Month: November 2014

The GOP’s Lock On Congress

Chait declares that “Democrats stand almost no visible prospect of attaining a government majority”:

The structural advantages undergirding Republican control of both chambers of Congress are so imposing that only extraordinary circumstances could overwhelm them. Democrats managed, briefly, to gain control of Congress when the catastrophe of the Bush presidency created two successive national wave elections in their favor.

Only that sort of freakish event would suffice.

And Democrats might notice that, since winning back Congress requires a backlash against the president, their “positive” scenario requires first surrendering to Republicans’ total control of government. As long as Democrats hold the White House, Republican control of Congress is probably safe — at least for several election cycles to come.

The second conclusion is simpler, and more bracing: Hillary Clinton is the only thing standing between a Republican Party even more radical than George W. Bush’s version and unfettered control of American government.

But Suderman argues that last night was bad news for Clinton:

Knowing Clinton, she’ll likely attempt a tailored version of the strategy that Democrats in close races adopted this time around—positioning herself as separate from the president but not actively opposed to him. She’ll highlight the parts of policies that are widely liked, but acknowledge that many need to be fixed, tweaked, or updated—while providing as few specifics as possible about what those specifics should be. Indeed, to some extent, this is already the approach that Clinton has taken, vaguely moving away from Obama in ways designed to cause as little real friction as possible. She’ll be neither with Obama nor against him, emphasizing distance but not disagreement.

That awkward, fence-straddling approach led to some slightly ridiculous moments, and ultimately failed to work for Democrats in this year’s midterm. It’s not likely to work for Clinton (or any other Democratic nominee) in 2016 either.

“Amnesty” In Jeopardy?

Even though Press Secretary Josh Earnest swears the plan is still on, Yglesias expects the GOP wave to scuttle Obama’s promise to take executive action on immigration reform by the end of the year:

To see why, just think about the speech that the president would have given had he announced this initiative back in June. He would have said that immigration reform was a pressing problem. He would have praised the Senate for passing a bipartisan reform bill with an overwhelming majority behind it. He would have noted that the House of Representatives had refused to bring any kind of immigration legislation to the floor. He would have argued that the public was behind him, and made the humanitarian case for action, and flagged the business community’s desire for reform. He would have bemoaned Republican obstructionism. And he would have plowed ahead with a controversial expansion of executive authority.

His argument, in other words, would have been that House Republicans were obstructing something the public, the business community, and even a bipartisan majority of the Senate wanted. But can you really cry obstruction right after losing an election? Republicans are now able to claim not just that Obama was stretching his authority in a novel way, but doing so specifically to overturn an adverse result in the midterms.

With nothing left to lose, though, Allahpundit fears he’ll go all-in:

Obama has nothing to fear from voters anymore. Even in a worst-case scenario, where he issues the order and there’s a public backlash, Hillary and the rest of the 2016 crop are free to condemn him for it. “I support the president’s noble goal of bringing the undocumented out of the shadows,” she’ll say, in perfect left-speak, “but we need to let the people’s representatives work this out in Congress.” That’s a win/win answer, pandering to the Latino voters she needs in 2016 while distancing herself from O for the benefit of independents. And of course, amnesty fans who are grateful to Obama will end up expressing it by voting for her, notwithstanding her (tepid, phony) opposition to it.

Meanwhile, issuing the order would have some nice political benefits for Obama. It’d be his way of showing his deeply demoralized base that he’s not giving up on progressivism entirely, even if he ends up making a deal or two with the evil GOP. And it’d be a clever way to throw the new Republican Congress off-balance, putting Boehner and McConnell in the agonizing position of deciding whether to pander to their base by fiercely opposing the order or to pander to Latinos they’re wooing for 2016 by going easy on Obama over it.

Obama had delayed his promised executive action out of fear of making even more trouble for Democrats in the midterms, but Esther Yu-Hsi Lee observes that the delay might actually have hurt some candidates:

Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) vacated his Senate seat for Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO) on Tuesday night, setting off speculation that low Latino turnout was the cause. Advocacy groups like Presente and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) have actively called on Latinos, who were a decisive force in the 2012 election, to resist voting for Democrats out of anger that the President hadn’t acted on promised action. Despite Udall’s loss, a Latino Decisions poll found that Latino voters in Colorado still strongly favored him over Gardner by a 71 percent to 23 percent margin. On the campaign trial, Democratic House members like Rep. Joe Garcia (D-FL) were confronted by Latino voters who demanded to know why the party — including Obama — had done nothing on immigration reform. Garcia lost his race on Tuesday to Republican challenger Carlos Curbelo.

Adrian Carrasquillo takes a closer look at Colorado, where new polling data “supports advocates’ contention that Udall’s defeat may have had something to do with immigration”:

According to a Latino Decisions election poll that connected with 400 Latino voters in Colorado in English and Spanish, on cell phones and on landlines, voters were not well-informed on the distinctions on immigration stances between the two candidates. A Colorado advocate with knowledge of the poll set to be released Wednesday said only 46% of Latino voters said they knew Udall’s stance on immigration and beliefs on Gardner’s stance were all over the place, with 21% saying he supported a path to citizenship, 38% saying he opposed “comprehensive immigration reform,” and 20% saying they didn’t know his stance.

And while Latino voters did turn out for Udall — in slightly higher aggregate numbers, according to early figures, than they voted four years ago — their share of the vote didn’t rise as fast as some expected. (Latinos make up more than 20% of the population of Colorado, according to federal figures.) So while Udall won 71% of the Latino vote, according to Latino Decisions, he fell short of Obama’s 87% showing in 2012 and Michael Bennet’s 81% in 2010, with the lack of clear distinctions on immigration as part of the reason why.

Will The GOP Take An Axe To The ACA?

While total repeal of healthcare reform isn’t in the cards as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House, Brett LoGiurato predicts that “the overall GOP strategy will likely be to chip away at parts of the law in bills that could make it to the president’s desk”:

A full-repeal bill would certainly prompt a presidential veto. One item Republican House and Senate aides think is likely to make it to Obama’s desk, and potentially get his signature, is a bill to repeal Obamacare’s tax on medical devices. A similar amendment, championed by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who is in line to become the next chair of the Senate Finance Committee, passed by a 79-20 vote in 2013. “I think the med-device tax and some other little areas would be the best place to start, because that is the ‘possible,'” a senior GOP aide on the Senate Finance Committee told Business Insider of Republicans’ pursuit of Obamacare-related legislation in the next session of Congress. Republicans could also take aim at so-called risk corridors in the health law, a potential fight that some Republican senators have already begun discussing as part of a shutdown battle.

Cohn wonders whether the new Senate will try to kill the individual mandate:

Of all the proposals Republicans might pass, this is the one that would probably threaten to wreak the most havoc.

Economists say that the requirement to get health insurance (or pay a fine) entices lots of people, particularly young and healthy ones, to buy insurance—and, in so doing, keeps premiums for everybody else lower. If their projections are right, then taking away the mandate would mean more people without insurance, and higher premiums for those who hold onto it. Obama, a skeptic of the individual mandate during his presidential campaign, eventually decided the economists were right. He’s fought to keep the mandate ever since and there’s no reason to think he’d back off that position now. But the provision is unpopular with the public and Republicans might be able to pick up enough Democratic votes to pass a bill, just to force a very public veto.

The GOP’s statehouse victories are also bad news for Obamacare, as the newly elected or re-elected Republican governors aren’t likely to move forward on expanding Medicaid and might well tinker with or scale back existing expansions:

In Arkansas, where Democratic Governor Mike Beebe pioneered a way to use Medicaid expansion funds to subsidize private coverage, the future of that program is in doubt under the incoming Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson. Republican leaders in moderate states have expanded Medicaid, including Rick Snyder in Michigan (who won last night) and Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania (who lost). Republicans taking over in blue states, including Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts, may seek permission from Washington to revamp those Medicaid programs to make them look more like the privatized versions in Arkansas, Indiana, and a handful of other places.

Overall, Gerard Magliocca concludes that the ACA “is still not settled law”:

While Congress cannot repeal the Act over the President’s veto, the issue will remain a live one through 2016.  More important, the election results may influence the Court’s thinking on whether to take the cert. petition in King.  Court watchers noted the other day that the petition was relisted, which is often (though not always) a prelude to a grant.  The timing of the relist to correspond with the midterm election may be a coincidence, but in any event the election result may embolden the Justices who dissented in NFIB to take a statutory crack at the Act.

Meanwhile, Igor Volsky glosses over the GOP’s other likely legislative targets:

Republicans promised to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline — a project 16 senate Democrats endorsed when the body voted on a non-biding resolution in March of 2013 — and have pledged to pass a budget in both chambers. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — the likely chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — has promised to tackle tax reform (a project he told Bloomberg on Tuesday night would ideally attract 60 votes in the Senate) and insisted that Republicans still plan to advance immigration reform — on a step-by-step basis that begins with border security. Obama endorsed such a process last year. Other issues with bipartisan support include an insistence that the administration submit any deal to stop Iran from developing a nuclear program to Congress and approving fast-track authority for trade deals with the European Union and nations in Asia.

Correction from a reader:

One of the quotes on your recent post on the ACA at the state level said the following: “Republican leaders in moderate states have expanded Medicaid, including Rick Snyder in Michigan (who won last night) and Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania (who lost).” Former Governor Corbett did not actually expand Medicaid. He submitted his own privatization plan to the federal government, but it was never approved or enacted.

Mencken’s Kind Of Misanthropy

Hal Crowther wonders what made the famous journalist such a notorious grump:

It’s precarious trying to isolate, precisely, just what it was about his time that most infuriated Mencken. … An educated guess is that the thing he loathed most was optimism. Animal dish_mencken optimism — animal spirits — he endorsed and enjoyed. Food and drink, sexual attraction, good music (as he defined it), good company, and good conversation were essential to his well-being. This was no sour ascetic or life-denying hermit. What he detested was delusional optimism, as he saw it — organized religion with its promises of ecstatic afterlife, the cult of human progress, American exceptionalism, popular beliefs in the essential goodness of humankind and the benevolence of representative democracy. It was this doctrine of the Ascent of Man, of cultural, moral, spiritual, and supernatural uplift, that never failed to raise his hackles and provoke his most venomous rhetoric.

Crowther goes on to imagine what Mencken would have made of society today:

[I]f he were here today to instruct us, as was his habit, he would point to the dreadful symmetry of our follies as he chronicled and predicted them. We were on the winning side in two wars, and each of them was followed by Red Scares and communist witch hunts, the notorious Palmer Raids in 1919–1921, and the equally notorious reign of Senator Joe McCarthy after World War II. These paranoid periods were characterized by jingoism, censorship, grotesque hypocrisy, and the righteous suspension of most of the liberties of which America loves to boast. Mencken would have nodded his head, ruefully, at the Patriot Act and the war on terrorism with its constitution-defying domestic spying, all spawned by the bombings of September 2001. Coddle them and they love freedom, he would have said; kick them and they destroy it.

(Photo via Flickr user mistermencken)

How Off Were The Polls?

Wang does some calculations:

In close Senate races, Republicans outperformed polls by an average of 5.3 percentage points. Prime examples of that effect could be seen with Republican wins in Kansas and North Carolina, two races that went against pre-election polls.

In gubernatorial races, Republicans outperformed polls nearly 2 percentage points on average. This was enough to put Paul LePage of Maine (tied), Rick Scott of Florida (tied), and Bruce Rauner of Illinois (Quinn +2.0%) over the top.

Silver ponders these polling misses:

Poll BiasInterestingly, this year’s polls were not especially inaccurate. Between gubernatorial and Senate races, the average poll missed the final result by an average of about 5 percentage points — well in line with the recent average. The problem is that almost all of the misses were in the same direction. That reduces the benefit of aggregating or averaging different polls together. It’s crucially important for psephologists to recognize that the error in polls is often correlated. It’s correlated both within states (literally every nonpartisan poll called the Maryland governor’s race wrong, for example) and amongst them (misses often do come in the same direction in most or all close races across the country).

This is something we’ve studied a lot in constructing the FiveThirtyEight model, and it’s something we’ll take another look at before 2016. It may be that pollster “herding” — the tendency of polls to mirror one another’s results rather than being independent — has become a more pronounced problem. Polling aggregators, including FiveThirtyEight, may be contributing to it. A fly-by-night pollster using a dubious methodology can look up the FiveThirtyEight or Upshot or HuffPost Pollster or Real Clear Politics polling consensus and tweak their assumptions so as to match it — but sometimes the polling consensus is wrong.

Joshua Tucker speculates about why the polls were wrong:

We are living in an era where poll response rates are dropping precipitously, at least for traditional phone-based surveys. This point was dramatically illustrated in a recent Pew Report showing that response rates had fallen from 36 percent in 1997 to 9 percent in 2012.

… [T]here are good reasons to think it is harder to reach young people today using telephone surveys. But of course pollsters know this, and so adjust the weights of their surveys accordingly. But with fewer young people in their surveys — combined with the possibility that the young people you can reach by phone are not representative of young people generally — the work that has to be done by these weights grows. Now, not wanting to get a mistaken estimate because of this bias, I wonder if the polling overcompensated in terms of weights in this regard because of the voting patterns observed in the 2012 presidential elections.

Wang identifies a different culprit:

Recently it’s been suggested that the polling industry has struggled lately to reach a representative swath of voters. Low response rate, increasing use of mobile phones, and hard-to-reach demographics have all been cited as possible biases. However, those difficulties would tend to undersample Democratic voters, which was not the problem this year. Instead, inaccuracy may have come from what David Wasserman at The Cook Political Report called “epic turnout collapse” in 2014. And estimating the precise effects of turnout is an older, unsolved problem that looms large for pollsters in every midterm election.

A Reid Swayed By The Wind?

Ed Morrissey doesn’t see any reason for Senate Democrats to keep Harry Reid as their leader after last night’s defeat:

[T]wo members of Reid’s caucus already have reasons to switch sides, and keeping Reid around will almost guarantee that Republicans will pressure Mitch McConnell to make the Democratic wilderness as miserable as Reid made the Republican wilderness. If that happens, both Angus King and Joe Manchin will certainly bolt, and Democrats may face another round of key retirements in the next two years, which will eat into their ability to regain the majority in 2016. McConnell doesn’t have any incentive to make that situation on Reid any easier, and plenty of incentive to force Reid out. McConnell may want to return to normal order, but not with Reid across the table from him. If McConnell wants to play hardball, all he needs to do is insist that Democrats shun Reid entirely — no leadership position, no ranking-member position on committees — for the next two years, in exchange for returning to the pre-Reid Senate environment.

But Susan Ferrechio gets the sense that none of Reid’s colleagues are prepared to challenge him:

If Senate Democrats move to oust Reid, the likely successor would come from the lower ranks of the leadership. Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, Democratic Policy Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer of New York and Conference Secretary Patty Murray of Washington are among the Democrats who might vie for the post. But those who know Reid best say there probably won’t be a challenge, because Reid, a former boxer who rose to power from a small town in the Nevada desert, would be too tough to beat. “If a Democrat wants to take him on, then they should know they are in for a no-holds-barred fight,” Eric Herzik, chairman of the political science department at the University of Nevada, Reno, told the Examiner.

In any case, Roger Pilon bets Reid is wishing he hadn’t “gone nuclear” right about now:

And where will those remaining Democratic senators who voted for Harry Reid’s nuclear option be sitting? Why on the minority side, watching Republicans enjoy their newly acquired power to block controversial Democratic nominees by the vote of a mere majority—all because of Harry’s hubris. But it wasn’t Harry’s alone. As the Wall Street Journal editorializes this morning, after his victory speech following his 2012 re-election, President Obama walked off the stage and made separate calls to Nancy Pelosi and House Democratic campaign chairman Steve Israel, telling them “he would spend the next two years helping Democrats retake the House in 2014.” In politics as in life, hubris has its price. We will now have a proper vetting of the president’s nominees, and that is good.

But Danny Vinik encourages Reid to play some hardball of his own and filibuster the shit out of everything, to give the Republicans a taste of their own medicine:

Reid has a history of supporting the filibuster when in the minority and criticizing it when in the majority. There’s no reason to expect that to change with McConnell as majority leader. And that’s a good thing. If Republicans are going to reap the political benefits of indiscriminant filibustering, then Democrats should do so as well.

The advantage of filibustering is that it allows a party to block progress without taking all of the blame for it, for the simple reason that most of the public—and, surprisingly, most of the media—don’t realize that filibusters are basically thwarting majority rule. Presidential vetoes, on the other hand, are easy for the public and media to understand and easy to appropriate blame. If Democrats relinquished the tool now, they’d give up a chance to make the same sort of gains. It’d be the equivalent of unilateral disarmament.

Correction Of The Day

From the NYT:

To the Editor:

I was grateful to see my book “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage” mentioned in Paperback Row (Oct. 19). When highlighting a few of the essays in the collection, the review mentions topics ranging from “her stabilizing second marriage to her beloved dog” without benefit of comma, thus giving the impression that Sparky and I are hitched. While my love for my dog is deep, he married a dog named Maggie at Parnassus Books last summer as part of a successful fund-raiser for the Nashville Humane Association. I am married to Karl VanDevender. We are all very happy in our respective unions.

ANN PATCHETT
NASHVILLE

The Question Of Scotland Isn’t Settled, Ctd

PUBLIC-SPOM-Wave-22-General-election-VI

A recent survey finds that two-thirds of Scots want another referendum on independence from the UK within the next 10 years, while 58 percent want one in the next five. This confirms Larison’s suspicion that we haven’t seen the last of the Scottish secession movement:

One might have thought that the referendum had been decided by a large enough margin to quash such sentiments, but that has clearly not happened. As I guessed it might, the ‘No’ victory seems to have just put off a final reckoning on the future of the U.K. rather than putting a stop to the independence debate. Whether independence for Scotland makes any more or less sense for the country in five or ten years’ time, the question is not going to be “settled” anytime soon. All indications are that the referendum campaign has significantly changed the political landscape in Scotland with consequences for the entire U.K., and the independence question seems likely to keep roiling British politics for the foreseeable future.

Pointing to another poll suggesting that the Scottish National Party could take all but four of Labour’s Scottish seats in next year’s parliamentary elections, Keith Humphreys speculates on the SNP’s potential to cause “an earthquake in British politics”:

First, the SNP has a reasonable chance of becoming a kingmaker in the UK general election of 2015. Particularly in the event of a Scottish Labour wipeout, it’s not unlikely that neither of the major parties will have enough seats in Westminster to secure a majority. Unlike in prior cycles, the Liberal Democrats, who have been bleeding support for years, may not be able to make up the difference, leaving the SNP with the opportunity to enter a coalition government. It’s obvious what price they would ask for this, though it’s unclear if either major party would be willing to pay it or would instead choose to muddle through as a minority government.

Second, if the SNP control Scotland, the West Lothian question becomes more important. Even if they are not included in the UK government, being able to vote as a bloc on English policies could give the SNP a free hand to extract concessions simply by making mischief wherever possible (e.g., when the ruling party can’t get all its ducks in a row on some English-specific issue). If the Scottish MPs were Labour, this problem could be minimized by the party leadership, but SNP members of the UK parliament would not owe anything to either major party leader.

Check out the Dish’s complete coverage of the independence vote here.

A Bad Night For Personhood

Fetal personhood ballot measures were defeated by solid margins yesterday in two states:

In Colorado, Amendment 67 — which sought to update the state’s criminal code to define fetuses as children — failed by a large 64 percent to 36 percent margin. It marks the third time that Colorado voters have rejected personhood. Meanwhile, in North Dakota, an effort to overhaul the state’s constitution to protect “the inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development” looked like it was poised to pass. Personhood proponents were hopeful that the conservative state would hand them their first major victory, galvanizing the push for similarly restrictive laws in other states. But Amendment 1 was defeated by similarly wide margins as the initiative in Colorado.

Noting that voters have turned down personhood in five separate ballot initiatives since 2008, Kliff reminds us that nobody is really sure what effects these laws would have:

Because no state has ever granted personhood rights to unborn fetuses, it’s really unclear how any specific amendment would work in practice. This was especially true with the North Dakota amendment, which didn’t give any particular rights to fetuses but instead required “the right to life of every human being at any stage” to be “recognized and protected.”

Supporters of both the Colorado and North Dakota initiatives argued that existing protections would still allow for legal abortion. Roe v. Wade, for example, protects legal, elective abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. Choose Life North Dakota said that protection supersedes any state laws. But opponents argued that the amendment was written too broadly and that personhood laws would make abortion illegal. The director of North Dakota’s only in vitro fertilization clinic said that he would close his practice if Measure 1 passed. Embryos are sometimes discarded in treatment, and his lawyer warned that the practice could put workers at risk of legal action.

Even major pro-life advocates are wary of such laws:

Large pro-life groups like Americans United for Life and the National Right to Life Committee have not endorsed personhood ballot initiatives. Part of this is politics: some worried that the amendments (which opponents call draconian abortion bans) will fail so badly they’re not worth the effort, and that they will only prove an embarrassment. And there are also some policy disagreements about what it would actually mean to give personhood rights to fetuses and whether that could have unintended consequences, such as disallowing certain types of birth control. This was what Colorado’s new senator, Cory Gardner, a Republican, was getting at in March when he withdrew his support for Amendment 67.

Marcotte is particularly relieved that Coloradans shot theirs down:

Since the law would have made it a matter of homicide to cause a miscarriage, it could have been used to prosecute women who had miscarriages by accusing them of somehow failing to do more to care for their fertilized egg babies. “If you get a prosecutor who wants to make a statement about unborn life,” Aya Gruber, a law professor at the University of Colorado told Politico, “Absolutely, you could have prosecutions for miscarriages. This law allows it. It allows it!”

At the same time, 53 percent of Tennesseean voters approved an amendment to their state constitution that will make it easier for lawmakers to place restrictions on abortion. Amelia Thompson-Deveaux calls the amendment “the culmination of 14 years of work” by pro-life advocates:

They began organizing in 2000 when the Tennessee Supreme Court struck down several abortion restrictions on the grounds that they violated women’s right to privacy. That decision has until now kept Tennessee from passing anti-abortion laws like the ones that have closed abortion clinics in neighboring states. It’s been an expensive fight — in the last three weeks of October alone, the amendment’s opponents spent more than $3.4 million. Now the protections that have shielded the state’s seven abortion clinics will disappear.