Beware The Early Exit Polls

Ed Morrissey calls them “worthless”:

Exit polling data gets collected all day long to find the eventual turnout model for elections, especially in demographics such as age, gender, ethnicity, affiliation, etc. That data only becomes valid when it is fully compiled. Partial data sets for exit polling do not provide predictive outcomes because the turnout models can change significantly during the day, perhaps especially because of early voting. That is exactly what happened in 2004, when media outlets used non-predictive data in predictive ways, and while the data sets were still being compiled.

That isn’t to say that completed exit polls are meaningless. The networks will use the data in part to plug into their election models in order to call races — but that takes place while the results of actual voting are being published, after the polls have closed.

Nate Cohn chips in his two cents on exit polls:

They’re not designed to measure the results perfectly or measure the composition of the electorate. I find myself surprised by how just how accurate the exit poll figures can be, despite the obvious issues with the raw responses and the inability to weight to population targets. Unfortunately, most analysts and reporters jump on the surprising, outlying, newsworthy findings. Often, those figures are the ones most likely to be wrong.

Dana Lind identifies another problem with exit polls, their “tendency to oversample a particular kind of voter of color — the kind who lives in majority-white areas”:

Even though the public doesn’t know exactly how the exit poll chooses where to go, it’s possible to make some educated guesses. The exit poll is trying to predict the margin of victory for one candidate over another across the state. So when it decides which polling places to put interviewers outside of, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s choosing lots of swing precincts — precincts that are harder to predict and likely to affect the outcome. Those are going to be largely white precincts. …

Here’s why this is a problem: the voters of color pollsters run into in majority-white precincts might not be representative of the voters of color across the state. In particular, according to Latino Decisions, voters of color living among whites are “more assimilated, better educated, higher income, and more conservative than other minority voters.”

Raising The Minimum Wage In Red States

Efforts to do so look likely to succeed:

Four states have minimum-wage increases on the ballot on Tuesday, an occasion that’s notable for two reasons. All four states — Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota — lean conservative, meaning that the debate over low wages and income inequality has spread beyond reliably blue parts of the country. And should these four measures pass, as they’re all expected to, a majority of states in the U.S. will soon have higher wage floors than the federal minimum.

Danielle Kurtzleben puts these initiatives in context:

As the Wall Street Journal has noted, all 10 proposed minimum wage measures on state ballots since 2002 have passed. That’s remarkable because the minimum wage is a divisive partisan issue.

When the CBO in February released a report saying that a nationwide $10.10 minimum wage would lead to a decline of around 500,000 workers, conservatives pounced and liberals went on the defensive. But despite these apparent partisan divides in the US, Republican voters aren’t entirely against minimum wage hikes. While Democrats tend to broadly support a higher wage, Republicans don’t always disagree — indeed, they’re roughly evenly split.

Ben Casselman reviews the economic debate over the minimum wage:

Economists are divided over whether these efforts are a good idea. In aworking paper released Monday, David Neumark, J.M. Ian Salas and William Wascher fired the latest salvo in a long–running battle over the effects of raising the minimum wage. Neumark, his coathors and their allies argue raising the minimum wage leads to lost jobs; their opponents, including University of Massachusetts economist Arindrajit Dube, argue the impact on employment is minimal. A 2008 meta-study looked at 64 minimum-wage analyses and concluded that they generally found little to no impact on employment. A poll of leading economists last year found them nearly evenly divided on the question of whether a $9-an-hour minimum wage would “make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment.”

Josh Barro compares the different measures:

The proposals differ in their particulars. Alaska would set its minimum wage the highest, with a gradual rise to $9.75 by 2016. Nebraska would go to $9 in 2016, South Dakota to $8.50 in 2015 and Arkansas to $8.50 by 2017. In Alaska and South Dakota, the minimum wage would continue to rise in line with price inflation in following years, which makes an enormous difference in the long term.

And Reihan wonders how the minimum wage hikes will play out in each state:

[W]hile the discussion of the minimum wage referendums have largely focused on what these states have in common — they’re relatively politically conservative — it hasn’t focused on the fact that among them, Arkansas is unusually poor and that its adult population has an unusually low average skill level. The consequences of a substantial increase in the local wage floor will likely have different consequences in Arkansas, in light of its history of deprivation and isolation, and where higher consumer prices associated with rising compensation costs will have more bite due to its low income levels, than in Alaska, which is considerably more affluent. And while both Nebraska and South Dakota had unemployment rates of 3.6 percent as of August, unemployment in both Alaska (6.8 percent) and Arkansas (6.3 percent) is fairly high. I can’t help but think that Arkansas is making a mistake. But better that Arkansas is making a state-level decision that, as inflation and productivity growth proceeds apace, will be less binding than new federal legislation, which will be less responsive to its particular conditions.

Maps Of The Day

Medicaid Expansion

Many states not expanding Medicaid has denied millions of Americans healthcare:

More than three million people, many of them across the South, would now have health insurance through Medicaid, according to an Upshot analysis of data from Enroll America and Civis Analytics. The uninsured rate would be two percentage points lower.

Today, the odds of having health insurance are much lower for people living in Tennessee than in neighboring Kentucky, for example, and lower in Texas than in Arkansas. Sharp differences are seen outside the South, too. Maine, which didn’t expand Medicaid, has many more residents without insurance than neighboring New Hampshire. In a hypothetical world with a different Supreme Court ruling, those differences would be smoothed out.

Jonathan Cohn makes the economic argument for expanding Medicaid:

It’s easy to recognize the human toll of refusing to expand Medicaid. It’s not so easy to recognize the economic toll. Maybe this chart will help:

GA-Medicaid

It comes from the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute and looks at the implications of that state’s decision not to expand Medicaid eligibility, as the Affordable Care Act’s architects intended.

Josh Barro and Margot Sanger-Katz calculate that today’s elections “could decide whether as many as 1.3 million more people get health coverage in the years ahead”:

There are 15 governor’s races this year in states that have declined to expand their Medicaid programs as part of the Affordable Care Act. But we count only the five where the election is likely to make a difference. The races we’re watching are genuinely competitive and could result in a policy change if a Republican governor is replaced by a Democrat or an independent. We’re also keeping our eye on a sixth state, Arkansas, which has already expanded its program, but where the legislature has to reauthorize the program every year with a three-quarters majority, leaving the program vulnerable to political shifts.

Update from a reader:

In addition to the states in which the the governorship could change, here in North Carolina, Republican Governor Pat McCrory said this week that he is “assessing” whether to expand Medicaid here, after signing a bill last year that blocked its expansion with approval of the General Assembly. “Assessing” might sound like weak tea, but it’s actually a sea change given the tenor of the NC GOP these last couple of years. (I’ll leave it to the reader to infer why he’s floated this the week before an election, when it has mostly gone unnoticed in the local news.)

Don’t Let Your Boss See You Reading This

Roland Paulsen, the author of Empty Labor: Idleness and Workplace Resistance, reviews the research on slacking off:

Most work sociologists tend toward the view that non-work at work is a marginal, if not negligible, phenomenon. What all statistics point towards is a general intensification of work with more and more burnouts and other stress syndromes troubling us.

Yet there are more-detailed surveys reporting that the average time spent on private activities at work is between 1.5 and three hours a day. By measuring the flows of audiences for certain websites, it has also been observed that, by the turn of the century, 70 percent of the U.S. internet traffic passing through pornographic sites did so during working hours, and that 60 percent of all online purchases were made between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. … Even if the percentage of workers who claim they are working at the pinnacle of their capacity all the time is slowly increasing, the majority still remains unaffected. In fact, the proportion of people who say they never work hard has long been far greater than those who say they always do.

Sweet 16 At The Polls?

Libby Nelson argues that 16-year-old Americans should be allowed to vote:

A study of Austria’s expanded electorate found that 16- and 17-year-olds were not less informed than 18-year-olds. Nor were they less willing to participate in politics. And they could pick candidates who represented their own political beliefs just as well as older voters. That addressed several of the common arguments against lowering the voting age: that 16- and 17-year-olds simply aren’t ready to vote. …

During the 1960s, the movement to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 started in four states. It then spread nationwide with a constitutional amendment passed in 1971. A handful of states seem like a natural place to experiment with setting the voting age even lower today.

State legislatures set many of the policies that most directly affect 16-year-olds’ lives, from whether they’re able to drive to how much state funding their schools get to what they’ll eventually pay in college tuition. If we’re going to experiment with giving older teenagers a voice in politics, it makes sense to start at the state level, where it could make the most difference in their day-to-day existence. For the same reason, allowing younger voters into local school board elections would be a logical step.

Osita Nwanevu recommends we keep the age of candidacy in line with the voting age:

Even if progress on youth issues continues to stall and even if young candidates are beaten out by older and more established politicians—as they certainly will be most of the time—establishing a universal right to stand for public office is worthwhile on its own merits. “It’s sort of like in 1919, when the franchise was extended to women for 1920, if people had said, ‘Well all of this hinges on whether women will actually start voting in big numbers next year,’ ” Seery says. “The principle sort of trumps the practice.”

Whether it yields policy changes and boosts participation or not, a constitutional amendment doing away with age of candidacy restrictions will simply extend rights to a politically underprivileged constituency just as the 15th and 19th Amendments did for women and blacks—a worthy objective in and of itself.

Car Repair For The Soul

After co-hosting the NPR show “Car Talk” with his brother Ray for a quarter century, Tom Magliozzi died yesterday at the age of 77:

In a remembrance, Mike Riggs declares, “If you are, or ever were, one of the 25 percent of Americans who can’t afford a major repair, Tom and Ray weren’t just funny, or just entertaining, they were very close to necessary”:

Car Talk did not pioneer consumer advocacy. Many local newspapers and TV stations employ columnists and on-air talent who will hound service providers accused of fleecing people. But most consumer protection journalists aren’t experts, and they certainly aren’t philosophers. Tom Magliozzi – a grease monkey with a degree from MIT – was both. Which is why what you got from Car Talk wasn’t just a first or second opinion on your car problem, but counsel and succor. Some of the people I heard call into Car Talk were anxious and more than a few were borderline frantic. …

Tom and Ray knew that for many of the people who listened to them, a car was not a luxury; they knew that millions of Americans need their cars – to get to work, to transport their children, to buy groceries. So they didn’t stop at diagnosing your about-to-break CV joint or a bad power steering pump, and they didn’t stop at coaching you on how to stand up to your mechanic. They wouldn’t let you off the line until they knew that you knew that there was a solution to your problem.

At least, that’s how it felt as a listener. We never actually called in to Car Talk. But we listened to Tom and Ray the way some people listen to televangelists, waiting for nuggets of divine wisdom that applied to our exact situation.

A classic clip from a reader:

Bob Collins remembers Magliozzi as “the man who made it OK to laugh on public radio”:

Public radio was a lot of things back in the day, but it wasn’t much for personality. You just didn’t laugh on public radio. Even within the public radio industry, a contingent thought the show threatened the dignity of the institution. To others, however, the show liberated public radio from itself, clearing the way for subsequent shows such as “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.”

And John Biggs notes that “Car Talk” had a special significance for a generation of tinkerers:

The brothers, and Tom in particular, reminded us that building and fixing isn’t scary and that repair, in fact, was the way forward. We aren’t supposed to be scared of getting our hands dirty because that’s how progress is made and that’s how you have fun. Tom taught a generation of hackers that there is nothing frightening about taking things apart.

Not Demeaning Ex-Cons

Ben Casselman discusses a ballot initiative in California:

Proposition 47 would reclassify some drug and property crimes as misdemeanors rather than felonies. Proponents of the measure have focused primarily on the cost savings from sending fewer people to prison, but they argue it would also help non-violent offenders like [Richard] Martin become productive members of society.

Opponents counter that any benefits aren’t worth the tradeoffs. The initiative would reclassify possession of date-rape drugs and the theft of many firearms as misdemeanors, which some law enforcement officials argue could result in the release of violent or potentially violent offenders.

But beyond the specifics of Proposition 47, there is an emerging consensus from across the political spectrum that some sort of reform is necessary to help millions of Americans with criminal records find work. Attorney General Eric Holder and other Democrats have spoken frequently about the issue, but so have conservatives such as Rand Paul and New Gingrich, who penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times supporting the California initiative.

Sonya Shah explains why ex-cons seeking employment aren’t the only ones who might benefit:

Proposition 47 stands to benefit survivors of crime, and people concerned about sexual assault should especially be interested in its promise. I know from hearing survivors’ stories how poorly we currently help sexual assault survivors access the trauma services that can be vital in their recovery and ability to avoid future harm. And I know this from first hand experience. …

The “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” would reduce certain nonviolent offenses (e.g., drug possession, petty shoplifting, etc.) from felonies that can bring prison sentences to misdemeanors that bring county jail time, supervised probation, treatment or other forms of accountability. This will prioritize space in our crowded jails and prisons and, importantly, save $750 million billion over five years, according to a state agency. These savings will be allocated to amongst K-12 program, mental health and drug treatment, and victims’ services. Specifically, $75 million in new funds could be available for victims’ services within five years. If $2 million opened two new trauma recovery centers, imagine what $75 million would mean?