later on. If Rubio performed well in Iowa, he’d look like that candidate, giving party elites as good an outcome as they had any right to expect.
The big caveat is that this was possibly an idiotic strategy to begin with; it’s nearly impossible to control either Trump or the media narrative surrounding him, and it might be even harder after a big win in Iowa. We’d want to look for active signs of party leaders moving toward Rubio — in the form of endorsements, and explicit pressure on candidates like Bush to drop out of the race. If Republican bigwigs just sit passively golf-clapping the result instead, the Trump whirlwind could sweep the news about Rubio’s vaguely good finish off the front pages.
Road No. 2: Trump beats Cruz, and Rubio does poorly
Get your Drudge sirens ready. If Trump not only wins but blows out the competition, with both Cruz and “savior” Rubio flopping, Monday will be one of the most famous days in American political history.3 Although there might be some hope of anointing a new savior in New Hampshire — Bush, Kasich and Christie — other party elites might begin to capitulate toward Trump, as is already happening to some degree.
Could Trump get off to an extremely strong start, winning the first several states along with most of them in the “SEC Primary” on March 1, only to fail later on? Well, perhaps. The GOP calendar backloads a lot of winner-take-all or winner-take-most primaries in blue and purple states into April and beyond, so Trump could emerge with huge amounts of momentum but not be anywhere close to mathematically clinching the nomination. To some extent, we’d be in uncharted territory, since a Trump-like candidate has never gotten off to such a strong start before. But for Trump to lose, someone would have to beat him, and if both Cruz and Rubio blew their chances, it’s hard to know which candidate that would be. In my view, it would be safe to say that Trump had become the odds-on favorite to win the nomination, but where he’d fall on the spectrum between 51 percent and 99 percent I’m not sure.
You might notice I’ve pulled a little trick there, however, presuming a “blowout win” for Trump when that wouldn’t necessarily be the case. Suppose Rubio did badly, but Trump only narrowly beat Cruz. Would that make a difference? My guess is that it wouldn’t make a lot of difference — a Trump win is a Trump win — unless the vote were so close that (as in 2012) the outcome was uncertain well after midnight.
But this is one of the trickier cases. Cruz’s campaign would point toward how it had beaten expectations despite “the establishment” having stacked the deck against it. Which would be a pretty reasonable argument! But that doesn’t mean that Republican elites, having registered their discomfort with Cruz, will be receptive to it.
Road No. 3: Cruz beats Trump, and Rubio does poorly
If Cruz actually beats Trump, however, Cruz will look teflon, and the Republican elites who tried to stop him will seem feckless. Also, since the conventional wisdom no longer anticipates a Cruz win in Iowa, it will be more surprising and possibly produce a bigger Cruz bounce. Furthermore, suppose that Rubio has a poor night. This is the nightmare case for Republicans who were hoping to stop Cruz.
It would also make New Hampshire really interesting. Trump begins with a fairly large lead there, and Cruz is not a good fit for the state. So even a fairly large bounce for Cruz (and an erosion in Trump’s support) could leave both candidates stuck in the high teens or low 20s, not necessarily enough to win. It’s possible that someone like Kasich or Bush could emerge under those circumstances.
We’d also want to look for signs of whether Cruz’s win in Iowa was an indication of Cruz’s strength or Trump’s weakness. If it seemed to be a result of Trump’s failed ground game, maybe that wouldn’t be as much of a problem for Trump in New Hampshire and other primary states, where the barriers to participation are less than in a caucus. Nonetheless, Trump would be — for the first time all campaign — a loser. To the extent his support is partly based on a bandwagon effect, it would be seriously tested.
Road No. 4: Cruz beats Trump, and Rubio does well
If both Cruz and Rubio have strong nights in Iowa, however, the meaning is clearer: Trump didn’t live up to the hype. There would be questions about whether Trump’s support in polls was a mirage to begin with, whether it had collapsed at the last minute because of voter dissatisfaction with his having skipped the Republican debate, or whether his lack of a turnout operation had foiled him. Those questions would be important for determining whether Trump had a chance to recover in New Hampshire. But in terms of the media narrative, they’d all be variations on the theme that Trump had gone bust.
In some ways, the Republican primary might even start to look fairly conventional. An “outsider” candidate with evangelical support would have won Iowa. A couple of “insider” candidates would be looking to emerge out of New Hampshire, with Rubio having a leg up because of his strong Iowa showing. Trump wouldn’t necessarily disappear — the media will keep writing him into the plot so long as he is willing — but it might be as more of a Newt Gingrich-esque sideshow, a candidate who wins a few states here and there but has little chance of commanding a majority. If we enter Iowa in a Trumpnado and exit it with what seems to be a fairly normal Republican race, that might be the biggest surprise of all.
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Friday, January 29, 2016
Significant Digits For Friday, Jan. 29, 2016
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
16 states
Number of states that require students to take a standardized test on basic economics, down from 25 in 1998. Only 17 states require students to take a course in personal finance. [CNBC]
32 percent
Alibaba, China’s Amazon.com, saw sales jump 32 percent, in part because of investments in rural China that aided with package delivery. [Bloomberg]
35 plays
The New England Patriots are not in the Super Bowl for many reasons. That their kicker missed an extra point in the first quarter of the AFC championship game is one of the least-important ones. There were 35 plays in that game that affected the Patriots’ chances more than that missed kick. [FiveThirtyEight]
38 phones
A man was found with 38 different phones stuffed down his pants at a Libertines concert in the U.K. Authorities are trying to find victims of phone theft, but perhaps for just one second we should consider the possibility this man has 37 jobs? [The Guardian]
80 percent
Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder, destroyed 80 percent of a protected reef in the Cayman Islands with his yacht’s anchor, 14,000 square feet of protected coral in all. If you want to help stop horrible and irreversible disasters like that, donate to Allen’s charity, which focuses on marine conservation and tackling overfishing when his pleasure yacht isn’t annihilating priceless and irreplaceable reefs. [The Guardian]
1,000 times as much poison
The nightmare scenario has arrived: Researchers found that killing U.S. bedbugs required doses of neonicotinoids — a fancy word for bug poison — 1,000 times as concentrated as bedbugs not found in the wild. [BBC]
$1,500
A jury awarded two panhandlers $1,500 after the Chicago sheriff’s department stopped them from asking for money on Daley Plaza. [The Associated Press]
10.2 million
Number of people aged 16 to 29 in the U.S. in 2015 who were neither employed nor in training for employment in 2015. Basically, these were folks who don’t have jobs and aren’t learning a skill to eventually get one. In good news, that number is down from over 11 million in 2013, according to Pew. [The Pew Research Center]
$40.1 million
How much Nancy Pelosi has raised for Democrats this cycle, according to House Democrats. [The Los Angeles Times]
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Americans Are Still Really Worried About The Economy
This is In Real Terms, a new column analyzing the week in economic news. We’re still experimenting with the format, so tell us what you think. Email me or drop a note in the comments. And thank you for all the great feedback so far!
Back in November, I described what I called the “Iowa paradox”: The economy, especially in Iowa but also nationwide, is improving, yet voters are rallying behind candidates (most notably Donald Trump, but also Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders and others) who tap into a deep well of economic unease.
With just days to go before the Iowa caucuses, that paradox was again on full display this week. On the one hand, Donald Trump is surging — fueled, as both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post showed, by voters’ economic anxieties. (Trump is now favored in both of our two election forecasts in Iowa.) On the other hand, new data this week showed that the housing market is continuing to improve, layoffs remain low and consumer confidence rose in January, suggesting that many Americans are feeling better about the economy.
How can Americans be feeling optimistic and pessimistic about the economy at the same time? One common explanation is that the optimists and the pessimists are two different groups of people. Maybe Trump and other out-of-the-mainstream candidates are drawing their support from those left behind by the economic recovery.
There’s probably some truth to this theory. The economic gains of the past few years have gone disproportionately to the wealthy, while incomes for the typical family have barely budged. And polls show that Trump’s support is especially strong among less-educated blue-collar workers, one of the groups that has struggled most in the recovery. (This is significantly less true of Sanders, who performs as well or better among wealthier, better-educated voters as he does overall.)
But this is a partial explanation at best. Trump and other insurgent candidates are polling well even among groups that are doing better economically. And in any case, the recovery has become more broad-based of late. Median household income has finally returned to its prerecession level, according to an analysis of government data by Sentier Research, and the recent decline in the unemployment rate has been driven primarily by the least-educated workers. Wednesday’s strong housing data showed that recent price gains have been concentrated among mid-price homes, not the luxury mansions that drove price increases earlier in the recovery. And the recent turmoil in the stock market will mostly hurt wealthier Americans.
It’s possible that voters, with memories of the recession still fresh in their minds, simply don’t believe the signs of progress, or worry they won’t last. But here’s another explanation: Americans are feeling better about the economy right now, but they remain deeply worried about their longer-run prospects — retirement, student debt and, in particular, the ability of their children to find middle-class jobs. This shows up in Gallup polling data, which shows a marked divergence between Americans’ assessment of their current conditions and their future outlook.
Those fears are grounded in economic reality. Wages may have rebounded from the recession but they have been largely flat since 2000 after adjusting for inflation. A college degree, long the surest pathway to the middle class, is no longer such a sure bet. And a growing group of influential economists are arguing that the U.S. has entered a prolonged period of slow growth. Few economists would endorse Trump’s plans for dealing with that stagnation, but it’s understandable that voters are looking for solutions.
Snow in winter
In case you hadn’t heard, it snowed on the East Coast last weekend (Snow! In January!), which brought the inevitable raft of “What will the blizzard mean for the economy?” stories. The general consensus: not much. Snow is bad for retail stores and restaurants, but it’s good for tow trucks and maintenance crews (also, apparently, for Tinder). Hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters that cause widespread structural damage are a different story, but snowstorms rarely amount to more than an economic blip. Most analysts put the storm’s economic impact in the single-digit billions of dollars, which is rounding error in a $15 trillion economy. (It didn’t hurt that the storm hit over a weekend, and that New York City was pretty much back to normal by Monday morning.)
The Fed
In a decision that surprised no one,1 the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged at its meeting on Wednesday. A rate hike was never likely; the Fed raised rates in December for the first time since the financial crisis, and few economists expected another move so soon. But the tumultuous start to the year in financial markets pushed a rate hike from “unlikely” to “unthinkable”; the biggest news out of Wednesday’s meeting was that the Fed didn’t take a March rate increase off the table entirely. (If the Fed was trying to reassure investors, it didn’t work. Stocks fell sharply after the announcement.)
Investors will parse the statement for every possible hint of what the Fed will do next, but for the rest of us, the key takeaway is this: Janet Yellen and co. don’t yet see much sign that the economy has changed significantly since their last meeting. But the slowing global economy, and the financial turmoil it is causing, are sufficiently worrisome to have the Fed’s attention. For now, policymakers are sticking to their plan of gradually pulling back from efforts to stimulate the economy. But that could change if trouble spreads.
Number(s) of the week
Americans started 232,000 new businesses employing 831,000 people in the second quarter of 2015, according to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this week. Both numbers are a hair better than a year earlier, and significantly improved from the depths of the recession. But the employment number, at least, is still well below its prerecession level.2
A couple weeks back I mentioned the decline in “labor market dynamism,” the slowing rate at which Americans change jobs. This week’s data reflects a parallel decline in “business dynamism,” the rate at which new companies are created and destroyed. It’s little surprise that startups fell in the recession, but the trend goes back much further than that, to at least the early 1980s. For all the talk of “disruption” in Silicon Valley, the U.S. economy is becoming increasingly dominated by large, established firms.
Economists aren’t sure what’s behind the twin declines in labor and business dynamism, but they believe the trends are related — and could be making the overall economy less efficient and innovative.
A warning
This morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will release its preliminary estimate of economic growth in the final three months of 2015. The report will likely show that gross domestic product grew very slowly at the end of the year, possibly at a rate of less than 1 percent.
My advice: Ignore this number. As my colleague Andrew Flowers explained in greater depth a couple of years ago, preliminary GDP estimates are little more than rough estimates. The average revision between the initial “advance” report and the “final” one two months later is more than half a percentage point, a huge difference in GDP terms. And even that number is routinely revised in subsequent years. (In the world of GDP, no number is ever truly final.) The details of the report can contain valuable insights for people willing to dig through them, but the top-line number that will make the headlines is nearly useless.
Elsewhere
Economist Robert Gordon says to worry about weak productivity growth, but not to blame robots.
School lunches are getting healthier, but kids aren’t actually eating them. Deena Shanker looks at economists’ efforts to change that.
Can you identify an economic trend just by the chart? Take this quiz by Andrew Van Dam and Lam Thuy Vo and find out.
Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup incubator, wants to fund a study on the viability of a “universal basic income,” the idea of getting rid of the traditional safety net and just giving people cash.
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Thursday, January 28, 2016
The Tennis Court Is A Laboratory For Innovation
Every singles tennis match is bound by the same dimensions — played on a court 78 feet long by 27 feet across and a net 3.5 feet high at the posts, with rackets no more than 29 inches long and 12.5 inches across — yet each one is a laboratory for innovation, unrestrained by a risk-averse coach or the conflicting desires of teammates. Not every tennis player thinks or talks deeply and consciously about analytics, but each one is analyzing herself and her opponents, strategically and tactically, before a match, between points and before every shot.
Top-ranked players can afford coaches who analyze and dissect play instead of serving as glorified companions, hitting partners and lay sports psychologists — but even they can’t help players once they’re on court at Grand Slam tournaments.1
Singles players make hundreds of decisions in each match, sometimes thousands,2 all alone on their side of the net. Hit a backhand or run around the ball to hit a forehand? Hit the ball with slice or topspin? Come to net or stay back? Go for placement, speed or spin on serve? Serve to your opponent’s forehand or backhand? Any one decision like these might involve an entire coaching staff in another sport, but tennis players not only do it alone, but under match conditions that evolve because of weather, injury or an opponent’s change in strategy.
In this way, the sport’s very format lends itself to invention and calculated risk-taking. Top stars play as many times in a season as an NBA or NHL team, and far more often than an NFL team. Unlike those team sports, though, they aren’t working toward a single championship. Each event is a fresh start, and the biggest events — the Grand Slams — come four times a year. This year there’s an extra target in the Olympic Games. Lose at a major tournament, and there’s another chance or two in the next few months.
The experimentation isn’t just born out of opportunity, but necessity. Every tennis player who isn’t ranked No. 1 gets chances to play as an underdog, as seen in this year’s Australian Open. Angelique Kerber is ranked sixth in the world, yet bookies gave her just a 19 percent chance of beating No. 16 Victoria Azarenka in the quarterfinals because Azarenka had won all six of their previous matches. (For the vast majority of matches — those that aren’t fixed — prematch odds are a decent indicator of players’ chances to win.) Maria Sharapova is ranked fifth in the world, yet she was given just a 22 percent chance of beating top-ranked Serena Williams in the quarterfinals — after all, she’d lost 17 matches in a row to the American. Even after losing a match in which she tried guessing where Williams would hit her first serves, Sharapova said she relished meeting her rival. “If I don’t have that chance then I don’t have the opportunity to try something different,” Sharapova said. She added, “She makes you go back to the drawing board, not just for me, but for many other players.”
Underdogs can try new things without much fear of failure, and sometimes those new methods can produce great upsets, such as Fernando Verdasco’s win over Rafael Nadal in the first round despite being given just an 11 percent chance before the match. Sometimes they almost produce great upsets, like when Gilles Simon (4 percent) extended Novak Djokovic to five sets in the fourth round. And sometimes they don’t even come close, like when Margarita Gasparyan (8 percent) won just three games in the fourth round against Williams. “I have a lot of double faults because I want to hit the ball more aggressive in the second serve, but I have mistakes,” Gasparyan said. Sometimes you swing big and you miss big. But that loss didn’t cost Gasparyan any money or ranking points, didn’t bring her any harsh questions from reporters, and didn’t get Gasparyan fired by her boss, because she has no boss.
Players who were big underdogs, or faced them, often use the word “aggressive” to describe their approach in trying to pull off a big upset — Kerber used it in one news conference to describe how Annika Beck had tried to beat her, and how she would in turn try to beat Azarenka. Sometimes aggression can describe underdogs’ in-match demeanor, like when Lukas Rosol unnerved Nadal with his posture while returning serve on his way to eliminating the defending champion from Wimbledon in 2012. More often, though, “aggressive” describes underdogs’ style of play, such as Rosol’s and Verdasco’s. It means playing offense, not defense, and taking big risks on individual shots by hitting the ball hard, close to the lines and the top of the net. Any one shot is less likely to go in, but hitting a series of shots like that throughout a match can neutralize top players’ defensive skills and natural talents while giving underdogs their best chance to win. Tennis players have figured out something that still flummoxes multimillionaire decision-makers in other sports: The riskiest strategy is often what looks like the lowest-risk tactic, and even if aggressive shots misfire once or twice, hitting many of them will pay off down the line.
“Today I was just like trying to be as aggressive as possible, but also not like so crazy,” Verdasco said after ousting Nadal. “Sometimes if you do like what I did today, you put all the balls outside, it’s like, ‘This guy’s crazy. He just hit everything and he miss.’ But when they are coming in, you play unbelievable. The difference is just so little and can be so big.”
“I’m an aggressive player,” Sharapova said after her fourth-round win. “But there is a difference between making the wrong errors and making the right errors. I feel like, yeah, I made errors. I went sometimes for a little bit too much. But I think the difference is sometimes you’re making errors, but you feel like you’re doing the right thing. Ultimately when the time comes, you have to believe that those errors are just, you know, a few centimeters wide or long that they’re going to start going in.” Sharapova had to believe guessing Williams’s serve placements would give her a better chance to win. She didn’t, but she probably wouldn’t have anyway, and it might work in a future meeting.
Not every player, though, has the same strength and competitive advantages of Rosol, Verdasco and Sharapova. Part of what makes a tennis tournament a lab with many simultaneous experiments is the wide range of players’ physiques and skills. After Barbora Strycova’s effort to beat Azarenka in the fourth round fell short, Strycova — who is seven and a half inches shorter than Azarenka — was asked about her unusual style, which includes serving and volleying, a rarity in women’s tennis today. “I’m not big enough to play powerful tennis,” Strycova said.
Simon is 6-foot, weighs just 154 pounds and has earned more than $10 million with his mind and his defense, not his power. After he’d pushed Djokovic to the limit, Simon contrasted himself with Stan Wawrinka, the last man to oust Djokovic from a Slam. “I have to find my own way to do it,” Simon said. “Like I wish I could hit like Stan, but that’s far from being the case. … I just try to keep it simple, use my strengths, use his weaknesses, yeah, just try to work it out.”
Roger Federer was watching. When a reporter pointed to Djokovic’s 100 unforced errors against Simon — representing 57 percent of the points the Frenchman won — as a sign the world No. 1 played badly, Federer replied, “How much did you see Gilles Simon play? I’m just wondering, because I think people miss the point of him. He plays every match like that. He makes you miss. He makes you go for the lines and he runs down a lot of balls. A lot of points end in errors … he knows exactly what he’s doing out there, and it worked almost to the very end.”
Athletes of all sizes and skills can thrive in part because tennis’s structure rewards idiosyncratic game styles, whatever you may have heard about the stultifying sameness of today’s players. At the macro level, that may be true, but players who have an uncommon style are hard to prepare for when matchups are set only a day or two ahead of time, and when you could face any of hundreds of other players in a Grand Slam. Dustin Brown was 30 when he upset a 29-year-old Nadal last year at Wimbledon, yet the two had played just once before and Nadal looked utterly perplexed by Brown’s serve-and-volley, go-for-broke, rush-between-serves game. Williams doesn’t encounter many opponents like Roberta Vinci, whose slicing, net-charging game halted the world No. 1’s 33-match Grand Slam winning streak at the U.S. Open last year.
And a player’s style isn’t a fixed quantity but one that can change during a career. A player can change her serve, or her racket, or where she stands on returns, or how often she comes to net. Federer has gone from a serve-and-volley style on fast surfaces earlier in his career to a baseline game to a hybrid that includes net charges off short-hop returns. He found the right mix for one set against Djokovic in Thursday’s semifinal, but Djokovic’s own tactical countermoves won the day, clinching the decisive break with a searing return as Federer charged the net. Fellow semifinalist Milos Raonic, who beat Federer to win the Brisbane tournament earlier this month, has excelled this year by improving his net game. Sharapova has started switching her racket to her nondominant left hand to reach balls out wide. Sometimes players work on new tactics in practice, then unveil them in matches — and shelve or retool them if they don’t work out. The constant adjustments to counter new rivals and tactics push the best players to new heights — by our Elo measure, Djokovic is playing the best tennis the sport has ever seen.
The tennis lab is far from optimal. The sport’s stats are limited and hamstrung by its fragmented structure, which makes it hard for players — and for us — to quantify the success of new gambits. Many players and coaches don’t pay attention to the stats that are available. For every player who talks tactics in news conferences, there are three who say they just try to “play my game.”
But don’t just listen to what they say. Watch how they play. You might learn a thing or two about mixed strategy and when the biggest risk is not taking risks. The women’s and men’s singles finals start at 3:30 a.m. Eastern on Saturday and Sunday, respectively. That’s not too early for coaches in another sport who could stand to learn about the right time to take risks.
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Significant Digits For Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
1.2 seconds
In 2004, the United States decided to change the font on many of its road signs from Highway Gothic to a new one called Clearview. The motivation: More older drivers. A clearer font would make it easier to read the signs, and a study from Texas A&M University found a driver could see a Clearview sign 80 feet earlier, at 45 miles per hour, than a Highway Gothic sign. That’s an additional 1.2 seconds of reading time. But on Monday, the U.S. Federal Highway Administration announced that it was trashing the 2004 order recommending Clearview, and cited newer research to argue that Clearview’s benefits were overstated. The designers of Clearview intend to mount a challenge. Begun, the Font Wars have. [Citylab]
2 years
Due to an ongoing Justice Department corruption investigation, Vice Adm. Ted “Twig” Branch, the Navy’s intelligence chief, has been forbidden from reading classified information since November 2013. The arrangement has proved … tricky. [The Washington Post]
9 p.m.
The highest traffic time on both Tinder and OKCupid, services that allow you to meet people for sex or dating based on either proximity or how attractive your 10 most attractive photographs are, respectively. Usage drops substantially after 10 p.m. according to the data from Nielsen, so that’s presumably when everyone’s carriages turn back into pumpkins and “successful career as an actor” turns back into “you’re cool grabbing the check, right?” [The Huffington Post]
53 percent
Percentage of white evangelical Protestants who have a favorable view of Donald Trump, who is definitely one, perhaps two, but certainly not all three of those things. That figure is up from 37 percent last November. [The Public Religion Research Institute]
90 percent
An analysis of the survey responses of 210,000 women who are in a relationship found that 72 percent of women who weren’t using contraception had sex in the past four weeks, compared to 90 percent of those who did use contraception. [NPR]
100 pounds
About $14 million worth of heroin — 100 pounds of it — was found in a pickup truck in Queens this week. A pound of heroin goes for about $140,000 — I think that’s the big takeaway from this story. [The New York Times]
6 billion Likes
Facebook is about to embark on a venture once considered unthinkable: messing with the “Like” button. Given that Facebook’s 1.6 billion users punch it more than 6 billion cumulative times per day, that’s actually something of a big deal! They’re adding five other options to the current thumbs-up-only button, which will make it somewhat easier to react to some bad news I suppose. [Bloomberg]
$11.6 billion
U.S. colleges raised an estimated $40.3 billion in 2015, but $11.6 billion of that went to just 20 schools. [Quartz]
$48.8 billion
Estimated net worth of Michael Bloomberg, who is considering a run for the presidency, according to Re/code. A thought experiment I was playing with some friends: You are at an auction where you’re bidding on one hour of rifling through Michael Bloomberg’s couch cushions for loose money. How much do you bid? [Re/code]
$99 billion
While the 20 most profitable hedge funds pulled in $15 billion last year, all the hedge funds combined lost $99 billion. This industry strikes me as healthy and in no way an existential long-term threat to the economy. [Bloomberg]
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Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Donald Trump’s Fox News Feud May Be Another Sign The GOP Is Failing
Donald Trump has announced that he “won’t bother” with Thursday’s Republican debate — the last one before Monday’s Iowa caucuses. It’s certainly not the norm for a leading candidate to bail out on a party event just as primary season is about to begin. But Trump’s decision not to participate Thursday is especially weird because the debate is hosted by Fox News.
In the school of thought that defines parties as networks of actors who have a common purpose, Fox News is easily included as part of the GOP — not just as a sympathetic news outlet, but as a member of the party coalition. So we have a situation where the Republican Party’s polling front-runner is openly feuding with its biggest media outlet. This is not how parties are supposed to work according to many political scientists.
Trump, of course, has already sparred verbally with Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, who moderated the first Republican debate back in August. The incident was one of Trump’s early run-ins with the informal GOP establishment, including media figures such as Kelly and Erick Erickson, who decided to bar Trump from an event the next weekend. But those dust-ups passed quickly. This time, the conflict has intensified, with Trump remarking that Kelly is “not very good at what she does” and withdrawing from the debate.
Pundits and political scientists have been debating for some time who controls presidential nominations, as well as what the 2016 race tells us about that question. The main argument has been whether Trump’s consistent success in the polls undercuts the theory that networked party elites can control the process, winnowing out undesirable candidates and promoting preferred ones.
Now that Trump has been denounced by one major conservative media outlet, National Review, and continued a feud with another, what does this mean for party politics? One of the steadfast claims of the “Party Decides” school is that different types of actors in the coalition don’t really play distinct roles. The density of the networks between, say, official party organizations (like the Iowa Republican Party) and ideological interest groups (like the American Conservative Union) means that these groups share staff and funders, and their overall goals and functions within the party end up being pretty similar: to work toward common policy goals and nominate amenable candidates.
But, although it is sometimes depicted that way, the “Party Decides” school doesn’t represent a consensus in political science about what parties are or how they work. Most recently, Ray LaRaja and Brian Schaffner have argued that formal party organizations make different decisions about which candidates to fund, for example, than do interest groups. In other words, there are other political scientists who think different party actors have different incentives and capacities.
The unfolding conflict between Fox News and Trump may illustrate the implications of loosely configured parties that operate by informal rules. Fox News and National Review may play critical roles in disseminating conservative ideas and promoting conservative causes. But they don’t seem to be very effective in winnowing out a candidate who can generate plenty of media coverage on his own.
Much of the debate over “The Party Decides” has been about its predictive power, but perhaps it is time to look at its implications. If parties really operate without much hierarchy or many formal rules, then we shouldn’t be surprised that they are highly susceptible, under the right circumstances, to hostile takeovers by outsider candidates. And if Trump’s decision to sit out the debate brings him more attention and raises his standing in the polls — as the trend seems to have been — then it will be another piece of evidence that sometimes primary voters decide on their own.
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Significant Digits For Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
3 minutes
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock — “the symbolic countdown to humanity’s end,” as The Guardian put it — to three minutes to midnight, informing me that what I thought was just a made-up thing from “Watchmen” is actually a real organization that somehow stuck around after the Cold War. [The Guardian]
5 arrests
Five people who had occupied a federal bird sanctuary in Oregon were arrested in a traffic stop Tuesday, including alleged ringleader Ammon Bundy. Two people were shot by police during a gunfight, and one, LaVoy Finicum, the group’s spokesperson, was killed. They’ll all face a federal charge of “conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation or threats.” [CNN]
10 percent
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality tossed two water samples from Flint that would have put the average test above the “actionable level” of 15 parts of lead per billion. Had those samples not been excluded, the state would have had to tell Flint residents their water was poisoned back in the summer of 2015, rather than just recently. [FiveThirtyEight]
34 years
Character actor Abe Vigoda died at 94 on Tuesday, 34 years after a mistaken report of his death in People in 1982. [The New York Times]
90 ads
Iowans are dealing with wall-to-wall campaign advertisements, and it completely overhauls most resident’s media consumption. One family my colleague Clare Malone followed for a day saw 90 political advertisements in about 17 hours. [FiveThirtyEight]
1:32:56
A dog ran a half-marathon in Alabama and got a way better time than you probably ever could. [The Guardian]
H.R. 4009
A bill to regulate flamethrowers the same way the government regulates machine guns, from Rep. Eliot Engle of New York. More importantly, the bill’s name is the “Flamethrowers? Really? Act” and it is named after a Seth Meyers line from Saturday Night Live. I mean, the guy had some valid points about the surprising legality of flamethrowers. [Bloomberg]
220,000
Brazil will deploy 220,000 soldiers to fight the Zika virus, which is spreading very quickly across country. I just realized, aren’t we having an Olympics there in like a few months? [BBC]
$2.9 million
A scooter accident in Brooklyn cost the City of New York $2.9 billion, after a surveillance video disputed a cop’s story and showed that a 72-year-old man had looked both ways before being hit by an NYPD officer on a scooter. The man was locked up for three days for jaywalking and an open container warrant from 10 years earlier. Following his release, the victim was hospitalized for four months. [The New York Post]
74.8 million iPhones
Number of iPhones Apple sold in the fourth quarter, a slight miss from expectations. [CNBC]
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Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Does Donald Trump Need To Win Iowa?
For this week’s 2016 Slack chat, the FiveThirtyEight politics teams ponders how important the Iowa caucuses are to Donald Trump.
micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): We’re less than a week out from the Iowa caucuses, and Donald Trump has overtaken Ted Cruz as the most likely winner in the Hawkeye State, according to our polls-only forecast. (And he’s closed the gap on Cruz in our polls-plus forecast.) But there are still doubts about whether Trump can turn out his voters. So, does Trump NEED to win Iowa to win the nomination?
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Ted Cruz wins Iowa, John Kasich wins New Hampshire, and Trump emerges as the consensus candidate. I’m joking. Maybe.
harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): The answer to me is “no, he doesn’t.” I can envision Trump winning without Iowa. But by winning it, he would greatly increase his chances. He’s already over a 50 percent chance to win in both of our New Hampshire forecasts and both of our South Carolina forecasts.
clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I don’t think he needs to … he’s the new Teflon candidate, right? Maybe he will even defy the momentum convention. (Look at that rhyme.)
natesilver: OK, I’ll bite. I think an Iowa loss would be pretty bad for Trump. Although maybe not because of “momentum.”
An Iowa loss is bad because the most probable cause of the loss is that his voters aren’t showing up. That means his polls could be inflated everywhere, although probably more in caucus states than in primary states.
The expectations game is harder to gauge, I think, because Trump’s relationship with the media is so oddly codependent.
harry: The question is whether a campaign all about “winning” can take losing. Trump hasn’t lost yet, and the few times he’s gone down in the polls, he’s gone bonkers.
natesilver: He hasn’t lost yet, and he hasn’t really had a moment yet where he had a string of bad polls. It’s interesting too that his top attribute in last night’s ABC News poll was electability. That’s the one where he had the largest lead over his rivals. That contradicts the data showing that Trump is extremely unpopular with general-election voters. But as long as Trump’s winning states and winning in the polls, GOP voters will think he’s a winner, and a great general-election candidate.
clare.malone: I think the idea of how Trump will actually handle losing is an interesting one to contemplate. Being too dismissive or defensive could make the whole enterprise crumble in on itself. People see the Emperor without his clothes, that kind of thing. And for a campaign that seems light on professional political operatives, it would be interesting to see the strategy that would emerge out of an Iowa loss.
harry: Of course, here’s the thing: Even if he loses in Iowa, he still has New Hampshire. Will his 15 to 20 percentage point lead collapse in a week?
micah: It’s possible, right?
clare.malone: I think that scenario is unlikely to happen; maybe Trump supporters in New Hampshire would even be galvanized all the more to get out to the polls and help their guy if he loses in Iowa.
micah: Well, it depends on why he lost in Iowa.
natesilver: If he loses Iowa, it’s also very possible that he’s not actually leading by 15 points in New Hampshire to begin with. You’re underselling the uncertainty in polls. Especially for an unconventional candidate like Trump.
By the same measure, if he way overperforms the polls in Iowa … well, look out, because maybe all those people showing up at rallies really are going to turn out.
clare.malone: What a time to be alive.
harry: Yes, I have to agree with that: two feet of snow in New York and a Trump win in Iowa.
natesilver: Our polls-only forecast has Trump with a 67 percent chance of winning New Hampshire. Which is pretty good for Trump, but also leaves open the distinct possibility he won’t win the state, especially if he loses Iowa.
A 15-point lead — actually, it’s an 18-point lead in our forecast — just isn’t anywhere near as solid in the New Hampshire primary as it would be in a general election. (If a candidate led by 18 points at this point in a general election, he’d be 99+ percent to win.) Especially when there are five other candidates who have some nonzero chance of winning the state.
harry: Right, I should point out that the non-poll factors, such as endorsements, still suggest that Trump isn’t anywhere near as strong as the polls suggest. Now that could mean one of two things.
- Endorsements don’t matter — a lack of support from elected officials and party operatives won’t hurt Trump.
- Or, that the polls may be off. Not in the sense that Trump ends up with 10 percent. But they could be off by enough to throw Iowa to Cruz by a decent margin, and then who knows what might happen.
clare.malone: I don’t think Trump’s supporters care a whit about him having politician endorsements — to me it’s a moot point with them/him. Which defies the traditional patterns we have to go off of.
natesilver: Feel free to throw things at me for saying this, but there’s still a good case that Trump is over-performing the fundamentals. Now, at this point, that may not matter. Even if it’s a bubble, Trump may be able to ride that bubble all the way to the nomination, especially if he wins Iowa. But if something happens to reset the race –— notably, a loss in Iowa — there’s a chance the Trump bubble could burst.
clare.malone: (Harry lobs abacus)
micah: I still think there’s like a 15 percent chance that that happens.
natesilver: And remember, about HALF of New Hampshire voters make up their mind in the final WEEK.
micah: So, if Trump loses Iowa, how do you all think he responds? Let’s say Cruz finishes with 36 percent and Trump with 25 percent.
clare.malone: I think he tries to spin it as “Iowa doesn’t matter, isn’t like most of the country” and then onward and upward with the arts. He’ll start touting bigtime New Hampshire poll numbers.
natesilver: It’s interesting (and maybe indicative) how y’all have framed that question. In a more traditional race, the big story of Cruz 36, Trump 25 wouldn’t be Trump losing Iowa but Cruz having won it. Cruz is the one who looks pretty Teflon in that case. And he’s Teflon with actual votes, not just in polls.
micah: But that won’t be the story this year.
So if Trump loses Iowa, what does his path to the nomination look like then? I take it he then NEEDS New Hampshire?
harry: If he were to lose Iowa and New Hampshire, it is difficult for me to see how he wins the nomination. It’s not impossible, but I just don’t see it.
clare.malone: I dunno, he could make a lot of inroads in the South. I mean, if he and Cruz are kinda competing for the same voters, this could still be a viable path.
natesilver: Trump could do well in the South, but the GOP’s delegate math doesn’t particularly favor the South. I think you all may be missing the forest for the trees there, though. If Trump loses both Iowa and New Hampshire, that means his big numbers in national polls may have been a mirage all along.
micah: Not necessarily … what if he loses by a hair?
natesilver: He could lose Iowa by a hair without underreporting his polls, but if he loses New Hampshire, that means something pretty significant has changed.
Either some other candidate gained huge momentum, the polls were way inflating Trump’s vote, or both.
Basically everything that I’m saying here boils down to NOBODY HAS VOTED YET. In the primaries, that’s not merely a perfunctory statement. Everything really can change once people start voting.
clare.malone: Nate’s pragmatism really puts a damper on wild-theories-on-a-Tuesday-afternoon time.
harry: Yeah, this point gets lost most of the time; people seem to think that primaries are just like general elections. Primary polling is far less accurate historically, and even if the polls are accurate, primaries can change very quickly. That doesn’t mean they will, but they can.
clare.malone: I mean, basically what we’re all looking to get out of the next couple of weeks is whether or not the Trump house is built out of sand and fog, or if it’s actually viable glass and steel — and then if all these supporters turn out to be real and he wins Iowa, etc., the GOP is really going to have to figure out what the heck to do all the way down the line in this primary season.
natesilver: Let’s spare a few moments for our friend Ted Cruz. Lots of powerful Republicans have spent three weeks trying to knock him out of the running in Iowa. But suppose he survives and wins the state by several percentage points. What does Cruz do then? And what does “the party” do, having fired a blank in their attempt to execute Cruz?
harry: Well, I think Iowa is a very Cruz-friendly state, so I don’t know what it means for “the party” on that score. I do think it’s good news for them, however. I continue not to understand why they are going after Cruz and not Trump. It’s one of the many things this cycle that just makes very little sense to me.
natesilver: Maybe they’re just not that bright. It was the same donor class that threw $100 million behind Jeb!, after all.
clare.malone: Well, Cruz might not play well in a lot of states still — yeah, what Harry just said. He’s playing on a certain kind of conservatism. I think what the party is going to do gets back to a previous chat where we discussed that nothing can be done until the establishment — sorry, Nate, the party elites — decide to unite behind one person. Then they can make better efforts.
micah: [Cue a pro-Rubio argument from Nate.]
harry: Nate loves Rubio like I love snow.
natesilver: Harry stop trying to hide your love for Chris Christie.
harry: Sorry, I’ve moved onto a new beau: John Kasich.
micah: Who does Clare secretly love?
clare.malone: I think I’m the only one without a fave!
natesilver: I thought you wanted to stand with Rand?
clare.malone: No, no. I am a rock. I am an island. No faves allowed.
natesilver: But back to those “party elites.” Weirdly, Trump wins Iowa, that’s a sign that they might have some influence after all.
clare.malone: Wait, why Nate? We can’t assign any of this Trump rise to just the power of the people? The elites always have to be behind it?
natesilver: Trump’s gained 5 percentage points or so in the Iowa polls since party leaders began their anti-Cruz kick.
clare.malone: Or maybe the Trump “he’s a Canadian” thing just worked really well.
micah: I agree with Clare.
natesilver: The timing doesn’t line up with that as well, though.
micah: Canadian + Trump’s general offensive. That timing matches up well enough.
harry: Truth is that it’s difficult to figure out whether X caused Y, or maybe Z did. But I do agree with Nate insofar as it wouldn’t be a negative indicator for party actor support. But again, I think it’s a very dangerous game to hope you can have Trump win Iowa and then beat him later.
natesilver: Yeah, that’s quite a feat they’re hoping to pull off. Kind of insane, really.
micah: So that brings me nicely to a final question: If Trump wins Iowa, how unstoppable does he become?
clare.malone: I think we’re basically all going to say versions of “not unstoppable,” right?
natesilver: Depends on a lot of things, including how Rubio does in Iowa and New Hampshire. If Iowa’s like Trump 31 percent, Cruz 23, Rubio 18 — then Rubio will probably be seen as the main challenger to Trump and might get a boost in New Hampshire.
If it’s Trump 31, Cruz 23, Carson 9, Rubio 8 … well, who knows what, but Trump looks a lot safer then.
micah: Yeah, not to respond to my own question, but I think the answer is: not unstoppable.
natesilver: Yeah, the short answer is “in pretty darn good shape, but not unstoppable.”
micah: Even if he wins Iowa and New Hampshire, a lot can happen. As our own David Wasserman has pointed out: The calendar is friendly to a March establishment comeback.
natesilver: Stop using the E word, Micah.
harry: If Trump wins Iowa, I think he can be stopped. I just don’t know how it happens exactly. I guess, as Nate points out, it would depend on how he did it. For Wasserman’s calendar to work out for the “establishment,” Rubio would probably need to do unexpectedly well in Iowa.
natesilver: There’s always Jim Gilmore, Harry. There’s always Jim Gilmore.
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How Much Can Really Change Before Iowa Votes
The tremendous buildup to the Iowa caucuses is about to culminate in real voting. We’re less than a week away. But anything can still happen … there’s still plenty of time … right? Sort of. It’s true that even the final Iowa polls are sometimes way off. But it’s also true that every caucus winner since 1980 was either within about 10 percentage points of the leader or showing at least some momentum in the polls by this point.
Right now, only two candidates on both the Democratic and Republican side are even close to the lead. In the Republican race, Donald Trump seems to have some momentum over Ted Cruz, though Cruz remains within striking distance. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton continues to hold a small lead over Bernie Sanders, though the race remains as close as it did a week ago.
How does that compare to past races? Let’s time travel to a week before the caucuses in each open election since 1980 (we don’t have any polls for this time period for the Democratic caucuses in 1984 and 1992): What did a 10-day polling average show, and how did that average compare to the results?
1980 Republicans: Although the Des Moines Register poll had Ronald Reagan leading with 26 percent, Reagan’s support was down from the 50 percent he held a little over a month before the caucuses. Meanwhile, eventual winner George H.W. Bush had climbed from 1 percent in August 1979 to 14 percent in December to 17 percent one week before the caucuses. He rode this momentum to beat Reagan on caucus night, 32 percent to 30 percent.
1988 Democrats: Every single poll taken had Dick Gephardt leading; he averaged 30 percent and finished with 31 percent. The polls did have Michael Dukakis ahead of Paul Simon by 4 percentage points for second place, though it was Simon who ended up ahead of Dukakis for second by 5 points. Either way, it was not a big jump.
1988 Republicans: The polls pegged the eventual winner, Bob Dole, with a clear lead over the competition. Dole averaged 44 percent and won 37 percent. In one of the largest predictive errors in our data set, second-place finisher Pat Robertson averaged only 9 percent in the polls but ended up with 25 percent thanks to a strong performance among religious conservatives.
1996 Republicans: A University of Iowa survey conducted during this stretch had Bob Dole ahead with 22 percent. He won with 26 percent. The surprise — just like in 1988 — came from the candidate appealing to religious conservatives, this time Pat Buchanan. Buchanan was well back in the polls with only 4 percent, but he finished second with 23 percent. Also finishing strong was Lamar Alexander, who climbed from 6 percent in the polls to 18 percent in the final results.
2000 Democrats: Al Gore led the average of polls over Bill Bradley by 20 percentage points a week before the caucuses. He won by 26 percentage points.
2000 Republicans: George W. Bush was leading Steve Forbes in the polls 45 percent to 22 percent. The actual result was closer: 41 percent to 31 percent; Bush’s margin was cut in half, but it was never in doubt.
2004 Democrats: This was the race that moved the most. John Kerry was in third place in the polls with 16 percent, while Howard Dean was leading the field at 27 percent. John Edwards averaged just 11 percent a week before the caucuses, but that was up from 5 percent in December. The final result: Kerry 37 percent, Edwards 33 percent, Dean 17 percent.
2008 Democrats: Hillary Clinton led Barack Obama in the average of polls, 32 percent to 30 percent, though a number of polls had Obama ahead. He eventually won 35 percent to 30 percent over Clinton. But the biggest surprise was John Edwards, who was averaging just 17 percent and came in second with 31 percent.
2008 Republicans: Mike Huckabee held a clear lead over Mitt Romney, 32 percent to 25 percent. On election night, it was Huckabee with 34 percent to Romney’s 25 percent.
2012 Republicans: You can see Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum gaining momentum during this stretch. While the entire 10-day average had Romney at 20 percent and Santorum at 7 percent, a CNN/Time survey ending seven days before the caucuses gave Romney 25 percent and Santorum 16 percent. The final result: Santorum 24.54 percent to Romney’s 24.51 percent. Third-place finisher Ron Paul almost perfectly matched his support in the polls (22 percent) by ending up with 21 percent.
So what does all this mean? Historical polls have been off by a lot — by enough that it wouldn’t be shocking (or even surprising) if Cruz, who has consistently run second to Trump in recent Iowa polls, prevailed in the Hawkeye State. Here’s what would be shocking: If someone not named Cruz, Trump, Clinton or Sanders carried Iowa. Then again, there have been plenty of shocks in the 2016 campaign already.
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Significant Digits For Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
1 percent
Share of worldwide olive oil exports the U.S. is responsible for, with most of it going to Canada and Mexico. The world’s largest producers are Italy, Spain and Tunisia, but U.S. olive producers are making a go at competing with the established players. [Bloomberg]
5 percent
Sales at McDonald’s were up 5 percent last quarter compared to a year before, buoyed by the implementation of all-day breakfast, me hearing about all-day breakfast, and me eating all-day breakfast. I take full responsibility for McDonald’s Q4 sales is what I’m saying. [Bloomberg]
4 Russians
The Russian Olympic Committee banned two athletes for two years and suspended two others for four years after discovering evidence of doping. Russia itself was banned by the IAAF in November from international athletic competitions after allegations of state-sponsored doping. [BBC]
16 years
Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran, will make the first trip to Europe by an Iranian president in 16 years. Thanks to the removal of sanctions, Europe and Iran are apparently cool again. Top priority: Rouhani wants to hang out with the pope. [The Guardian]
60 days
New executive actions from President Obama will limit the maximum amount of time a prisoner can be sent to solitary confinement for a first offense from the current 365 days to 60 days. The executive actions will also ban solitary confinement for minors in the federal system. [The Washington Post]
68 percent
Percentage of words in “The Little Mermaid” that are said by men. Sure, that might have to do with the whole “Ariel loses her voice” plot line, but Ariel marked the start of a whole era of Disney movies ostensibly about princesses but kind of about the dudes they hang out with. [The Washington Post]
$200
A local genius built an igloo in Brooklyn following Saturday’s blizzard and listed it for $200 per night on AirBnB. I would say the company took down the ad because of safety concerns, but AirBnB historically doesn’t really care about those. Or, maybe it was an illegal hotel? That doesn’t come up as a concern for AirBNB much either. So absent additional information, presumably the company just took the ad down because they hate fun. [Metro]
$10 million
After Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters broke his leg on tour, the band incurred nearly $10 million in fees and expenses for cancelling the rest of its European tour. The risk of injury is just one reason that artists are wary of relying on touring, one for the few remaining lucrative parts of the increasingly broke music business. [The New York Times]
45.7 million viewers
Number of people who watched the Carolina Massacre on Sunday, when Cam Newton’s Carolina Panthers wrecked the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC Championship game, 49-15. On the other hand, the AFC championship — which featured Tom Brady and Peyton Manning— pulled in 53.3 million viewers. [ESPN]
6.6 trillion cubic feet of snow
Ballpark estimate for how much snow was dumped on the U.S. by last week’s blizzard. [Ryan Maue]
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Monday, January 25, 2016
You’d Have To Be Pretty Dumb To Fix A Tennis Match This Week
If suspicions that a mixed-doubles match was fixed at the Australian Open on Sunday prove true, it could go down in the gambling annals as the dumbest fix in sports history. Many of the telltale signs of match-fixing are indeed present; to a large degree, however, the stupidity of fixing a match now is just as strong a reason to doubt it happened.
Pinnacle Sports suspended betting before a mixed-doubles match in which Andrea Hlavackova and Lukasz Kubot faced the Spanish pair of Lara Arruabarrena and David Marrero. Even though it looked on paper like a close matchup, with all four players experienced and highly ranked in doubles, most bettors backed Hlavackova and Kubot, even after the books shifted the odds to promise a bigger payout if Arruabarrena and Marrero won. And volume was heavy for mixed doubles, which many players treat more like an exhibition than like a meaningful match.
After Hlavackova and Kubot won easily, 6-0, 6-3, all four players were questioned by journalists — a rarity in mixed doubles, especially in the first round. Kubot, facing more reporters than he did after winning the 2014 Australian Open men’s doubles title, said Arruabarrena and Marrero “were trying 100 percent.” The Spanish pair also dismissed the idea that they fixed the match. The New York Times put its story about the match on its home page Sunday, sent out a news alert and ran the print version on the front page Monday.
The prominence given to the story by the Times is prima facie evidence for why this would be such a dumb fix. Since BuzzFeed News and the BBC published an investigation a week ago into accusations that tennis authorities aren’t doing enough to stamp out corruption in the sport, journalists have been focused on the possibility of match-fixing — and getting a piece of the story — like never before.
Meanwhile, pressure is on tennis authorities to show they are taking the problem seriously, making it a bad time to try to slip something past them. Hlavackova and Kubot said at their post-match news conference that they’d already been contacted by the Tennis Integrity Unit, a joint initiative of tennis governing bodies that is tasked with fighting corruption in the sport.
Grand Slam tournaments in particular have more officials on site than other events and far more journalists — an order of magnitude more than some of the tennis tour’s smallest stops. And for reporters at Slams, it’s easy to watch matches — tune your television to any court while the match is in progress, or access video of many matches after the fact. Doubles matches at other events usually aren’t televised at all. The Times story included a detailed account of the match that would be difficult to produce if a reporter were chasing reports of suspected fixing at a smaller tournament — such as many of the matches mentioned in the BuzzFeed-BBC report.
Grand Slams also are more lucrative than other events. Although mixed doubles is worth less in prize money than men’s or women’s doubles — and doesn’t earn players ranking points — a win would have netted Arruabarrena and Marrero 2,250 Australian dollars ($1,570 U.S.) more each than their loss did. And they’d have had the chance to win 78,500 Australian dollars each if they went on to win the title. That’s not bad for doubles, where purses generally are far smaller than in singles.
By losing, Arruabarrena and Marrero also miss chances to compete together and impress their national tennis federation. That matters because another mixed-doubles tournament is coming up this summer, one that should be easier to win yet matters far more than an exhibition. Just 16 pairs will get into the mixed-doubles event at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, meaning it will take just four wins to get gold, or three to win silver or bronze. Arruabarrena and Marrero are ranked in the top 35 in women’s and men’s doubles, respectively, which gives them a shot at making the Spanish Olympic team. Here’s one sign that mixed doubles matters more to pros this year: There are 12 pairs in the 32-team Australian Open draw made up of two players who represent the same country, up from just seven last year.
At this site, we often try to use Bayesian thinking. That means we try to estimate the probability of something being true — our prior — and then update it as we gain new information. My Bayesian prior after match-fixing became the dominant tennis topic last week is that we were unlikely to see actual match-fixing with scrutiny so high, and that any suspected match-fixing was likely to be something else. How much should reports about the suspicious mixed-doubles betting change my beliefs?
On the one hand, perhaps quite a bit. Betting on the match really did look funny. Tennis bettors and betting analysts told me that volume on the match — both in terms of the raw number of bets and overall liability — was far heavier than usual for mixed doubles, though the maximum bet at Pinnacle was just $500 at its peak, making it tough to turn too large a profit. And several Marrero doubles matches last year had unusual betting movements, the Times reported. So my Bayesian prior for a Marrero match being fixed might be higher.
“It’s a strange one,” Ian Dorward, a London-based tennis bettor who used to set and adjust tennis betting lines for a bookmaker, said in an email. It “would be a really stupid time to fix it, but maybe he just does not care.” Dorward added, “Either way, it is this type of thing that the TIU should be investigating.” (The TIU doesn’t comment on details of its work.)
On the other hand, as I wrote last week, betting data alone isn’t enough to identify match fixers. There are many other plausible explanations. One that Marrero offered is that he’s injured and that someone in his or his partner’s camp might have let that information slip. Or at a tournament with thousands of fans on the grounds, one could have seen Marrero struggle in practice or in his men’s doubles match, which he’d already lost. The video clips embedded in the Times article from the match hardly are conclusive evidence that Marrero wasn’t trying.
There’s so little data on mixed doubles that it’s not surprising that bookies who often struggle to set opening odds for singles matches might miss big on mixed. Players’ lifetime match records in mixed doubles aren’t readily available and often include just a couple of dozen matches. “With only four mixed doubles events annually, it’s easy to get the opening prices wrong,” Scott Ferguson, a sports gambling consultant, wrote in an email. Odds at Pinnacle for at least two earlier mixed-doubles matches moved by even more.
It could be that bettors noticed before bookies did that Marrero simply stinks at mixed doubles. As the Times reported, he has now lost his last 10 mixed matches and is 7-21 in his career. “Normally, when I play, I play full power, in doubles or singles,” Marrero told the Times. “But when I see the lady in front of me, I feel my hand wants to play, but my head says, ‘Be careful.’ This is not a good combination.”
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What Do Anti-Abortion Demonstrators Want? (Besides An End To Abortion)
Last Friday, Washington, D.C.’s blizzard began sometime after the anti-abortion March for Life began, but before protesters reached the Supreme Court. The snow couldn’t stop a Franciscan friar, though. He kept on walking, barefoot, down the streets, singing hymns with other marchers. A long column of students, all in yellow, chanted a few choruses of “Pro-choice, that’s a lie! Babies never choose to die!” and then started up a call-and-response rosary with a bullhorn.
Not far away, I was cracking ice off of the tips of my touch-screen gloves and surveying protesters, trying to learn who had come to the march and what kind of post-post-Roe v. Wade world they wanted to build. I approached every fifth marcher I saw and interviewed 60 people over the four-hour event.1 It’s not a sample I’d publish in an academic journal or anything, but it let me learn more about the movement than I could from staid news reports of how many people showed up.
The majority of the marchers weren’t protesting abortion simply as an abstract, political problem. Seventy-two percent of the people I surveyed told me that they knew someone personally who had had an abortion. A number of times, although I hadn’t asked for any more details, they told me their friends’ names.
I asked each interviewee whether they had always considered themselves anti-abortion,2 and 18 percent said no. Some described themselves as previously being pro-abortion rights, while others said they wouldn’t have an abortion themselves, but hadn’t always felt they should prevent others from doing so.
The crowd I surveyed matched some expectations of the anti-abortion movement (83 percent of people I spoke to were Catholic), but the crowd was younger (36 percent under 25) than I expected and, for a movement often lumped into a war on women, included more women than men (60 percent female).
The marchers were there to protest Roe v. Wade on the decision’s 43rd anniversary, but while they waited to see if the next president would appoint justices willing to overturn the case, I wanted to know what they thought their movement’s greatest tools were outside of the courthouse. About a quarter (14 of 60 respondents) of the people I surveyed thought defunding Planned Parenthood would do the most to reduce the number of abortions performed in America. An equal number decided that requiring women to view sonograms or receive other information about their pregnancies would reduce abortions the most. Closing abortion clinics through regulation (eight respondents) and offering crisis-pregnancy counseling (seven respondents) were also named.
When I asked marchers about exemptions to abortion bans, none of the people I interviewed thought abortion should be allowed to prevent the birth of a physically or mentally disabled child. The marchers were more divided on abortions intended to save the life of the mother — 38 percent thought these abortions should be allowed. Only four people I spoke to (about 6 percent) felt abortion should be allowed for pregnancies conceived through rape or incest.
But what would the world look like if the marchers succeeded and abortion became illegal? I asked protesters what penalties, if any, they thought would be appropriate for women who obtained illegal abortions and the doctors who performed them. Half of the marchers I interviewed said a doctor who performed an abortion should be charged with murder. About one fifth (13 respondents) said a doctor should lose his or her medical license, and seven respondents felt a charge of manslaughter would be most appropriate. Six respondents were unsure.
The attendees were much more torn over what the appropriate penalty for a woman who had an abortion should be. Fifteen respondents said that she should be charged with manslaughter, while 14 marchers said that they didn’t know what the appropriate penalty should be. A little over one sixth (11 respondents) said there should be no penalty for the woman, while nine of 60 respondents said she should be charged with murder. A number of the people I surveyed told me that they felt the woman should be offered or required to attend counseling to help address whatever circumstances led her to seek an abortion. And one woman told me that she wanted the doctor to be offered counseling. “He must be wounded, too,” she said.
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The Republican Party May Be Failing
“The Party Decides,” the 2008 book by the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller, has probably been both the most-cited and the most-maligned book of this election cycle. After re-reading the book, which underpinned a lot of our early analysis of the primaries here at FiveThirtyEight, I’ve come to another conclusion: It’s probably also the most misunderstood book of the 2016 campaign.
The caricature of the book seems to be this: “The Party Decides” posits a clash between “the establishment” and rank-and-file voters and claims that the establishment always prevails. But that’s not really what the book says. Instead, the book argues that the major American political parties are broad and diverse coalitions of politicians, activists and interest groups, many of whom would never think of themselves as belonging to the political establishment.
However, the book does presume that, in part because of their breadth and diversity, American political parties are strong institutions. Furthermore, it assumes that strong, highly functional parties are able to make presidential nominations that further the party’s best interest.
For a variety of reasons, the nomination of Donald Trump would probably not be in the best interest of the Republican Party. Such an outcome this year, which seems increasingly likely, would either imply that the book’s hypothesis was wrong all along — or that the current Republican Party is weak and dysfunctional and perhaps in the midst of a realignment.3
The party isn’t “the establishment”
You might associate “The Party Decides” with an empirical claim made in the book: Endorsements made by influential Republicans and Democrats are a good predictor of who will win each party’s nomination. At FiveThirtyEight, we’ve been keeping track of a subset of those endorsements, those made by current governors and members of Congress in each party.
Our focus on endorsements by governors and members of Congress is mostly a matter of convenience, however.4 In “The Party Decides,” the authors consider a much broader array of endorsers, including state legislators, labor unions, interest groups and even celebrities. This is important because, in contrast to earlier scholarship that thinks of parties as consisting solely of politicians and party organizations like the Republican National Committee, the authors of “The Party Decides” take a more inclusive view. Their parties include not just elected officials but also “religious organizations, civil rights groups … organizers, fundraisers, pollsters, and media specialists” and even “citizen activists who join the political fray as weekend warriors.”
That means the term “Republican establishment” (in addition to its other problems) is not a good approximation for the book’s view on the party. “Anti-establishment” members of Congress, such as the Freedom Caucus, are parts of “the party” as much as members who always vote with leadership. Lots of people within Washington, D.C., are considered to be part of the “party,” but so are people in Kentucky and Alaska. The editors of National Review magazine are probably5 part of the Republican Party as the book’s authors would define it, but so are bloggers at RedState and conservative talk-radio hosts in Iowa.
The authors of “The Party Decides” use phrases like “party elites” and “party insiders” to describe this collection of people. An alternative that I sometimes prefer is “influential Democrats” and “influential Republicans.” That’s really the bottom line: These people have some ability to influence the nomination,6 and they have some interest in doing so. That influence could take many forms, including holding a position of power, having access to a donor network, possessing scarce skills or knowledge, contributing time or money, or having the ability to persuade others through a media platform.
It might even be tempting to boil down “The Party Decides” to an idea like this: You ought to pay attention to what influential people who care about a party nomination are doing, since they can have a lot of say in the outcome. Indeed, that’s probably a better representation of “The Party Decides” than the idea that a monolithic establishment always wins.
But the book has something more than that in mind. Parties are not merely collections of influential people; those people are supposed to be working together to further the party’s interests. If they “can agree to work together for a candidate, as usually they can, they constitute a formidable political force,” the book says. But they cede much of that power when they remain splintered.
The mechanics of this are complicated, obviously. Some groups within a party care a great deal about winning office. Others are more interested in policy or ideological victories. Moreover, in a given election, a party can only nominate one candidate; if she wins office, she’ll have only so much political capital. Which issues get priority and which ones get short shrift?
But if the parties in “The Party Decides” are complicated, that’s because real American political parties are complicated, too. It’s not inherently obvious what anti-abortion activists, the National Rifle Association, the oil lobby and movement conservative intellectuals have in common — but all of them usually associate themselves with the Republican Party and they potentially stand to gain by working together under its banner.7 Historically, the result of this party-building process has been a punctuated equilibrium of parties that can be stable for decades at a time but which occasionally undergo rapid and dramatic realignments.
Strong parties nominate strong candidates
So the party always wins? Not quite. Blame the book’s title if you like (the long version is: “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform”). It seems to imply that the Republican and Democratic parties are all-powerful, with voters merely going along for the ride. That’s not quite what the authors say, however. “We do not claim that parties are juggernauts that always prevail,” they write in the first chapter.
The authors are also aware of the limited data available on party nominations. “The greatest point of vulnerability, in our view, lies in the thinness of the data that underlie the analysis,” they write. “Our main analyses involve sixty-one candidates, but these candidates ran in only ten nomination contests — and ten is not a large number for making inferences about a process as complicated as presidential nominations.”8 Being aware of these limitations is not the same thing as working around them, of course. But generally speaking, I think the book does a pretty good job under the conditions. (For geeky readers, I have a longer discussion in the footnotes.9)
One reason I say this is because the claims made by “The Party Decides” are modest. The authors aren’t saying that parties can wave a magic wand and nominate whomever they like. Instead, they posit that American political parties are robust and diverse institutions. And they claim that these parties make fairly rational choices in whom they nominate for president. The closest the book comes to a thesis statement is this:
Parties are a systematic force in presidential nominations and a major reason that all nominees since the 1970s have been credible and at least reasonably electable representatives of their partisan traditions.
There are a couple of things to unpack here. First, that qualification “since the 1970s.” That refers, in part, to the nomination process that’s been in place since the McGovern-Fraser reforms, which greatly increased voter participation in the system. However, it conveniently also excludes the Democratic nominations of 1972 and 1976, which were contested under the new system but resulted in the choice of factional candidates, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter.
The book’s view is that party elites had yet to learn the nuances of the new rules, whereas McGovern and Carter had clever strategies to exploit them. (In McGovern’s case, focusing on delegate accumulation instead of the popular vote; in Carter’s, understanding that a strong performance in Iowa could produce media-fueled momentum that would give him a leg up in subsequent contests.) Perhaps, but these years also suggest that the power wielded by party elites is fragile and that unconventional candidates can win if they (like Trump) pursue unconventional strategies.
Nonetheless, truly disastrous nominations like McGovern’s have been rare. Instead, parties have usually nominated candidates who, as the book puts it, are:
- “Credible and at least reasonably electable”;
- “Representatives of their partisan traditions.”
You might describe these two dimensions (as we sometimes have) as “electability” and “ideological fit.” The goal for a party is to find a candidate who scores highly along both axes. George W. Bush in 2000, for example, was acceptable to all major factions of the GOP, but he also began the race as a “compassionate conservative” with a highly favorable image among general election voters. It’s no surprise that Bush won his nomination easily.
At other times, the party must contemplate a trade-off between these goals. Sometimes, it will choose a candidate who breaks with party orthodoxy in important ways, but who has a lot of crossover appeal to general election voters. Bill Clinton in 1992 and John McCain in 2008 are good examples. Or, it may go for broke with an ideologically “pure” candidate whose electability is unproven. Sometimes, the gamble pays off, as it did for Republicans with Ronald Reagan in 1980, but there’s also the risk of winding up with the next Barry Goldwater. Note that Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz, if chosen, would arguably10 fit into the category of ideologically pure but electorally dubious nominees.
It has been extremely rare, however, for a candidate to be nominated while scoring poorly along both dimensions. McGovern is probably the best example, insofar as he was too radical even for many Democrats in 1972 and a disaster of a general election nominee.
Donald Trump might be another of those cases. It’s not clear what policy positions Trump really holds, but to the extent he has articulated them, they’re all over the map and not that well aligned with those traditionally held by Republican officeholders. However, unlike previous “mavericks” such as Bill Clinton or McCain, Trump is not very popular with general election voters. On the contrary, he’s extremely unpopular with independents and would begin the general election race with worse favorability ratings than any candidate to receive a major-party nomination before.
To some extent — at least until we see how the first few states vote — this is a reason to be skeptical of Trump. It’s possible that even if party elites don’t have much say in the process, Republican voters will figure out on their own that Trump is a risky nominee.
Put another way, the case for being doubtful of Trump’s nomination prospects never had all that much to do with “The Party Decides.” It was not as though Trump fit the profile of a typical Republican nominee but just lacked endorsements from party elites. Instead, Trump is an outlier in nearly every respect and in ways that suggest he could be extremely damaging to the Republican Party as its nominee. To have doubted Trump is to have given the Republican Party credit, perhaps too much credit, for being able to avoid a potential disaster.
But now that Trump has gone from “black swan” to prospective nominee, it’s worth asking another question: If Republican voters are on the verge choosing Trump, why aren’t party elites doing much to stop them?
So why isn’t the GOP stopping Trump?
Some of the reasons could be circumstantial. One way in which a factional candidate might win the nomination is by claiming the plurality when the vote among mainstream candidates is divided. That might be some of what’s happening this year. An unprecedented number of traditionally well-qualified Republicans entered the race. Although some of them have since dropped out, there’s still a pile-up in New Hampshire –– a state where Republicans might otherwise have a chance of stopping Trump — with Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich each polling between 8 percent and 12 percent of the vote.
Another reason could be if a candidate rides a wave of media-driven momentum to victory. Usually, we’d think of a momentum candidate as someone like Carter, who parlayed an unexpected “win”11 in the Iowa caucuses in 1976 to emerge from obscurity and top a disorganized field. Can Trump, who was a nationally renowned figure before he entered the race, really be placed in the same category as Carter? Maybe. The media coverage of Trump has been disproportionate and seems to be self-reinforcing, with polls and coverage begetting one another in a virtuous cycle.
But these aren’t the good excuses for party elites that they might seem. In fact, they are exactly the sorts of outcomes that party elites are supposed to intervene to prevent. One of the reasons to coordinate during the early, “invisible primary” phase of the nomination is to avoid a logjam of candidates later on. As for Trump’s media coverage, surely some of it reflects the fact that he’s a perpetual attention machine who generates good ratings. But in “The Party Decides,” party elites are supposed to serve as a counterweight to “the poor quality of media coverage, which covers leading candidates much more than others.” So far, they haven’t been able to change the narrative on Trump.
What power does the party really have?
If the “Party Decides” theory is at a loss to explain why GOP elites have failed to stop Trump, it may be because elites never had all that much power to begin with. Indeed, the book can be frustratingly opaque when describing how party elites motivate rank-and-file voters to go along with their choices. “The inner workings of the invisible primary are, as the name implies, hard to see,” it says at one point.
So I’ll try to fill in the some of the blanks by borrowing from the political scientist Joseph Nye’s distinction between “hard power” and “soft power” in international relations. Hard power consists of military and economic might. Soft power consists of non-coercive forms of influence, such as gaining global esteem by exporting popular culture.
In the context of presidential nominations, the analogy to “hard power” is rule-setting authority plus control over scarce resources. Modern political parties do have some of this. They control the rules by which delegates are chosen, for example, though attempts to rig the rules in favor of the elites’ preferred candidate can backfire. They would have quite a bit of power in the (unlikely) event of a contested convention. Party elites also have access to financial resources, though not a monopoly on them.12 The party may own quite a bit of data, an increasingly important resource.
For the most part, however, “The Party Decides” seems to think that party elites possess “soft power”: the power of persuasion. It assumes that party elites have largely the same goals as rank-and-file voters, but are more informed about which candidates to support, leaving the electorate “open to suggestion”:
All of which leads us to reason as follows: An electorate that is usually not very interested, not very well informed, and attracted to candidates in significant part because they are doing well is probably an electorate open to suggestion about whom to support. If, as we know to be the case, many primary and caucus voters are also strong partisans, what they want in a candidate may be exactly what party insiders want: someone who can unite the party and win in November.
This is a plausible story in some respects. In particular, it coincides with the finding that polls are not very predictive until quite late in the nomination race and even then can undergo dramatic shifts in the span of weeks or days. Voters usually like several of their party’s candidates; it may not take all that much to nudge them from one candidate to another. There are also reasons to be skeptical, however. For example — perhaps especially in the Republican Party — there has been an erosion of trust between party elites and rank-and-file voters.
For a long time, this seemed to be the question that the Republican nomination would turn upon. Trump seemingly had plenty of support from voters, but almost none from party elites, making him the “perfect test case.” How much power did the party really have? Would voters continue to support Trump once the party threw its whole playbook at him?
But just when it looked like we were about to get some answers, a funny thing happened on the way to Des Moines.
Party elites haven’t been doing much to stop Trump
It became clear a month or so ago, if it hadn’t been already, that Republicans didn’t have much of a strategy for stopping Trump. In fact, other than occasionally tsk-tsking at some of his more inflammatory remarks, they weren’t doing much of anything about him. They weren’t waging a concerted negative campaign; there have been remarkably few negative ads of any kind against Trump. But party elites also weren’t throwing their support to any of the other candidates, at least judging by those candidates’ still-lackluster pace of endorsements.
Recently, the race took an even stranger turn. There were stories like this one, from Philip Rucker and Robert Costa at The Washington Post, suggesting that party elites were warming to Trump. Soon after, Bob Dole was suggesting that Trump wasn’t such a bad guy, while Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley was appearing with Trump and urging voters to “make America great again.”
Importantly, these actions seem to have been taken mostly in opposition to Ted Cruz, instead of in support of Trump. Nonetheless, these reports caused me to renounce much of my remaining skepticism of Trump’s chances. Even tactical and tacit support for Trump is remarkable from the “Party Decides” perspective because the book suggests he’s just about the last person party elites would want to nominate.
I mentioned the main reasons for this before: Trump scores poorly on the two dimensions — electability and ideological fit — that party elites are supposed to care most about. Maybe you could make a devil’s advocate case on Trump’s behalf, but I’m not sure how convincing it would be.13
Moreover, Trump is not the sort of candidate to whom you’d expect the party to extend the benefit of the doubt. Under “The Party Decides,” parties are supposed to prefer candidates who are acceptable to as much of the coalition as possible to those who are polarizing. Trump generates considerable enthusiasm among some Republican groups but strong opposition among others. Party elites tend to prefer candidates who have worked their way up through the system and developed a network of relationships within the party. Trump, a relative newcomer to Republican Party politics, worked around the system instead.
What’s more, Trump has touched on any number of “third rail” issues, from banning Muslims from entering the United States to denouncing super PACs, that Republican candidates usually avoid. This is part of Trump’s appeal, of course: He says what other candidates won’t say, but which may nevertheless be popular with Republican voters. But Republican candidates usually avoid mentioning these topics for good reason14: They tend to expose the seams in the Republican coalition — splitting the base from the “donor class,” dividing some Republican constituencies from others, or damaging the party’s brand for the general election.
Perhaps you can argue that Cruz is just as bad as Trump from a “Party Decides” standpoint. Cruz is far enough to the right that he could cost the GOP points in the general election. He’s such a purist, in fact, that he also might be too far to the right for some groups of influential Republicans, such as those who support government subsidies for ethanol. Furthermore, Cruz is perceived to be difficult to work with. But there’s no reason party elites can’t oppose Cruz and oppose Trump just as vocally.
One explanation could be that party elites are misinformed or confused about Trump. “The Party Decides” tends to assume that party elites are highly sophisticated — able to see past the spin, the non-predictive early polls and the media talking points of the day. But perhaps this isn’t the case. Party elites often have relatively little communication with rank-and-file voters and may not understand the reasons for Trump’s popularity because they don’t encounter very many Trump supporters. At the same time, they exist within the political echo chamber and are inundated with constant media chatter about Trump’s polls and momentum. The party elites may even be engaged in a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts: Because everyone thinks that Trump is impervious to attack, no one is bothering to attack him.
Have Republicans lost their team spirit?
Maybe the most incredible passage of the campaign cycle comes from a recent Jonathan Martin article in The New York Times. It suggests that some Republican professionals are supporting Trump because they think he’ll lose:
Of course, this willingness to accommodate Mr. Trump is driven in part by the fact that few among the Republican professional class believe he would win a general election. In their minds, it would be better to effectively rent the party to Mr. Trump for four months this fall, through the general election, than risk turning it over to Mr. Cruz for at least four years, as either the president or the next-in-line leader for the 2020 nomination.
I’m a bit skeptical, but Martin seems to be referring to Republican lobbyists and consultants, in which case the reporting makes a certain amount of sense. If Trump wins the nomination but loses the general election, we’ll have another extremely vigorous competition for the Republican nomination in 2020, which means lots of work for consultants.15 Lobbyists and consultants would stay busy with either the transactional Hillary Clinton or the wheeler-dealer Trump as president, but less so with an ideologue like Cruz.
Other types of party elites have their own incentives. Republican members of Congress apparently think they’ll do worse with Cruz on the ballot than with Trump. I haven’t seen much evidence to support this claim (or much evidence against it), but so long as the members believe it, you might expect their self-preservation instincts to kick in.
The other Republican campaigns, meanwhile, may have tactical reasons to avoid attacking Trump even as they pillory one another.
The theme is that many Republican elites have no professional incentive to oppose Trump even if they personally dislike his politics or think he’d be a poor nominee. That’s fair enough. But the whole point of forming a party is to work together to facilitate the party’s interests. In that sense, the GOP would qualify as a weak, fraying party if it can’t avoid nominating Trump, a candidate who might at once reject large parts of the party’s traditional platform and potentially cost it a highly winnable general election.
That’s not to say the Republican Party would disappear after a Trump nomination — there would almost certainly still be something named the Republican Party — but it could conceivably be transformed into something more in Trump’s image, perhaps more in the direction of a European populist party. Trump’s nomination could even trigger a political realignment. Such things are rare, occurring perhaps once every several decades, but nominees like Trump are awfully rare, too.
Or maybe not. “The Party Decides” isn’t wrong, not quite yet. While most of the book’s focus is on the “invisible primary” phase of the campaign, it also presents statistical evidence that party elites continue to exert influence on the outcome well after Iowa and New Hampshire have voted.16 Furthermore, on the previous three occasions when party elites failed to reach a consensus before Iowa (these were the 1988 and 2004 Democratic nominations and the 2008 Republican race), the parties nevertheless wound up nominating fairly conventional candidates (Michael Dukakis, John Kerry and McCain). If Marco Rubio winds up the Republican nominee after all, the theory will come out looking pretty good. And if it’s Jeb Bush, somehow, the party’s powers will seem miraculous.
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