U.S. Election - Why Obama is likely to win.

TC's view is that so far, while the race is close, barring significant unforeseen developments in the last week, Obama will likely win a majority in the electoral college and the national popular vote on November 6th.

If you follow the race through the impressions of reporters in the mainstream media, one gets the impression of a race that has rocked back and forth.  There is a clear difference in the view of the race between the quantitative analysts - sites such as Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight and Mark Blumenthal's Pollster.com on the Huffington Post - and the so-called 'savvy experts'.  Some polls have suggested a volatile race while others have suggested a much more stable scenario.

These clashing views were best articulated by YouGov pollster Peter Kellner in an analysis (essentially similar to the views of Nate Silver and Mark Blumenthal) that TC finds persuasive:

There are two versions of what has happened in the past three weeks in the battle to be US President. One is the version told by most nationwide polls and accepted by the media; the second, told by a minority of nationwide polls, including YouGov, and most polls in the key battleground states, is significantly different.

Version one says that the first television debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney was a game-changer. If we average the polls conducted by Gallup, Pew, Ipsos, ARG and the Daily Kos, we find that before the debate, Obama was ahead by four points; afterwards Romney led by four – a shift in the lead of eight points. Before the debate, Obama was heading for a clear victory; afterwards, Romney looked the more likely winner. Since then, the contest has narrowed a little, but Romney has held most of his initial gains.

Version two says that the first debate made only a small difference. If we average the polls conducted by YouGov, Rasmussen and ABC/Washington Post, then the debate shifted the nationwide vote shares by just a single point: from an Obama lead beforehand of 2% to an Obama lead of 1% afterwards. The figures have stuck close to that ever since. (YouGov’s latest survey, completed this Monday, shows Obama 2% ahead.)

Movements in polls in the key states sit nearer version two than version one. If we average their findings then Florida tipped from Obama to Romney after the first debate, but Obama remained ahead in other key states – notably Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico. Obama narrowly led in Virginia and Colorado before the first debate; afterwards, they were too close to call. On these figures, Obama would still win the electoral college, even if Romney won Virginia and Colorado.

This commentary was posted on October 23 but little has changed since.

There are a number of factors that even suggest Obama may win by more than expected: 

1. There is evidence assembled by Latino Decisions that national polls (and one might add state polls) are systematically under-counting Latino votes for Obama who leads by 3-1 in that community.  Here is what was posted on their web site on October 23:

In 1998 Harry Pachon and Rudy de la Garza wrote a report for the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute titled “Why Pollsters Missed the Latino Vote – Again!” in which they argued that polls across California failed to accurately account for Latino voters in their samples, and that pre-election polls statewide were fraught with errors as a result. Pachon and de la Garza argued that “mainstream” pollsters failed to account for Latinos for three primary reasons: 1) their sample sizes of Latinos were far too small; 2) their Latinos samples were not representative of the Latino population within the state; and 3) they were not interviewing Latinos in Spanish at the correct proportions. THIS WAS 14 YEARS AGO (yes I am screaming).

In 2010 Gary Segura and I wrote that not much had changed and polls continued to mis-represent the Latino vote. It is now well-known that polls in Nevada had small, unrepresentative and biased samples of Latinos, leading them to entirely miss Harry Reid’s 5-point lead over Sharron Angle. Two weeks ago, Nate Silver wrote at 538 that some polls seem to be continuing the same mistakes and under-counting and mis-counting Latino voters, which he had originally picked up, and wrote about the day after the 2010 midterms. Around the same time some new polls started appearing in states like Nevada and Florida with bizarre data for Latino voters – Obama only had an 8 point lead among Nevada Latinos, and Romney was actually ahead among Latinos in Florida. Really?

No.

If this is true, and the evidence they present is persuasive, Obama is likely to do better in the national popular vote than polls suggest, and will easily win Latino vote-rich states such as Nevada and Colorado.

2. Obama is much better organized to turn out the vote, which alone could be worth 2 points.  This report on the Atlantic Monthly website concludes:

Some Republicans admit that the ground game is a weakness for the party. In Colorado, one top GOP consultant who has worked on presidential campaigns told me he mentally added 2 to 4 points to Obama's polls in the state based on superior organization. In Florida, GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart said Republicans would win in other ways: "They're very organized. They're very, very organized, and you have to admit they're very organized," Diaz-Balart said of the Democrats. "However, I think Republicans are very motivated."

We may not be able to fully size up the campaigns' ground games and their effect until Election Day -- and maybe not even then. But what struck me most, in talking to Republicans about their ground game, was the extent to which they admitted they weren't even playing the game.

3. It is worth noting what a friend pointed out to me: there have been a lot of election polling errors recently that go in one direction.  Examples include the recent elections in Quebec and Alberta, last year's federal election, the 2010 UK election and the French presidential election earlier this year.  What all had in common was that support for incumbents was under-estimated.  Perhaps the same will happen in the U.S. on Nov. 6.

Most of the attention is on the race for the presidency.  However, the contests for the House and Senate are equally important, and there the outcome is likely to be a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. A divided Congress is not good news for any hope of policy activism in a second Obama term. The House of Representatives has considerable power and influence in the American system so the outcome there matters. To date the national generic congressional polls show a slight Democratic edge, but the margin does not appear to be enough to oust the Republican majority.

 

Obama and the Washington Consensus

There are a number of young, very astute, intellectually brilliant bloggers TC has been following over the past number of years.  They include Matty Yglesias, Josh Marshall, Ezra Klein, Jon Chait, Nate Silver, and Greg Sargent.  To this list one must add Noam Scheiber of The New Republic. His takedown of Bob Woodward of Watergate fame is not to be missed. It captures all of the corrupt, dysfunctional character of 21st century Washington D.C.  It is a review of Woodward's book about Obama, The Price of Politics.  This paragraph stood out:

...the book is perfectly in sync with Woodward’s oeuvre. There is a body of respectable Washington opinion that considers Obama unworthy of the presidency: he hadn’t put in his time before running, didn’t grasp the majesty of the office, evinced no respect for the way things were done. He not only won without courting the city’s elders, he had the bad manners to keep his distance even after winning. This is the view Woodward distills.

There is a relatively simple dynamic at play among establishment Washingtonians. They favour changes that would take from those on lower incomes and give to the wealthy. The Woodward book is about the debt ceiling crisis and deal from the summer of 2011 and Obama's alleged failure to play the bipartisan Washington game even when the ideological extremism of the Republican party made this impossible. This summary paragraph from Scheiber says it all:

So, to review, the Republicans were theologically opposed to even the meagerest, mangiest revenue increases—even to the minimum amount of revenue Obama could have gotten without them, even in exchange for trillions of dollars in spending cuts—and yet Obama is somehow to blame for blowing up the deal because … why, exactly? Because he didn’t invite Boehner over for grilled cheese? (The mind boggles over the catastrophe that would have ensued had Obama texted Boehner via iPhone.) This reeks of the frozen-in-amber Sally Quinn lament that politicians don’t spend enough time bantering at Georgetown dinner parties, when in fact there are vast structural forces militating against collegial deal-making. Namely, that national politics has become intensely polarized over the last generation as the parties have sorted themselves along ideological lines. During that same time, the Republican Party has completely lost its marbles, having turned into a collection of anti-tax jidhadis bent on the upward redistribution of wealth.

Justin Trudeau and the state of the federal Liberals in Quebec

I am grateful to Jonathan Kay of the National Post for his Trudeau story on September 26.  It frames the expectations for Justin Trudeau well.

"It’s fashionable to write off Mr. Trudeau as a lightweight, and his party as a spent force. But recent events in Quebec — specifically, Pauline Marois’ election as premier, and the student strikes that indirectly brought her separatist party to power — suggest there is an avenue for the Liberals, with Mr. Trudeau at the helm, to make themselves relevant again in Canadian politics, and perhaps even make a play for power.

First off, anyone who still dismisses Mr. Trudeau as an untested political dilettante isn’t paying attention. As early as 2006, he was chairing the Liberals’ youth-renewal task force. In 2008, he became an MP — and he did so in the competitive, highly multicultural, hardscrabble east-end Montreal riding of Papineau. In the 2008 election, he fought a hard door-to-door ground war against former BQ vice-president Vivian Barbot, defeating the incumbent by fewer than 1,200 votes. In 2011, he survived the Orange Wave, defeating his NDP challenger by more than 4,000 votes.

In short, he’s gone up against both the separatists, and the left, and won both times. Even if he’s done this using the political rocket juice of name recognition, he’s won the right not to be treated as a pretty-face novice....

But the Liberals do have one remaining advantage. As Conrad Black reminds us, the Liberals ruled Canada for 80 of the 110 years from 1896 onwards. And the reason for this, he argues, is that they were the party (a) that could convince Quebec to stay in Canada; and (b) that could convince the rest of Canada that they could make the sale in Quebec."

Let's start with the 'Liberals ruled Canada for 80 of the 110 years from 1896 onwards'.  They did dominate Canadian politics and there were good reasons for that, including domination in Quebec. However, at the end of that era the Chretien majorities were built on sweeping Ontario not Quebec.

In the first instance Laurier, as the first French-speaking prime minister, commanded loyalty from his fellow citizens in Quebec. That would be reinforced in 1917 by the conscription crisis, which led to long-term francophone distrust of the Conservatives.  However, the reasons for Liberal support among Quebec francophone voters no longer apply.  Indeed the Liberals last won a plurality of francophone votes in Quebec in 1980, some 32 years ago. Antagonism to the 1982 Constitution for allegedly 'excluding' Quebec, plus Meech Lake and sponsorship reduced the Liberals to their lowest point ever among the Quebec francophone electorate in 2011.

How bad is it for the Liberals in Quebec?  Look at the table below which groups Quebec riding results from 2011 into three categories, by far the largest of which is "Most Francophone":

	C.P.C	Liberal	NDP	Green	Bloc	Other	Total
Most Francophone (85%+)	18.6%	8.8%	43.7%	2.0%	26.4%	0.5%	100.0%
Intermediate (50% to 85%)	11.0%	18.5%	44.5%	2.2%	22.1%	1.7%	100.0%
Anglo (Less than 50%)	19.8%	33.6%	33.7%	2.7%	9.6%	0.5%	100.0%
Quebec - All voters	16.5%	14.2%	42.9%	2.1%	23.4%	0.9%	100.0%

The Liberal vote among francophone voters is somewhere around 9%.

Let's look closely at Justin Trudeau's own riding of Papineau: the pattern repeats itself there. The red Liberal polls at either end of the riding are predominantly anglo/allo while the more francophone strip in the middle divided itself between the NDP orange and the Bloc blue. See this map of allophones by census tracts in Montreal. While not perfect it gives you the general idea. Look at the tracts just south of Metropolitan Boulevard on either side of Papineau. Indeed the NDP/BQ split of the francophone vote enabled Justin Trudeau to increase his margin (as Kay cites) while simultaneously losing vote share (he received about 41.5 % of the vote in 2008 but just 38.4% in 2011).

This is the situation the Liberals face. They confront a newly successful federalist NDP now led by Thomas Mulcair, a person who has deeper roots in Quebec than Justin. And a complete loss of faith in the Liberal Party by the Quebec francophone electorate, and they have even lost some ground among the anglo/allo electorate.

There were specific, valid reasons why the Liberals did so well in the 20th century that are not present now. What is it that Justin Trudeau brings to francophone Quebec voters that would permit them to reason that he makes a preferable alternative to other parties? There is no obvious answer.

The Liberals still retain a significant measure of support among anglophone/allophone voters. Perhaps Trudeau could expand Liberal support among this demographic but Mulcair too has a history of defending the interests of this community.  It won't be as easy or automatic as many seem to assume to roll back the orange tide.

It continues to be TC's strong impression that the Liberals are just not facing up to the dilemmas that confront them, particularly with respect to Quebec.

Quebec postmortem - polls and PQ prospects

The person with the best grasp of Quebec polling (in TC's view) is Université de Montréal sociologist Claire Durand.  In a post on her blog Ah les sondages, she made several estimates of the potential outcome based on the polls.  Her scenario #2 here (en français) was not all that far off the final result estimating the PQ at 32.5% [actual was 31.94%], the PLQ at 28.9% [31.21%] and the CAQ at 27.7% [27.06%].

The problem of underestimating the Liberal vote is not new and it showed up again in 2012.  The reason Durand's scenario # 2 was closer than others was that she disproportionately distributed undecided voters to the Liberals, giving them half of that group. In a close three way race such as this one, an apparently small shift can make a significant difference. Durand discusses it further in her post-mortem.

The PQ now has a government and a leaderless Liberal opposition, so it will have some breathing room. However, it has one of the weakest mandates of any newly elected administration in Canadian history.  The 1927 Manitoba election gave the Bracken Progressives 32.4% of the vote, although they won a majority of the seats. I have been looking but haven't yet found a weaker popular vote (the BC Socreds were a little lower in the 1952 BC election but it wasn't a first-past-post voting system).

The PQ faces an electorate opposed to its sovereignty plans and with little appetite for a referendum.  The same CROP poll that reported 62% opposed to sovereignty found that 68% of Quebec's citizens are opposed to holding a referendum.  For all the initial bluster of their post-election statements they will have no choice but to proceed cautiously.

Quebec Election - PQ will win

The PQ will win tomorrow's Quebec election, either just above or just below a majority.  This assumes the polls are accurate, by no means a certainty given what happened in Alberta earlier this year.

There has been near unanimity in the closing polls on a close race overall.  However, there are two Quebecs: in anglophone Quebec the Liberals continue to hold a large overall lead, while the PQ is about six or seven points ahead of the CAQ among francophones.  The latter is the critical number.  A six point lead is enough to give the PQ a comfortable victory although perhaps not a majority in the province as a whole. Earlier upward progress for the CAQ among francophones has stalled. Is this accurate? That's the question.

My seat estimate gives the PQ just above a majority with the Liberals in second and the CAQ third.  If the vote is at all close overall the Liberals could easily finish third in the popular vote while finishing second in seats.

Only CROP has polled on the sovereignty question.  They appear to be using a "hard" question about sovereignty rather than a variation on the sovereignty-association questions used in 1980 and 1995. Nevertheless, with the undecided redistributed proportionately, the NO side leads 69-31 and this has increased since the beginning of the campaign. With the PQ on the verge of winning the increase in anti-sovereignty sentiment may be a consequence.

The campaign of prospective Premier Marois has made a great deal of nationalist noise since the beginning of the campaign.  However, pressure from party ranks appears to have made this necessary.  I expect that post-campaign the new PQ administration will initially sound a lot like the mythological Rene Levesque of this Aislin cartoon:

Indeed we have already heard via the Globe and Mail that the bond market will take it all in stride:

Investors may be “underpricing the risk” of a pro-sovereignty government in Quebec, but a Parti Québécois victory in Tuesday’s election promises only a muted initial response after a campaign of soothing words where the markets are concerned.

Nonetheless, the greatest constant of Quebec history is nationalism and, while it is quiescent at the moment, one cannot always count on it remaining so.

Quebec election - my initial take

It is much too early to get a good take on the Quebec election. 

However, there is reason to conclude that it will be an indecisive result. The choice is between an unpopular incumbent Liberal administration that appears to be calling the election early to avoid the fallout of an inquiry into corruption allegations, an opposition PQ whose leader suffered numerous defections from her party and caucus over the past few years, and a small 'c' conservative third party, the CAQ, led by an uncharismatic former PQ minister, who now implies that he is no longer interested in sovereignty but is trying to straddle the nationalist fence while embracing bizarre policy planks.

The eventual post-Labour day outcome seems a long way off.

This seat-by-seat projection from Canadian Election Atlas seems as reasonable as one might expect at this stage, and the totals of Liberal - 44, PQ - 57, CAQ - 17, Quebec Solidaire - 2 and Close - 33 seem reasonable but by no means predictive of the final count. 

The $16 orange juice

There has been a growing tendency in all forms of media to regard almost all forms of benefits accruing to those who work in the public sector, either in the political or bureaucratic realm, as a scandalous waste of resources and an unnecessary burden on the taxpayer.  Thus we have the $16 orange juice expensed by the now departed Bev Oda deemed to be a critical factor in her expulsion from the Harper cabinet rather than her many other abuses as a minister.  As Calgary Grit noted: "While most will toast Bev Oda’s departure with a $16 glass of orange juice, to me, she’ll always be the Cabinet Minister who doctored government files and got away with it." Elizabeth May also has a good blog post on this topic that focuses on Oda's real sins.

What TC laments is that there is a whole structure of private privilege in the corporate world, most of which has real costs that are borne by taxpayers (through corprate and personal tax deductions) and individuals as citizens (through prices, interest rates, lower returns on pensions, you name it). But we rarely hear about them.

Watch this scene from the 2011 movie Margin Call where the corporate chief executive played by Jeremy Irons treats himself to an expensive meal with a fine bottle of red wine. He is in the fictional company's dining room high atop a New York skyscraper overlooking the city's skyline. The scene is a metaphor but these kinds of perks are real. They do receive some attention from investor watchdog sites. The business magazine Forbes provided a few highlights (or lowlights) in this article. Many are tax-subsidized.

Our perspective on this has become completely lopsided and distorted. Oda stayed at an expensive hotel in London (the Savoy) that she she should not have. But who do you think the hotel serves most of the time: politicians and public servants, or those in the private sector (including celebrities) many of whom will be able to deduct the costs from corporate and personal taxes, or who work for firms such as defence contractors that are lavished with tax dollars?