This subject has been around a long time. It has been a "front burner" item at least since the Obama Administration started trying to pass Obamacare. The proximate cause of this post is the publication of a long article in Time Magazine by Steven Brill. At the time I am writing this post it is available on the web at http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/. I don't know if Time intends to keep it up permanently. Mr. Brill makes a positive and useful contribution to the discussion. But it was neither the opening shot nor the final word.
Back in the olden days when I was born things were different. When my mother decided she was pregnant she sought out an OB/GYN she trusted. He charged a flat fee that covered everything: visits, hospital fees, drugs, the works. In those days few people had insurance and the Great Depression was not that far in the past. People expected to pay medical costs out of pocket and most medical procedures were fairly inexpensive. A "hospital bed" was just a bed that was not very different than a normal bed and the hospital was a building that was not very different than other buildings. There were few drugs and medical devices and both tended to be inexpensive.
After that medicine started getting much more expensive, complex, and specialized. And more and more people started getting medical insurance through their employers. For a good long time this insurance was pretty cheap because medicine in general was pretty cheap. So companies used medical plans as an inexpensive lure to attract employees. But medical costs started a long term trend of increasing at a rate much faster than other costs. And after a while company paid medical plans started getting expensive.
Back in the period when medical insurance started to become popular my parents signed us up for an HMO called Group Health. At the time Group Health was slightly more expensive than a traditional insurance plan, perhaps 10% - 20% more expensive. But many people thought the extra expense was worth it because they perceived the GHC product to be better than a standard medical plan. And at this time the competition was between nothing and GHC as most people were not covered by an employer funded insurance plan. And GHC was very successful during this period.
Eventually company insurance became quite common. Some companies offered an HMO option for a little more money but many did not. But then a law was passed that said employers had to offer an "HMO option". This did not work out as supporters expected. The insurance companies just started offering a slightly modified version of their standard insurance which they called an HMO option. Most people's experience with HMOs is with one of these phony HMO insurance option rather than a real HMO. So why am I going into all this?
Because the HMO model is a wellness approach. The idea is that you pay one standard fee. If the HMO can keep you healthy then they make money on you. Otherwise, they don't. The alternative approach is the one we all get now called "fee for service". The insurance company pays for some or all of the cost of whatever services you end up using. There is an argument you hear all the time now that if we only did wellness rather than fee for service medicine would be cheaper. GHC and other HMOs in those early years worked hard and worked smart in their wellness efforts. But they always ended up costing more than the insurance plans. Now it is possible that when you counted up all the costs the HMO approach was cheaper. But the premiums said it was more expensive. And what this tells us is that if the wellness approach is cheaper it's not cheaper by a lot. If it was a lot cheaper then HMOs would have been able to get their premiums below those of the insurance plans. I think the wellness approach is the better way to go. But I don't think it is going to save a lot of money. It might even slightly increase health care costs.
Mr. Brill does not seriously address the wellness versus fee for service debate. So let me move on to an area where he does spend a lot of time and effort. Who's the villain that is driving up health care costs. Mr. Brill says it is NOT doctors. But here some context is missing because the key events happened many years ago.
When people first started noticing that health care costs were climbing the dominant component was doctor fees. At this time hospitals were still relatively cheap as were drugs and medical devices. So people went after doctors. They essentially drove the fees doctors charged down relative to other medical costs. Before doctors could make a good living by charging fees that they thought were appropriate. And many of them would bundle in a lot of extras as did the OB/GYN my mother went to when I was in the process of coming along. But this bundled approach started being a bad idea from the doctor's point of view. One doctor might bundle in a lot of stuff and charge a higher rate compared to another doctor who bundled less in. Surveys were done as to how much each doctor was charging and standard rates were developed. So doctors did the sensible thing. They unbundled. Patients now got billed separately for everything so that the only thing that was included in the doctor charge was for the time the doctor spent.
This trend continued and intensified. This drove the hourly rate the doctor could charge down. And great amounts of creativity were applied to increasing the cost and number of things that were charged separately. Mr. Brill goes into the ridiculous lengths that are now employed to pad the bill by adding individual charges for individual items. One of his examples involves a single tablet of a Tylenol generic that is separately charged. Another example is a charge for the smock the doctor wears when he examines you. This ever finer slicing and dicing of medical charges have added greatly to the costs of medicine.
And by now this fierce pressure on the hourly rates doctors charged has proceeded long enough so that Mr. Brill now considers doctor rates to not be a major part of the problem. But there is another phenomenon related to the income of doctors that Mr. Brill does rightly spend a lot of time on. While the hourly rate doctors charge is now relatively low the amount of income doctors receive is now quite high. This is because doctors now get a lot of their income from other medical sources. They form group practices and the group practice creates subsidiaries that perform medical services like lab work, pharmaceutical services, CAT scans, MRI scans, X-Rays, etc. These services are ordered by the doctors in the practice and provided by the wholly owned subsidiary which charges high fees for the service. So doctors make large profits on the medical goods and services they order. In some cases doctors get a direct or indirect kickback from medical device makers for the device (e.g. replacement knee) that the doctor specifies. All these alternate sources of income are medical related but they don't show up as an increased hourly rate. They also encourage doctors to prescribe extra procedures. More procedures means more money for the doctor.
Mr. Brill spends most of his time dissecting actual medical bills received by patients. His point is that hospitals and other medical facilities jack prices way up. This results in a lot of profit for the hospital. The fact that many of these hospitals are considered non-profits by the IRS makes no difference at all. That just leaves more money for new buildings, new expensive medical devices like MRI scanners, and especially higher salaries for senior hospital executives. He singles out the salaries of a number of these executives. One case among several involves Yale University. The executive who oversees a hospital affiliated with the Yale Medical School makes several times as much as the president of Yale. (Actually, this sort of thing is not that unusual. In my state the highest paid state government employee is the football coach. He makes far more than the president of the university he nominally coaches for or the governor of the entire state.)
Mr. Brill spends a lot of time on something he calls the chargemaster. I have never heard of such a thing. What he describes sounds like what is usually called a price list. It is a list of all the goods and services a hospital provides and the nominal price for each. Calling it "chargemaster" rather than "price list" makes it sound more exotic I suppose. "Look at me! I have discovered this secret thing you have never heard of before. And its very bad." Whatever you call it, it is very bad. But not because it is some kind of exotic secret thing. Its bad because of how it is used and abused. Companies have been abusing price lists since time immemorial. "This widget is on sale at 50%, 70%, 90% off it's suggested retail price". We have all seen zillions of examples of this sort of thing going on all over the place. Anyone who doesn't think that the "list price" has been pumped up as much as the retailer thinks he can get away with should have his head examined.
Mr. Brill makes three general points. First, hospitals do this kind of inflation to an even more extreme extent that even the sleaziest retailer. He cites examples of prices that are thousands of percent too high. Second, hospitals provide no justification for the price they list. This item is no mystery to me. I will talk about it later. And finally, hospitals actually charge full list price to some of their customers. Insurance companies usually get a discount off this list price. A common amount is 30% off. But it may be 50% off or more. It is not unusual for Medicare to get 90% or more off. But if you are a walk in customer (i.e. no insurance or Medicare) they will usually initially charge you full list. If they give you a discount it is usually considerably less than the amount of the discount they give to insurance companies. Medicare charges are based on actual costs and not list price. And actual costs, even after a "Medicare markup" is added in, will frequently amount to a discount of 90% or more off the list price.
Mr. Brill never did get a straight answer as to how list prices are set. I can tell you how it works. The list price is whatever the hospital thinks the traffic will bear. They don't want to admit this so they give Mr. Brill a nonsense answer or no answer at all.
Partly what's going on here is the old balloon analogy. If you squeeze the balloon in at one place it just bulges out at another place. If doctors can't get enough income from charging higher rates they will find another way. They will have their practice buy a CAT scanner then order up a lot of CAT scans, as an example. If a hospital can't get a high enough room rate they will start charging by the pill for Tylenol or assess a fee for changing the sheets or jack up the price for X-Rays, etc.
We have seen where some part of the medical establishment decides they are not making enough so they game the system. And if the rules are changed to deal with one revenue enhancing technique people will adapt and find a new technique. One contemporary example of this that Mr. Brill discusses is drugs. Back in the olden days my HMO was known for pushing pills. Why? Because at that time drugs were usually cheaper than alternatives and studies showed they were effective. But times have changed. Drugs, as a general category, are no longer cheap. Some drugs can cost tens of thousands of dollars per month for a standard dose. Why? Because drugs used to be cheap. So there was little attention paid to what they cost. Some smart executive in the pharmaceutical industry figured this out and started rolling out extremely expensive drugs. It didn't take long for other pharmaceutical companies to start doing the same thing. The system has yet to come up with a counter for this strategy. So every year we see a number of extremely expensive new drugs hitting the market.
I think Mr. Brill does a good job of working us through why medicine is so expensive in the U.S. Since he doesn't go into any history he does a poorer job of explaining how we got where we are now. And I think his prescriptions for fixing things are extremely weak. So what do I think we should do? Let me first discuss what we should not do.
The first thing we need to do is understand the whole balloon thing where if you squeeze costs here you often end up just pushing costs to over there. I think in retrospect this clamping down hard on the hourly rate of doctors was a mistake. It just pushed the costs to other parts of the system. A piecemeal approach that just looks at part of the system (hospital charges and, to a lesser extent prescription drug prices), as Mr. Brill did will just cause the medical establishment to push costs somewhere else.
Mr. Brill also makes a common observation that is worth repeating. The medical industry is NOT a market as we commonly understand markets. It is an interlocking set of monopolies that have successfully organized themselves so that they have pricing power. They use that power in a variety of ways to raise prices. We should not be surprised that in this environment prices are high. Mr. Brill says he set out to do an apolitical analysis. But he also says he believes in the free market. That's fine if you can find a way to restructure things so that market forces are introduced into the medical industry. Mr. Brill never comes up with a method for doing this.
Mr. Brill suggests getting rid of the chargemaster. As I said, it's just a price list. The problem with the price list is not that it exists. It's that the prices in the list are too high. And generally speaking they are a secret. In general the price list is one of numerous areas where sunlight would help. It would be nice if these price lists were published so that comparison shopping would at least theoretically be possible. One of the good parts of Obamacare is that health care providers are required to spend 80% (in some situations) or 85% (in other situations) on medical care. Some companies have had trouble hitting these targets, which gives you an idea of how bloated they have become. If there is some sensible way to fix the problems with current price lists, I'm all for it. But I'm not sure that is possible. Now let me finally move on to what I think should be done.
The first thing I want to suggest is not a specific fix but a general approach to finding fixes that work. We as a country should do what successful companies often do: go to school on the competition. Here I am not talking about looking at one insurance company versus another, or one hospital versus another. There is benefit to doing that. But there is even greater benefit in studying how other countries do health care. General Motors studies Toyota. Why can't the U.S. study the Japanese health care system? There are many countries out there. They have all come up with different ways to do health care. Why not study each system carefully and figure out how it works. Then try to figure out what works well and what does not in that system. Actually a start has already been made. T.R. Reid, a writer for the Washington Post has written a book called "The Healing of America". In it he takes a look at the health care systems of not only Japan but the U.K. (Britain), Germany, Taiwan, and Switzerland. What he found was that each system is quite differently from the others. But all of them deliver health care of equivalent or better quality to the U.S.. All of these systems are much more popular in their native country than the U.S. system is in the U.S., and all of the systems are cheaper than the U.S. system. The Swiss system is considered the "Cadillac option" and even it is substantially cheaper. In many cases these systems have been operating for decades so you can really see how well they work over the long term.
I think it is impossible to effectively apply actual market forces to the health care system. If you want details of why it is likely impossible I refer you to Mr. Brill's story. Beyond that, there is the balloon issue I have been talking about.
Finally, let me deliver the short term good news and long term bad news. If we look at what other countries are doing it is obvious that health care costs can be drastically cut and health care quality improved (but probably only by a little). That means that if I could wave a magic wand and instantly make all the changes that should be made then costs would drop drastically and quality would go up. But as far as I can tell no country has solved the problem of the high rate of health care cost increase. This is a long established trend that is going on everywhere. It's nice that costs in Taiwan are much lower than they are in the U.S. But costs are increasing faster than inflation in Taiwan. The inexorable law of compound interest says that, while it may take a little longer for costs in Taiwan to go through the roof it will eventually happen. So, while I am optimistic that something can be done about costs in the short run I am pessimistic that anything can be done in the long run.
And that leads me inexorably to "death panels". Death panels are a bugaboo of conservatives as in "Obamacare equals government death panels." What this line of thinking ignores is that we currently have and have always had death panels. In days of yore the death panels were located in the family. Dad would decide that the family couldn't afford the medicine (or operation) that was necessary to keep aunt Edith alive. So aunt Edith would quietly be laid to rest. Current death panels are run by insurance companies. They decide what to cover and what not to. Mr. Brill has several examples of the effect of coverage limits. A policy would have a limit on how much it would cover for a particular year or for the lifetime of an individual. If the limit got exceeded then you were on your own. There used to be an exclusion for "experimental procedures" like heart transplants. After insurance companies lost enough law suits ("that nice person is so sick and the insurance company has so much money") they gave up on that sort of thing. Mr. Brill points our that 60% of all individual bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. Obamacare is phasing out the limits but it will raise rates. And nowhere in the Obamacare legislation is there anything that creates a government death panel. The closest thing is a very modest effort to study how to make things more efficient.
The medical industry is very good at making decisions into life and death decisions. "This $10,000 drug is cheap if it saves a life." You can easily plug "this operation" or "this medical device" into the previous sentence. Ultimately either medical costs will expand forever (impossible) or we will be confronted with a life and death decision. How much is aunt Edith's life worth? If we don't decide that the cost of saving aunt Edith is too high in some cases then ultimately we will be unsuccessful in containing health care costs.
One question no one asks is "how much is health care worth"? The answer is "it depends". Let's say that I invent a magical device. You spend 30 minutes in it twice per year. That's it! No doctor's visits. No more drugs or exercise. None of that. You just do your 30 minutes twice per year. What you get is the body of a healthy 30 year old. And not only is it healthy, it's fit and trim. You can stop exercising. You can smoke and drink. If you drink and crash your car, you're still dead but you are now immune from standard medical maladies. Now if you stick with your "30 minutes, twice a year" regime you live to be 150 years old. Then you die quietly in your sleep. How about that?
That's the setup. Now pretend you're Bill Gates and the magic machine treatment costs a billion dollars per person. If I were Bill Gates I would pay $5 billion and sign up myself, my wife, and my three children. The real Bill Gates would probably also sign up some other people like his father. But you get the idea. For Bill Gates this would be a good deal. Neither you nor I are Bill Gates so let's get a little more real.
Let's pretend you are Charlie Rose. Mr. Rose has a nightly talk show on PBS and does an hour in the morning on CBS. I don't know what his income or net worth is. But I think I can accurately characterize it as "very comfortable but not in the billionaire range". Now the deal for Mr. Rose is that the magic machine will cost him half his income. Mr. Rose is one of those lucky people who has enough money and knows it. He does things he likes to do like his two TV gigs but he doesn't own a bunch of homes scattered over the planet or his own private jet or any of those other super-rich trappings. And maybe Mr. Rose could cut his effective income in half and it would make no difference. But let's assume this in not true. I picked Mr. Rose for a specific purpose. His PBS show is supported by a number of blue chip corporate sponsors. If Mr. Rose needed to up his income he could just go to his current sponsors and ask for more money or rope in additional sponsors. Like most of us Mr. Rose doesn't like to hustle for money. So when he has lined up enough sponsorship money he quits. He is one of those few people who controls his income. So this "half your income" deal would be a good deal for Mr. Rose. At least it would be if I were Mr. Rose.
Now let's take another step down the income curve. Consider John and Jane Smith and their two children Bob and Mary. John and Jane both work full time and each pulls down $40,000 per year, close to the median income in this country. So the family income is $80,000 as Bob and Mary are too young to work. Now offer this same deal to the Smith family. They put half their income into health care. This is only $40,000 per year. It would take thousands of years to add up to the $5 billion we have asked from Mr. Gates. I'm sure half of Mr. Rose's income is far greater than $40,000. So it's a steal of a deal, right? No! Bargain though it may be, the Smith family can't afford to spend $40,000 per year on health care, even for the magically wonderful health care I have invented.
In my made up example I have made up a health care that is truly miraculous. The actual health care that is on offer falls far short of what I have made up. It is far less effective. The longest anyone has ever lived is 122 years. And our health is not perfect even at thirty. And it goes down hill steadily after that even if we have great health care and we live an exemplary life from a health standpoint. Almost none of us that live to be a hundred are able to live a full active life at that point. The best most of us can do is be reasonably vigorous into our eighties. And many of us don't even last that long without significant degradation. So actual health care is far short of my invented ideal.
Judging by the decisions people actually make most people believe that extreme measures should be taken for people they love as long as someone else is paying for it. But as a society we are paying for it. And most people are unwilling to admit that health care is a very inexact science. There is a common statistic to the effect that half of all lifetime health costs are incurred in the last six months of life. Assuming that is so, and it probably is, what are we supposed to do about it? The problem is that in many cases we don't know that it's the last six months. That happened to me recently. I had Christmas dinner with an acquaintance, an older gentleman. To my eye he looked like he had many years ahead of him. But less than three months later he is gone. He took sick unexpectedly and died. At no time did his illness look life threatening.
I don't know how much money is spent on people who don't pull through after it is obvious that they will not make it. This would seem like the area where the most and the most obvious cost savings exist. But people find it very hard to let people go under even these circumstances. Saying "it's just too expensive" in other areas of health care is even harder. But if we don't find a way to do just that then clever people will find a way to turn ever more expensive devices or drugs or procedures into "life and death" and medical expenses will continue to go up and up and up.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Second Amendment Rights
This country has been arguing about gun rights for a long time. The argument has been hot and heavy at least going back to the Reagan Assassination attempt on March 30, 1981. That was over thirty years ago. The most recent iteration of the argument heated up immediately after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut on December 14, 2012. In this instance 20 small children were killed as were a number of adults. As has frequently been the case in recent actions the perpetrator was killed.
I have frankly been surprised by the reaction to Sandy Hook. The details of these atrocities vary but we have shrugged off many of them in the past few years. What has stayed the same through many years now are the arguments of the various "sides", particularly the National Rifle Association. After each of these events they trot out the same old nonsense. Before Sandy Hook not much attention was paid to what they said. Nor was much attention paid to the arguments of various people disagreeing with them. The media had been quick to drop coverage after previous incidents because for years now reporters could recite the talking points of the actors almost word for word before they even opened their mouths. What has changed after Sandy Hook is that people are paying attention to what the NRA in particular is saying and reacting with outrage. This is different. I am at a loss to explain this change in behavior but I welcome it.
With that as background I would like to address a key component of the argument. Gun rights advocates argue that their rights are guaranteed by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Is that really so? And, if so, to what extent? The Second Amendment is very short. So let me quote it in its entirety:
That's it. That's the whole thing. Now conservatives are big on something called "strict constructionism". The constitution means what it says, they opine. Looking at the words my strict interpretation would be "if you are properly associated with a militia you can have guns". But what do I know? Not much, according to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court opined on the subject in 2008. They ruled in a case usually abbreviated as "Heller". The actual title of the case is "District of Columbia et al., petitioners, v. Dick Anthony Heller". The docket is 07-290. You can read their opinion at http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf. The whole thing is 157 pages long. But the pages are paperback sized and it is written so that normal people can follow the important parts. So that is not as hard as you might think. I read it all the way through several years ago. Note: There was a follow on case which I have not read. But the consensus was that it broke no new ground. It was necessary because Heller was a District of Columbia case where there was no State involved. The second case involved a State (Illinois, I believe) but the second case essentially said the rules were the same. So what does Heller have to tell us about what rights the Second Amendment protects and what rights it doesn't? It turns out it tells us a lot.
The majority opinion was written by Justice Antonin Scalia, a very conservative justice and a well known "gun rights" advocate. The opinion can be broken down into three parts. Part one is a general discussion of what the words of the Second Amendment mean and what should happen in the absence of any gun regulation. Scalia's opinion contains a lot of interesting history and analysis. Justice Souter delivered a dissent to this portion of Scalia's opinion. The second part is the one that would come as the biggest surprise to gun rights advocates. Quoting Scalia directly, "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited." I will be getting back to the details that follow in a minute. The third and final part discusses whether the specific law passed by the District of Columbia is appropriate (constitutional) or not. Scalia said "not". Justice Breyer filed a dissent to this section.
So let me paraphrase the decision. Part 1 argues that there is a general right of pretty much everyone to keep and bear arms in the absence of sensible regulation. Part 2 argues that there is such a thing as a sensible regulation. Part 3 argues that the DC regulation was not sensible and therefore unconstitutional. So the whole thing boils down to a "pornography" argument. Paraphrasing the pornography version: I can't define sensible gun regulations but I know them when I see them. Generally speaking I was swayed by Scalia's argument in part 1 that in the absence of sensible regulation guns are always legal. There was no dissent to part 2 (there is such a thing as sensible regulation) so that obviously represents the unanimous opinion of the court. I was swayed by Justice Bryer's dissent in part 3. I am convinced that the DC regulation was sensible and, therefore, constitutional. But the majority disagreed.
Since the Heller case came down with the exception of the case I mentioned above there have not been any big gun rights cases argued in front of the Supreme Court. I think the reason is similar to the reason there have been no big pornography cases argued for many years now. In the case of pornography the Court came to see that it all boiled down to personal opinion and decided they were tired of playing that game. So they stopped taking cases. In the gun situation I think the analysis is the same, it's just coming from the other end. Instead of the court turning cases down plaintiffs are not filing them. They are just not comfortable risking that the court will disagree with whatever side of the "reasonable gun law" argument they are on. And this "not comfortable" position applies to both "pro" and "anti" sides.
Now I want to get into some more detail about what Justice Scalia had to say about what he thought was "reasonable". There are some surprises. He is in favor of "prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons". He also says "nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms." He also is OK with the ban on "M-16 rifles and the like".
This last item is particularly interesting. A large portion of his opinion is devoted to militias. The U.S. military adopted the M-16 during the Vietnam War ('60s). They have recently replaced it with the M-4. But the M-4 is an "M-16 and the like" weapon. It is an M-16 with a shorter barrel, a modified stock (the part you put to your shoulder), and a few other minor changes to make it easier to carry around. Militias in the form of state National Guard units are typically equipped with the same weapon the military uses. This means M-16s and now M-4s. Militia members at some times and in some places have been responsible for providing their own weapon. Applied in the modern context this means that they would be required to provide an M-16 or M-4. The obvious argument sounds reasonable to me (if you adopt Scalia's analysis) and would justify the Second Amendment requiring that it be legal for ordinary citizens to purchase M-16s then and M-4s now. But Justice Scalia explicitly rejects that argument by unequivocally stating that is is constitutional to regulate the sale and possession of M-16s (and by extension M-4s) by ordinary civilians.
Justice Scalia also says 'We think that limitation is fairly supported by historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of "dangerous and unusual weapons"'. What is a "dangerous and unusual weapon"? I have absolutely no idea. I could possibly come up with a definition. But I have no way of knowing whether the Supreme Court would agree with me. If I had to put money down I would bet that the court would come up with a different definition than I would. And I have no idea how the Court's decision would differ from mine. Also, like pornography, what constitutes "dangerous and unusual" is likely to change with time. Something like say a Thompson submachine gun (see any thirties gangster movie if you are not sure what I am talking about) has now been around for something like 80 years. I think most people would have characterized it as "dangerous and unusual" in the '20s and '30s. But would they now?
I am confident that pro-gun types would be shocked to find out what Justice Scalia thinks (or at least thought in 2008) are appropriate gun regulations. And certainly many anti-gun people would be pleasantly surprised to find out how much cover Justice Scalia provides to them. But I think everyone who has studied the actual situation carefully is in the same position I am. They do not know with any kind of confidence what the state of play is on the "gun law" front. Polls on people's positions on various gun regulation ideas have been static for a couple of decades. But they seem to be changing very quickly in our post Sandy Hook world. This adds even more confusion and uncertainty to the situation. It is too soon to predict that any new laws will actually make it through at the Federal level given our political environment. And who knows what the Supreme Court will think of what might come out? All I know for sure is that I don't know.
I have frankly been surprised by the reaction to Sandy Hook. The details of these atrocities vary but we have shrugged off many of them in the past few years. What has stayed the same through many years now are the arguments of the various "sides", particularly the National Rifle Association. After each of these events they trot out the same old nonsense. Before Sandy Hook not much attention was paid to what they said. Nor was much attention paid to the arguments of various people disagreeing with them. The media had been quick to drop coverage after previous incidents because for years now reporters could recite the talking points of the actors almost word for word before they even opened their mouths. What has changed after Sandy Hook is that people are paying attention to what the NRA in particular is saying and reacting with outrage. This is different. I am at a loss to explain this change in behavior but I welcome it.
With that as background I would like to address a key component of the argument. Gun rights advocates argue that their rights are guaranteed by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Is that really so? And, if so, to what extent? The Second Amendment is very short. So let me quote it in its entirety:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
That's it. That's the whole thing. Now conservatives are big on something called "strict constructionism". The constitution means what it says, they opine. Looking at the words my strict interpretation would be "if you are properly associated with a militia you can have guns". But what do I know? Not much, according to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court opined on the subject in 2008. They ruled in a case usually abbreviated as "Heller". The actual title of the case is "District of Columbia et al., petitioners, v. Dick Anthony Heller". The docket is 07-290. You can read their opinion at http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf. The whole thing is 157 pages long. But the pages are paperback sized and it is written so that normal people can follow the important parts. So that is not as hard as you might think. I read it all the way through several years ago. Note: There was a follow on case which I have not read. But the consensus was that it broke no new ground. It was necessary because Heller was a District of Columbia case where there was no State involved. The second case involved a State (Illinois, I believe) but the second case essentially said the rules were the same. So what does Heller have to tell us about what rights the Second Amendment protects and what rights it doesn't? It turns out it tells us a lot.
The majority opinion was written by Justice Antonin Scalia, a very conservative justice and a well known "gun rights" advocate. The opinion can be broken down into three parts. Part one is a general discussion of what the words of the Second Amendment mean and what should happen in the absence of any gun regulation. Scalia's opinion contains a lot of interesting history and analysis. Justice Souter delivered a dissent to this portion of Scalia's opinion. The second part is the one that would come as the biggest surprise to gun rights advocates. Quoting Scalia directly, "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited." I will be getting back to the details that follow in a minute. The third and final part discusses whether the specific law passed by the District of Columbia is appropriate (constitutional) or not. Scalia said "not". Justice Breyer filed a dissent to this section.
So let me paraphrase the decision. Part 1 argues that there is a general right of pretty much everyone to keep and bear arms in the absence of sensible regulation. Part 2 argues that there is such a thing as a sensible regulation. Part 3 argues that the DC regulation was not sensible and therefore unconstitutional. So the whole thing boils down to a "pornography" argument. Paraphrasing the pornography version: I can't define sensible gun regulations but I know them when I see them. Generally speaking I was swayed by Scalia's argument in part 1 that in the absence of sensible regulation guns are always legal. There was no dissent to part 2 (there is such a thing as sensible regulation) so that obviously represents the unanimous opinion of the court. I was swayed by Justice Bryer's dissent in part 3. I am convinced that the DC regulation was sensible and, therefore, constitutional. But the majority disagreed.
Since the Heller case came down with the exception of the case I mentioned above there have not been any big gun rights cases argued in front of the Supreme Court. I think the reason is similar to the reason there have been no big pornography cases argued for many years now. In the case of pornography the Court came to see that it all boiled down to personal opinion and decided they were tired of playing that game. So they stopped taking cases. In the gun situation I think the analysis is the same, it's just coming from the other end. Instead of the court turning cases down plaintiffs are not filing them. They are just not comfortable risking that the court will disagree with whatever side of the "reasonable gun law" argument they are on. And this "not comfortable" position applies to both "pro" and "anti" sides.
Now I want to get into some more detail about what Justice Scalia had to say about what he thought was "reasonable". There are some surprises. He is in favor of "prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons". He also says "nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms." He also is OK with the ban on "M-16 rifles and the like".
This last item is particularly interesting. A large portion of his opinion is devoted to militias. The U.S. military adopted the M-16 during the Vietnam War ('60s). They have recently replaced it with the M-4. But the M-4 is an "M-16 and the like" weapon. It is an M-16 with a shorter barrel, a modified stock (the part you put to your shoulder), and a few other minor changes to make it easier to carry around. Militias in the form of state National Guard units are typically equipped with the same weapon the military uses. This means M-16s and now M-4s. Militia members at some times and in some places have been responsible for providing their own weapon. Applied in the modern context this means that they would be required to provide an M-16 or M-4. The obvious argument sounds reasonable to me (if you adopt Scalia's analysis) and would justify the Second Amendment requiring that it be legal for ordinary citizens to purchase M-16s then and M-4s now. But Justice Scalia explicitly rejects that argument by unequivocally stating that is is constitutional to regulate the sale and possession of M-16s (and by extension M-4s) by ordinary civilians.
Justice Scalia also says 'We think that limitation is fairly supported by historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of "dangerous and unusual weapons"'. What is a "dangerous and unusual weapon"? I have absolutely no idea. I could possibly come up with a definition. But I have no way of knowing whether the Supreme Court would agree with me. If I had to put money down I would bet that the court would come up with a different definition than I would. And I have no idea how the Court's decision would differ from mine. Also, like pornography, what constitutes "dangerous and unusual" is likely to change with time. Something like say a Thompson submachine gun (see any thirties gangster movie if you are not sure what I am talking about) has now been around for something like 80 years. I think most people would have characterized it as "dangerous and unusual" in the '20s and '30s. But would they now?
I am confident that pro-gun types would be shocked to find out what Justice Scalia thinks (or at least thought in 2008) are appropriate gun regulations. And certainly many anti-gun people would be pleasantly surprised to find out how much cover Justice Scalia provides to them. But I think everyone who has studied the actual situation carefully is in the same position I am. They do not know with any kind of confidence what the state of play is on the "gun law" front. Polls on people's positions on various gun regulation ideas have been static for a couple of decades. But they seem to be changing very quickly in our post Sandy Hook world. This adds even more confusion and uncertainty to the situation. It is too soon to predict that any new laws will actually make it through at the Federal level given our political environment. And who knows what the Supreme Court will think of what might come out? All I know for sure is that I don't know.
Monday, January 7, 2013
A Modest Proposal for Guns
Johnathan Swift wrote a satirical piece in 1729. The piece had a long title, which is usually shortened to "A Modest Proposal". In it he proposed to solve the problem of the Famine that was then affecting Ireland by having Irish peasants eat their children. There is a nice article in Wikipedia, if you are interested in learning more about the original Swift piece. The article includes a link to a "Project Gutenberg" entry (see note 1 in the Wikipedia article), if you want to read the whole thing. It is pretty short. The proposal I outline here is not satirical but it is modest. Hence the title.
In the U.S. we have what are often referred to as "sin taxes". We tax items that some people think of as sinful as a source of revenue. Taxes are unpopular so, since these things are "sinful", it is easier to get a tax on these items passed through the legislature than than it is to get a tax passed on more mundane or useful ones. The taxes have two purposes. They are supposed to modestly depress demand for the taxed items and to raise revenue. There is no question that these taxes are legal. And the two "poster child" products that are subject to sin taxes are alcohol and tobacco. Both are subject to federal taxes.
Alcohol and tobacco are both regulated by the Federal ATF department, the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. I propose to impose a federal sin tax on the third category of items regulated by the ATF, namely firearms or guns, for short. The tax certainly would not outlaw guns. And, since I propose a modest rate of tax, it would do only a little to discourage them. I propose that an annual tax of $10 be imposed on most guns. If the gun had a serial number it would be taxed at this rate. If the gun was an old "antique or collectible" gun that did not have a serial number then it would be taxed at the rate of $15 per year. It would have to have been made before 1960 (roughly 50 years ago) to qualify for this category.
In the case of other guns that did not fall into this antique and collectible category and lacked a serial number, including guns where the serial number had been defaced or otherwise rendered illegible, an ATF issued serial number would have to be affixed to the weapon. A one time $50 "registration" fee would have to be paid in these situations. And the gun owner would have 6 months to get the serial number affixed, say by a gunsmith. Antique and collectible guns would also be subject to the one time registration fee but would be exempted from the serial number requirement. They could, of course, voluntarily put an ATF serial number on the gun. In this case the gun would be be taxed at the lower rate. Included in this registration process would be a detailed description of the gun. That's why an additional fee would be required.
Paying the tax would involve identifying a "registered owner". In the same way that a Social Security card is "not to be used for identification", this registered owner would "not be used for purposes of identifying the legal owner". It would only identify the person responsible for paying the tax. Every time the registered owner changed, an additional $10 "transfer fee" would be required. This is for transactions involving the transfer of ownership between private parties. In the case of manufacturers, dealers, or importers (hereafter referred to as wholesalers), a $1 transfer fee ("wholesale" fee) would be required. Each time the gun was transferred to a different wholesaler the wholesale fee would be again assessed. The $10 ($15 for a classic or antique gun) "retail" fee would be due when the gun was sold at retail. If a wholesaler bought a gun from a private party the "wholesale" fee would be assessed at the time of the transaction. Subsequently selling the gun to a new private party would necessitate payment of the "retail" fee. The retail fee would cover the tax due that year on the gun, if the gun had not already been taxed in the current year. But the full "retail" fee would be due even if the gun had already been taxed in the current year.
In the case of lost or stolen guns the gun and tax would continue to be the responsibility of the registered owner until a "lost or stolen" report was filed. In the case of guns imported or exported the gun would have to be reported to customs. In the case of importation the appropriate registration and fees would be required at the time of the importation.
The penalties for failure to comply with the law would be civil, not criminal. It would be like getting a parking ticket not a speeding ticket. The point is to raise revenue, not to make people into criminals. There are many details to be worked out including penalties for failing to pay required fees. I leave it to the ATF to work these details out. I simply note that a simple failure to pay the fee would result in an additional larger civil penalty. If the issue goes beyond a simple failure to pay a fee, e.g. if an unregistered or improperly registered gun is used to commit a crime then criminal penalties might be appropriate. I leave it to the ATF, and perhaps subsequent legislation, to address these issues.
All guns should be registered as their ownership may eventually devolve to civilian hands. But the ATF may, at its discretion, exempt the military, law enforcement, etc. from the fees. It may also exempt artillery pieces and other purely military guns at its discretion. But in borderline cases, e.g. heavy machine guns, I would recommend that the ATF err on the side of requiring registration even if they choose to waive the fee requirements. I suspect that many of these items contain a manufacturer provided serial number so modern computer systems make it easy to add these items to the registry.
There are supposedly about 300 million guns in the U.S. If each gun generated $10 per year this would amount to $3 billion per year in additional Federal revenue. Budgetary matters are often calculated over a ten year period. In this case the ten year revenue forecast would be for $30 billion in additional revenue. This would definitely not close the current budget deficit. It would, however, improve the situation in a modest way. Of course, the actual number of guns in circulation may be far less. Or efforts to impose the tax on all guns could be only partially successful. In either case the revenues forecast might be much less than I have forecast. Still, the additional funds should help, if only in a modest way.
In the U.S. we have what are often referred to as "sin taxes". We tax items that some people think of as sinful as a source of revenue. Taxes are unpopular so, since these things are "sinful", it is easier to get a tax on these items passed through the legislature than than it is to get a tax passed on more mundane or useful ones. The taxes have two purposes. They are supposed to modestly depress demand for the taxed items and to raise revenue. There is no question that these taxes are legal. And the two "poster child" products that are subject to sin taxes are alcohol and tobacco. Both are subject to federal taxes.
Alcohol and tobacco are both regulated by the Federal ATF department, the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. I propose to impose a federal sin tax on the third category of items regulated by the ATF, namely firearms or guns, for short. The tax certainly would not outlaw guns. And, since I propose a modest rate of tax, it would do only a little to discourage them. I propose that an annual tax of $10 be imposed on most guns. If the gun had a serial number it would be taxed at this rate. If the gun was an old "antique or collectible" gun that did not have a serial number then it would be taxed at the rate of $15 per year. It would have to have been made before 1960 (roughly 50 years ago) to qualify for this category.
In the case of other guns that did not fall into this antique and collectible category and lacked a serial number, including guns where the serial number had been defaced or otherwise rendered illegible, an ATF issued serial number would have to be affixed to the weapon. A one time $50 "registration" fee would have to be paid in these situations. And the gun owner would have 6 months to get the serial number affixed, say by a gunsmith. Antique and collectible guns would also be subject to the one time registration fee but would be exempted from the serial number requirement. They could, of course, voluntarily put an ATF serial number on the gun. In this case the gun would be be taxed at the lower rate. Included in this registration process would be a detailed description of the gun. That's why an additional fee would be required.
Paying the tax would involve identifying a "registered owner". In the same way that a Social Security card is "not to be used for identification", this registered owner would "not be used for purposes of identifying the legal owner". It would only identify the person responsible for paying the tax. Every time the registered owner changed, an additional $10 "transfer fee" would be required. This is for transactions involving the transfer of ownership between private parties. In the case of manufacturers, dealers, or importers (hereafter referred to as wholesalers), a $1 transfer fee ("wholesale" fee) would be required. Each time the gun was transferred to a different wholesaler the wholesale fee would be again assessed. The $10 ($15 for a classic or antique gun) "retail" fee would be due when the gun was sold at retail. If a wholesaler bought a gun from a private party the "wholesale" fee would be assessed at the time of the transaction. Subsequently selling the gun to a new private party would necessitate payment of the "retail" fee. The retail fee would cover the tax due that year on the gun, if the gun had not already been taxed in the current year. But the full "retail" fee would be due even if the gun had already been taxed in the current year.
In the case of lost or stolen guns the gun and tax would continue to be the responsibility of the registered owner until a "lost or stolen" report was filed. In the case of guns imported or exported the gun would have to be reported to customs. In the case of importation the appropriate registration and fees would be required at the time of the importation.
The penalties for failure to comply with the law would be civil, not criminal. It would be like getting a parking ticket not a speeding ticket. The point is to raise revenue, not to make people into criminals. There are many details to be worked out including penalties for failing to pay required fees. I leave it to the ATF to work these details out. I simply note that a simple failure to pay the fee would result in an additional larger civil penalty. If the issue goes beyond a simple failure to pay a fee, e.g. if an unregistered or improperly registered gun is used to commit a crime then criminal penalties might be appropriate. I leave it to the ATF, and perhaps subsequent legislation, to address these issues.
All guns should be registered as their ownership may eventually devolve to civilian hands. But the ATF may, at its discretion, exempt the military, law enforcement, etc. from the fees. It may also exempt artillery pieces and other purely military guns at its discretion. But in borderline cases, e.g. heavy machine guns, I would recommend that the ATF err on the side of requiring registration even if they choose to waive the fee requirements. I suspect that many of these items contain a manufacturer provided serial number so modern computer systems make it easy to add these items to the registry.
There are supposedly about 300 million guns in the U.S. If each gun generated $10 per year this would amount to $3 billion per year in additional Federal revenue. Budgetary matters are often calculated over a ten year period. In this case the ten year revenue forecast would be for $30 billion in additional revenue. This would definitely not close the current budget deficit. It would, however, improve the situation in a modest way. Of course, the actual number of guns in circulation may be far less. Or efforts to impose the tax on all guns could be only partially successful. In either case the revenues forecast might be much less than I have forecast. Still, the additional funds should help, if only in a modest way.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Political Catastrophe Theory
Catastrophe Theory is the cute name for a branch of mathematics developed about 50 years ago. It's not just about catastrophes but the name was too precious not to stick. I think that the insights that come from this branch of mathematics might shed some light on the evolving current political scene. But, as is my wont, it's time for a digression. In order to shed light on catastrophe theory let me first talk about linear analysis.
What does it mean to say in the mathematical sense that something is linear. A classic example is the famous equation in physics that comes from Sir Isaac Newton: F = ma. In words, this is "Force equals mass times acceleration". In this case the equal sign is literally true. Take the mass of an object and multiply it by its acceleration and you get exactly the amount of force applied. For those of you whose physics is weak let me take this a step at a time. If you are in a car and you mash on the gas pedal the car speeds up. This change in speed is called acceleration. Mass is the same as weight in every day situations. It's that number that is displayed on your bathroom scale. There is a technical difference between weight and mass but I am going to skip over that. That leaves force. Force is how hard you push on something. So when you mash on the gas pedal the engine revs up and pushes harder on the wheels. The car speeds up. If it is a big engine (lots of force) and a light car (not so much mass) then the car speeds up (accelerates) a lot.
What "F=ma" tells us is that there is a "linear" relationship between force and acceleration. If you push twice as hard you will get exactly twice as much acceleration. And the relationship works backwards. If you want the car to accelerate half as fast then apply exactly half as much force. "F=-ma" is a simple equation. The whole thing has only 4 letters in it. So linear relationships are about as simple as you can get in physics. Now, a lot of things are not linear. But mathematicians and physicists have come up with a lot of tricks to handle various situations.
Maybe in some situations you have to apply a little more than twice the force to get twice the acceleration, for instance. The Einstein "relativity" version of "F=ma" requires just these kinds of adjustments. I'm not going to get into them because I want to keep things simple. But even though a lot of situations in physics may not be strictly linear the basic insight often holds. If you want more of one thing provide more of something else. If you want less of something then provide less of something else. These situations are technically called "monotonic relationships". And monotonic relationships are common and intuitive. They seem like how a lot of the world works.
We can see this playing out all the time in politics. The relationship may not be strictly linear but we naturally assume that more gets more and less gets less. Generally, for an issue it is common to assume that there are a verity of positions held. These positions can be laid out on a scale going from "more of this" to "more of that". Commonly we will have a scale going from more conservative to more liberal. And it also seems like we can place say Senators on this scale. So we place everyone in their proper place on the scale. To get something done we need to pass a bill. The idea is to structure a bill so that has the right mix of liberal and conservative components. What we want to do is to get a majority of the Senate to be in favor of the bill. So we put the mix of components that will garner the support of a majority. Let's say we start with a very conservative version of the bill. We will start with only a few Senators supporting it, those whose position is as conservative as or more conservative than the bill in its current form. Then to get more support we add liberal components. As the bill slides down the scale toward the liberal side it will pick up more and more supporters. If we do this correctly then we will end up with a majority supporting the bill and we can pass it out of the Senate. The same approach can be used where we start with a very liberal bill and keep modifying it to add more and more conservative supporters.
This process is not strictly linear. Making the bill 1% more liberal is not going to always get you exactly one more Senator. And the scale might not be a liberal - conservative one. And we can talk about the House instead of the Senate or an election or many other political processes. But this whole "add sweeteners till you get a majority" process is how things are supposed to work in politics. Here a "sweetener" is a component that will get you one or more additional votes, hopefully without losing any current supporters.
We can see this all the time. The stimulus package that President Obama proposed shortly after he first got into the White House is a typical example. The bill had "infrastructure" spending to appeal to Democrats. It had tax cuts to appeal to Republicans. It was designed to be a classic "something for everyone" bill. Health Care Reform was the same kind of thing. It had components designed to appeal to Democrats (expanded coverage) and components designed to appeal to Republicans (individual mandate - originally a Republican idea). It also had components designed to make various pressure groups happy: the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, others. The whole idea was if you are a few votes short, add the right sweeteners and you can pick up those votes and pass the bill. This is linear thinking applied to politics. Push a little harder here and you will get a little more of there.
The same thing applies to elections. Voters are presumed to lie along a scale, usually assumed to be the liberal - conservative scale. If you don't have a majority then move a little right (or left) and pick up a few more votes. The key to success is supposed to be putting yourself close to the center. Depending on the specifics of the electorate you may actually want to be center-left or center-right. If it looks like you are a little behind in the race then you just need to adjust your positions to move you a little to the left or to the right. This will pick up enough centrist votes to put you over the top.
That's the model most people use to analyze politics. The idea is that a small change that moves you in the correct direction on the appropriate scale will turn defeat into victory. This is definitely how the media analyzes and covers politics. They pick the scale. They lay out voters or politicians (or whatever) on the scale. They then decide who is winning. They then determine which direction the loosing side needs to move in. They pick actions they think will move the losers in that direction then watch to see if they do it. Since the media does not exist to pursue truth but instead to pursue eyeballs (readers, listeners, viewers) that can be delivered up to advertisers the media does not worry about whether this "analysis" is correct. They only worry whether it attracts eyeballs. For the media, winning is not serving up accurate information. It consists of winning the admiration of advertisers. And admiration is measured in terms of ad revenue. The shorthand for this behavior by the media is "covering the horse race".
So lets get back to catastrophe theory. The key idea behind linear analysis is that small changes result in small changes. But there is something more. If a relationship is linear (or can be massaged to behave like a linear relationship with the proper mathematics) then you can always get back to where you started with. In our "F=ma" example, suppose we decide that we have too much "a". Then we can dial back the "F" by the right amount and "a" will settle back to where we want it. It may be complicated to figure out the right amount to dial back the "F" by but the proper mathematics will allow us to calculate the correct value. But can we always get back to where we were? Catastrophe theory says no!
Put a Popsicle stick on the edge of a table so that about half of it is sticking over the edge. Now push down on the end of the stick that is sticking over the edge. That's the "F". Now observe what happens to the end of the stick. It bends down. That's the equivalent of the "a" in our example even though it is not really acceleration. If we push down a little the stick bends a little. If we push down harder it bends down more. And it we stop pushing it returns to sticking straight out. In other words, it is a classic linear system. A little push results in a little bend. More push results in more bend. If we stop pushing it goes back to where it started. The actual amount of bend you get for a specific amount of push may be mathematically very complicated. But the general idea is simple. And the way most people think of politics involves the exact same ideas as our Popsicle stick analysis.
But now lets push really hard on the end of the stick. What happens? The stick breaks. Now if we stop pushing the stick does not go back to being straight. It stays bent because the stick is broken. This is the key idea behind catastrophe theory. The actual analysis can be quite complex. But catastrophe theory says that there are systems that change behavior radically if a threshold is exceeded. The best way to explain what mathematicians are talking about is to talk about catastrophes and that's where the name comes from. In our simple case the catastrophe is the stick breaking. But consider Superstorm Sandy. After you have washed away a bunch of buildings things do not go back to the way they were after the wind and the waves die down.
All this media analysis and a lot of the thinking done by many political experts is well modeled by linear analysis. For instance, the assumption is that the U.S. electorate lays out nicely along a liberal-conservative scale. Democrats are successful when a little over half of the electorate is feeling liberal. Conservatives do well when a little more than half of the electorate is feeling conservative. The expectation is that opinions will change slowly and in a liner manner over time. The electorate will slowly become more liberal or more conservative. This will result in a slow change from Democratic success to Republican success as this slow incremental change takes place. But what does the historical record say?
For decades the electorate was conservative and Republicans were successful. Then the Great Depression took place and all of a sudden (the 1932 election) Democrats became successful. This continued with some exceptions until the 1980 election. Reagan swept in and for the most part Republicans have been successful since. This behavior fits a catastrophe model better than a linear model. As late as 1928 the Republicans were doing very well. But in 1932 Democrats got in and for the most part stayed in until 1980. Then the Reagan Revolution happened. The Democrats were kicked out and the Republicans swept in and they have pretty much stayed there since. In other words some "catastrophic event" happened and the electorate switched pretty much immediately from one kind of behavior (say favoring the Democratic party) to another kind of behavior (favoring the Republican party).
We did not see a series of elections where one party does less well by a fairly small amount in each subsequent election until they lose control. This is followed by a number of elections where the new winning party improves their margin by a small amount until they peak and a swing back starts. Instead we see a series of elections where generally speaking one party prevails. Then a catastrophic event (politically speaking) happens and all of a sudden the other party starts generally prevailing. So I contend that I have proven that catastrophe theory is a better model for how politics works that linear analysis. Assuming I am right, who cares?
Well, I think we are now in the middle of one of those catastrophic events. It will take a few years to see if I am right. But trends are always obvious after the fact. What is interesting is figuring out what's going on before the trend becomes obvious to everyone. So what do I see and why does it make a difference?
The way elections work, in my opinion, is that they are about two competing narratives. Each side constructs a narrative. If you buy into the narrative you buy into the candidate. And that candidate and his party (assuming the narrative is part of a broader narrative) wins. If you look at either narrative it seems compelling. But only one narrative works because only one candidate can win. So generally voters come to have more faith that one narrative is more correct than the other one. At its simplest, voters believe one candidate more than another.
Now many attributes of these narratives can be analyzed to see if they are correct. It would be nice if the media and others did this. But they don't. They have decided that "horse race" is much more fun and easier to do. So voters are pretty much on their own for figuring out who is more right. And the Republicans have an awesome messaging machine. Dave Frum, a long time conservative activist, recently called it the "Conservative Entertainment Complex". For more on this see my recent post http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/12/how-obama-won.html. But my point in this post is that the Republican messaging machine has been very successful for a long time in convincing voters that the Republican narrative is more true than the Democratic narrative. As a result, Republicans have won a lot of elections between 1980 and now.
The messaging machine is still there. But if voters decide it is not credible then Democrats are more likely to win the narrative wars and, therefore, elections. As I pointed out in the "How Obama Won" post, Republicans have been pushing a number of unpopular positions. People who should vote Democratic (old white people on Social Security and Medicare) voted heavily Republican in the last election. But Obama in particular and Democrats in general won anyhow. If voters decide that Republicans are dishonest or are not working on their behalf then they will switch allegiance and, according to catastrophe theory, do it quickly and stay switched for a long time. Recently we have seen a number of reliable Republican narratives being rejected.
Historically, Republicans have been seen as being better at things military. But the Obama position of getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan are now very popular. In fact, most people would like to move faster than Obama wants to. The public has generally sided with Republicans on abortion/birth control. This actually makes sense. Old white people are past their child bearing years. So being against abortion/birth control carries no personal cost. People that are more directly affected, younger women, oppose Republican positions by large majorities. Another long time Republican narrative that has been successful is that Republicans are fiscally conservative and Democrats are spendthrifts. I wrote a blog post on this subject over two years ago that argued that this was exactly backward. Here's a link: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/10/there-are-no-fiscally-conservative.html. Until recently the media and the majority of voters, however, have disagreed with me and agreed with Republicans. But voters now generally believe that Obama is better on the economy than Mitt Romney. And polls indicate that the public is siding with Obama on the Fiscal Cliff negotiations. I have argued in http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/11/off-cliff.html that it would be not that bad to go off the cliff. As of today (December 22, 2012) it looks like I may get my wish. Anyhow, the point is that sentiment seems to have shifted away from Republicans on the issue of "who is a better steward of the economy".
Finally, there is Gun Control. I have been around the block a lot on Gun Control. I am for it. But I have been losing badly on this issue for a long time. In his first term President Clinton pushed through a couple of what I would consider to be pretty wimpy anti-gun laws. One of them banned assault weapons and some other things. But before it passed the NRA and its allies applied the Swiss Cheese strategy. They got a lot of specific language inserted that built many loop holes into the law. So a simple effective and easy to enforce law was turned into a complicated and hard to enforce law that was much less effective. The other law was a background check law. Again the NRA was able to Swiss Cheese it. The major loop hole is the "gun show exception". This and other exceptions means that 40% of all legal gun sales (and all illegal gun sales) do not involve a background check. We have had a number of massacres that involved people with mental problems. NRA Swiss Cheese provisions have made it difficult to prevent people with mental problems from getting guns. Another loop home is the one that allows people on the terrorist watch list to legally buy guns. I think you can now see why I think both of these laws are wimpy. And, by the way, the assault weapon law had a 10 year "sunset" provision. When it came up in Bush's first term it was not renewed.
So a couple of wimpy anti-gun laws were passed in front of the 1994 elections. And several people who voted for these laws lost their re-election bids. It was generally agreed that being anti-gun was the key factor in a number of these losses. Now the case could be made that elections are complex. So it is unfair to blame the NRA for these losses, the argument goes. But let's look at the record since. There are no cases in the roughly two decades since then where it is generally agreed that a candidate lost because he was too pro-gun. A lot of wildly pro-gun people have run and won. This is the track record that generates the fear politicians have of the political power of the NRA. Interestingly, in the recent election Obama had a better pro-gun record than Romney. But the NRA endorsed Romney and trashed Obama anyhow. So politicians have had good reason to run away from anti-gun legislation.
Then we had the Newtown massacre in which 20 young children were killed. I don't know why all the other massacres had no effect but this one seems to be having a large one. All of a sudden the public seems to have changed its mind. And it seems to have specifically changed its mind on the NRA. The NRA has had something to say after all of the massacres we have had in the last few years. Their statements follow a pattern. The NRA feels bad for the victims. They opine that there are lots of reasons for these massacres (I'm not going to list them all) but none of those reasons involves the ready availability of guns or the lack of regulation of guns or gun owners. This nonsense has worked just fine every time they have done it before. But it seems to be not working this time. There is shock and outrage over the NRA statement all over the place this time. Let me be very clear here. The NRA nonsense this time is exactly the same nonsense as it was every other time. What is different this time around is that the general consensus this time is that it is nonsense. In other words the messaging is not working this time.
That's my case for why we are going through a catastrophic event. And here I am talking about an event that is catastrophic in the mathematical sense and that is a political event. If I am right then this event will drastically rearrange the political landscape. As I said above, a lot of political conflicts are a war of narratives. Generally speaking the Republican narrative has prevailed over the Democratic narrative. This has resulted in the Republican narrative being taken as the foundation and only legitimate way of selecting issues that warrant coverage and the Republican narrative has framed how issues are presented.
A simple example of this is the current budget negotiations. The problem is a big deficit (Republican narrative) rather than a weak economy that needs stimulus (Democratic narrative). I could easily cite a half dozen situations where various problems are framed from a Republican perspective. The Democratic perspective is ignored to a great extent. And, if Republicans don't want to talk about an issue (e.g. the total dysfunction of the Republican caucus in the House, or the cost to the economy of Republican Senate filibusters), the issue becomes invisible. We have seen a massive change in the narrative surrounding the NRA. The beltway media has been slow to move off the Republican perspective on budget negotiation talks. Boehner pulling the "plan B" alternative to negotiating with Obama on the Fiscal Cliff may result in additional change. We'll see. If I am right then the narrative will change. And it will change on a broad range of issues, not just a few.
Given that Republican positions on many positions are wildly unpopular, electoral success could change dramatically too. The messaging machine has been successfully providing cover for Republicans on these issues. If people start distrusting Republican messaging and the media starts properly covering actual Republican positions and actions on these issues, Republicans could become deeply unpopular very quickly. And they are likely to stay unpopular because there are powerful forces that have driven them to take these unpopular positions. Those forces are unlikely to back off. For instance, raising taxes on the wealthy is broadly popular. But House Republicans could not even agree to raise taxes on millionaires (the key provision in plan B). The millionaires that are critical to Republican fund raising efforts are unlikely to change their position on this. The religious conservatives that are behind the Republican hostility to abortion and birth control are unlikely to change their mind. The gun lobby that favors an open market on all things gun is unlikely to change its position. The list goes on and on. And, if the Republicans lose any of these constituencies, they are in trouble. They need the money to fund the message machine. They need the activists in the other camps to do the grunt work in campaigns. So they are pretty much stuck with these peositions for now.
The reaction that most people expect, and here I agree with the consensus, is centered on the likely Republican reaction to electoral losses. The two most recent Republican presidential candidates (McCain and Romney) have been viewed as centrists from within the Republican tent. Many Republicans have concluded that the reason for their failure is that they weren't conservative enough. If this is true then the obvious correction is to put up a true conservative next time. Now people outside the Republican party think that both candidates ran campaigns that were too conservative and not moderate enough. But it is now possible to live within the conservative bubble all the time. So opinions from outside the party and even from outside the hard core conservative movement are unimportant. If the Republicans run candidates that are even more conservative than the current batch then these candidates should lose and by wide margins.
But that's for the future. In the short run watch for the general response to Republican actions. The response to the Newtown massacre and the NRA statement are new territory. So far, the media is continuing to provide at least some cover to the Republican "plan B" fiasco. The more important response is the one of the general public. If the opinion that going over the Fiscal Cliff is a bad thing and is the fault of the Republicans hardens then the media will eventually come around. This will weaken the Republican message machine that is so critical to Republicans. This in turn will further erode support for Republicans. This will first show up in negotiations after the first of the year about how to clean up the Fiscal Cliff mess after the fact. Then we are looking at debt ceiling negotiations in a couple of months. If the response by the public to any Republican hanky panky (anything but a clean bill to raise the ceiling) is immediate and harshly negative then we will know that the contours of the political landscape have changed in a Superstorm Sandy manner. I live in hope.
What does it mean to say in the mathematical sense that something is linear. A classic example is the famous equation in physics that comes from Sir Isaac Newton: F = ma. In words, this is "Force equals mass times acceleration". In this case the equal sign is literally true. Take the mass of an object and multiply it by its acceleration and you get exactly the amount of force applied. For those of you whose physics is weak let me take this a step at a time. If you are in a car and you mash on the gas pedal the car speeds up. This change in speed is called acceleration. Mass is the same as weight in every day situations. It's that number that is displayed on your bathroom scale. There is a technical difference between weight and mass but I am going to skip over that. That leaves force. Force is how hard you push on something. So when you mash on the gas pedal the engine revs up and pushes harder on the wheels. The car speeds up. If it is a big engine (lots of force) and a light car (not so much mass) then the car speeds up (accelerates) a lot.
What "F=ma" tells us is that there is a "linear" relationship between force and acceleration. If you push twice as hard you will get exactly twice as much acceleration. And the relationship works backwards. If you want the car to accelerate half as fast then apply exactly half as much force. "F=-ma" is a simple equation. The whole thing has only 4 letters in it. So linear relationships are about as simple as you can get in physics. Now, a lot of things are not linear. But mathematicians and physicists have come up with a lot of tricks to handle various situations.
Maybe in some situations you have to apply a little more than twice the force to get twice the acceleration, for instance. The Einstein "relativity" version of "F=ma" requires just these kinds of adjustments. I'm not going to get into them because I want to keep things simple. But even though a lot of situations in physics may not be strictly linear the basic insight often holds. If you want more of one thing provide more of something else. If you want less of something then provide less of something else. These situations are technically called "monotonic relationships". And monotonic relationships are common and intuitive. They seem like how a lot of the world works.
We can see this playing out all the time in politics. The relationship may not be strictly linear but we naturally assume that more gets more and less gets less. Generally, for an issue it is common to assume that there are a verity of positions held. These positions can be laid out on a scale going from "more of this" to "more of that". Commonly we will have a scale going from more conservative to more liberal. And it also seems like we can place say Senators on this scale. So we place everyone in their proper place on the scale. To get something done we need to pass a bill. The idea is to structure a bill so that has the right mix of liberal and conservative components. What we want to do is to get a majority of the Senate to be in favor of the bill. So we put the mix of components that will garner the support of a majority. Let's say we start with a very conservative version of the bill. We will start with only a few Senators supporting it, those whose position is as conservative as or more conservative than the bill in its current form. Then to get more support we add liberal components. As the bill slides down the scale toward the liberal side it will pick up more and more supporters. If we do this correctly then we will end up with a majority supporting the bill and we can pass it out of the Senate. The same approach can be used where we start with a very liberal bill and keep modifying it to add more and more conservative supporters.
This process is not strictly linear. Making the bill 1% more liberal is not going to always get you exactly one more Senator. And the scale might not be a liberal - conservative one. And we can talk about the House instead of the Senate or an election or many other political processes. But this whole "add sweeteners till you get a majority" process is how things are supposed to work in politics. Here a "sweetener" is a component that will get you one or more additional votes, hopefully without losing any current supporters.
We can see this all the time. The stimulus package that President Obama proposed shortly after he first got into the White House is a typical example. The bill had "infrastructure" spending to appeal to Democrats. It had tax cuts to appeal to Republicans. It was designed to be a classic "something for everyone" bill. Health Care Reform was the same kind of thing. It had components designed to appeal to Democrats (expanded coverage) and components designed to appeal to Republicans (individual mandate - originally a Republican idea). It also had components designed to make various pressure groups happy: the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, others. The whole idea was if you are a few votes short, add the right sweeteners and you can pick up those votes and pass the bill. This is linear thinking applied to politics. Push a little harder here and you will get a little more of there.
The same thing applies to elections. Voters are presumed to lie along a scale, usually assumed to be the liberal - conservative scale. If you don't have a majority then move a little right (or left) and pick up a few more votes. The key to success is supposed to be putting yourself close to the center. Depending on the specifics of the electorate you may actually want to be center-left or center-right. If it looks like you are a little behind in the race then you just need to adjust your positions to move you a little to the left or to the right. This will pick up enough centrist votes to put you over the top.
That's the model most people use to analyze politics. The idea is that a small change that moves you in the correct direction on the appropriate scale will turn defeat into victory. This is definitely how the media analyzes and covers politics. They pick the scale. They lay out voters or politicians (or whatever) on the scale. They then decide who is winning. They then determine which direction the loosing side needs to move in. They pick actions they think will move the losers in that direction then watch to see if they do it. Since the media does not exist to pursue truth but instead to pursue eyeballs (readers, listeners, viewers) that can be delivered up to advertisers the media does not worry about whether this "analysis" is correct. They only worry whether it attracts eyeballs. For the media, winning is not serving up accurate information. It consists of winning the admiration of advertisers. And admiration is measured in terms of ad revenue. The shorthand for this behavior by the media is "covering the horse race".
So lets get back to catastrophe theory. The key idea behind linear analysis is that small changes result in small changes. But there is something more. If a relationship is linear (or can be massaged to behave like a linear relationship with the proper mathematics) then you can always get back to where you started with. In our "F=ma" example, suppose we decide that we have too much "a". Then we can dial back the "F" by the right amount and "a" will settle back to where we want it. It may be complicated to figure out the right amount to dial back the "F" by but the proper mathematics will allow us to calculate the correct value. But can we always get back to where we were? Catastrophe theory says no!
Put a Popsicle stick on the edge of a table so that about half of it is sticking over the edge. Now push down on the end of the stick that is sticking over the edge. That's the "F". Now observe what happens to the end of the stick. It bends down. That's the equivalent of the "a" in our example even though it is not really acceleration. If we push down a little the stick bends a little. If we push down harder it bends down more. And it we stop pushing it returns to sticking straight out. In other words, it is a classic linear system. A little push results in a little bend. More push results in more bend. If we stop pushing it goes back to where it started. The actual amount of bend you get for a specific amount of push may be mathematically very complicated. But the general idea is simple. And the way most people think of politics involves the exact same ideas as our Popsicle stick analysis.
But now lets push really hard on the end of the stick. What happens? The stick breaks. Now if we stop pushing the stick does not go back to being straight. It stays bent because the stick is broken. This is the key idea behind catastrophe theory. The actual analysis can be quite complex. But catastrophe theory says that there are systems that change behavior radically if a threshold is exceeded. The best way to explain what mathematicians are talking about is to talk about catastrophes and that's where the name comes from. In our simple case the catastrophe is the stick breaking. But consider Superstorm Sandy. After you have washed away a bunch of buildings things do not go back to the way they were after the wind and the waves die down.
All this media analysis and a lot of the thinking done by many political experts is well modeled by linear analysis. For instance, the assumption is that the U.S. electorate lays out nicely along a liberal-conservative scale. Democrats are successful when a little over half of the electorate is feeling liberal. Conservatives do well when a little more than half of the electorate is feeling conservative. The expectation is that opinions will change slowly and in a liner manner over time. The electorate will slowly become more liberal or more conservative. This will result in a slow change from Democratic success to Republican success as this slow incremental change takes place. But what does the historical record say?
For decades the electorate was conservative and Republicans were successful. Then the Great Depression took place and all of a sudden (the 1932 election) Democrats became successful. This continued with some exceptions until the 1980 election. Reagan swept in and for the most part Republicans have been successful since. This behavior fits a catastrophe model better than a linear model. As late as 1928 the Republicans were doing very well. But in 1932 Democrats got in and for the most part stayed in until 1980. Then the Reagan Revolution happened. The Democrats were kicked out and the Republicans swept in and they have pretty much stayed there since. In other words some "catastrophic event" happened and the electorate switched pretty much immediately from one kind of behavior (say favoring the Democratic party) to another kind of behavior (favoring the Republican party).
We did not see a series of elections where one party does less well by a fairly small amount in each subsequent election until they lose control. This is followed by a number of elections where the new winning party improves their margin by a small amount until they peak and a swing back starts. Instead we see a series of elections where generally speaking one party prevails. Then a catastrophic event (politically speaking) happens and all of a sudden the other party starts generally prevailing. So I contend that I have proven that catastrophe theory is a better model for how politics works that linear analysis. Assuming I am right, who cares?
Well, I think we are now in the middle of one of those catastrophic events. It will take a few years to see if I am right. But trends are always obvious after the fact. What is interesting is figuring out what's going on before the trend becomes obvious to everyone. So what do I see and why does it make a difference?
The way elections work, in my opinion, is that they are about two competing narratives. Each side constructs a narrative. If you buy into the narrative you buy into the candidate. And that candidate and his party (assuming the narrative is part of a broader narrative) wins. If you look at either narrative it seems compelling. But only one narrative works because only one candidate can win. So generally voters come to have more faith that one narrative is more correct than the other one. At its simplest, voters believe one candidate more than another.
Now many attributes of these narratives can be analyzed to see if they are correct. It would be nice if the media and others did this. But they don't. They have decided that "horse race" is much more fun and easier to do. So voters are pretty much on their own for figuring out who is more right. And the Republicans have an awesome messaging machine. Dave Frum, a long time conservative activist, recently called it the "Conservative Entertainment Complex". For more on this see my recent post http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/12/how-obama-won.html. But my point in this post is that the Republican messaging machine has been very successful for a long time in convincing voters that the Republican narrative is more true than the Democratic narrative. As a result, Republicans have won a lot of elections between 1980 and now.
The messaging machine is still there. But if voters decide it is not credible then Democrats are more likely to win the narrative wars and, therefore, elections. As I pointed out in the "How Obama Won" post, Republicans have been pushing a number of unpopular positions. People who should vote Democratic (old white people on Social Security and Medicare) voted heavily Republican in the last election. But Obama in particular and Democrats in general won anyhow. If voters decide that Republicans are dishonest or are not working on their behalf then they will switch allegiance and, according to catastrophe theory, do it quickly and stay switched for a long time. Recently we have seen a number of reliable Republican narratives being rejected.
Historically, Republicans have been seen as being better at things military. But the Obama position of getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan are now very popular. In fact, most people would like to move faster than Obama wants to. The public has generally sided with Republicans on abortion/birth control. This actually makes sense. Old white people are past their child bearing years. So being against abortion/birth control carries no personal cost. People that are more directly affected, younger women, oppose Republican positions by large majorities. Another long time Republican narrative that has been successful is that Republicans are fiscally conservative and Democrats are spendthrifts. I wrote a blog post on this subject over two years ago that argued that this was exactly backward. Here's a link: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/10/there-are-no-fiscally-conservative.html. Until recently the media and the majority of voters, however, have disagreed with me and agreed with Republicans. But voters now generally believe that Obama is better on the economy than Mitt Romney. And polls indicate that the public is siding with Obama on the Fiscal Cliff negotiations. I have argued in http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/11/off-cliff.html that it would be not that bad to go off the cliff. As of today (December 22, 2012) it looks like I may get my wish. Anyhow, the point is that sentiment seems to have shifted away from Republicans on the issue of "who is a better steward of the economy".
Finally, there is Gun Control. I have been around the block a lot on Gun Control. I am for it. But I have been losing badly on this issue for a long time. In his first term President Clinton pushed through a couple of what I would consider to be pretty wimpy anti-gun laws. One of them banned assault weapons and some other things. But before it passed the NRA and its allies applied the Swiss Cheese strategy. They got a lot of specific language inserted that built many loop holes into the law. So a simple effective and easy to enforce law was turned into a complicated and hard to enforce law that was much less effective. The other law was a background check law. Again the NRA was able to Swiss Cheese it. The major loop hole is the "gun show exception". This and other exceptions means that 40% of all legal gun sales (and all illegal gun sales) do not involve a background check. We have had a number of massacres that involved people with mental problems. NRA Swiss Cheese provisions have made it difficult to prevent people with mental problems from getting guns. Another loop home is the one that allows people on the terrorist watch list to legally buy guns. I think you can now see why I think both of these laws are wimpy. And, by the way, the assault weapon law had a 10 year "sunset" provision. When it came up in Bush's first term it was not renewed.
So a couple of wimpy anti-gun laws were passed in front of the 1994 elections. And several people who voted for these laws lost their re-election bids. It was generally agreed that being anti-gun was the key factor in a number of these losses. Now the case could be made that elections are complex. So it is unfair to blame the NRA for these losses, the argument goes. But let's look at the record since. There are no cases in the roughly two decades since then where it is generally agreed that a candidate lost because he was too pro-gun. A lot of wildly pro-gun people have run and won. This is the track record that generates the fear politicians have of the political power of the NRA. Interestingly, in the recent election Obama had a better pro-gun record than Romney. But the NRA endorsed Romney and trashed Obama anyhow. So politicians have had good reason to run away from anti-gun legislation.
Then we had the Newtown massacre in which 20 young children were killed. I don't know why all the other massacres had no effect but this one seems to be having a large one. All of a sudden the public seems to have changed its mind. And it seems to have specifically changed its mind on the NRA. The NRA has had something to say after all of the massacres we have had in the last few years. Their statements follow a pattern. The NRA feels bad for the victims. They opine that there are lots of reasons for these massacres (I'm not going to list them all) but none of those reasons involves the ready availability of guns or the lack of regulation of guns or gun owners. This nonsense has worked just fine every time they have done it before. But it seems to be not working this time. There is shock and outrage over the NRA statement all over the place this time. Let me be very clear here. The NRA nonsense this time is exactly the same nonsense as it was every other time. What is different this time around is that the general consensus this time is that it is nonsense. In other words the messaging is not working this time.
That's my case for why we are going through a catastrophic event. And here I am talking about an event that is catastrophic in the mathematical sense and that is a political event. If I am right then this event will drastically rearrange the political landscape. As I said above, a lot of political conflicts are a war of narratives. Generally speaking the Republican narrative has prevailed over the Democratic narrative. This has resulted in the Republican narrative being taken as the foundation and only legitimate way of selecting issues that warrant coverage and the Republican narrative has framed how issues are presented.
A simple example of this is the current budget negotiations. The problem is a big deficit (Republican narrative) rather than a weak economy that needs stimulus (Democratic narrative). I could easily cite a half dozen situations where various problems are framed from a Republican perspective. The Democratic perspective is ignored to a great extent. And, if Republicans don't want to talk about an issue (e.g. the total dysfunction of the Republican caucus in the House, or the cost to the economy of Republican Senate filibusters), the issue becomes invisible. We have seen a massive change in the narrative surrounding the NRA. The beltway media has been slow to move off the Republican perspective on budget negotiation talks. Boehner pulling the "plan B" alternative to negotiating with Obama on the Fiscal Cliff may result in additional change. We'll see. If I am right then the narrative will change. And it will change on a broad range of issues, not just a few.
Given that Republican positions on many positions are wildly unpopular, electoral success could change dramatically too. The messaging machine has been successfully providing cover for Republicans on these issues. If people start distrusting Republican messaging and the media starts properly covering actual Republican positions and actions on these issues, Republicans could become deeply unpopular very quickly. And they are likely to stay unpopular because there are powerful forces that have driven them to take these unpopular positions. Those forces are unlikely to back off. For instance, raising taxes on the wealthy is broadly popular. But House Republicans could not even agree to raise taxes on millionaires (the key provision in plan B). The millionaires that are critical to Republican fund raising efforts are unlikely to change their position on this. The religious conservatives that are behind the Republican hostility to abortion and birth control are unlikely to change their mind. The gun lobby that favors an open market on all things gun is unlikely to change its position. The list goes on and on. And, if the Republicans lose any of these constituencies, they are in trouble. They need the money to fund the message machine. They need the activists in the other camps to do the grunt work in campaigns. So they are pretty much stuck with these peositions for now.
The reaction that most people expect, and here I agree with the consensus, is centered on the likely Republican reaction to electoral losses. The two most recent Republican presidential candidates (McCain and Romney) have been viewed as centrists from within the Republican tent. Many Republicans have concluded that the reason for their failure is that they weren't conservative enough. If this is true then the obvious correction is to put up a true conservative next time. Now people outside the Republican party think that both candidates ran campaigns that were too conservative and not moderate enough. But it is now possible to live within the conservative bubble all the time. So opinions from outside the party and even from outside the hard core conservative movement are unimportant. If the Republicans run candidates that are even more conservative than the current batch then these candidates should lose and by wide margins.
But that's for the future. In the short run watch for the general response to Republican actions. The response to the Newtown massacre and the NRA statement are new territory. So far, the media is continuing to provide at least some cover to the Republican "plan B" fiasco. The more important response is the one of the general public. If the opinion that going over the Fiscal Cliff is a bad thing and is the fault of the Republicans hardens then the media will eventually come around. This will weaken the Republican message machine that is so critical to Republicans. This in turn will further erode support for Republicans. This will first show up in negotiations after the first of the year about how to clean up the Fiscal Cliff mess after the fact. Then we are looking at debt ceiling negotiations in a couple of months. If the response by the public to any Republican hanky panky (anything but a clean bill to raise the ceiling) is immediate and harshly negative then we will know that the contours of the political landscape have changed in a Superstorm Sandy manner. I live in hope.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
How Obama Won
President Barack Obama just won reelection a few weeks ago. There has been a lot of speculation by people on the right about how Romney lost. Most of it is of execrable quality. I want to look at it from the other side, from the Obama perspective. And I am going to start far afield with Gerrymandering. What is Gerrymandering and how does it work? Let's start with how it works.
Consider a hypothetical state that has 10 congressional districts. Assume that the state is evenly split between the Red party (R voters) and the Blue party (B voters) and that the Red party controls the levers of state government, thus putting them in charge of redistricting, resetting the district boundaries after the census that happens every 10 years. For simplicity let's further assume that the state has 100 voters. In a real scenario we can think of each of our hypothetical voters as standing in for 1% of the actual population. So in our case we have 50 R voters and 50 B voters.
Each district would then end up with 10 voters in it. In an ideal situation each district would end up with 5 R voters and 5 B voters and each election would be a heavily contested affair with the candidate for each party having a 50-50 chance. We would expect that the Red candidate would win half the time and the Blue candidate would win half the time. This would result in the state being represented by a delegation consisting of 5 Red congressmen and 5 Blue congressmen. But the Red state officials would like for things to turn out better for their party and also be less subject to the vagaries of luck. Here's how they would go about getting their wish.
They would put 6 R voters and 4 B voters in the first district. They would do the same thing with districts 2 through 8. At this point they would have allocated 48 R voters and 32 B voters. They would then put 1 R voter and 9 B voters in district 9. They would do the same thing in district 10. All 100 voters would be assigned to a district. Each district would have exactly 10 voters in it. But now 8 of the districts would elect Red congressmen and only 2 would elect Blue ones. All of a sudden a very balanced state ends up with a very unbalanced delegation.
That's how you Gerrymander. You create as many districts as you can that tilt in your favor by a small margin. The remaining few districts now tilt in favor of the other guys by a large margin. The result is that more politicians that you support win (by a small margin) and fewer politicians that you oppose win (by a large margin). There are now computer software packages that you can download from the Internet that will do this for you automatically. You plug in the election results from each precinct in the state. The software then builds a large number of districts that are tilted in your favor by a small margin and a small number of districts that are tilted toward your opponent by a large margin. There are other considerations. But the software packages can handle many of them. So Gerrymandering is now simple to achieve if you control the process for drawing districts.
In our case we were able to tilt things so that what should have been a 5-5 situation becomes an 8-2 situation. If you have more districts to work with and if you can accurately predict how voters will tilt you can do even better. So Gerrymandering is a technique to create an unfair advantage in favor of the party that can control how districts are drawn. The only thing you need to know is the distribution of voters that will support or oppose your preferred group of politicians.
Now this is something both parties do. But in the recent election the Republicans were much more effective at it. Why? Because they controlled the legislatures of way more states than the Democrats in 2011. This is the year when redistricting was done based on the 2010 census. Censuses are done on a ten year cycle so redistricting is done on a ten year cycle. The result of Republican Gerrymandering efforts was that the Democrats had many more votes cast for their candidates in the 2012 elections for the various races for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. But the Republicans won many more seats anyhow. It is unusual for one party to control the redistricting process in way more states than the other party. But it happens. And it happened in the most recent redistricting cycle.
My state (Washington) has a "nonpartisan" redistricting commission. But I live in a district that tilts heavily Democratic. This should have made it possible for Republican representatives to win more races in other districts by winning closely. It didn't actually happen. In my state Democrats won a number of close races in supposedly "slightly Republican leaning" districts. This was actually unexpected. Most of the smart money said that the Republicans had won the "redistricting war" in my state. So the smart money expected the Republicans to do better than they actually did. But my state was an exception. The Republicans did as well or better than expected in most states. And they were expected to do well due to Gerrymandering. So the U.S. House of Representatives for the session that starts in January of 2013 has many more Republican representatives, a comfortable majority in fact, than the overall vote would predict.
So the principles of how to Gerrymander are simple. Theoretically, the math necessary to pull it off is hard. But with "off the shelf" software available on the Internet this does not represent a real practical difficulty. In the past it was easy to spot Gerrymandering. Some districts would look like abstract art creations, not congressional districts. But, if you are willing to settle for getting a good Gerrymander rather then the best possible Gerrymander, even this obvious give away can be avoided. That leaves only one possible problem.
In our little artificial example we assumed we could accurately predict who voters would support. There is a term of art, a "yellow dog Democrat". This is a voter who will vote Democratic even if his candidate is a "yellow dog lying in the road". And, of course, one can imagine yellow dog Republicans. There are a number of Democratic voters who always vote Democratic and a number of voters who always vote Republican. These people are frequently described as "hard core" Democratic/Republican voters. In my example I have assumed that all my voters were hard core voters. In the real world not all voters are hard core voters. In fact, pundits talk interminably about "swing" voters. There are the opposite of hard core. They sometimes vote for the Democrat and sometimes for the Republican. Supposedly they are "convincable".
Most of the "informed opinion", baloney for short, had it that the election was all about swing voters. In fact the field was narrower than that. It was about swing voters in swing states. One "expert" went so far as to say that the whole election boiled down to swing voters in one county in Ohio. But polling suggests that people the experts identified as swing voters went for Romney. So expert opinion got it wrong. Their swing voters should have determined the outcome of the election but they didn't. This doesn't necessarily mean that the experts did a bad job of identifying who were swing voters. But if they did the identification correctly, it means there was something else going on that turned out to be more important than the whole "swing voter" thing.
Now, the publicly available estimates are that the Obama campaign spent about a billion dollars. This was matched by about a billion dollars spent by the Romney campaign and a billion dollars spent by "independent groups", actually a dozen or so very rich people. So three billion dollars were spent to influence the vote of perhaps a hundred thousand voters (swing voters in Ohio). That's about $30,000 per vote. If this were how the election truly worked then each vote cost roughly a year's salary for a typical middle class family. (Assume 1.5 independents per family and you get very close to the median family income of same). Spending this kind of money on the people who are supposed to determine the outcome only to find out that actually other people would determine the outcome is bad, very bad. If the Romney people spent their money influencing the wrong group of people while the Obama people spent their money influencing the right group of people then that would explain the outcome. But it doesn't tell us anything about the people that the Obama campaign targeted, apparently correctly.
We can understand what's going on by returning to our little Gerrymandering lesson. We learned that you can work magic if you know how people will vote. One approach a Gerrymandering group can take is to put people into three groups: us, them, and swing voters, also called "independents". If the independent group is large then it's hard to Gerrymander. You can't make a lot of close districts because you have to put in a big enough cushion to allow for the possibility of the independents going heavily for the other guy. And people don't walk around with a big "R" or "B" tattooed on their forehead. So the usual technique is to use results from previous elections. Precinct by precinct election tallies are available. Theoretically, all you need is to pick one statewide office, say Governor and tally the R and B votes for each precinct. But if you go with one race, you may have a "good candidate" or "bad candidate" effect. Let me take a minute to expand on what I am talking about.
I am not talking about "the issues". I am talking about non-issue oriented attributes of a candidate. Voters like candidates that are good looking, articulate, and relatable. Good looks are particularly important for female candidates. Most successful female candidates are blonds with a full but trim figure. Height is particularly important in male candidates. Tall men tend to beat short men. Height is less important for women and handsomeness is less important for men. Voters like candidates that give a good speech. So being articulate helps. But in this context "articulate" is more related to smooth delivery and an ability to use humor effectively than it is an ability to put together and deliver a well reasoned argument. In fact, appearing too brainy is a liability. A "good old boy" will beat a "professor" almost every time. Voters like a candidate that they think can see things from their point of view. Bill Clinton is the undisputed master of this. But if a voter decides a candidate "just doesn't understand my situation", that candidate is in a lot of trouble.
Another attribute voters don't value is actual honesty. They don't want to be told what they don't want to hear. They prefer candidates that will make a plausible sounding argument for what the voter wants to believe. But voters don't like this kind of deception to be rubbed in their faces. The usual candidate strategy for dealing with this is to be as vague as possible. Say something bland and meaningless instead of telling the voter what they don't want to hear. Unfortunately, if a voter agrees with a candidate's position on 9 out of 10 issues he will still vote for the other guy if the other guy throws up enough fog so that the voter doesn't notice points of disagreement. Effective candidates can expound at great length (here defined as about 3 minutes) while appearing to say something in any situation and in response to any question. A candidate that has not mastered the effective use of this skill will not be successful.
Gerrymandering committees will put the R, B, and S data for each precinct into the computer model along with whatever other information they think is important and a nice Gerrymander will be produced. The computer can even figure out how big a cushion each of your districts needs to be safe. Given that the Republicans did this in 2011, and did it well, there must be more to the story when it comes to the Presidential campaign.
Some elections are high turnout (a relatively high percentage of eligible voters actually cast a ballot) elections and other races are low turnout elections. The 2008 election was a high turnout election and the 2010 election was a low turnout election. Polls indicated that the general population had not changed their opinions on the issues by much in the intervening two years but Democrats did very well in 2008 and Republicans did very well in 2010. What happened? In the simplest terms, Democrats stayed home in large numbers in 2010 compared to 2008 but the Republican turnout dipped far less between the same two elections. If you don't vote your vote doesn't count. The absolute number of Republican votes dipped in 2010 but the absolute number of Democratic votes dipped more. So the Republicans won a large number of races in 2010 that they had lost in 2008.
Voters hate negative ads. But they have come to dominate campaigns. Why? The general consensus is that negative ads depress the turnout for whoever the ad is aimed at. If you can depress the number of votes for the other guy more than he can depress the number of votes you get then that gives you an advantage. All you have to do to win is get more votes than the other guy And, as the saying goes, "winning is everything".
Republicans have had a long term strategy of catering to voting blocks that reliably turn out and vote. In relative terms, young people don't vote. Old people do. Minorities don't vote. White people do. Women don't vote. Men do. So the core constituency of the Republican base is old white men. This has worked very well for them, particularly since the "Reagan revolution". Historically, white blue collar men, particularly union members, voted for Democrats. Reagan in the 1980 campaign convinced this group that they had been sold down the river by the Democrats and that Republicans would take much better care of them. They bought the claim and came over to the Republican party in large numbers. Union leaders would strongly support Democratic candidates. But the rank and file would vote Republican in large numbers. One thing that helped with this argument is that this group is socially conservative and strongly religious. Democrats had put a lot of effort into liberal causes (civil rights, women's rights, anti-war - viewed by this group as being unpatriotic) and were less effective in implementing changes that were seen as both positive and important to this group. Republicans were able to put conservative social positions in the forefront and successfully divert attention away from Republican anti-union and pro-business policies that this group would have disliked. With this block added to their other constituencies, Republicans have been very successful winning elections since 1980.
But Obama has won twice now, and the recent win was the more surprising of the two. In 2008 the Republicans were coming off of 8 years of what ultimately became a very unpopular President in George W. Bush. Then the financial crisis hit. Most people blamed Republican policies much more than Democratic ones. And Obama was a charismatic figure who ran a very well regarded campaign. McCain's campaign was not as nearly as well regarded and he was bucking the "W" currents. So it was not a big surprise when he lost. 2012 was supposed to be a Republican year. Obama was seen as an ineffective legislator and the economy was in poor shape. The theory was that an "I'm not Obama" campaign would not have much trouble winning. So what went wrong?
The conventional wisdom is that Romney ran a poor campaign from a technical point of view and that he was a bad campaigner. While extremely weak on the economy, Obama was seen to have an advantage elsewhere. He was seen as being on the "right" side of many issues. But losing candidates have often been on the right side of issues and have still lost. Many Republicans, Romney most prominent among them, also disagreed with the characterization that Romney ran a poor campaign from a technical point of view. They thought they had a strategy that would be successful and that they implemented their strategy well. But they lost. Why?
In a nut shell those things that I said above about who votes turned out to be wrong, at least relatively speaking. Obama got large numbers of young people to vote and vote for him. He got large numbers of minorities to vote and to vote for him. He also got large numbers of women, particularly single women, to vote and to vote for him. Taken together, these groups put him over the top. So why did the Romney people miss all this?
The Republican party has had a very effective messaging machine for decades now. They started out by convincing large numbers of white blue collar men, frequently union men, to vote for them. They did this by catering to them on social issues while implementing anti-union and pro-business (and pro rich people) policies. They used their superior messaging machine to successfully deflect attention away from their unpopular policies. They have now been able to hold on to this block for about 30 years. And a number of the social issues they have championed, anti-"women's libber" and anti-immigrant/minority issues in particular, are popular with this group. But you eventually alienate women and minorities by doing this.
They have also been anti-entitlement. George W. Bush famously championed drastic changes to Social Security in 2005, for instance. More recently, Republicans have attacked Medicare in its current form. Many of the Republican core constituency depend heavily on Social Security and Medicare. Their efforts in these areas have not been completely successful. But a large number of this core constituency have stuck with them due to the herculean efforts of the messaging machine to frame these initiatives as "necessary reform" whether or not these initiatives really are either necessary or a reform (e.g. improvement).
Republicans have also made a careful calculation that they can keep a large percentage of women on board. The theory is that husbands will sway married women in sufficient numbers to keep the loss manageable. As to the young, minorities, and single women, they don't vote (in very large numbers) so they don't count. This kind of calculus has worked very well for them for decades. Experts have predicted the death of this strategy for almost as long as it has been around. So anyone opining that "time's up" for this strategy can be rebutted with the many past predictions of its demise that turned out to be incorrect.
Republicans have had electoral success for many years in spite of pushing unpopular positions. The thing that has made this possible has been their messaging machine. It has been able to cover up or paper over innumerable unpopular positions. As a result, politicians associated with many of these unpopular positions in the past have garnered success at the polls anyhow. Why should this not continue? And Republicans have also not been shy about trying to use various techniques in the past to keep the turnout low among the groups listed above. They have been past masters of negative campaigning. They have long championed voter registration policies that make it hard for the young, who move around a lot, and minorities who are concentrated in a few areas, to register and vote. The fact that these groups have long been categorized as "groups who don't vote" is testament to their success. A voter who would normally vote for the other guy but stays home is effectively a vote for your guy.
The Obama campaign made a specific effort to counter all this. First they did what a traditional campaign would do. They concentrated their efforts in about ten swing states. The Romney people did the same thing. The vast majority of us who lived in one of the "other forty" saw a far different campaign than the swing staters did. But this was not a differentiators. As I said, both campaigns did this.
The strategy that the Obama campaign successfully implemented that won them the election was to Get Out The Vote (GOTV, in politics-speak) among traditionally low turnout groups, specifically young people, minorities, and single women. Everyone, but especially the Romney people, missed this. The actual Obama vote outdid predictions based on the standard polls by about 2%. More people voted for him than the pollsters thought would. Romney, on the other hand, underperformed relative to the standard polls, and way underperformed relative to Romney internal polls. Why was this?
Well, you remember the discussion above about Gerrymandering. And how important it is to know which bucket to put voters in, e.g. R, B, or S. And remember the discussion about how negative advertising depresses turnout. The Romney campaign assumed that the Republican juju would work one more time. In the past many polls have overestimated the Democratic turnout and underestimated the Republican turnout. This campaign was heavily negative by both sides. That should result in a low turnout election like 2010. In a low turnout election only hard core voters turn out. So the Romney people tracked sentiment among hard core voters and figured they were in good shape. They also tailored the Romney message toward hard core Republican voters for the most part. If turnout had gone as the Romney people expected he would have won and he and his people would have looked brilliant.
But the Obama campaign saw an opportunity to turn out a large number of people who are the opposite of the traditional hard core voter. They are young, minority, single women. They put together a very sophisticated turn out machine designed to get these people to register and vote. They also devoted a significant part of their traditional campaign to issues important to these people. In the case of minorities they highlighted immigration and voter suppression. In the case of single women they highlighted Republican anti-abortion and anti-birth control activities. They highlighted student loan reforms already implemented and support for science, education, and the environment, issues important to young people.
Campaigning, like most other things, is captive to technological issues. Historically, the best way to reach people has been TV ads. So campaigns for the last 50 years have invested heavily in TV ads. Both the Obama and the Romney people spent a lot of money on TV this time too. But the Obama campaign put a lot more effort into social media and did it better than the Romney campaign. They invested in things like Twitter and Facebook. They invested in an extremely sophisticated GOTV tools. The Obama tools were better and they worked.
And the biggest irony about the Obama win is that they learned their strategy from Carl Rove. Rove's nickname is "Bush's brain". In 2004 he headed up the Bush reelection campaign. It looked like a bad year for the Republicans. Rove decided to go after a group of voters and see if he could increase Republican turnout. He picked a group he was confident were in the Bush camp, evangelicals. He then put together a sophisticated campaign to reach these people and turn them out. In his case, he used the informal network evangelical churches use to communicate with each other. This network is invisible to the Washington punditocracy so he could go about his business out of the public spotlight. The campaign was not invisible. The Kerry people figured out what he was doing. It looked like Rove could turn out 4 million additional Bush voters this way. So they set out to find enough Kerry voters to counter this. Their effort was successful. So why did he lose the election? Because Rove was able to turn out 8 million new evangelicals. The additional 4 million overwhelmed the Kerry response and he lost.
I'm sure the Romney people were aware of what the Obama people were up to. But in the same way the Kerry people underestimated how successful Rove would be, the Romney people underestimated how successful the Obama people would be. In the case of the Kerry people, you can hardly blame them. They were not wired into the evangelical community so they couldn't accurately gage how successful Rove was being. And the same is true of the Romney people. But Romney had an additional problem. The Republican messaging machine, recently dubbed the "Conservative Entertainment Complex" by David From, a prominent conservative intellectual, has been very successful at lying (Frum's characterization) to the Republican base (and the rest of us) for a long time now.
This operation is also referred to as the "Conservative Media Bubble". A lot of conservatives genuinely believed that Romney would win the election. Why? Because a lot of people in the Conservative Entertainment Complex/Conservative Media Bubble said Romney would win. Democrats do not have an equivalent Bubble. They have been forced by Republicans to live in the real world. So I am sure that a lot of people in the Kerry campaign thought their guy would win. But some of them had their doubts. And I am sure that none of them believed that a loss was impossible. So far no one has found anyone in the Romney organization who thought it was possible for Romney to lose.
Besides the win itself, there is another thing that seems to have come out of the election. One of the themes that the Obama campaign hammered on continuously was that conservatives in general and Romney in particular was dishonest. This idea was definitely reinforced by the spectacular and very public failure of the Conservative Entertainment Complex (Fox TV, Rush Limbaugh and others on the radio, etc.) to predict the outcome of the election. It is definitely possible that this reputation for dishonesty will dissipate. But what if it doesn't? Credibility is important in the short run and critical in the long run.
Political parties and movements come back from the dead all the time. Republicans did it in 2010 after being beat badly in 2008, way more badly than they were beat in 2012. But the key to a comeback is to have a message that works and to have people believe the message. If people think an individual or group is dishonest then they will think "that's just old so and so mouthing off again" and not pay attention to what he is saying. I don't know how you make a comeback if no one is paying attention to what you say. Republicans have come back from setbacks far worse than the 2012 election results before. They have done it by coming up with a popular message and then getting it out using their messaging machine. But this will not work if no one believes the message machine. In this environment they become responsible for their many unpopular policies. This makes it even harder for them to come back.
It is way to soon to write off the Republican messaging machine. But if it turns out that the Obama campaign has severely damaged it then 2012 may turn out to be a "sea change" election like 1980.
Consider a hypothetical state that has 10 congressional districts. Assume that the state is evenly split between the Red party (R voters) and the Blue party (B voters) and that the Red party controls the levers of state government, thus putting them in charge of redistricting, resetting the district boundaries after the census that happens every 10 years. For simplicity let's further assume that the state has 100 voters. In a real scenario we can think of each of our hypothetical voters as standing in for 1% of the actual population. So in our case we have 50 R voters and 50 B voters.
Each district would then end up with 10 voters in it. In an ideal situation each district would end up with 5 R voters and 5 B voters and each election would be a heavily contested affair with the candidate for each party having a 50-50 chance. We would expect that the Red candidate would win half the time and the Blue candidate would win half the time. This would result in the state being represented by a delegation consisting of 5 Red congressmen and 5 Blue congressmen. But the Red state officials would like for things to turn out better for their party and also be less subject to the vagaries of luck. Here's how they would go about getting their wish.
They would put 6 R voters and 4 B voters in the first district. They would do the same thing with districts 2 through 8. At this point they would have allocated 48 R voters and 32 B voters. They would then put 1 R voter and 9 B voters in district 9. They would do the same thing in district 10. All 100 voters would be assigned to a district. Each district would have exactly 10 voters in it. But now 8 of the districts would elect Red congressmen and only 2 would elect Blue ones. All of a sudden a very balanced state ends up with a very unbalanced delegation.
That's how you Gerrymander. You create as many districts as you can that tilt in your favor by a small margin. The remaining few districts now tilt in favor of the other guys by a large margin. The result is that more politicians that you support win (by a small margin) and fewer politicians that you oppose win (by a large margin). There are now computer software packages that you can download from the Internet that will do this for you automatically. You plug in the election results from each precinct in the state. The software then builds a large number of districts that are tilted in your favor by a small margin and a small number of districts that are tilted toward your opponent by a large margin. There are other considerations. But the software packages can handle many of them. So Gerrymandering is now simple to achieve if you control the process for drawing districts.
In our case we were able to tilt things so that what should have been a 5-5 situation becomes an 8-2 situation. If you have more districts to work with and if you can accurately predict how voters will tilt you can do even better. So Gerrymandering is a technique to create an unfair advantage in favor of the party that can control how districts are drawn. The only thing you need to know is the distribution of voters that will support or oppose your preferred group of politicians.
Now this is something both parties do. But in the recent election the Republicans were much more effective at it. Why? Because they controlled the legislatures of way more states than the Democrats in 2011. This is the year when redistricting was done based on the 2010 census. Censuses are done on a ten year cycle so redistricting is done on a ten year cycle. The result of Republican Gerrymandering efforts was that the Democrats had many more votes cast for their candidates in the 2012 elections for the various races for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. But the Republicans won many more seats anyhow. It is unusual for one party to control the redistricting process in way more states than the other party. But it happens. And it happened in the most recent redistricting cycle.
My state (Washington) has a "nonpartisan" redistricting commission. But I live in a district that tilts heavily Democratic. This should have made it possible for Republican representatives to win more races in other districts by winning closely. It didn't actually happen. In my state Democrats won a number of close races in supposedly "slightly Republican leaning" districts. This was actually unexpected. Most of the smart money said that the Republicans had won the "redistricting war" in my state. So the smart money expected the Republicans to do better than they actually did. But my state was an exception. The Republicans did as well or better than expected in most states. And they were expected to do well due to Gerrymandering. So the U.S. House of Representatives for the session that starts in January of 2013 has many more Republican representatives, a comfortable majority in fact, than the overall vote would predict.
So the principles of how to Gerrymander are simple. Theoretically, the math necessary to pull it off is hard. But with "off the shelf" software available on the Internet this does not represent a real practical difficulty. In the past it was easy to spot Gerrymandering. Some districts would look like abstract art creations, not congressional districts. But, if you are willing to settle for getting a good Gerrymander rather then the best possible Gerrymander, even this obvious give away can be avoided. That leaves only one possible problem.
In our little artificial example we assumed we could accurately predict who voters would support. There is a term of art, a "yellow dog Democrat". This is a voter who will vote Democratic even if his candidate is a "yellow dog lying in the road". And, of course, one can imagine yellow dog Republicans. There are a number of Democratic voters who always vote Democratic and a number of voters who always vote Republican. These people are frequently described as "hard core" Democratic/Republican voters. In my example I have assumed that all my voters were hard core voters. In the real world not all voters are hard core voters. In fact, pundits talk interminably about "swing" voters. There are the opposite of hard core. They sometimes vote for the Democrat and sometimes for the Republican. Supposedly they are "convincable".
Most of the "informed opinion", baloney for short, had it that the election was all about swing voters. In fact the field was narrower than that. It was about swing voters in swing states. One "expert" went so far as to say that the whole election boiled down to swing voters in one county in Ohio. But polling suggests that people the experts identified as swing voters went for Romney. So expert opinion got it wrong. Their swing voters should have determined the outcome of the election but they didn't. This doesn't necessarily mean that the experts did a bad job of identifying who were swing voters. But if they did the identification correctly, it means there was something else going on that turned out to be more important than the whole "swing voter" thing.
Now, the publicly available estimates are that the Obama campaign spent about a billion dollars. This was matched by about a billion dollars spent by the Romney campaign and a billion dollars spent by "independent groups", actually a dozen or so very rich people. So three billion dollars were spent to influence the vote of perhaps a hundred thousand voters (swing voters in Ohio). That's about $30,000 per vote. If this were how the election truly worked then each vote cost roughly a year's salary for a typical middle class family. (Assume 1.5 independents per family and you get very close to the median family income of same). Spending this kind of money on the people who are supposed to determine the outcome only to find out that actually other people would determine the outcome is bad, very bad. If the Romney people spent their money influencing the wrong group of people while the Obama people spent their money influencing the right group of people then that would explain the outcome. But it doesn't tell us anything about the people that the Obama campaign targeted, apparently correctly.
We can understand what's going on by returning to our little Gerrymandering lesson. We learned that you can work magic if you know how people will vote. One approach a Gerrymandering group can take is to put people into three groups: us, them, and swing voters, also called "independents". If the independent group is large then it's hard to Gerrymander. You can't make a lot of close districts because you have to put in a big enough cushion to allow for the possibility of the independents going heavily for the other guy. And people don't walk around with a big "R" or "B" tattooed on their forehead. So the usual technique is to use results from previous elections. Precinct by precinct election tallies are available. Theoretically, all you need is to pick one statewide office, say Governor and tally the R and B votes for each precinct. But if you go with one race, you may have a "good candidate" or "bad candidate" effect. Let me take a minute to expand on what I am talking about.
I am not talking about "the issues". I am talking about non-issue oriented attributes of a candidate. Voters like candidates that are good looking, articulate, and relatable. Good looks are particularly important for female candidates. Most successful female candidates are blonds with a full but trim figure. Height is particularly important in male candidates. Tall men tend to beat short men. Height is less important for women and handsomeness is less important for men. Voters like candidates that give a good speech. So being articulate helps. But in this context "articulate" is more related to smooth delivery and an ability to use humor effectively than it is an ability to put together and deliver a well reasoned argument. In fact, appearing too brainy is a liability. A "good old boy" will beat a "professor" almost every time. Voters like a candidate that they think can see things from their point of view. Bill Clinton is the undisputed master of this. But if a voter decides a candidate "just doesn't understand my situation", that candidate is in a lot of trouble.
Another attribute voters don't value is actual honesty. They don't want to be told what they don't want to hear. They prefer candidates that will make a plausible sounding argument for what the voter wants to believe. But voters don't like this kind of deception to be rubbed in their faces. The usual candidate strategy for dealing with this is to be as vague as possible. Say something bland and meaningless instead of telling the voter what they don't want to hear. Unfortunately, if a voter agrees with a candidate's position on 9 out of 10 issues he will still vote for the other guy if the other guy throws up enough fog so that the voter doesn't notice points of disagreement. Effective candidates can expound at great length (here defined as about 3 minutes) while appearing to say something in any situation and in response to any question. A candidate that has not mastered the effective use of this skill will not be successful.
Gerrymandering committees will put the R, B, and S data for each precinct into the computer model along with whatever other information they think is important and a nice Gerrymander will be produced. The computer can even figure out how big a cushion each of your districts needs to be safe. Given that the Republicans did this in 2011, and did it well, there must be more to the story when it comes to the Presidential campaign.
Some elections are high turnout (a relatively high percentage of eligible voters actually cast a ballot) elections and other races are low turnout elections. The 2008 election was a high turnout election and the 2010 election was a low turnout election. Polls indicated that the general population had not changed their opinions on the issues by much in the intervening two years but Democrats did very well in 2008 and Republicans did very well in 2010. What happened? In the simplest terms, Democrats stayed home in large numbers in 2010 compared to 2008 but the Republican turnout dipped far less between the same two elections. If you don't vote your vote doesn't count. The absolute number of Republican votes dipped in 2010 but the absolute number of Democratic votes dipped more. So the Republicans won a large number of races in 2010 that they had lost in 2008.
Voters hate negative ads. But they have come to dominate campaigns. Why? The general consensus is that negative ads depress the turnout for whoever the ad is aimed at. If you can depress the number of votes for the other guy more than he can depress the number of votes you get then that gives you an advantage. All you have to do to win is get more votes than the other guy And, as the saying goes, "winning is everything".
Republicans have had a long term strategy of catering to voting blocks that reliably turn out and vote. In relative terms, young people don't vote. Old people do. Minorities don't vote. White people do. Women don't vote. Men do. So the core constituency of the Republican base is old white men. This has worked very well for them, particularly since the "Reagan revolution". Historically, white blue collar men, particularly union members, voted for Democrats. Reagan in the 1980 campaign convinced this group that they had been sold down the river by the Democrats and that Republicans would take much better care of them. They bought the claim and came over to the Republican party in large numbers. Union leaders would strongly support Democratic candidates. But the rank and file would vote Republican in large numbers. One thing that helped with this argument is that this group is socially conservative and strongly religious. Democrats had put a lot of effort into liberal causes (civil rights, women's rights, anti-war - viewed by this group as being unpatriotic) and were less effective in implementing changes that were seen as both positive and important to this group. Republicans were able to put conservative social positions in the forefront and successfully divert attention away from Republican anti-union and pro-business policies that this group would have disliked. With this block added to their other constituencies, Republicans have been very successful winning elections since 1980.
But Obama has won twice now, and the recent win was the more surprising of the two. In 2008 the Republicans were coming off of 8 years of what ultimately became a very unpopular President in George W. Bush. Then the financial crisis hit. Most people blamed Republican policies much more than Democratic ones. And Obama was a charismatic figure who ran a very well regarded campaign. McCain's campaign was not as nearly as well regarded and he was bucking the "W" currents. So it was not a big surprise when he lost. 2012 was supposed to be a Republican year. Obama was seen as an ineffective legislator and the economy was in poor shape. The theory was that an "I'm not Obama" campaign would not have much trouble winning. So what went wrong?
The conventional wisdom is that Romney ran a poor campaign from a technical point of view and that he was a bad campaigner. While extremely weak on the economy, Obama was seen to have an advantage elsewhere. He was seen as being on the "right" side of many issues. But losing candidates have often been on the right side of issues and have still lost. Many Republicans, Romney most prominent among them, also disagreed with the characterization that Romney ran a poor campaign from a technical point of view. They thought they had a strategy that would be successful and that they implemented their strategy well. But they lost. Why?
In a nut shell those things that I said above about who votes turned out to be wrong, at least relatively speaking. Obama got large numbers of young people to vote and vote for him. He got large numbers of minorities to vote and to vote for him. He also got large numbers of women, particularly single women, to vote and to vote for him. Taken together, these groups put him over the top. So why did the Romney people miss all this?
The Republican party has had a very effective messaging machine for decades now. They started out by convincing large numbers of white blue collar men, frequently union men, to vote for them. They did this by catering to them on social issues while implementing anti-union and pro-business (and pro rich people) policies. They used their superior messaging machine to successfully deflect attention away from their unpopular policies. They have now been able to hold on to this block for about 30 years. And a number of the social issues they have championed, anti-"women's libber" and anti-immigrant/minority issues in particular, are popular with this group. But you eventually alienate women and minorities by doing this.
They have also been anti-entitlement. George W. Bush famously championed drastic changes to Social Security in 2005, for instance. More recently, Republicans have attacked Medicare in its current form. Many of the Republican core constituency depend heavily on Social Security and Medicare. Their efforts in these areas have not been completely successful. But a large number of this core constituency have stuck with them due to the herculean efforts of the messaging machine to frame these initiatives as "necessary reform" whether or not these initiatives really are either necessary or a reform (e.g. improvement).
Republicans have also made a careful calculation that they can keep a large percentage of women on board. The theory is that husbands will sway married women in sufficient numbers to keep the loss manageable. As to the young, minorities, and single women, they don't vote (in very large numbers) so they don't count. This kind of calculus has worked very well for them for decades. Experts have predicted the death of this strategy for almost as long as it has been around. So anyone opining that "time's up" for this strategy can be rebutted with the many past predictions of its demise that turned out to be incorrect.
Republicans have had electoral success for many years in spite of pushing unpopular positions. The thing that has made this possible has been their messaging machine. It has been able to cover up or paper over innumerable unpopular positions. As a result, politicians associated with many of these unpopular positions in the past have garnered success at the polls anyhow. Why should this not continue? And Republicans have also not been shy about trying to use various techniques in the past to keep the turnout low among the groups listed above. They have been past masters of negative campaigning. They have long championed voter registration policies that make it hard for the young, who move around a lot, and minorities who are concentrated in a few areas, to register and vote. The fact that these groups have long been categorized as "groups who don't vote" is testament to their success. A voter who would normally vote for the other guy but stays home is effectively a vote for your guy.
The Obama campaign made a specific effort to counter all this. First they did what a traditional campaign would do. They concentrated their efforts in about ten swing states. The Romney people did the same thing. The vast majority of us who lived in one of the "other forty" saw a far different campaign than the swing staters did. But this was not a differentiators. As I said, both campaigns did this.
The strategy that the Obama campaign successfully implemented that won them the election was to Get Out The Vote (GOTV, in politics-speak) among traditionally low turnout groups, specifically young people, minorities, and single women. Everyone, but especially the Romney people, missed this. The actual Obama vote outdid predictions based on the standard polls by about 2%. More people voted for him than the pollsters thought would. Romney, on the other hand, underperformed relative to the standard polls, and way underperformed relative to Romney internal polls. Why was this?
Well, you remember the discussion above about Gerrymandering. And how important it is to know which bucket to put voters in, e.g. R, B, or S. And remember the discussion about how negative advertising depresses turnout. The Romney campaign assumed that the Republican juju would work one more time. In the past many polls have overestimated the Democratic turnout and underestimated the Republican turnout. This campaign was heavily negative by both sides. That should result in a low turnout election like 2010. In a low turnout election only hard core voters turn out. So the Romney people tracked sentiment among hard core voters and figured they were in good shape. They also tailored the Romney message toward hard core Republican voters for the most part. If turnout had gone as the Romney people expected he would have won and he and his people would have looked brilliant.
But the Obama campaign saw an opportunity to turn out a large number of people who are the opposite of the traditional hard core voter. They are young, minority, single women. They put together a very sophisticated turn out machine designed to get these people to register and vote. They also devoted a significant part of their traditional campaign to issues important to these people. In the case of minorities they highlighted immigration and voter suppression. In the case of single women they highlighted Republican anti-abortion and anti-birth control activities. They highlighted student loan reforms already implemented and support for science, education, and the environment, issues important to young people.
Campaigning, like most other things, is captive to technological issues. Historically, the best way to reach people has been TV ads. So campaigns for the last 50 years have invested heavily in TV ads. Both the Obama and the Romney people spent a lot of money on TV this time too. But the Obama campaign put a lot more effort into social media and did it better than the Romney campaign. They invested in things like Twitter and Facebook. They invested in an extremely sophisticated GOTV tools. The Obama tools were better and they worked.
And the biggest irony about the Obama win is that they learned their strategy from Carl Rove. Rove's nickname is "Bush's brain". In 2004 he headed up the Bush reelection campaign. It looked like a bad year for the Republicans. Rove decided to go after a group of voters and see if he could increase Republican turnout. He picked a group he was confident were in the Bush camp, evangelicals. He then put together a sophisticated campaign to reach these people and turn them out. In his case, he used the informal network evangelical churches use to communicate with each other. This network is invisible to the Washington punditocracy so he could go about his business out of the public spotlight. The campaign was not invisible. The Kerry people figured out what he was doing. It looked like Rove could turn out 4 million additional Bush voters this way. So they set out to find enough Kerry voters to counter this. Their effort was successful. So why did he lose the election? Because Rove was able to turn out 8 million new evangelicals. The additional 4 million overwhelmed the Kerry response and he lost.
I'm sure the Romney people were aware of what the Obama people were up to. But in the same way the Kerry people underestimated how successful Rove would be, the Romney people underestimated how successful the Obama people would be. In the case of the Kerry people, you can hardly blame them. They were not wired into the evangelical community so they couldn't accurately gage how successful Rove was being. And the same is true of the Romney people. But Romney had an additional problem. The Republican messaging machine, recently dubbed the "Conservative Entertainment Complex" by David From, a prominent conservative intellectual, has been very successful at lying (Frum's characterization) to the Republican base (and the rest of us) for a long time now.
This operation is also referred to as the "Conservative Media Bubble". A lot of conservatives genuinely believed that Romney would win the election. Why? Because a lot of people in the Conservative Entertainment Complex/Conservative Media Bubble said Romney would win. Democrats do not have an equivalent Bubble. They have been forced by Republicans to live in the real world. So I am sure that a lot of people in the Kerry campaign thought their guy would win. But some of them had their doubts. And I am sure that none of them believed that a loss was impossible. So far no one has found anyone in the Romney organization who thought it was possible for Romney to lose.
Besides the win itself, there is another thing that seems to have come out of the election. One of the themes that the Obama campaign hammered on continuously was that conservatives in general and Romney in particular was dishonest. This idea was definitely reinforced by the spectacular and very public failure of the Conservative Entertainment Complex (Fox TV, Rush Limbaugh and others on the radio, etc.) to predict the outcome of the election. It is definitely possible that this reputation for dishonesty will dissipate. But what if it doesn't? Credibility is important in the short run and critical in the long run.
Political parties and movements come back from the dead all the time. Republicans did it in 2010 after being beat badly in 2008, way more badly than they were beat in 2012. But the key to a comeback is to have a message that works and to have people believe the message. If people think an individual or group is dishonest then they will think "that's just old so and so mouthing off again" and not pay attention to what he is saying. I don't know how you make a comeback if no one is paying attention to what you say. Republicans have come back from setbacks far worse than the 2012 election results before. They have done it by coming up with a popular message and then getting it out using their messaging machine. But this will not work if no one believes the message machine. In this environment they become responsible for their many unpopular policies. This makes it even harder for them to come back.
It is way to soon to write off the Republican messaging machine. But if it turns out that the Obama campaign has severely damaged it then 2012 may turn out to be a "sea change" election like 1980.
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