Month: November 2016

Tempering our expectations

Following up on my comment about feeling like I’ve stumbled into a dystopian timebreak, I just got a missive from the alternate timeline that we should have been in. It’s an article by Jeff Stein and Sarah Frostenson on Vox, published at 8:47pm on the night of the election. He is reporting that the early results show that the Democrats will almost certainly fail to attain a majority in the House of Representatives, and commenting on the consequences:

The Republican Party will keep control of the House of Representatives, extinguishing Democrats’ hopes of a new progressive era in Washington.

Failing to retake the House is a sign that liberals will have to somewhat temper their expectations after Election Day. With both branches of Congress and the White House, Democrats could have passed a cap-and-trade bill to combat climate change. They may have tried thrusting through immigration reform. There could have been a real chance at implementing a nationwide paid family leave program or universal pre-K. Perhaps there were enough congressional Democrats to dramatically raise the minimum wage, or pass campaign finance reform, or tackle any of the rest of the party’s key agenda items.

All of that is now probably off the table. At the very least, the odds of any of those things happening are massively diminished.

Still tempering…

Ulysses Obama

I’ve just been reading Ronald C. White’s wonderful new biography of Ulysses Grant, American Ulysses. Inspiring and depressing at the same time, it’s the story of a modest man with a peculiar foreign-sounding name. Possessed of enormous gifts of organisation and leadership, he rose from a decidedly modest background to become president. He was extremely popular during most of his eight years in office, and pursued vigorous high-minded policies as president, particularly focused on protecting civil rights of ethnic minorities, and repairing relations with other countries after a long war. At the end of his two terms he was still popular enough that he could easily have been re-elected for a third. 

His successors set about dismantling everything he had accomplished as president, and later generations judged his presidency an utter failure, partly in order to justify the racist policies that followed.

He was a talented writer, who wrote a celebrated memoir, but political opponents, who held his intellect in contempt, asserted without evidence that it had been ghost-written.

I’m not sure why this all seems relevant at the present moment.

Why were the polls so wrong?

While Tuesdays election result is a global disaster, it is most immediately distressing for three groups: American Latinos, American Muslims, and American pollsters.

First of all, let us dispel with the idea (that I have heard some propound) that they weren’t wrong. Huge numbers of polls done independently in multiple states gave results that were consistently at variance in the same direction with the actual election results. I can see three kinds of explanations:

  1. The pollsters shared a mistaken idea or methodology for correcting their tiny unrepresentative samples for differential turnout.
  2. Subjects lied about their voting intentions.
  3. Subjects changed their minds between the last poll and the election.

3 seems unlikely to account for a lot, as it seems implausible to suppose that many people changed their minds so rapidly. 2 is plausible, but hard to check and difficult  impossible to correct. 1 is a nice technical-sounding explanation, and certainly seems like there must be some truth to it. Except, probably not much. As evidence, I bring the failure of VoteCastr.

Slate magazine teamed up with the big-data firm VoteCastr to trial a system of estimating votes in real time. Ahead of time they did extensive polling to fit an extensive model to predict an individual’s vote (probabilistically) as a function of several publicly-available demographic variables. Then they track records of who actually voted, and update their totals for the number of votes for each candidate accordingly.

Sounds like a perfectly plausible scheme. And it bombed. For instance, their final projection for Florida was 4.9 million (actually, 4,225,249) for Clinton and 4.6 million for Trump, a lead of about 3% for Clinton. The real numbers were 4.5 million and 4.6 million, a lead of 1.3% for Trump. (The difference in the total seems to be mainly due to votes for other candidates, though the total number of Florida votes in VoteCastr is about 100,000 more than in the official tally, which I find suspicious.) They projected a big victory for Clinton in Wisconsin.

The thing is, this removes the uncertainty related to reason 1: They know exactly who came to vote, and they’re matched by age, sex, and party registration. Conclusion: Estimating turnout is not the main problem that undermined this year’s presidential election polls.

What is the rating on this movie?

Looking at the NY Times headline

U.S. Faces a Startling New Political Reality After Donald Trump’s Victory

with some mentions of possible cabinet positions for Chris Christie and Rudolf Giuliani, and I had the powerful sense of having fallen into one of those movies where the protagonist accidentally upsets his time stream — for instance, travels to the past and crushes a butterfly — creating an alternate reality where all kinds of bizarre events start to accumulate in the intermediate past: For instance, instead of the respected former secretary of state who is president in our reality, there is a depraved reality TV star who has become president and then filled his cabinet with criminals and then nuked California. (They were nasty.) There must be a way to fix this…

Rehabilitating the single-factor models

Lots of people — myself included — have mocked the penchant of a certain kind of political scientist who like to say that all the superficial busyness of election campaigns is just a distraction, it matters not at all, nor do the candidates really. Presidential elections are decided by the “fundamentals” — usually one or two economic variables. Except that the models work much better for the past than they do for the present or future, and so end up with lots of corrections: So much for an ongoing war, so much for incumbency, or for a party having been in office too long, and so on. They seem kind of ridiculous. Obviously people care who the candidates were. And, of course, these experts agreed that those things weren’t irrelevant, they just tended to cancel each other out, because both major parties choose reasonably competent candidates who run competent campaigns.

And last year they said the fundamentals mildly favoured the Republican to win a modest victory. But the Republicans chose a ridiculous candidate who ran a flagrantly incompetent campaign. So of course this couldn’t be a test of the “fundamentals” theory. But after all that, the Republican won a modest victory. Kind of makes you think…

Bullet not dodged

I thought I should post an email that I wrote yesterday morning, expressing my despair before the election, when I thought we might “dodge the bullet” of Trumpism, but still held out little hope for a political system that put us in front of the gun in the first place: Continue reading “Bullet not dodged”

Second season

When my daughter asked me recently, “What happens if Donald Trump wins?” I said I just couldn’t imagine it (even though, as I noted, I couldn’t see a good reason to think it extremely unlikely.) The mind recoils from such madness, though as I have also noted, Berlusconi is a good precedent, and it took nearly a decade to winkle him out of office. Berlusconi with nukes and the NSA.

But while I tried to find a reason for confidence, there was always a nagging voice telling me: People are going to want to see how this show ends. This was the voice of the Sanders supporter quoted in the NY Times back in June who said he would probably support Trump in the general election because Clinton would be boring:

A dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in. There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen. It’s like reality TV. You don’t want to just see everybody be happy with each other. You want to see someone fighting somebody.

The showman Trump had set up an outrageous spectacle that ended on a cliffhanger. If you vote for Clinton, the Trump show gets cancelled, and you never get to see what would have happened.

That dark side won (though not a majority, apparently — now the Republicans will never agree to get rid of the electoral college). The Trump show has been renewed, and we’ll all be watching it — living it, really — for at least the next four years.

Democratic antinomianism

One thing that the US and UK have in common is a sort of democratic antinomianism — a pervading sense that to the holy all things are holy, and to the inherently democratic all things are democratic. Thus they can spy on their populace, torture prisoners held indefinitely without trial, hold embarrassingly badly organised elections, and still be offended at the notion that anyone might have anything to lecture them about democracy. They can elect, or come close to electing, a comically unfit would-be ethnic-nationalist authoritarian strongman and still celebrate their constitutional order.

This is a reason why I feel particularly comfortable in Germany. Germans can be arrogant, on a personal and national level, but they have learned deep in their bones distrust of colourful demagogues.

Used and abandoned

Donald Trump has tried, with limited success it would appear, to convince African-Americans that they have been swindled by the Democrats, who use their votes but ignore their concerns. I don’t think that is actually true. We can argue about whether Democrats have done enough, or had the right priorities, and to what extent this is just another example of the Republicans blocking progress and then accusing the Democrats of not wanting it enough, not “leading” enough. But the needs of African-Americans — including affirmative action, housing integration, support for the poor — are clearly a significant concern of governing Democrats.

The people who were really used and abandoned by the Democrats were the white racists. The Democrats were happy to have their votes through the 1970s, and then abandoned them as the fraction of non-white voters made the racists seem electorally less significant. Shameful!

In the bunker

While accepting all the principles of the dangers of any political argument that involves Hitler, I couldn’t read this report from the NY Times about the desperate final days of the Trump campaign without thinking of Hitler in his bunker fantasising with his loyal paladins about being rescued by new rocket weapons:

On Oct. 28, the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, announced that his agency would review newly discovered emails potentially pertinent to its investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

Mr. Trump was unsure how to respond.
“What do you think this means?” he asked the small circle traveling with him… To the assembled men sitting in white leather seats, the answer was simple: It could turn the election around.