Tag Archives: presidential campaign

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections (Revisited)?

Media, Politics, Social psychology, , , ,

Social psychologists have known for a long time that (a) politically conservative people are more responsive to fear-arousing threats, such as news about terrorism or weather emergencies, and that (b) reminding them of these threats causes people to become more conservative in their attitudes. Due to COVID-19, this is a time when we are all confronting our own mortality. (How many of you, in the last six weeks, have thought about the current status of your will?) This raises the question of what effect the coronavirus will have on the 2020 elections.

This week the Association for Psychological Science reprinted a 2016 research study by Alec Beall and colleagues entitled “Infections and Elections: Did an Ebola Outbreak Influence the 2014 U. S. Federal Elections (And If So How)?” Unfortunately, the study is gated, so only members can read it, but I wrote a blog post about it on December 31, 2016, shortly after its publication. Here is that post. After you’ve read it, I’ll return with some comments (also in italics).

 

Republicans did very well on Election Day 2014, gaining control of the Senate for the first time in eight years and increasing their majority in the House of Representatives. Most pundits attributed these results to low turnout by Democrats in a non-presidential election year and to President Obama’s poor approval ratings, due primarily to the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act earlier that year. But a recent paper by Alec Beall and two other psychologists at the University of British Columbia suggests that breaking news about the Ebola epidemic also played a significant role in the election outcome.

Their paper contains two studies, both of which are interrupted time series designs. In this design, data that are routinely collected are examined to see if they change after a specific event. In the first study, they analyzed the aggregate results of all polls conducted between September 1 and November 1, 2014 that asked respondents whether they intended to vote for a Democrat or a Republican in their upcoming House election. The “interruption” occurred when Center for Disease Control announced the first Ebola case in the U. S. on September 30. The research question was whether the poll results changed from before to after that date.

The above results show support for the Republican candidate minus support for the Democratic candidate in the month (a) and the week (b) before and after the Ebola story broke. In both cases, the temporal trends were significantly different from before to after September 30. The before and after lines had different slopes, and the shift was in favor of the Republican candidates. The authors also collected data from Google on the daily search volume for the term “Ebola,” and found that it too was positively related to Republican voting intentions.

Beall and his colleagues examined two possible alternative explanations—concern about terrorism and the economy. They measured daily search volume for the term “ISIS,” and checked the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, which was dropping at the time. Interest in ISIS was (surprisingly) negatively related to Republican voting intentions and the stock market had no significant effect.

In their second study, the authors looked at the 34 Senate races. They computed 34 state-specific polling averages by subtracting Democratic voting intentions from Republican intentions. Then they subtracted the September results from the October results. Thus, a higher number would indicate a shift toward the Republican candidate. The aggregate results showed a significant increase in Republican voting intentions after September 30.

However, not all states shifted in the same direction. Using Cook’s Partisan Voter Index, they determined whether each state had voted more for Republicans or Democrats in recent years. Then they analyzed the data separately for “red” and “blue” states. The results are shown below.

The changes were in the direction of the state’s dominant political party. In the red states, the Republican candidate did better after September 30. In the blue states, the Ebola scare seemed to help the Democrat, although the effect was smaller. This could also be interpreted as a shift toward the favorite, since candidates who were leading before September 30 tended to do even better after that date.

This study is part of a small but increasing body of research which shows that external threats that cause fear in the population seem to work to the advantage of conservative political candidates. In a previous post, I reported on a British study which indicated that the 2005 London bombings increased prejudice toward Muslims. More to the point is a 2004 study in which reminding participants of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center increased support for President George W. Bush in his campaign against John Kerry. These studies are consistent with older research suggesting that social threats are associated with an increase in authoritarianism in the U. S. population. Authoritarian attitudes are characterized by obedience to authority, hostility toward minority groups and a high degree of conformity to social norms.

Surprisingly, Beall and his colleagues did not mention terror management theory as a way of understanding their results. According to this theory, human awareness of the inevitability of death—called mortality salience—creates existential terror and the need to manage this terror. One way people manage terror is through defensive efforts to validate their own cultural world views—those attitudes that give their lives meaning and purpose. Previous research suggests that mortality salience results primarily in conservative shifts in attitudes, including support for harsher punishment for moral transgressors, increased attachment to charismatic leaders, and increases in religiosity and patriotism. (A charismatic leader is one whose influence depends on citizen identification with the leader or the nation-state, as in “Make America great again.”) The Bush v. Kerry study mentioned in the preceding paragraph was intended to be a test of terror management theory.

One of the effects of saturation coverage of the Ebola epidemic was to remind people of the possibility of their own death and that of loved ones. The results of the 2014 House elections are consistent with a terror management interpretation. The Senate results do not contradict the theory, since there was an overall shift in favor of Republican candidates, but they add an additional detail. In states that usually voted Democratic, the Ebola scare increased support for Democrats. If mortality salience causes people to reaffirm their cultural world views, this could have produced a shift toward liberalism in states in which the majority of citizens held progressive attitudes.

Research findings such as these suggest the possibility that political parties and the corporate media might strategically exaggerate threats in order to influence the outcomes of elections. Willer found that government-issued terror alerts between 2001 and 2004 were associated with stronger approval ratings of President Bush. Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security at the time, later admitted that he was pressured by the White House to increase the threat level before the 2004 election. Since that time, it has become routine for Republicans to emphasize threats to the public’s well-being more than Democrats, and evidence from the 2016 presidential debates suggests that the media gave greater attention to Republican issues.

Republicans made Ebola an issue in the 2014 election, claiming that President Obama was failing to adequately protect public health and arguing that he should close the borders and not allow Americans suffering from the virus back into the country for treatment. In retrospect, news coverage of the threat of Ebola appears to have created unnecessary panic. Analysis of the motives of the media decision makers is complicated by the knowledge that they also exaggerate threats because they believe that increasing public fear leads to higher ratings. Media Matters for America presented data showing that coverage of Ebola plummeted immediately after the 2014 election was over (see below). However, I know of no “smoking gun” showing that the corporate media deliberately created panic in order to help Republican candidates.

 

Addendum

It’s interesting to speculate about how the coronavirus affected the 2020 Democratic primary contest. The first known American death due to COVID-19 occurred near Seattle on February 28. The sudden reversal of fortune in which the most conservative candidate Joe Biden burst into the delegate lead at the expense of the most liberal candidate Bernie Sanders began with the South Carolina primary on Saturday, February 29, and continued with the Super Tuesday contests on March 3. Over that weekend, one of the top news stories was the dramatic spike in the number of infections in Europe. President Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, by which time the Democratic contest was essentially over. It seems plausible that the coronavirus was a background factor that helped convince Democrats not to risk going into the 2020 election with a candidate that Trump might brand a socialist, and to choose a more familiar candidate.

I’m not suggesting that the coronavirus will guarantee the reelection of President Trump or the election of any other Republican candidate. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the data in Beall’s study were collected within just a few days of the peak of publicity surrounding the Ebola virus. A lot can happen between now and November. In the unlikely event that the coronavirus is no longer a problem, its effect on the elections may be minimal. In the case of the president, the success with which he is perceived to have responded the emergency should logically be more important than the existence of the emergency itself. But the polling done thus far suggests that there is very little agreement among partisans on how effectively Trump has dealt with the crisis. And the Ebola study suggests that the pandemic could even influence the outcomes of down-ballot races for political offices have no direct effect on the epidemic or our recovery from it.

If nothing else, Beall’s research should alert us to the importance social context during an election, including external threats that are sometimes overlooked because they are not explicitly political. It should also make us mindful of politicians and media sources that attempt to either exaggerate or downplay these events.

A Plague on Both Your Houses

Media, Politics, ,

False equivalencies abound in today’s journalism. When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans.

Thomas Patterson

President Trump’s recent statement that the tragedy in Charlottesville, VA was due to “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” has led to renewed interest in the concept of false equivalence or false balancing. False equivalence occurs when the media, following the journalistic norm of non-partisanship, give the incorrect impression that there is an equal amount of evidence supporting both sides of a controversial issue. For many years, media coverage of climate change implied that there were an equal amount of evidence supporting or questioning the claim that the Earth was getting warmer due to human activity. False balancing usually occurs with a single article, but when discussing several articles over a period of time, false equivalence is the better term.

I recently became aware of a report by Dr. Thomas Patterson, a political scientist with Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, entitled “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters.” The data come from a content analysis of all campaign items appearing between the second week of August through Election Day in five newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and USA Today) and the main nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC. They were collected by Media Tenor, a firm which specializes in such analyses. Each campaign news item was classified according to its theme and whether its depiction of the candidate was positive, negative or not clear. Here are some highlights.

First, the basics. Donald Trump received more news coverage than Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign. Whether this was an advantage is not clear, however, given the tone of the coverage.

Those who believe in the folk theory of democracy—that voters have stable policy preferences, attend to the policy statements of the candidates, and vote for the candidate whose position most closely matches their own—will be disappointed by the themes of the 2016 coverage. The candidates’ policy stands were mentioned in only 10% of the stories. As is the recent past, the most frequent theme was “horserace” coverage—that is, who’s winning, usually illustrated by poll results.

The tone of the coverage of the nominees was consistently negative, both during the general election and the entire campaign, including the primaries.

Here it is, by week, for each candidate separately.

In the critical final weeks of the campaign, Trump’s coverage became slightly more positive while Clinton’s veered in the negative direction. This was undoubtedly due to FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Clinton’s emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. This is shown more clearly in this chart of Clinton’s week-by-week “scandal” coverage.

Patterson computed a theme regarding the candidates’ fitness for the office of president, which combined reports on their policy positions, personal traits, leadership skills and ethical standards. According to the media, they were equivalent.

There has been a long-term trend toward greater negativity in coverage of the presidential candidates over the past 56 years.

The negativity is not confined to political candidates. Their coverage of other recent issues has also been negative. In psychology, negativity bias refers to the fact that negative information has a greater effect on human behavior than neutral or positive information. Media coverage of public issues may be both an effect and a cause of negativity bias.

Patterson makes two important points about these results. First, the relentlessly negative tone of the coverage contributes to cynicism and apathy among the voters, which could have reduced voter turnout. Research suggests that lower voter turnout benefits Republican candidates. Secondly, he argues that the uniformly negative coverage created the false impression of equivalence between the candidates. This raises the question of how researchers can demonstrate false equivalence empirically. To what external criterion can the media coverage be compared?

In some cases, external standards are available. For example, in the case of climate change, researchers can compute the percentage of peer-reviewed scientific articles that find evidence of human influence on the climate or can survey climatologists to find out what percentage of them believe that global warming is human-caused.

Patterson is writing for an academic and/or politically engaged audience that is likely to accept his assumptions that Clinton’s email scandal was less serious that the legal and ethical problems faced by Trump, and that Clinton was better prepared to be president than Trump. Obviously, not all voters agreed. Unfortunately, he presents no objective evidence to support these implicit claims, and it’s not even clear what data he could have consulted.

While false equivalence is an important source of media bias, demonstrating its existence empirically will continue to be a challenge.

You may also be interested in reading:

October Surprise

Framing the Debates

False Balancing: A Case Study

October Surprise

Politics, Social psychology, ,

Articles that end with confident assertions such as, “And that’s why Donald Trump is president,” are inherently suspect. A presidential campaign is a complex chain of events in which an almost infinite number of factors could have influenced public opinion by an amount greater than or equal to the margin of victory.

Consider this analogy. On the last play of the game, a football team is trailing by one point. Their kicker misses a relatively easy field goal from the opponent’s 25 yard line. Most spectators are likely to conclude that the missed field goal was the cause of their loss. However, if we were to watch a replay of the game, we might find dozens of offensive and defensive mistakes that, had they turned out differently, would have changed the outcome of the game. Picking any one of them as “the cause” of the loss is essentially arbitrary. It was the kicker’s bad luck to have failed on the very last play. Since it is readily available in everyone’s memory, people see it as the cause of his team’s defeat.

This is the first reason you should disregard the data I’m about to present and be skeptical of the claims that have been made for them.

An organization called Engagement Labs does market research in which they attempt—for a price—to measure consumer attitudes toward brand name products. They do this by asking an online sample of consumers to report whether they have had any positive or negative conversations about the product. The difference between the percentages of positive and negative conversations is their measure of consumer “sentiment” toward the product.

Every four years, out of curiosity, this organization asks their respondents to report positive and negative conversations about the two major party presidential candidates. Not surprisingly, Americans had negative attitudes toward both candidates. Averaged over the duration of the campaign (Labor Day to Election Day), attitudes toward Trump (-47%) were more negative than attitudes toward Clinton (-30%).

However, between the surveys conducted on October 23 and October 30, there was an abrupt change in their respondents’ conversations. October 28 was the day that FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress stating that he was reopening his investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Here are the data.

Two days after Comey’s letter, attitudes toward Clinton dropped by 17% and attitudes toward Trump increased by 11%—a 28% shift, sufficient to put Trump ahead. Trump maintained that slight edge on November 6, two days before the election.

This is an astonishing change in attitudes. Such a large shift is almost never reported in pre-election surveys. Here’s the average of pre-election polls conducted by traditional methods.

Why didn’t other pre-election surveys report this abrupt shift in attitudes following Comey’s letter? Brad Fay, Chief Commercial Officer of Engagement Labs, maintains that their measure of political sentiment is a more sensitive predictor of election outcomes than the typical survey question which asks respondents for whom they intend to vote. He gives four reasons.

  1. Behavior predicts behavior better than attitudes do. The behavior being predicted in this case includes the decision of whether to vote or stay home as well as for whom to vote.
  2. The invisible offline conversation matters.
  3. Conversations amplify the impact of the media.
  4. Humans are a herding species. This is Fay’s way of saying that people conform to the expressed attitudes of other people.

As a social psychologist, I accept Fay’s first argument. Attitudes don’t always predict behavior very well. However, past behavior is a relatively good predictor of future behavior. In this case, the behavior of stating your opinions to friends can encourage you to behave in a way that is consistent with those opinions. Fay’s last three reasons are semi-redundant. They are different ways of saying that our behavior is influenced by the attitudes of our peers.

However, there is a second reason you should be skeptical of the information in this post. I’ve searched the Engagement Labs website in vain for basic information about how their surveys were conducted—their sample size, their method of ensuring the representativeness of their sample, the wording of their questions, etc. All I can find is jibberish such as “(t)he data are fed into our TotalSocial platform, where it is scored and combined with social media data to capture the TotalSocial momentum for leading brands.” They probably regard this information as a trade secret. But until such information is provided, I’ll have to claim that this is an intriguing finding of uncertain validity.

You may also be interested in reading:

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

Looking For an Exit

Counterfactual

The Stress of Politics

Health, Politics, Social psychology, , ,

Since 2007, the American Psychological Association (APA) has contracted with the Harris Poll to conduct an annual survey of Stress in America. Respondents are asked to rate their typical level of stress on a 10-point scale, where 1 = little or no stress and 10 = a great deal of stress. They are also asked to rate a variety of sources of stress as either very significant, somewhat significant, not very significant or not significant.

Until now, the APA survey has been a lackluster affair, with average stress levels remaining pretty much the same from year to year, and the most significant sources of stress being money, work and the economy. But that changed with the 2016 survey, due to the addition of some questions about politics.

The 2016 survey was conducted in August, with a sample of 3511 U. S. adults aged 18 or older. Because so many respondents (52%) reported that the 2016 presidential campaign was a very or somewhat significant source of stress, APA did a followup in January 2017 to see if the political climate had cooled off. January’s survey had a reduced sample size of 1,109—still a respectable number. Unless otherwise specified, the data reported below are from this most recent survey.

The overall stress level increased between August and January, from 4.8 to 5.1 on the 10-point scale. While that may not sound like much of a change, this was the first time in the history of the survey that there was a statistically significant increase in stress between consecutive samples. The percentage of respondents reporting physical symptoms of stress also increased, from 71% in August to 80% in January. The most commonly-reported symptoms were headaches (34%), feeling overwhelmed (33%), feeling nervous or anxious (33%), and feeling depressed or sad (32%).

As in previous years, economic and job-related sources of stress were among the the most important. Sixty-one percent reported that money was a very or somewhat significant source of stress; 58% said the same for their work; and 50% for the nation’s economy. However, these numbers were rivaled by three stressors related to politics.

Not suprisingly, responses to two of these questions were influenced by political partisanship. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to be stressed by the election outcome (72% vs. 26%), and by concern about the future of the country (76% vs. 59%).

Stress about the election outcome was influenced by several demographic variables. It varied by race.

It also varied with age.

And it varied by place of residence.

Education also made a difference, with 53% of those with more than a high school education being stressed out by the election outcome, compared to 38% with a high school education or less.

Some stressors that were presidential campaign issues increased in importance since the last survey. Those saying that terrorism was a very or somewhat significant source of stress went from 51% in August to 59% in January. Those concerned about police violence toward minorities went from 36% to 44%. And the rate of concern over one’s own personal safety increased from 29% to 34%.

Here’s the breakdown of concern about police violence by race. Black respondents appeared to show a ceiling effect. Their stress level didn’t increase very much because it was quite high to begin with.

Americans are usually described as apathetic about politics.  Partisan political conflict usually declines after a presidential campaign is over, but that hasn’t happened this year. Stress over the election outcome is almost as high (49%) as stress over the campaign itself was (52%). It is tempting to attribute this to a growing awareness among Americans that they have elected a man who is unfit to be president, or to the fact that Republicans seem determined to proceed with a political agenda most of which is not supported by a majority of citizens. Unfortunately, we don’t have historical data with which to compare stress over this election outcome to the same question after the 2000 and 2008 elections.

We also can’t be certain whether the rhetoric of the presidential campaign increased concern over terrorism, police violence and our personal safety, since perceptions of those stressors may have been influenced by real events that occurred between August and January, i.e., actual acts of terrorism or police violence. However, it seems obvious that Donald Trump tried to elevate anxiety about terrorism and personal safety to an unrealistically high level. The APA survey suggest that he may have been successful. Whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign raised concerns about police violence is less clear, since she typically called for greater respect for the police as well as clearer use of force guidelines.

You may also be interested in reading:

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

Why the Minority Rules

Framing the Debates

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology, , , ,

One question has dominated the conversation among political scientists attempting to explain the presidential election: Were Trump’s supporters motivated primarily by economic anxiety or racial resentment? So far, I’ve avoided weighing in on this question, hoping that the definitive study would appear. It hasn’t yet, but a new experiment by Michael Tesler is interesting enough to warrant giving you a progress report.

The corporate media narrative clearly favors the economic explanation. In a typical article, we are told (correctly) that the family incomes of working class families have been stagnant for 35 years, that trade agreements and the 2008 recession have caused widespread unemployment and underemployment, and that both political parties have ignored the plight of these Americans. This is followed by interviews with a couple of Trump supporters who express pain and anger over the way they have been treated. However, this is anecdotal evidence. The answers given by Trump supporters are partially driven by the questions they are asked. For the media, framing the election in terms of economic anxiety rather than racism avoids offending Trump and his supporters.

Much of the evidence available prior to the election failed to support the economic anxiety narrative. Surveys showed that racial attitudes predicted Trump support better than economic attitudes—for example, these two, and this one. This large sample Gallup poll also cast doubt on the economic explanation. The median household income of a Trump supporter in the primaries was $72,000, higher than the median income of Clinton supporters ($61,000) and the general population ($56,000). In addition, post-election analyses showed that Clinton received more votes in economically-distressed communities—those with a higher percentage of their population below the poverty line.

Michael Tesler has been studying the racialization of politics for over a decade. Racialization refers to the tendency of racial attitudes to influence opinions toward a variety of other issues not obviously related to race, such as health care or gay marriage. Tesler embedded an experiment within a YouGov/Huffington Post national survey of 1000 voters conducted on December 6 and 7. Half the participants were asked if they agreed with the following statement:

Over the past few years, Blacks have gotten less than they deserve.

Ths is an item from the Symbolic Racism Scale, which is used to measure racial resentment. The remaining respondents were presented with this statement.

Over the past few years, average Americans have gotten less than they deserve.

Most people assume an “average American” is White. In 2005, Devos and Banaji conducted a series of five studies showing that the category “American” is more strongly associated with the category “White” than either “African-American” or “Asian-American.” Based on this evidence, Tesler assumed that respondents would interpret the second statement as referring to Whites. He then compared the responses of people who reported that they had voted for Clinton and Trump to these two questions.

This study pits the economic anxiety and racial resentment explanations against one another. Would Trump voters be more likely than Clinton voters to agree that average Americans have gotten less than they deserve? Or would differences emerge only when the question referred to Black Americans?

The results on the left show a typical racial divide between Black and White respondents. White participants were more than twice as likely to think that average Americans had gotten less than they deserve than to think that Blacks had gotten less than they deserve. Black participants thought everyone had gotten less than they deserve. Since there were more White than Black participants, the averages for the full sample resembled those of Whites.

The data on the right address the research question. Clinton voters were almost as likely (57%) to say that average Americans have gotten less than they deserve as Trump voters (64%). Since this was a large sample, this 7% difference is probably statistically significant, but it is small in comparison to the difference on the racial resentment item. Only 12% of Trump supporters agreed that Blacks had gotten less than they deserved, compared to 57% of Clinton supporters—a difference of 45%. The data are more consistent with the racial resentment interpretation of Trump’s victory.

Tesler frames the responses of Trump supporters as an example of the ultimate attribution error. Attribution is the processes by which we infer the causes of behavior. The ultimate attribution error is the tendency to take personal credit for our own successful behavior and that of our in-group, and blaming our failures on environmental obstacles, while at the same time blaming members of out-groups for their failures, and attributing their successes to unfair advantages. Given this bias, it follows that Whites have gotten less than they deserve, while Blacks have gotten more.

Were the election results caused by economic anxiety or racism?  We still await a more definitive study. It will require a larger sample of voters and a valid measure of economic anxiety, with statistical controls for other variables known to influence voting decisions. If I see such a study, I’ll let you know.

You may also be interested in reading:

Trump’s Trump Card

What Does a Welfare Recipient Look Like?

Framing the Debates

Why the Minority Rules

Politics, , ,

As Donald Trump forms a right-wing government with its sights trained on health care and workers’ rights, Americans are about to experience important policy changes they didn’t vote for and don’t want. On the morning after Election Day, Michael Moore pointed out:

You live in a country where a majority of citizens have said they believe there’s climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don’t want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the “liberal” position.

This year, 48% of voters belong to or lean toward the Democratic Party and 44% belong to or lean toward the Republicans. The Democratic candidate has won the popular vote for President in six of the last seven elections, but for the second time, has been denied the office. 42.5 millions Americans voted for a Democrat for the Senate in 2016, while 39.3 milllion voted for a Republican. In the House of Representatives, Republicans collected 49.7% of the votes to the Democrats’ 47.5%. Yet the Republicans will have a 52-48 advantage in the Senate and a 241-194 majority in the House. At all levels of government, Republicans typically wind up winning a percentage of elective offices that is greater than their percentage of the votes.

There are a variety of political and ideological reasons why the Republicans, the minority party for decades, do better than expected in elections, but this post will focus only on the structural reasons for minority rule. Our political system favors rural over urban areas, small states over larger ones, and conservatives over liberals, and this is by design. These structural biases have greater consequences now that rural and urban America have become more polarized.

The Senate

Of the branches of government, the Senate is the most structurally unequal. Every state gets two Senators regardless of its population. California has over 39 million residents, while Wyoming has just over 586,000, which means that a Wyoming resident’s Senate vote counts almost 67 times as much as a Californian’s. Today, states containing just 17% of the American population can theoretically elect a Senate majority. To make matters worse, even when the majority party controls the Senate, the filibuster rule requires a 60-vote majority to pass most legislation. Senators representing a very small percentage of the population can produce gridlock in the Senate.

The House of Representatives

In theory, House districts are approximately equal in population and are therefore “representative.” But there’s an exception, since every state gets at least one representative, and seven states have a smaller population than an average Congressional district—another small state advantage. There is also a built-in time lag, since redistricting occurs at the end of each decade’s census. Redistricting assumes the census is accurate, which of course it’s not. It is estimated that the census misses 2.1% of Black Americans and 1.5% of Hispanics. (Whites, not surprisingly, are overcounted.)

Two additional factors which account for most of the Republican advantage in the House.

Demography. Republican partisans are more evenly spread over the territories of most states, while Democratic partisans are concentrated in a smaller number of predominantly urban areas. This results in Democrats winning by large majorities in the districts they control, while Republicans win by smaller margins in a greater number of districts. This can be seen as unintentional gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering. Republicans control a greater number of state legislatures, especially after their victories in the 2010 (off-year, low turnout) election, and they have used this advantage to gerrymander Congressional districts. Gerrymandering refers to the manipulation of district boundaries for political advantage. With the aid of computer programs, it can produce legislative districts that resemble salamanders crawling across the state map. (I live in Pennsylvania’s notorious 12th district.)

Gerrymandering is most effective when the minority party engages in “packing”—that is, concentrating the majority party members in a small number of districts. This results in many “wasted votes.” Wasted votes are either votes for the losing candidate, or votes for the winning candidate that exceed the number need to win, as when a House candidate in an urban area receives 85% of the votes.

This chart shows how gerrymandering works. In the example, 60% of the voters favor blue. But if the red party controls redistricting, by packing two of the five districts, they can produce an outcome such as the one on the right where they control 60% of the seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans controlled the 2010 redistricting. In 2012, Democrats received 51% of House votes, but won only 5 of 18 seats (28%).

Stephanopoulos and McGhee have proposed a mathematical formula for the efficiency gap, defined as the difference between the two parties’ wasted votes divided by the total votes cast. Ideally, it should be close to zero. When it’s not, it gives you a measure of a party’s undeserved vote share. This raises the possibility that the courts could rule that if the efficiency gap exceeds a certain percentage, the redistricting is unfair. A Wisconsin federal court recently struck down the Republicans’ 2010 redistricting, citing expert testimony about the state’s large efficiency gap.

The Electoral College

In the Electoral College, each state has a number of electors equal to its number of Senators plus Representatives—that is, a minimum of three. This produces a level of structural inequality that is intermediate between the more biased Senate and the (theoretically) less biased House. However, since the presidency is a winner-take-all event, it seems more unfair when Clinton, with 48.2% of the vote (as of this morning), loses to Trump, with 46.4%. Clinton’s large majorities in California and New York mean nothing in the Electoral College.

And it gets worse. In Wyoming there is an electoral vote for every 195,000 residents while in California there is one for every 711,000 residents. Merling and Baker point out that the states that are overrepresented are less diverse than the country as a whole. (Wyoming, for example, is 84% white; California, 38%.) Thus, the Electoral College amplifies the votes of White people. The chart below shows the underrepresentation of minorities in the Electoral College.

merling-baker-electoral-2016-11-fig-1

The States

These inequalities at the national level tend to be replicated in the states. As of January, Republicans will control both chambers of the state legislatures in 32 states, and the governor’s office as well as the legislature in either 24 or 25 states (depending on the outcome in North Carolina). Many states have geographically small urban areas that are traditionally outvoted by rural residents. (Lots of money for highways in rural areas, but little for mass transit.) When cities enact progressive changes, such as a minimum wage, they are sometimes preempted by more conservative state legislatures.

Why it is and won’t change

While some of our first political leaders, such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, favored proportional representation, the small-state, rural bias was an intentional policy choice deliberately built into the Constitution. The Senate and the Electoral College were a result of the Connecticut Compromise of 1787 designed to allay the fears of the smaller states that, if decisions were made by popular vote, their interests would be ignored by the larger states. Later, the small-state bias served to maintain slavery at a time when it probably would have been abolished by popular vote. (The analogy to our present situation is obvious.)

Equal state representation in the Senate is the only part of the Constitution that cannot be amended. The Electoral College, however, could be abolished by Constitutional amendment. Amending the Constitution, as specified in Article Five, is a two-step process. First, the proposed amendment must pass with a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate. Then it must be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths, or 38, of the 50 states. It is hard to imagine the smaller states agreeing to surrender so much power.

Conclusion

This post only begins to cover the many reasons for minority rule in this country. Here are some additional political and ideological reasons. To their credit, the Republicans have a higher turnout, especially in seemingly less important off-year elections, probably because Republicans are older than the average voter, and are more likely to see voting as a normative obligation. They have used their control of state legislatures to enact voter suppression laws that reduce turnout among traditional Democratic constituencies such as poor people and college students. 2016 was the first election in over 50 years without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, and 14 states celebrated by enacting new voter restrictions such as requiring voter I.D., and reducing the time people could vote and the number of polling places.

Because they represent the interests of corporations and rich individuals, Republicans are able to raise more money to influence political campaigns and to lobby Congress. In recent decades, they have carefully developed a strategy of using religion and racial prejudice to persuade working class Americans to vote contrary to their economic self-interest. And so on.

But the structural advantages that favor the rural minority require Democrats to win by a landslide in order to have any real influence on social policy.

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Looking For an Exit

Counterfactual

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Looking For an Exit

Politics, ,

The news that Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump in the popular vote by over two million votes (and counting) is no doubt one of many factors giving rise to demands for recounts in states where the vote totals are very close. Green Party candidate Jill Stein has raised over $3 million so far to finance recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, not to change her own outcomes but because “the unexpected results of the election and the anomolies that have been reported need to be investigated. We deserve elections we can trust.” The total cost of a recount in these three states is $6-7 million.

The unexpected results that require investigation are not the differences between pre-election polls and the outcome. There are many explanations for this discrepancy, including real changes in opinion in the last few days of the campaign and partisan differences in enthusiasm leading to differences in turnout. The real concern of experts in voter research is the discrepancy between the exit poll results and the official vote counts.

Exit polls are interviews with voters conducted, usually by news organizations, as they are leaving the polling place. Representative polling places are chosen, and researchers are given quotas to fill broken down by age, race, gender, etc. These data are then weighted by their best approximation of the demographic composition of the actual voters. In some countries, exit polls results are considered more reliable than official vote totals, and international observers use them to detect voter fraud.

chart_1

Above are the exit poll-vote count comparisons in four states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, in which the exit polls showed Clinton winning while the official totals gave the victory to Trump. Adding these two percentages together gives you the “red shift,” or the extent to which the official results unexpectedly favored the Republican candidate. In Michigan, the exit polls showed both Clinton and Trump at 46.8%, while the official totals stand at Trump 47.60% and Clinton 47.33%—a miniscule red shift, but worth recounting due to the vote’s closeness. Had Clinton won these three states, she would have won the Electoral College by 288 to 250.

If exit polls are subject only to random error, red and blue shifts should occur with equal frequency. Voting researcher Jonathan Simon, who compiled these data, has found a systematic tendency toward red shifts in all presidential elections since 2004. Blue shifts are almost nonexistent. However, a better name for these discrepancies might be a “conservative shift,” since in this year’s Democratic primaries, exit polls regularly showed higher percentages for Bernie Sanders than the official vote counts.

What, other than fraud, can account for these discrepancies? Here are the most likely suspects.

  • Early voting. Early voters are not exit polled. But if a recount is done, it should be easy to separate early voters from those who voted on Election Day.
  • Selection bias. The people interviewed may not be representative of the actual voters. This could occur if the interviewer chooses unrepresentative people, such as those who are smiling. A more likely possibility is that Republicans are more likely to refuse to answer. For example, if white male Republicans systematically decline to be interviewed, the white male quota will be filled by more Democrats. Neither the quotas given to the researchers nor the weighting formula totally correct for selection bias.
  • Response bias. Some of the respondents who voted for Trump may falsely claim to have voted for Clinton. This is a variation of the Bradley effect, named for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, in which polls systematically overestimate support for Black candidates and underestimate support for candidates who appeal to voters’ prejudice. In this case, it would mean that some voters are embarrassed to admit to a stranger that they voted for Trump.

Of course, the existence of these possible sources of error doesn’t mean that a recount is not worth doing, only that Democrats should have a low expectation of success.

The main argument for doing these recounts is the apparent ease with which computerized voting systems can be hacked. Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security, notes that, while he does not personally believe the outcome of the election was tainted by fraud, this year has seen an unprecedented number of cyberattacks apparently intended to influence the election. He explains that, prior to the election, hackers could probe election systems in various localities to see which ones can be hacked easily. Immediately before the election, they could select highly competitive districts and install malware designed to shift the vote totals by a couple of percentage points. The malware would erase itself after the election.

There’s no question that this is possible for technically sophisticated attackers. (If my Ph.D. students and I were criminals, I’m sure we could pull it off.) If anyone reasonably skilled is sufficiently motivated and willing to face the risk of getting caught, it’s happened already.

If the malware is self-erasing, tampering can only be detected when there are backup paper ballots. However, Halderman mentions the possibility that examining the voting equipment might produce evidence of some types of fraud.

Clearly paper ballots are the best technology for preventing and detecting computerized voter fraud. Optical scanning can be used to count the ballots quickly. But many districts, including some in Pennsylvania, continue to use computer systems known to be insecure with no paper ballots as backups. This is unacceptable in 2016.

The deadlines for filing for recounts are November 23 in Pennsylvania, November 25 in Wisconsin, and November 28 in Michigan. Contributions to the Green Party recount effort can be made at https://jillstein.nationbuilder.com/recount. It’s hard to believe the Democratic National Committee isn’t willing to finance this effort.

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Counterfactual

What Happened? What Will Happen Next?

Framing the Debates

Counterfactual

Media, Politics,

The dictionary defines a counterfactual as “a conditional statement in which the first clause is a past tense subjunctive statement expressing something contrary to fact, as in: if she had hurried, she would have caught the bus.” In the aftermath of the Tuesday’s election, some progressives are suggesting this counterfactual: If the Democrats had nominated Bernie Sanders, he would have beaten Donald Trump in the presidential election.

This counterfactual can never be proven. The main evidence in its favor comes from the results of polling during the primaries which showed Sanders doing consistently better than Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical race against Trump. The chart below shows Real Clear Politics’ average of all polls pitting Sanders against Trump from January 1 until June 6, when pollsters stopped asking the question. The overall average is Sanders, 49.6%, and Trump, 39.3%. Clinton also had a slight lead over Trump during some (but not all) of this period, but Sanders’ advantage was, on average, more than twice as large.

sandersvstrump

Not only were these poll results seldom reported by the corporate media, who were busily engaged in a “Bernie blackout,” but when they were, pundits urged readers to disregard them. (A classic example is an article by Slate‘s William Saletan entitled “Polls Say Bernie is More Electable Than Hillary. Don’t Believe Them.”) The pundits argued that Sanders had not been “vetted” as thoroughly as Clinton, and would therefore be more vulnerable to attack during the election campaign.

As Adam Johnson notes, this argument is wrong on two counts. First, Sanders’ qualifications had been thoroughly examined during the primary and throughout his long career. Secondly, whatever “vetting” Clinton had undergone had already resulted in a public evaluation that was more unfavorable than favorable, and she was still under FBI investigation. This effectively neutralized the corruption and character issues when voters compared Clinton with Trump.

But, you may say, Democratic Party could hardly have selected Sanders since Clinton received more votes in the primaries. She won it “fair and square.” (Cue the laughter.) Of course, this ignores the many obstacles the Democratic National Committee (DNC) placed in Bernie’s path. By far, the heaviest thumb they placed on the scales was the superdelegates—just under 15% of the convention delegates, nearly all of whom favored Clinton. More importantly, the corporate media, from day one, misreported the delegate totals by combining superdelegates (who were not committed) with those earned in the primaries (who were committed). This inflated Clinton’s lead by over 400 delegates. Her lead appeared insurmountable, and she was declared the winner before the primaries were over. It is reasonable to assume that this discouraged potential Sanders voters, but there is no way to tell how many votes this cost him.

It will be interesting to see whether the DNC reforms their primary selection process, or whether conservative Democrats continue to try to take the risk out of democracy.

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Trumping Bernie

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What Happened? What Will Happen Next?

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, , ,

This post is not completely thought out and is inadequately sourced.  I decided to write it quickly in order to compare my initial impressions of a Trump presidency to what happens weeks, months, or years from now.

What happened? And what will happen next? The first question must be approached with caution. I hope social scientists have collected good data on the demographic and ideological characteristics that are associated with support for Donald Trump. My guess is that the two leading contenders will be economic deprivation and racial or ethnic prejudice.

The corporate media have attempted to “normalize” Trump’s candidacy by suggesting that his support comes mainly from less educated Whites who have seen their standard of living decline in recent years. A couple of early studies cast doubt on this explanation and suggested that “racial anxiety” was the stronger motivator of Trump supporters. (See also this previous post.) A study by Rothwell and Diego-Rosell of the Gallup organization—the best I’ve found so far—finds only limited support for the economic explanation. Trump supporters are less educated and more likely to be blue-collar workers, but they are wealthier than either Clinton supporters or the population generally, and are no more likely to be unemployed. In other words, Trump is supported by the traditional Republican base of relatively affluent people hoping to increase their wealth. These authors also found that Trump supporters tend to live in racially isolated communities. However, their study lacked a measure of prejudice. Let’s hope some political scientists have included measures of racial attitudes in their research.

Why were the polls so wrong? The most likely explanation is the so-called Bradley effect, named for LA Mayor Tom Bradley, in which pre-election polls overestimate support for Black candidates. The flip side of this is that polls underestimate support for candidates who appeal to voters’ prejudices. The best indication of a Bradley effect so far has been the finding that Trump did better in online polls than telephone polls, possibly because respondents were embarrassed to admit they support Trump to a live person. (Of course, there are other explanations for this finding.)

To determine what will happen next, we need to divide Trump’s campaign promises into those that he can easily fulfill on his own, those that will require the cooperation of Congress, and therefore can be disrupted either by lack of unanimity among Republicans or a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, and those that will be difficult or impossible to carry out under any circumstances.

The easiest thing for Trump to do is abandon efforts to control climate change. Both the Obama Clean Power Plan and the United States’ ratification of COP 21, the Paris climate change agreement, are essentially executive orders by President Obama. They can be undone with the stroke of a pen, and most likely they will be. The latest studies of climate change are extremely alarming, suggesting that previous climate models have dramatically underestimated the problem. Any international climate agreement will collapse without U. S. cooperation. This suggests that by electing Trump, Americans may have inadvertantly brought about the end of human life on Earth within a couple of decades.

All the rest is merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Since Republicans control the Senate, it is likely that Trump will be able to ensure conservative domination of the Supreme Court for at least the next three decades. If so, Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned, and the few remaining barriers to racial discrimination will be eliminated. But the best descriptor of the Roberts court is “pro-corporate.” This is important due to corporations’ tendency to sue any time a law is passed which they find inconvenient. Needless to say, they will find a sympathetic audience in a Trump-appointed court.

I also believe that Trump will have little difficulty getting approval for elimination of the minimal protections against Wall Street risk taking and outright fraud provided by the Dodd-Frank Act. This will likely include elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. However, this may not make much difference since Dodd-Frank is so weak. In other words, it’s likely that we will have another Great Recession fairly soon, regardless of what Trump does.

At an intermediate level of difficulty for Trump are actions that require Congressional approval, and which all Senate Democrats and some Republicans may be reluctant to go along with. I put the repeal of the Affordable Care Act in this category, since it is essentially a massive giveaway of public funds to the insurance, medical and pharmaceutical industries, all important Republican donors. More likely to happen are modifications to Obamacare that increase corporate profits and make it more difficult and expensive for less affluent Americans to obtain medical care.

Another change requiring Congressional approval that will elicit Congressional resistance is Trump’s promise to cancel and/or renegotiate so-called “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA, or to withdraw from the World Trade Organization. These treaties, the primary goal of which is to increase corporate dominance of the international economy, have always had greater support from Republicans than Democrats.

On the impossible side is Trump’s immigration policy. In the final months of the campaign, he began to back off from his promise to build a wall on the Mexican border. More importantly, it is difficult to imagine the kind of chaos that would result from any attempt to deport the approximately 11 million undocumented people living in this country. More likely, he will cooperate with Congress in passing laws that make it more difficult or impossible for people of certain religious or ethnic groups to enter to the country in the future.

Now for two wild cards.

Will Trump be more or less likely than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to involve us in any more than the five foreign military interventions in which we are currently involved? My guess is that he will escalate the war against ISIS, with totally unpredictable consequences, but be reluctant to deploy American troops in new wars. But given Trump’s childlike temperament, this prediction could be way off base.

Finally, it is important to remember that George W. Bush and Barack Obama have created a massive national security apparatus, including the capability of spying on virtually any electronic communication between American citizens, and the militarization of the police, who can bring overwhelming force to bear against protesters and demonstrators. This is important because if Trump is able to fulfill his campaign promises, there will be widespread dissent on the left, and if he blunders badly, there will be buyers’ remorse among his current followers. Some of us were dismayed by FBI Director Comey’s recent intervention in the presidential election, but we should be prepared for the possibility that Trump will not hesitate to use the national security state for political purposes, including attempts to influence future elections.

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Trump’s Trump Card

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Framing the Debates

Framing the Debates

Media, Politics, ,

There was much to dislike about the three presidential and one vice-presidential debates, but one objection that was near the top of everyone’s list was the narrow range of topics about which the candidates were questioned. Adam Johnson has tabulated the number of questions asked by the moderators about each of the 22 issues they brought up, along with 10 issues that were not included.

questionsubjects

Of course, candidates could have brought up issues that were not specifically targeted by the questions. Johnson’s second chart tabulates the number of mentions of each of 33 issues.

finaldebatementions

Russia, terrorism and taxes were the moderators’ favorites, and Donald Trump’s taxes and Hillary Clinton’s emails received more attention than such issues as climate change, poverty or campaign finance. Johnson describes the framing of the issues as “center-right in nature,” and offers some examples to support his case, i.e., Elaine Quijano’s question, “Do we ask too much of police officers in this country?”

I subsequently ran across an article by Alexander Podkul and Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institute. As part of the 2016 Primaries Project, they tabulated the issue positions, taken from their campaign websites, of over 1700 Congressional primary candidates. They found that candidates in the two parties are not talking about the same issues. Here are the top five issues mentioned by Republican and Democratic hopefuls. Aside from their common focus on the Affordable Care Act, there is little overlap.

gs_20161020_primaries-project-issues

In the debates, there was one question about Obamacare. With regard to the other top Republican issues, there were four questions about taxes, three about the debt, two about immigation and one about gun control, for a total of eleven questions about Republican issues. The Democrats did not do as well. There were two questions about social security, but the framing suggested it needed to be “reformed” rather than expanded as some Democrats maintain. Since there were no questions about climate change, education or the minimum wage, the Democrats scored a total of three questions. It appears that the debate moderators (or their corporate media bosses) shared the views of Republican candidates about which issues are more important.

Tabulation the number of mentions of each issue yields a similar result. There were 241 mentions of the five Republican issues and 90 mentions of the Democratic issues. (The 45 mentions of Obamacare account for half of the comments about Democratic issues.) Unfortunately, Johnson does not tabulate mentions of the minimum wage, but even if we assume that it was referred to all ten times that poverty came up for discussion, that would still bring the Democratic issue mentions up to only 100.

Of course, these mentions were largely triggered by the debate questions. However, Secretary Clinton could have raised some of the Democrats’ issues more often than she did. Thus a second interpretation of these data is that the Democratic candidate approaches the upcoming election from a more Republican point of view than their Congressional candidates.

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