CA-50

The Republicans narrowly won a special election (what we call in Canada a by-election) in California’s 50^th Congressional District on Tuesday. The margin was 49-45 in a district that went 58-37 for the Republicans in 2004.

My forecast model suggests that the CA-50 special election result translates into a 56-40 Democratic advantage nationwide. This is larger than the average of recent generic Congressional ballot polls. While more than the usual caveats apply to this number crunching, it should also be noted that this would give the Democrats a 245 to 190 margin in the House of Representatives.

The blogosphere is offering differing interpretations of the result (update: some interesting comments here in Swing State Project), some critical of the Democratic candidate’s campaign. However, there is no good news in any of this for the Republicans. This wasn’t a hypothetical generic Congressional ballot (for the limitations of which, see here), these were real votes in a solid Republican southern California San Diego suburban/ex-urban district where the Democrats should not be expected to be competitive.

New Nova Scotia Election Poll

There is a new poll out in Nova Scotia from Corporate Research Associates and it reports a close race between the NDP and the Conservatives, with the Liberals a distant third.

The overall numbers are:

PC - 38
NDP - 36
L - 20

That translates into the following using my seat calculator:

PC - 30
NDP - 18
L - 4

However, the poll sample size is only 572 yielding a margin of error of ± 4.1%. The small gap plus margin of error mean that a wide range of outcomes are possible. For example, lets just reverse the PCs and the NDP (well within the margin of error). That would then give us:

PC - 25
NDP - 23
L - 4

You can see that the Conservatives do have the advantage: their vote is more efficiently distributed than the NDP and they are ahead in the poll, but the actual outcome remains very much in doubt. The Halifax Chronicle Herald said the poll showed the Conservatives are "flirting with a majority", when what they ought to have emphasized was the sheer closeness of the race.

The Al Gore Movie

We went off to see the Al Gore movie tonight. Here are the words of Roger Ebert on the film's web site:

“The director, Davis Guggenheim, uses words, images and Gore’s concise litany of facts to build a film that is fascinating and relentless. In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.”

If the worst case scenario of global warming unfolds, of course, then all other issues slide into insignificance, so I echo Mr Eberts comments.

With the release of the movie comes word that Gregg Easterbrook who I have always seen as an oddball, but who is nonetheless a widely read American writer, has flipped his position as a longtime skeptic of global warming. He wrote a column about his conversion in the New York Times on May 24 to coincide with the opening of the movie in New York. The column is now behind their subscription wall but here is an excerpt:

Yes: the science has changed from ambiguous to near-unanimous. As an environmental commentator, I have a long record of opposing alarmism. But based on the data I'm now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert.... Once global-warming science was too uncertain to form the basis of policy decisions ...

Clearly, the question called for more research.

That research is now in, and it shows a strong scientific consensus that an artificially warming world is a real phenomenon posing real danger:

The American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society in 2003 both declared that signs of global warming had become compelling.

In 2004 the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that there was no longer any ''substantive disagreement in the scientific community'' that artificial global warming is happening.

In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences joined the science academies of Britain, China, Germany, Japan and other nations in a joint statement saying, ''There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring.''

This year Mr. Karl of the climatic data center said research now supports ''a substantial human impact on global temperature increases.''

And this month the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found ''clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.''

Case closed. Earth's surface, atmosphere and seas are warming; ocean currents are slowing; ice shelves are melting faster than projected; spring is coming ever sooner; rainfall patterns are changing; North American migratory birds are ranging father north; the ability of the earth to self-regulate to resist warming appears to be waning. While natural variation may play roles in climatic trends, overwhelming evidence points to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, as the key.

And those are the words of a person who first heard Gore on the topic 20 years ago and who has resisted reaching this conclusion.

Blogs, Politics and Media

Blogging has become one of the most important political and media developments of the 21st century. It is beginning to have a profound importance on American politics (although not in Canada as yet in my view). An acknowledgement of this latter fact can be found in the article in the May 28 New York Times Magazine by Matt Bai about Yearly Kos, a convention of the liberal blogosphere sponsored by the blog Daily Kos, about which the Bai article notes:

Barely four years after Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a former American soldier who grew up in El Salvador and Chicago, started Daily Kos from his home in Berkeley, Calif., the site is now less a blog than a civic phenomenon. With some 600,000 visitors a day, Daily Kos reaches more Americans — albeit like-minded Americans — than all but a handful of the largest daily newspapers.

Bai goes on in the article to be airily dismissive of its importance, but as a journalist in the traditional world of the mainstream media he misses the obvious point about the internet: it reduces the costs of information (networking, organizing, staying in touch, communicating laterally) to almost zero. And that has profound implications. The Howard Dean campaign demonstrated its fund raising potential but blogs are also a important political and media phenomenon, influencing opinion and delivering new forms of accountability.

I think Bai is also threatened by the democratization of media that blogging represents. There is an excellent discussion of blogging and media here in the blog of the American Prospect, which argues the following:

It’s often observed that the blogosphere constitutes a threat to big news orgs. But it’s not a threat only for the usual reasons mentioned -- competition for traffic, the speeding up of the news cycle, etc. Bloggers are also a threat because they're in the process of making the opinion-generating profession a purely meritocratic one.

Blogging is in its infancy. Daily Kos started up only in 2002. Despite the impacts of the past few years, it is likely that blogging's greatest impact has yet to be seen.

Nova Scotia Election Poll

A Corporate Research Associates poll was released in Nova Scotia this week, the first of the election campaign. It reported the following:

PC - 34
L - 30
NDP - 27

The poll if it were precisely accurate would give the PCs exactly 26 seats in the 52 seat legislature.

The poll elicited the usual media response of Tories down, Liberals up etc. compared to the previous poll released in March which had the following results:

PC - 36
L - 27
NDP - 29

In fact the results are all within the margin of error and indicated no change. Nova Scotia has a close, competitive three party system. I suspect the default option is a Conservative minority at the moment but the campaign, when the system is this competitive, is all important.

My impression to date is that not much has happened. There comes a point usually midway when a campaign develops a clear dynamic. It is not there yet.

The only part of the poll I found truly intriguing were the leader evaluations:

Macdonald (PC) - 33
Dexter (NDP) - 29
Mackenzie (Lib) -16

This does confirm my earlier impression from afar that the Liberals have weak leader. However, not everyone agrees, especially some Liberals. See the second last paragraph here for a contrary view.

Harper and the Mulroney Coalition

In two items in the May 23rd editions of the Globe and National Post, the narrative about a coming Harper majority based on breakthroughs in Quebec is once again articulated.

In the Globe Harper advisor Tom Flanagan suggests the coalition was outlined in a Stephen Harper speech 10 years ago:

“Mr. Harper marshalled historical evidence to show that all winning Conservative coalitions in 20th-century Canadian history had been built around three main elements: populist reformers, strongest in the West but also present in rural Ontario; traditional Tories, strong in Ontario and Atlantic Canada; and francophone nationalists in Quebec. “

The problem with this generalization is that there are only three cases and this fact alone makes generalizing problematic. One case, Borden’s victory in 1911, came prior to the World War I conscription crisis, which so defined Quebec politics in the 20th century, and should therefore be excluded. Flanagan’s argument does not accurately describe Diefenbaker’s 1958 sweep. Dief won Quebec votes based on the Quebec electorate wanting a share of power in an election where the outcome was generally known in advance. However, he was not at all successful in Quebec in 1957, 1963 and 1965. The unilingual Diefenbaker simply did not build a coalition with Quebec nationalists (although he received some support from the Union Nationale). Only Mulroney built the coalition Harper/Flanagan describe, sustaining it through two elections, and it always had the potential to disintegrate in the way it did in 1993 because the values of his western supporters and those in Quebec, while similar on free trade, were polar opposites on language and national unity issues. It does not have the potential to be a formula to make the Conservatives a “natural governing party” as suggested by Mr. Flanagan. Quebec might buy into Conservative decentralization but it rejects the rest of the package.

The big difference between today and 1984 is that there was no nationalist party in Quebec that stood between Mulroney and those nationalist votes. Now we have the Bloc Quebecois. Pro-independence nationalist parties have commanded thirty-nine percent or more of the Quebec vote, federally and provincially, since 1993 and 1976 respectively with the single exception of the Quebec provincial election in 2003 when the PQ received 33%, losing some soft nationalist votes to the ADQ.

The other obstacle facing Conservatives in Quebec are that province’s values. Whether it is Kyoto, Afghanistan or gay marriage, there are a host of issues where the Harper Conservatives are at odds with the views of a large majority of Quebeckers.

An Ipsos-Reid poll out May 23 is headlined as saying the Conservatives would win a majority if an election were held today. And indeed T.C. Norris’ forecast model agrees it would give the Harper Conservatives a majority of about 175 seats. But it is not based on gains in Quebec.

But in today’s National Post story on the poll we find the Quebec-as-source-of-majority narrative continuing:

“Basically what's happening is that Stephen Harper is recreating the Brian Mulroney majority," Ipsos Reid president Darrell Bricker said in an interview.
"And the way he is doing that is by breaking through in the province of Quebec. It's very much that kind of coalition -- Quebec and the West."

I think Mr. Bricker should study carefully the results of his own poll because it gives the Conservatives their greatest gains in B.C., Ontario and Atlantic Canada. That is where the majority is created. Indeed the Conservatives are in first place everywhere except Quebec. The Conservatives are up in Quebec, but they still trail the BQ and would pick up only six seats according to my model.

I think Harper could win a majority if an election were held today, but if he is going to do so, then this poll tells us it is likely to be outside Quebec. Harper needs significant gains especially in Ontario and Atlantic Canada plus smaller gains in B.C., combined with a more modest advance in Quebec, to win his majority.

This poll has a sample size of only 1,000 and therefore the regional numbers are suspect due to very high margins of error. To take just one example, the Ipsos poll says the NDP are at 11% in Ontario while two weeks ago, the SES poll had the NDP at 24% in the province. The SES poll would produce a strengthened Conservative minority of 139 seats, but nowhere near a majority.

The Ipsos poll also was taken prior to the Kyoto flare-up, and the Afghanistan vote and Gwyn Morgan fiascos, so it probably reflects the positive media around the budget, but not the more recent bad news days for the Conservatives.

The overall total for the Conservatives of 43% has a margin of error of ± 3.1% meaning it could be less than 40% and still be within the margin of error. The range of 40-43% is really in the area somewhere between majority and minority, so one cannot say for sure that this is the result the poll actually forecasts. I would say that a poll giving the Conservatives 45% is highly likely but not certain to predict a majority (given the margin of error).

Will our pundits notice the weakness and ambiguity of this week’s majority assertions? Since they seem incapable of noticing that Quebec is the one place where the Conservatives don’t have a lead, I don’t hold out much hope.

Republican Troubles

There is now a growing recognition that the Republicans are in deep political trouble, a train wreck in slow motion as I have previously characterized it. Normally, what we are seeing will produce a dramatic political sea change, greater than the prognosticators typically foresee. There is a good summary of the changing landscape at the Emerging Democratic Majority web site. I would say we are headed for Democratic control of both the House and the Senate. I do not underestimate Republican cleverness and there are many months to go, but the key issues, the war and corruption, are now out of their control.

It must not be forgotten that the current House of Representatives is gerrymandered in favour of the Republicans. My forecast model calculates their advantage as being about eight percent. That means the Democrats must have a total vote at least eight points ahead of the Republicans to win a bare majority in the House. I suspect it would work out to slightly less but the disadvantage remains regardless. However, look at the spread in all the recent polls on the generic Congressional ballot. With one exception, the Democrats are 10 points or more ahead.

In 2004 the Republicans were three per cent ahead in the House of Representatives.

Is there anything the Republicans can do? Say gay bashing?

Frank Rich, in a column in Sunday’s New York Times, (you need a subscription to see the whole thing) cites a most interesting poll number:

“The number of Americans who "strongly oppose" same-sex marriage keeps dropping — from 42 percent two years ago to 28 percent today, according to the Pew Research Center…” The poll details show there is a clear trend on this.

This issue was a critical tool for the Republicans just two years ago, but this poll suggests that those who feel strongly about it, and therefore for whom it could motivate voting behaviour, are declining precipitously.