Matt Yglesias

Race and Entitlements

Atrios says:

For some reason I seem to be one of the few people who noticed that Republicans ran on the truthy claim that Obama & Dems had cut Medicare. Combine that with the looming catfood commission making it impossible for Dems to style themselves credibly as defenders of Social Security and you have a bit of the reason they voted for Republicans. I’m not discounting the impact of the various race-infused freak show stuff that were tossed around, but if you want old white people to vote for you maybe you should give them a reason.

I agree with that. But it’s important to note that talking up retirement programs and race-infused freak show stuff is synergistic process. Among white Americans, more ethnocentric voters are more supportive of Social Security and Medicare and less supportive of means-tested social spending. The Affordable Care Act restrains increases in Medicare and uses the money to finance a means-tested program to make health care affordable for non-elderly poor people. When an initiative like that is on the table, there’s no need for race-infused dog whistles or anything else.

What If They Gave a Pitchfork, And Nobody Noticed

Ryan Avent marvels that “It’s striking how little inchoate public rage has actually boiled to the surface in the rich world” and elaborates:

In America, the language of the angriest is very similar to that of the plutocrats themselves. Indeed, the complaint that today’s elite lack the noblesse oblige of the aristocrats of old, and are therefore risking public anger, seems to badly misread American public opinion. The middle class doesn’t want hand-outs from condescending rich people. They want moralistic language and complaints about deficits.

Kevin Drum endorses this, but I think it’s really mistaken. The only problem here is that populist rage in America doesn’t happen to line up with the policy objectives of the mainstream Democratic Party.

Every poll I’ve seen shows strong support for higher taxes on rich people and lower taxes on non-rich people. That’s straight-up redistributive politics relative to the status quo and it’s what the public wants. Democrats flirted with making this part of their agenda, but ultimately blinked. And it just wasn’t the centerpiece of their agenda in 111th Congress which, instead, was focused on stabilizing the short-term economy, expanding the welfare state, trying to grapple with climate change, improving US immigration policy, and reducing the level of discrimination against gays and lesbians. Personally, I think all those things were important. But from the point of view of an insured employed middle aged middle class heterosexual legal resident of the United States its not an agenda that has a lot to do with his family. By contrast, a drive to permanently push his tax rate lower than where it was under George W Bush while pushing rich peoples taxes higher than they were under Bill Clinton would be a juicy populist agenda. And it polls well. But it wasn’t on offer because leading politicians didn’t—and don’t—want to offer it.

But people sure seem plenty mad to me.

The Median Voter Supports The Affordable Care Act

We’ve seen this before, but today CNN has another poll (PDF) confirming that the Affordable Care Act’s conservative critics are a minority:

I’m not 100 percent sure if “not liberal enough” is the way I would describe the law. But you make the ACA better by making it more aggressive. That’s a public option, but it’s also more forceful implementation of the Independent Medicare Advisory Panel concept and a more aggressive phase-out of the tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance.

It’s The Economy, Stupid

Peter Baker’s Week in Review piece trying to add some texture to the story of Bill Clinton’s post-1994 political moves is pretty good, but like most such narratives I think it slights the central role of macroeconomic performance:

Mr. Clinton’s lowest postelection moment arguably came less than 24 hours before he began his comeback. In April 1995, he was reduced to arguing at a news conference that “the president is relevant.” The next day, bombers blew up an Oklahoma City federal building, and Mr. Clinton’s steady, reassuring and empathetic response made him more of a national leader.

Mr. Sosnik identified two other phases that followed. Phase 2, he said, was spent “getting our theory of the case on how we were going to deal with this new reality,” and really started when Mr. Clinton proposed balancing the budget in hopes of outflanking the Republicans. Phase 3, he said, came in the fall of 1995, when Mr. Clinton engaged Republicans over the role of government, ultimately refusing to agree to deeper spending cuts and winning the spin battle over who was responsible for government shutdowns.

Underlying all of this is the fact that economic growth accelerated rapidly in the mid-1990s. For example, I think most of us would agree that were an allegation to emerge that Barack Obama had an affair with a White House intern, then Obama responded by denying the affair to his senior staff and the public, then it was proven that he’d been lying, and then it was also proven that he’d offered misleading sworn testimony about the matter that this would constitute a serious political misstep. And yet, all those things happened to Bill Clinton and he enjoyed high approval ratings and Democratic gains in the 1998 midterms.

That’s not to say that Obama’s tactical decisions don’t matter. They make a great deal of difference to the question of what laws get passed, which regulations are implemented, what judges obtain lifetime appointments, and to the conduct of US foreign policy. And these things, in turn, to some extent influence the performance of the American economy. But it’s the performance of the economy that will, above all else, determine Obama’s public fortunes just as it did for Clinton.

Did “Class Warfare” Doom John Kerry?

A selection from Noam Scheiber’s reporting on the evolution of the tax debate:

Within the administration, the split over whether to mount a tax-cut offensive broke down largely along wonk-operative lines. The wonks spent the last year mystified that the White House was ducking the fight when the substantive merits were so one-sided. The operatives brooded that the politics could abruptly turn against them, despite polling showing little public appetite for the upper-income cuts. “They view it through the class warfare stuff—Kerry in 2004, Gore in 2000,” says one administration official. “They worry that they’ll get painted as lefties, tax-raisers.”

The thesis here seems to be that “class warfare stuff” hurt John Kerry and Al Gore badly in 2000 and 2004. But where’s the evidence? True, Kerry and Gore both lost. But surely that doesn’t mean every single tactical decision they made went wrong. What’s more, not only did Al Gore win the popular vote in 2000 but when you consider the Ralph Nader factor it’s clear that Gore did a good job of getting the median voter to vote for him. What’s more, Kerry overperformed the fundamentals as measured by the Hibbs “bread and peace” model. On top of that, though Barack Obama’s 2008 platform differed from Kerry and Gore in a number of ways opposition to the Bush tax cuts was not one of those ways. So everything about this analysis seems arbitrary and suspect.

Democrats and Low-Income Whites

Lane Kenworthy has an excellent post up at the Monkey Cage building on Larry Bartels’ research and looking at the question of why low-income white voters don’t show more affection for Democratic presidential candidates. You really must read the whole thing for yourself, but this one chart is provocative enough that it should entice you in:

The point here is just to attend to the basic stability of the dynamic as well as to the fact that contrary to boatloads of conventional wisdom, the Clinton/Gore/Kerry era Democrats did better with this demographic than has been the postwar norm.

The Anti-Populist Populace

(cc photo by LateNightTaskForce)

Alex Tabarrok points us to an interesting bit of 1996 public opinion research which revealed the following:

Imagine that you faced a choice for the United States between the following two extreme possibilities, which would you choose?

1) The US would have in the next 10 years an inflation rate of only 2% a year, but an unemployment rate of 9%, thus about 12 million unemployed.

2) The US would have in the next ten years an inflation rate of 10% a month, but an unemployment rate of only 3%, thus about 4 million unemployed.

About 75 percent of survey respondents chose option one. Now I would say this isn’t super-duper relevant to our current situation since the high-inflation scenario on offer is much more extreme than anything I’ve heard anyone propose. But the fact that the public is more tolerant of high-unemployment than of high-inflation is suggestive.

On a related note, I observed over the weekend that even amidst the worst labor market crisis in many decades, the vast majority of people who want a job have one. Which is to say that an unemployment rate of 9.8 percent means a non-unemployment rate of 91.2 percent. Some people took that to mean me saying that we should be complacent about sky-high unemployment. I absolutely reject that. High unemployment is a moral and economic disaster. But in political terms it does matter. The costs of high unemployment are disproportionately borne by the unemployed minority. If the non-unemployed majority fears that measures to reduce unemployment—whether they involve higher deficits or a higher rate of increase in the price level or what have you—are likely to come at their expense, then building political support for said measures will be challenging. It’s especially worth noting that senior citizens are extremely insulated from labor market conditions and have emerged as a critical pro-conservative voting bloc.

To regard the politics of 9.8 unemployment as a zero-sum competition between the interests of the unemployed and the non-unemployed is a mistake but it’s very common for people to mistakenly over-estimate the zero-sum element of policy debates.

Rushing to Deport

Here’s another one for the “obsessive focus” file as the Center for Investigative Reporting shows that the Obama administration undertook a politically motivated deportation wave for the sake of a random talking point:

For much of this year, the Obama administration touted its tougher-than-ever approach to immigration enforcement, culminating in a record number of deportations. [...]

When ICE officials realized in the final weeks of the fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, that the agency still was in jeopardy of falling short of last year’s mark, it scrambled to reach the goal. Officials quietly directed immigration officers to bypass backlogged immigration courts and time-consuming deportation hearings whenever possible, internal e-mails and interviews show.

The article focuses on a number of stats-juking methods undertaken in an effort to set the record. This is apparently not particularly unusual and I’m not particularly scandalized by it. The real problem, I would say, is simply with the goal. There’s no reason to think that setting about to undertake a record number of deportations was a good idea. It’s inhumane, it’s bad for economic recovery, and you don’t need to be a telepath to see that the motivation here was political rather than substantive. And while I of course don’t want to say that this is somehow the key to our present-day economic situation, the fact of the matter is that the administration’s main political problems today are attributable to the economy and not to messaging failures. And yet for the sake of messaging, the administration undertook a variety of initiatives that were counterproductive to the economy. This is one.

Who Do You Trust

I think almost all political polls are overrated in terms of their relevance, but Gallup’s efforts to gauge the popularity of different occupational groups are underrated:

The very high ratings given to military officers is hugely important in understanding the politics of the war in Afghanistan. And the very high ratings given to health care providers is hugely important in understanding the politics of health care costs. Any given cut in spending might be a trimming of fat, or else it might lead to a major reduction in the availability of useful health care services. And in a standoff between a member of congress and a doctor or nurse over which it is, people are highly inclined to believe the member of congress is lying.

Trust in Government

Matt Bai muses:

In this way, the “Don’t touch my junk” fiasco raises, yet again, what has become the central theme of Mr. Obama’s presidency: America’s faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work. From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled — blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry.

That broad-based skepticism of government is, of course, why the Obama Era has also witnessed a broad-based public backlash against unrestrained government surveillance powers, the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, public demands that Obama cut Medicare benefits more sharply. That’s why a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana passed easily in California, and public momentum is growing to get Big Government off our southern borders and let people travel back and forth more easily.

I would say the main story of the Obama years has to do with people’s trust in other people. Most Americans are white, most Americans have health insurance, most Americans are native-born citizens, most Americans aren’t Muslims, and over the course of the Great Recession most Americans have become more suspicious that they live in a zero-sum world where any effort to improve the condition of other people will come at their expense.

Adventures in Polling Analysis

Anne Kim and Stefan Hankin report the “key findings” of Third Way’s latest poll:

In a new post-election survey, Third Way and Lincoln Park Strategies polled 1,000 Obama voters who abandoned Democrats in 2010, either by staying home (the “droppers”) or by voting Republican (the “switchers”). This report paints a portrait of these droppers and switchers—the voters that Democrats will need to win again in 2012. Our key findings:

Droppers are more than the base. One in 3 droppers is conservative, 40% are Independents, and they are split about whether Obama should have done more or did too much.

For switchers, it’s not just the economy. The economy matters but switchers also overwhelmingly think Democrats are more liberal that they are. Two in three say “too much government spending” was a major reason for their vote.

Republicans won a chance, not a mandate. Only 20% of switchers say that a major reason for their vote was that “Republicans had better ideas,” and nearly half say Republicans are more conservative than they are.

Two points here. One, I don’t think it’s very enlightening to rely on survey data to get people to explain their own voting behavior. Systematic surveys make it very clear that voters, in the aggregate, swing against presidents who preside over poor economic performance (as well as those who preside over elevated incidence of shark attacks) but presumably few swing voters subjectively perceive themselves to be fickely remaking their ideology according to macroeconomic fluctuations.

Second, the treatment of the “independent” vote in this bullet point is naive in the extreme. The result that most self-described independents are in fact consistent partisan voters is well-establishment. If 40 percent of droppers are self-identified independents that mostly goes to show that some non-trivial faction of the Democratic Party’s base vote self-identifies as independent.

American Politics Was About Race Long Before Barack Obama Came on the Scene

Adam Serwer commented on racial attitudes and the Obama agenda earlier today, saying:

I think it’s wrong to suggest that opposition to Obama’s agenda is “race-based,” because that suggests conservatives would feel differently if Obama weren’t president. I think the GOP’s general positions on the issues would be the same if Hillary Clinton were president.

I think that’s basically true, but in some ways it misses the point. American political behavior is heavily shaped by racial attitudes in ways that are much more fundamental than the race of the candidate. Just look at the extraordinary racial gap in voting behavior that occurs clearly and consistently every time a white Democrat faces off against a white Republican. Or look at how nominating Michael Steel didn’t make African-American Marylanders suddenly love Republicans. Stephanie Mencimer found a good example of this in the American Values Survey when she observed a big partisan gap in the answer to the question of whether or not discrimination against whites “is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

56 of Republicans (and 61 percent of self-described tea partiers) say it is, but only 28 percent of Democrats agree. Among white voters, more ethnocentric attitudes are associated with less support for means-tested welfare and more support for universal social insurance. It’s difficult to get this stuff acknowledged in the media because people get very defensive about accusations of racism. But the genius of the Mencimer question is that it’s really just a question. Evidently a question Americans disagree about. And in a way that’s systematically related to broader political issues.

I think it’s fair to say that putting an African-American presidential candidate on the ballot increases the salience of some of these divides over racial topics (I don’t think I would have seen so many of my black neighbors standing on long lines to buy special editions of the post-election copy of the Washington Post had Hillary Clinton been the Democratic nominee) but racial issues have been important drivers of American politics since before the Constitution was written.

Obama Approval in Context

Lowell Feld brings some much-needed perspective to the future predictive value of Barack Obama’s currently mid-forties approval rating. Here’s Gallup’s comparison of Obama to some other recent presidents:

I don’t think progressives should draw false comfort from this. The mere fact that Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had substantial political recoveries doesn’t make an Obama turnaround inevitable. And both Reagan and Obama were substantially hampered in their last six years in office by the presence of an opposition congress. Nevertheless, both men did turn their public approval ratings around and both men passed important pieces of bipartisan legislation even after losing control of congress.

The point is that nobody now looks back on 1982 and says “well, conservative overreach killed the right for a generation.” Instead it’s more like “conservatives changed a bunch of stuff then suffered a setback and there’s was some retrenchment but still the country was never the same.”

The Misinformation That Matters

Evan Bayh thinks “Democrats should support a freeze on federal hiring and pay increases. Government isn’t a privileged class and cannot be immune to the times.”

Steve Benen asked a good question about this:

Reading this, I’m wondering, “How would that help the economy?” Bayh is arguing that we’d be better off if fewer unemployed workers get jobs and federal workers have less money. I’m sure he can explain why this would help the economy — and I’m sure it’s very “moderate” — but I have no idea what that explanation might be.

I think that Bayh is probably operating with an explicit model of the economy as a closed zero-sum system. A recession is a negative shock leading to bad times. Policymakers then have the opportunity to influence the course of the recession by allocating the badness around. Failure to cut public sector compensation creates a “privileged class” and increases the quantity of pain felt by people outside that class, whereas ensuring that members of that class experience pain reduces the pain felt by others.

My view is that the Bayh Model is mistaken. Of course the primary losers in Bayh’s plan will be those whose incomes are directly reduced. But individuals will respond to reduced income by reducing spending, and those reductions in spending will reduce everyone else’s income. My model of the economy isn’t a zero sum system. In my version, a typical recession is a needless waste of resources—unemployed workers, vacant storefronts, empty offices, idled factories—and public policy actually impacts the extent to which resources are wasted and the pace at which they’re put back into use.

I think the primary political problem progressives have had over the past two years stems from the fact that our accurate account of the recession is less believed than Bayh’s inaccurate model. I think virtually all Republican members of congress and many Democratic members of congress embrace the Bayh Model. And I think this is how it goes throughout the ranks. From ordinary citizens to campaign operatives to Hill staff to reporters etc. The Bayh Model had common sense on its side, most people are not specialists in the subject, and I think most non-specialists believe in it. They think that being hit by a recession is like being hit by a hurricane or a drought. It’s something that causes a temporary period of intense suffering that can be managed well or poorly but primarily has to be endured. Common sense views “fiscal stimulus” (whether for good or for ill) as a form of humanitarian disaster relief, and common sense views Bayh’s pain-sharing proposal as reasonable, and common sense doesn’t think about monetary policy at all.

I think all this is mistaken and recessions are quite different from hurricanes. But I think that progressives have tended to focus too much on “crazy person misinformation” (Obama is a secret Muslim, Obama spent nine trillion dollars on a trip to India, Obama is from Kenya) and not enough on “common sense misinformation” of the sort Bayh is expressing. The widespread nature of common sense misinformation about the nature of recessions—not just among low-information voters but even among political professionals and policy elites—has been a huge drag on macroeconomic performance and that in turn has dragged down the entire progressive agenda.

Bilingual Polling

Most discussion of potential sampling error problems with polling that I’ve heard in recent cycles has focused on cell phone only households. Time and again, however, pollsters seem to be able to adjust for this correctly. Joshua Tucker rounds up some research on a different potential source of error—monolingual polling in a country where many people primarily speak Spanish. This could account for the way polls seem to have systematically overrated Republican performance in Nevada, Colorado, and California.

Self-Defeating Blue Dogs?

Joe Klein says Blue Dogs shot themselves in the foot:

Normally, I don’t have much patience for the whining on the left about the Blue Dog democrats — who were sliced in half on Tuesday, losing at least 28 of their 54 seats. When they lose, the Democrats lose control of the Congress. This year, however, I do feel that there is an argument that, to an extent, the Dogs brought this on themselves by being penny-wise, dogpound-foolish. The argument goes like this: a larger stimulus package might have helped the economy recover at a faster clip, but the Dogs opposed it on fiscal responsibility grounds. A second argument: the public really has had it with Wall Street, but the Dogs helped water down the financial regulatory bill, gutting the too-big-to-fail provisions. There is real merit to both points. If the stimulus had been bigger and the financial reform package clearer and stronger, the public would have had a different — and, I believe, more positive — sense of the President’s agenda.

Kevin Drum wants to add mortgage cramdowns to the list. I would say that a variety of aspects of the health reform process—mostly notably just the slow pace of it—also fit the bill.

But to be fair to the Blue Dogs, there’s a big collective action problem. Voting “no” on high-profile legislation does help vulnerable members. Similarly, the Chamber of Commerce seems to have been effective at picking off vulnerable Democrats it disliked while protecting those it smiled upon. So in many ways the ideal scenario for a Democrat in a red-leaning district would be for other members to have passed a giant stimulus. Then you could say you voted against this $2 trillion boondoggle while still benefitting from its impact. Actually “yes” seems like a bad move no matter what the size of the stimulus.

Stuff Doesn’t Matter Very Much

It’s natural in the wake of an electoral defeat for progressives to argue that Democrats would have done better had they been more progressive, while “centrists” argue that Democrats would have done better had they been less progressive. The reality is that Democrats would have done better had the economy been in better shape. And the most important fine-grained analysis you’ll get will comes from John Sides who shows that far and away the most important factor in determining who got re-elected was the underlying partisanship of the district:

In all 402 contested House elections, the 2008 presidential vote in that district would explain 83% of the variation in the Democratic House candidate’s vote share. Nothing else in our dataset comes close.

Honestly if there’s one thing this blog could accomplish, I would love to increase the level of awareness on the Hill of this fact and of the importance of the macroeconomy. The fact of the matter is that members of congress should vote their conscience on issues of significance. The political importance of issue positioning is dwarfed by the political importance of objective reality, and the political impact of votes on legislation is dwarfed by the substantive impact of votes on legislation. If staffers and members of congress cut the time they spend thinking about “strategy” by fifty percent and reallocated it to learning about the issues on the merits the world would be a much better place and the electoral outcomes would be extremely similar.

Did the 1995 Government Shutdown Boost Public Approval of Bill Clinton?

Conventional wisdom in Washington DC is that the “government shutdown” prompted by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s hardball tactics was a political fiasco for congressional Republicans. And today conventional wisdom is split between a camp that thinks conservatives have “learned the lesson” of this fight and won’t do it again, and those who think that Tea-fueled House backbenchers will force a shutdown.

John Sides suggests that the conventional history is a bit simplistic:

There are perhaps other ways we can score the government shutdown. As I noted, other public opinion data suggested that more people faulted Gingrich than Clinton. And clearly Gingrich blinked first. Clinton “won” in that sense.

But the public did not come to feel more favorably toward Clinton during this period, which suggests again that life under divided government isn’t easy, even when presidents fight the opposite party and win.

Of course economic conditions also promise to be quite different in 2011 than they were in 1995. My sense is that under current conditions, a temporary halt in government purchases and transfers would be not only annoying to people but potentially really harmful to the larger macroeconomic picture.

Interracial Dating and Vote Preference

I’m not surprised to see a correlation between white voters’ inclination to vote for Democrats and white voters’ inclination to say interracial dating is okay, but Michael Tesler observes that the correlation is sharply up today relative to four years ago:

Obviously John Boehner isn’t going to ban interracial dating, and Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to force your daughter to go out with a black guy. One possibility is that the election of Barack Obama has suddenly made irrelevant racial considerations more salient. But my hypothesis would be that we’re seeing the link between economic distress and xenophobia, the same thing that’s driving so many anti-Chinese themes in midterm advertising.

Same as It Ever Was

Very funny video from Reason reconceptualizing actual rhetoric from the 1800 presidential campaign as 2010-style attack ads:

I was making a related point earlier today to someone who was complaining about some incoherent public views as registered in polls and how we now have “post-truth” politics. The fact of the matter is that as best anyone can tell levels of political information have always been low and most people have never had coherent political ideologies.

In 1960, for example, a majority of the population hadn’t finished high school and the all-white electorates of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Arkansas cast their votes for John Kennedy on the grounds that Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery a hundred years earlier.