Nate Silver: "Police Clashes Spur Coverage of Wall Street Protests"

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Nate Silver (NY Times):

Unlike the Wall Street protests, however, the Tea Party rallies were a one-day event, and coverage declined thereafter, to an average of 215 media hits per day over the three-week period from April 15 to May 5, 2009.

By contrast, the Occupy Wall Street protests have been covered in an average of 144 articles per day in the three weeks of their existence. In the aggregate, this is about two-thirds as much coverage as the Tea Party protests received. MORE...

Nate Silver: "How Liberal Is President Obama?"

Nate Silver:

Earlier this week, The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein published a column entitled “Obama revealed: A moderate Republican.”
(SNIP)
I’m a big fan of Mr. Klein’s work, but I don’t find his thesis persuasive in this case. Instead, I’d suggest that the evidence points toward a considerably less exciting conclusion. Rather than being an early 1990s moderate Republican, Mr. Obama is a prototypical, early 2010s Democrat. And although a 2010s Democrat shares more in common with a 1990s Republican than with the Republicans of today, they are still far from alike.

It’s fairly easy to demonstrate that Mr. Obama’s policy preferences resemble those of a typical Democrat in today’s Congress. MORE...

Nate Silver on "The 800-Pound Mama Grizzly Problem"

Nate Silver:

Ms. Palin may not be the front-runner in a traditional sense (although it’s not clear that any of the other candidates are either). But she literally commands as much of the public’s attention as the President of the United States, and the strategy for the other candidates will have to revolve around her to some significant degree. In fact, since it is uncertain whether she will run or not, they will effectively have to develop two separate sets of strategies, one contingent upon the assumption that she will enter the race and the other on the bet that she won’t. MORE...

Democracy Now!-Ari Berman and Nate Silver on the Midterms (with audio/video/text)

Democracy Now! with audio/video and text:

Candidates are entering the final few days of campaigning in what may turn out to be one of the more interesting midterm elections in recent decades. Most polls are forecasting Republicans will take control of the House, while Democrats are expected to hold on to the Senate, which would result in a rare split Congress. We speak to New York Times pollster and FiveThirtyEight.com founder Nate Silver, and Ari Berman, political correspondent for The Nation magazine and the author of the new book Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics.

Reich: "The Final Lesson of BP"

Robert Reich:

BP is starting over. It just named a new American president and its finances are looking up. BP’s second-quarter report showed surprisingly strong revenues of $75.9 billion, beating Wall Street’s estimates. (This includes a $32.2 billion writedown along with the $20 billion liability fund that the Obama Administration wanted.) The company has started to sell $30 billion of its assets to ensure it has all the money it needs to pay any liability claims. No wonder several Wall Street analysts are suggesting BP stock as a terrific buy.

It doesn’t seem to matter BP was responsible for the worst environmental disaster in American history. Consumers worldwide – including Americans – continue to slurp up its oil.

But wait a minute. If BP emerges from this debacle fatter and happier than anyone imagined a few months ago, whatever happened to the idea of corporate accountability? Does this mean any giant corporation can wreak havoc and then get back to business as usual? MORE...

Howie P.S.: If Nate Silver is right, it might become even more difficult for Congress to pass laws that get "corporations to act differently."

Nate Silver on "Mini-Super Tuesday" on DemocracyNow! (video)

Democracy Now! with video (14:35):

It’s Mini-Super Tuesday, the biggest primary day of the 2010 election cycle. All eyes are on three key Senate primaries: Democratic incumbent Arlen Specter vs. Congress member Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania; two-term Democratic incumbent Blanche Lincoln vs. Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter in Arkansas; and on the Republican side, Secretary of State Trey Grayson vs. political newcomer Rand Paul in Kentucky. We speak to leading pollster Nate Silver of the polling analyst site FiveThirtyEight.com. [includes rush transcript]

"Nate Silver Is Fired Up"

Bob Cesca:

Nate Silver has been raging on the kill-billers this week. While I'm not as fired up as Nate, I absolutely agree with this point:

One of the reasons I consider myself to be a progressive/liberal/whatever is because, more often than not, I've found progressives to be on the "right" side of the argument. They're more empirical, more "scientific", less dogmatic, less sophistic, less demagogic, less anti-intellectual -- not always by any means but at least some majority of the time. After tangling with the kill-billers, however, I'm beginning to have my doubts.

And the reason I agree mainly comes down to the inability of the Kill the Bill progressives to present the Senate bill figures and percentages within the context of the status quo. And I think it's very misleading to ignore the horror stories of the status quo when presenting horror stories from the bill.

I made this point on Twitter yesterday, but it bears repeating. 3x higher costs for senior citizens sounds insane and criminal -- until you present it in the context of the status quo. Without the Senate bill, seniors would be paying 11x more. Additionally, a family of four earning $60,000 will pay around 20 percent of their income to premiums and out of pocket expenses. Insane! Until you put in context of the status quo -- 41 percent of their annual income would go to health insurance without reform.

I just hope, like we did after the Clinton vs. Obama primaries, we can all regroup. Although, it's very likely that some of the progressive anger at the president is an aftershock of the divisive primaries. Nevertheless, we're closer than we ever imagined to having a progressive president, and yet we can't seem to hold him accountable without self-destructing and allowing a giant opening for the Republicans to drive a wedge between us. Lieberman's already doing it, as is the teabagger David McKalip. I suspect the Republicans will be exploiting the progressive divisions any second now.

Adding... By the way, Nate also attempts to debunk the health insurance stock market thing. The only thing I can add to this is that the focus on the market seems awfully similar to the Fox News practice of showing the DJIA ticker whenever the president speaks.

Nate Silver: "The Public Option Fight May Not Have Been Winnable"

Nate Silver:

There's been a little bit of revisionist history in the post-mortem over the public option. The fact is that progressives did very, very well to get to within a handful of votes in the Senate on a weak-ish public option -- perhaps as close as one or two votes on the latest compromise, the Medicare buy-in.

Exhibit A: At least four Democratic Senators had declared relatively unambiguous opposition to the public option as early as mid-June, when the health care debate began in earnest:

Blanche Lincoln -- June 18th:

LITTLE ROCK — U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., says she prefers private insurance cooperatives to a government-run provider that would compete with the private sector in reforming the nation’s health care system.

Mary Landrieu -- June 9th:

Count Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) as a "no" vote on the public insurance option.

"I am not open to a public option, however I will remain open to a compromise - a full compromise," Landrieu told reporters Tuesday. "A public option is not something I support I don't think its the right way to go."

Joe Lieberman -- June 14th:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said this weekend that he opposes a public option plan for consumers in a healthcare reform plan to emerge from the Senate.

"I don't favor a public option," Lieberman told Bloomberg News in an interview broadcast this weekend. And I don't favor a public option because I think there's plenty of competition in the private insurance market."

Ben Nelson -- April 30th:

Sen. Ben Nelson said Thursday that he will oppose the creation of a government-run health insurance plan as part of a health care overhaul, contrary to the position held by many of his fellow Democrats.

Nelson, D-Neb., said he may try to assemble a coalition of like-minded centrists opposed to the creation of a public plan, as a counterweight to Democrats pushing for it. He said he does not believe a majority of the Senate supports the idea.

Exhibit B: As of August 12th, the number of clear yesses in favor of the public option stood only at about 43.

Exhibit C: On September 29th, the very robust Rockefeller public option was defeated 8-15 out of the Senate Finance Committee, with 5 of the 13 Democrats voting against, and the marginally robust Schumer public option was defeated by a vote of 10 to 13 moments later.

In other words, I don't see the ConservaDems -- with the possible and important exception of Joe Lieberman -- constantly moving the goalposts on the public option or otherwise negotiating in bad faith. Rather, I see them as having staked out a firm stance and sticking to it, and the public option advocates always facing a consequently uphill battle.

Suppose the following scenario plays out when you're trying to buy a used car:

Dealer: The price of the car is $2,000.
You: For that beat-up Honda Accord? I'll give you $1,200.
Dealer: Nope, it's $2,000.
You: How about $1,500?
Dealer: I'm going to stick with $2,000.
You: Will $1,700 get it done?
Dealer: My best and final offer is $2,000.
You: Give a guy a break! $1,875?
Dealer: $2,000.
You: $1,995 and a Slurpee coupon?
Dealer: Now we're talking -- step into my office.

Is that a negotiation in bad faith? Is the dealer moving the goalposts? No. He's being very stubborn and very firm -- but he's also being very explicit about what he wants. It's possible that you were an incompetent negotiator and that maybe if your first offer had come in a little lower, or a little higher, you could have gotten a better price. But more likely the dealer simply had more of the leverage and ultimately $2,000 is an acceptable price to you, even if it's more than you were hoping to pay.

Progressives did just about everything in their power to try to get a decent public option into the bill. They threatened. They bargained. They complained. They organized. They persuaded. They begged. There was the opt-in, the opt-out, the trigger, the Medicare buy-in. There was no lack of initiative or creativity. And they actually had quite a bit of success: from 43 votes in August, they got up to perhaps as many as 48-52 for a strong-ish public option, and 57-59 for a weak-ish one. People like Kay Hagan, Tom Carper and Kent Conrad, to varying degrees, came on board.

But just because you perceive yourself as being in a negotiation with another party doesn't entitle you to win that negotiation, or even to split things halfway. Sometimes your adversary doesn't think there's anything to negotiate at all. Sometimes they would in theory be willing to negotiate if you could find the right leverage point, but there's nothing that fits the bill, for all your best efforts. Sometimes their first offer is pretty much as good as it's going to get, and not merely a negotiating ploy.

At the end of the day, negotiations are about leverage, and in this case, the ConservaDems had almost all of it. Why?

Firstly, because a bill without a public option still does a world's worth of good from a progressive standpoint, providing in excess of $100 billion per year in subsidies to the disadvantaged to help them procure health care.

Secondly, because the public option is considerably more popular in progressive districts than in ConservaDem ones.

Thirdly, because the health care bill has become fairly unpopular overall. Whereas for a moderate or liberal Democrat, a vote for health care is nevertheless a slam dunk, the more conservative Democrats have to weigh a nay vote that would really hurt their party nationally versus an aye vote that could potentially harm them personally.

Fourthly, because money talks in politics, and corporate campaign donations tend to push policy toward the center-right, and the ConservaDems tend to be especially reliant on corporate contributions.

Fifthly, because progressives do not have a history of behaving "irrationally", and so attempts to refute the above logic are not credible.

Sixthly, because the threat to use reconciliation is only minimally credible -- it could be done, but the bill that emerged could easily be worse from a progressive standpoint than a bill passed under regular order without a public option, and the attendant political fallout would be damaging to all Democrats.

This is a very difficult set of circumstances to overcome. Perhaps not impossible -- if Joe Lieberman weren't such a prick, for instance, maybe it could have been done. But very, very tough. I see neither a strategic failure on behalf of progressives, nor "enabling" behavior on behalf of moderates**, nor bad faith on behalf of conservatives. Nothing was yanked away from progressives -- they set a very high bar, worked their butts off, and just barely failed to clear it.

** The one possible exception -- the White House -- which was pretty darn popular when this debate began and wasn't willing to gamble much of its political capital.

"Don't Count Health Care Chickens Yet"

Nate Silver:

The smart, insider take these days seems to be that health care reform will almost certainly pass the Congress. Different encapsulations of this can be found from Ezra Klein ("that's where we sit: incredibly, incredibly close to the finish line") and Megan McArdle ("I now put the chances of a substantial health care bill passing at 75%").

Actually, Megan's number seems about right. If I had to attach a probability estimate to health care passing, it would be that one: 75 percent. But I don't think it's as high as, say, 90 or 95 percent, and my sense is that there are lot of informed observers who do.

My encapsulation last week was that public opinion on health care is now more or less fully formed, and that Democrats managed to snatch a draw from the jaws of defeat. Hardly what they'd want under ideal circumstances. But probably good enough, given that the memory of the impact of the failure to pass health care reform in 1993-94 looms large in the Democratic consioussness.

But it's one thing for some combination of the 59 Senate Democrats, plus Olympia Snowe, plus Ted Kennedy's replacement in Massachusetts, plus perhaps one or two retiring Republicans like George Voinovich, to have the intention of passing health care reform. It's another thing to actually do it. And the process itself is rather complicated, for several reasons.

1) The process will be loooooooong. There are more than 500 amendments to Senator Baucus's mark-up, some of which are dilatory or trivial, but many of which -- especially those offered by Sens. Snowe, Wyden are Rockefeller -- are substantive. Essentially every aspect of the health care debate will be revisited? The public option? There's an amendment for that. More generous subsidies for the middle class? There's an amendment for that. Some random crap about ACORN? There's an amendment for that too. (Personally, I'm surprised that no Senator has yet taken the opportunity to insert an amendment ensuring that no Al Qaeda members will be covered by the health care bill.)

A lot of these amendments, presumably, won't make it to the Senate floor. But many will. And some of them may not only be voted on -- they may also be filibustered, which could eat up days at a time.

And that's still only one-third of the process. The House still has to pass its bill, and that vote is likely to be close. And then there's the conference committee report that would merge the Senate and House versions. A lot of hurdles still have to be cleared.

2. There's opposition from both the left and the right. I remain somewhat agnostic about the idea of issuing an ultimatum on the public option -- both whether it's the correct tactic, and whether the threat is credible. But certainly, this is different from how it usually goes in Washington. Either a public option will have to be inserted -- or a lot of progressives will lose face. Neither of those things will be pretty, but one of them has to happen. It is a multi-way negotiation, and multi-way negotiations are exponentially more complex than two-way negoitations. It is not necessarily obvious that the window for a health care bill that is neither too far to the right nor too far to the left is large enough to accommodate 60 senators and 218 representatives.

3. The opposition is multi-dimensional. As we described last week, there are a lot of objections to the Baucus bill -- and, moreover, there are a lot of different kinds of objections. A particular problem seems to be the funding mechanisms. Pro-labor Democrats object to the tax on expensive health care policies; people like John Kerry have parochial objections to the tax burden placed on various industries that may be abundant in their states; governors object to what they see as a heavier load that the states will have to carry on Medicare. We can expect to hear from the booze, cigarette, and Slurpee if the various sin taxes are reintroduced. And the Senate seems anathema to inserting a broad surtax on high-income earners, as the House bill deigns to do. If the negotiations break down, it will most likely be over the funding mechanism -- not because of coverage-related issues like the public option, where the objections are less orthogonal.

4. Reconciliation is, at best, a last resort. For months now, there's been debate over the Democrats could plausibly use reconciliation -- a tactic that would allow them to circumvent the filibuster and pass health care reform with 50 + 1 votes. I'm not an expert in Senate procedure, but I've found the "anti"-reconciliation arguments more persuasive. The pro-reconciliation folks seem to be saying: there's nothing really stopping Democrats from doing this, except political willpower. But political willpower is the whole rub: it's not clear there's enough of it to get it done. If the bill goes through reconcilation, a lot of process hawks will drop out. To name names, I'm thinking of Senators Snowe, (Ben) Nelson, Lieberman, Byrd, and Conrad, probably among others -- I can imagine Russ Feingold objecting, for instance. It is also likely to be a strange duck of a bill if it goes through reconcilaition, and so you might also have people dropping their support for more substantive reasons.

Again, the point of this is not to frighten anyone. I've thought the chances of a health care bill passing have always been at least 50 percent, and are higher now than they have been in some time. But the Democrats still have a couple of first downs to achieve before it's goal to go.

Nate Silver: "Specter's Switch More Insult Than Injury to GOP"

Nate Silver:

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has decided to become a Democrat.

This strikes me as being bad news for the Republican Party more than it is good news for the Democrats. Back in January, I described a process which I labeled the Republican Death Spiral:

Thus the Republicans [...] are in something of a death spiral. The more conservative [...] their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base -- but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself.

This defection, coming at a time when historically low numbers of Americans are identifying themselves as Republican, would seem to be a manifestation of said Death Spiral. These problems, indeed, were particularly acute in Pennsylvania, where many of the state's more moderate Republicans had re-registered as Democrats to vote in the state's extremely contentious primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Thus, given an extremely conservative Republican electorate, Specter appeared to be an underdog against his extremely conservative primary challenger, Pat Toomey, and switched parties in order to increase his odds of survival.

But this is not necessarily an unmitigated win for the Democrats. Unlike Jim Jeffords' switch in 2001, this does not affect who controls the Senate Chamber. Rather, it merely nudges the filibuster math, which has always been somewhat fuzzy. While the Democrats will have a nominal total of 60 votes once Al Franken is seated, the Senate's fortunes will still be determined by a group of about a dozen moderate senators from both parties (including Specter), just as it was before.

The real question is -- how often will Specter's vote change as a result of this? Specter was already voting with the Democrats on some issues, like the stimulus, and he said in his statement today that he will continue to vote against the Democrats on at least one other high-profile issue, the Employee Free Choice Act. If he goes from voting with the Democrats 40 percent of the time to 60 percent of the time, that is not so terrific for them, particularly if the 60th seat raises expectations and lends credence to Republican claims about the need for divided government.

But of course, Specter can't be too cute about this, or he might have primary problems on the left. The Republican nominee is probably going to be Toomey, who will be an underdog against any sentient Democrat. Why should the Democrats settle for a Liberdem when they can probably get Pennsylvanians to elect a mainline Democrat along the lines of Bob Casey? Specter's cooperation on key issues like health care and cap-and-trade would now seem all but assured -- but then again, Democrats could perhaps already have expected such cooperation to begin with.

Unless Specter becomes a fairly liberal Democrat (perhaps with one or two exceptions like EFCA) his party switch today is something which might have more symbolic than actual impact.

Howie P.S.: H/t to Mike Kato.

Nate Silver: "Zogby Engages in Apparent Push Polling for Right-Wing Website"

Nate Silver:

The conservative website HowObamaGotElected.com reports that it has commissioned Zogby International to conduct a poll of 512 Barack Obama voters as part of what can best be described as a viral marketing effort to discredit the intelligence of Obama supporters.

The website, created by former radio talk show host John Ziegler to promote a forthcoming documentary, features a YouTube clip of interviews with 12 Obama voters who "were chosen for their apparent intelligence/verbal abilities and willingness to express their opinions to a large audience". The clip portrays the Obama supporters as giving "incorrect" answers to political questions such as "which candidate said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket". Of the 12 Obama supporters interviewed for the clip, 7 (58%) are black; nationwide, about 23% of Obama supporters were black according to the national exit poll.

In connection with the YouTube clip, Ziegler describes that he "also commissioned a Zogby telephone poll which asked the very same questions (as well as a few others) with similarly amazing results." Partial results of the survey from among 512 Obama voters are reported on the website. It is not clear if voters for non-Obama candidates were screened out by the survey, or Ziegler has chosen not to report their results.

Most of the questions on the survey take the form of a multiple choice political knowledge test, stating a "fact" to the respondent and asking them which of the four major candidates (Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin) the statement applies to. Questions include the following:

"Which of the four [candidates] said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket?"

"Which of the four [candidates] started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground?"

"Which of the four [candidates] quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism?"

"Which of the four [candidates] won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot?"

As should be obvious, the veracity of several of these claims is -- at best -- debatable, yet they are apparently represented as factual to the respondent. It is not clear whether the respondent is informed of the "correct" response after having had the question posed to him.

Not all of the items in the poll are intended to apply to Obama or Biden. Several apply to Sarah Palin, although the items about Palin, while probably unflattering ("which of the four [candidates] has a pregnant teenage daughter?") are nevertheless apparently true. The exception is a "twist" question about Palin in which the respondent is asked "which candidate said that they can see Russia from their house?". Ziegler claims in the video that none of the four answers is correct because the statement was made by Tina Fay rather than Sarah Palin. (In her interview with Charlie Gibson, Palin said that "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska", not that she can see Russia from her house.)

To my mind, this survey meets the definition of a "push poll", which the Random House Dictionary defines as "a seemingly unbiased telephone survey that is actually conducted by supporters of a particular candidate and disseminates negative information about an opponent." That (i) several of the items on the survey contain information which, in addition to being negative, is arguably also untrue; (ii) Ziegler brags that the survey includes a trick question to which no correct answer can be provided, and that (iii) apparently only Obama voters were targeted by the survey (although this is not 100 percent clear), also inform my opinion that the survey can fairly be described as a "push poll".

In an item on his personal website dated today, 11/18, Ziegler claims that Zogby will officially release the results of the survey tomorrow. Ziegler also appeared on Fox's Hannity & Colmes news program yesterday (11/17) to promote his documentary, on which clips from the YouTube video were shown.

Why Zogby International has decided to accept this client and conduct a survey in this fashion is not clear. I would hope, however, that any and all clients that need legitimate polling work conducted would take their business elsewhere. These clients include C-SPAN and Reuters, two organizations with longstanding and well-deserved reputations for accuracy and neutrality; contact information for C-SPAN and Reuters can be found at their respective webpages.

Barack Obama

"Nate Silver on the race to 60" (video)

MSNBC, video (06:42).

Howie P.S.: Arianna Huffington fills in for Rachel Maddow and talks with Nate Silver about the odds of getting to 60. Rachel's seat is safe.

"The Movement Comes After Labor Day" (with video)

Al Giordano with video (05:23):

Nate Silver - whose statistical approach to forecasting the primary results this spring hung bad pollsters out to dry and has sent good pollsters into a long overdue stampede to reexamine the technical bases of how they do their work - was on Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night.

It's a sign of the times that the new rising star of political analysis doesn't come from inside a campaign staff (a la Pat Caddell in '76, Roger Ailes in '80, James Carville in '92 or Karl Rove in '00) but from the outside.

In a few short months Nate has gone from being one of thousands of bloggers on Daily Kos (he used the pseud Poblano there) to launching his own website, which in addition to the addictive numbers-crunching, charts and graphs, features excellent commentary (and really good writing).

In this interview with Olbermann, Nate made an important point that we repeat a lot here, too: That public opinion on the presidential candidates won't really solidify until September:

"At this point there’s a pretty big margin of error. Once we have the conventions, especially the first debate, Obama will be vetted by voters… The movement comes after labor day and after the conventions…."

If you find yourself wondering or frustrated why your candidate hasn't thrown the kitchen sink at his rival during these dog days of summer, that largely explains the strategic and tactical reasons for it: a vast chunk of the electorate simply does not begin to pay attention until the conventions are held and it's back to school or work at the end of the summer.

Barack Obama