The Dish

The latest polling indicates that Americans want a GOP Senate:

According to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll, a majority of likely voters – 52 percent – say they would like to see Capitol Hill controlled by Republicans, compared to 41 percent who favor the president’s party. (For registered voters, it’s 46 percent GOP and 42 percent Democrat-controlled.) While neither party can boast stellar approval ratings, those surveyed gave Republicans better marks when asked whether what they’ve heard, seen or read in the past few weeks has made them feel more or less favorable towards either party.

Aaron Blake highlights another poll, which shows that “congressional Democrats are facing their highest disapproval rating in at least the last 20 years, at 67 percent.” He later puts this finding in context:

To be clear, the Washington Post-ABC poll still shows a slight difference between the parties, with congressional Republicans viewed dimly by 72 percent of Americans, which is slightly worse than the record 67 percent who view Democrats dimly. And it is beyond question that the GOP’s continually poor image is holding it back from making what could be even bigger gains than it’s primed to make in the Nov. 4 elections.

But the gap between the two parties is shrinking, and there’s plenty of reason to believe the GOP’s image isn’t hurting it much more than Democrats’ is these days.

Beinart ponders our collective apathy:

The dullness comes from this election’s lack of a compelling macro-theme. Yes, there are national refrains: Democrats in state after state call their Republican opponents heartless misogynists; Republicans call their Democratic opponents Obama clones. But there’s no big national issue on which voters feel that they can change the country’s course. It’s not that candidates today are more cynical or homogenized than in midterms past. It’s that the subjects they’re discussing cynically and homogenously don’t matter as much. …

Republicans still denounce Obamacare, but few still believe they can repeal it. Big partisan differences about the size of government remain, but with the deficit going down and Republicans no longer willing to go to the brink over the debt limit, the crisis atmosphere of 2010 has faded. Overseas, Americans worry about Ebola and ISIS, but those threats don’t divide them along partisan lines like Iraq. There’s little reason to believe that electing a Republican Senate would substantially change American policy toward either.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying next month’s elections don’t matter. They do. As Annie Lowrey has predicted, a Republican Senate—if elected—will work mightily to prevent President Obama from using his executive authority to implement a broad range of government regulation. But these potential fights are mostly too narrow and too technical to grab public attention. Americans just don’t believe that as much hinges on their vote as did in 1998, 2002, 2006, or 2010. For many pundits, that makes this election boring. For many ordinary Americans, I suspect, it’s something of a relief.

Along the same lines, Lee Drutman and Mark Schmitt blame our politicians’ lack of big ideas on polarization:

Historically, parties and candidates have sought political advantages by trying to raise the salience of particular issues that might cut across party lines. The assumption was that voters might support Democrats on some issues, while they might agree with Republicans on other issues. So, for example, a pro-choice Republican might be able to win over enough Democratic voters to emerge victorious in a Democratic district, or the reverse. …

As party politics has become at once more homogenous and polarized, it’s not only harder to reach a compromise at the end – such as on immigration reform or the federal budget. There’s also less room for ideas and fresh approaches to issues at the beginning. The “political issue space,” once wide open and full of opportunities to form new coalitions, is now narrow and closed.

Sam Wang compares this election to past ones:

Journalists and pundits have lavished considerable attention on the question of who will control the Senate in 2015. But a broader phenomenon has escaped notice: the sheer number of close state-level races, both in the Senate and in statehouses. At risk are many incumbents who were elected in previous wave years: in 2010 for Republican governors and in 2008 for Democratic senators.

Silver remarks upon the relative stability of his forecast:

Republicans’ odds have never been higher than 66 percent — a figure they reached late last week — or lower than 53 percent. The informal model updates we published going as far back as March also had Republicans as 55 or 60 percent favorites.

To an extent, this stability reflects the noise-reducing features of the FiveThirtyEight model. Our program examines the polls for signs of statistical bias, and weighs them more heavily when they have larger sample sizes, better methodologies and better track records — which can reduce the impact of outliers. The FiveThirtyEight model is also fairly conservative in estimating the uncertainty associated with each race and the disposition of the Senate overall. At times in the past, the polls in most swing states have been biased in the same direction (either toward Democrats or Republicans).

But this degree of stability is unusual. In pretty much every election we’ve covered, the polls have more clearly broken toward one or another party by this point.

Nate Cohn anticipates that “the results of the governors’ races may ultimately play a big role in how analysts interpret the results Nov. 4, including whether this will be viewed as a ‘wave election.'”:

On balance, Democrats seem set to pick up two or three states, mainly because the Republicans enter the elections with twice as many Republican-held seats. But it is easy to imagine the Republicans holding their advantage — there are 29 Republican governors and 21 Democratic ones — or the Democrats picking up a half-dozen seats.

For his book Bad Paper, Jake Halpern investigated the world of American debt collectors. In a review, Thomas Geoghegan considers what makes people pay up:

In [debt collector and ex-con Brandon] Wilson’s case—and I admit I came to like Wilson—it’s because he knows how to “marry the debtor.” He doesn’t threaten; he doesn’t talk about bringing a suit, much less raise the specter of incarceration. It’s true that’s all illegal under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. But the real point here is that such measures don’t get results. No, as Wilson notes, a good collector is even and caring. The good collector will say things like “It’s the right thing to do” and “You’ll feel better about yourself.”

Here’s what collectors know: People want to pay. It’s what Porfiry knows about Raskolnikov: He wants to confess. The good collector helps the debtors get out of their mental jails.

After explaining, Wilson’s collectors dare the author to make a call; for me, and perhaps for Halpern, it’s the most unsettling part of the book.

This is not a writer who calls attention to himself unduly, so the encounter that prompts him to enter into the narrative stream of Bad Paper is significant. Halpern does try to marry the debtor. He tries to show empathy. He listens to the woman Wilson assigns him. She is not a deadbeat. She has been ill. She is bipolar, didn’t he know? But Halpern lets her go. He writes that he lacks a real collector’s rapport with people, together with Wilson’s “innate sense of when to segue from courtship back to the unpleasant matter of collecting.” But the real problem, he admits, is that he doesn’t have the drive. If he were desperate enough, if he had to do this for a living, if the alternative were to push dope out on the streets . . . well, he might be much readier to squeeze her. As he later quotes one collector, who happens to be African American, debt in America is the “white man’s dope.”

So a dealer can have only a certain amount of empathy. Or, as one collection manager tells the author: “You have to empathize with debtors but not have sympathy, because if you have sympathy you don’t get paid.”

Bruce Grierson revisits a surprising study from 1981 that suggests as much:

The men in the experimental group were told not merely to reminisce about this earlier era [1959], but to inhabit it – to “make a psychological attempt to be the person they were 22 years ago,” [psychologist Ellen Langer] told me. “We have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this,” Langer told the men, “you will feel as you did in 1959.” From the time they walked through the doors, they were treated as if they were younger. The men were told that they would have to take their belongings upstairs themselves, even if they had to do it one shirt at a time.

Each day, as they discussed sports (Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain) or “current” events (the first U.S. satellite launch) or dissected the movie they just watched (Anatomy of a Murder, with Jimmy Stewart), they spoke about these late-’50s artifacts and events in the present tense – one of Langer’s chief priming strategies. Nothing – no mirrors, no modern-day clothing, no photos except portraits of their much younger selves — spoiled the illusion that they had shaken off 22 years. At the end of their stay, the men were tested again. … They were suppler, showed greater manual dexterity and sat taller – just as Langer had guessed. Perhaps most improbable, their sight improved. Independent judges said they looked younger. The experimental subjects, Langer told me, had “put their mind in an earlier time,” and their bodies went along for the ride.

Cari Romm relays a similar finding from a more recent study:

In a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science, [Becca] Levy and researchers from Yale and the University of California Berkeley set out to learn the answer by studying 100 volunteers between the ages of 61 and 99 (the average age was 81). One group of participants was asked to write a story about “a senior citizen who is mentally and physically healthy,” while another group completed a subliminal-messaging computer task where positive aging-related words – “spry” or “wise,” for example – flashed across the screen too quickly for them to detect on a conscious level. As a control, others were asked to complete neutral versions of the same activities, either writing a story on a topic unrelated to aging or watching a screen with flashes of nonsense strings of letters.

The volunteers completed their respective tasks once a week for five weeks. At the beginning of the experiment and once weekly for three weeks after it ended, they also took three different tests: one that measured their attitudes towards old age in general; one that measured their perceptions of themselves as people of advanced age; and one that tested their gait, strength, and balance, or what the researchers called “physical functioning.”