Tag: Premium

Poor Choices

Linda Tirado, author of Hand To Mouth, explains why the poor often make terrible decisions:

I smoke. It’s expensive. It’s also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It’s a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from collapsing or exploding.

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing?

Dreher, who was initially sympathetic to Tirado, had second thoughts after a reader dug up a 2013 hit piece on her. In an interview with Danielle Kurtzleben, Tirado defends herself against such attacks:

DK: You were accused of being a hoax after that “Poverty Thoughts” essay came out. Is that flaring up again now, with your book coming out? What’s your response to all that?

LT: I’m a published author at this point, and The Nation did a very, very good job of reporting on that. But most of the criticism I’ve seen centers around my decision-making processes. What I see a lot of is people talking about like things I have to explain — like why did you do this or why did you do that? A lot of people are confused about how I couldn’t, for instance, feed myself when I could pay my electric bill.

The Guardian also caught up with Tirado:

[Q.] Were you expecting what happened after your essay was published?

[A.] Oh, God, no! I was just on a message board. I was just talking to my friends the same way I’d done for many years. Then I went to bed, and then I went to work. It took me about two weeks to realise I was awake because I was pretty sure I was having a really fucked-up dream. There is no processing what happens when the internet looks at you and says: it’s your turn. It was insane: people were outside my house, they were calling my elderly relatives, I got 20,000 emails in a week. I still have no idea why it was this piece at this moment; it’s nothing me and my friends haven’t been saying for years. I don’t understand why it was controversial. Period.

Meanwhile, Andrea Louise Campbell, author of Trapped In The Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle, shares another harrowing story of poverty:

In February 2012 my sister-in-law Marcella was in a car accident on her way to nursing school, where she was working towards a career which she hoped would catapult her and my brother Dave into middle-class security. Instead, the accident plunged them into the world of American poverty programs. Marcella is now a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the chest down. She needs round-the-clock personal care and assistance.

The only source – public or private – for a lifetime of such coverage is Medicaid. But because Medicaid is the government health insurance for the poor, she and my brother must be poor in order to qualify. (Medicare does not cover long-term supports and services, and private long-term care insurance is time-limited and useless to a 32-year-old who needs decades of care). Thus, Marcella and Dave embarked on a hellish journey to lower their income and shed their modest assets to meet the state limits for Medicaid coverage.

To meet the income requirement, my brother reduced his work hours to make just 133 percent of the poverty level (around $2,000 per month for their family). Anything he earns above that amount simply goes to Medicaid as their “share of cost” – a 100-percent tax.

A Warm Welcome For Narendra Modi

US-INDIA-DIPLOMACY-MODI

The prime minister of India, who was once denied entry to the United States for apparently turning a blind eye to deadly anti-Muslim riots during his tenure as chief minister of Gujarat, will be meeting with President Obama at the White House tonight. Somini Sengupta considers the significance of Modi’s visit:

Mr. Modi is visiting at a time when India and the United States are each seeking big things from the other. Theirs was supposed to be what Mr. Obama once called the defining “partnership” of the 21st century. The relationship has withered since then, though, and both Washington and Delhi are trying urgently now to repair it, showering each other with the diplomatic equivalent of Champagne and roses during Mr. Modi’s five-day visit to America.

He has met with two mayors and three governors, and more than two dozen members of Congress attended his event at [Madison Square] Garden. He is scheduled to meet on Monday with 11 chief executives from companies like Boeing, Google and Goldman Sachs, and then to speak at the Council on Foreign Relations. An intimate dinner is planned with Mr. Obama on Monday (though Mr. Modi’s aides have let it be known that he is fasting for a Hindu festival called Navratri), as well as lunch on Tuesday at the State Department and tea with Speaker John A. Boehner. His itinerary also includes a meeting with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Raghav Bahl argues that “Modi’s rapid transformation from persona non grata to esteemed White House guest signals a momentous shift, not only in India’s prospects but also in its relationship with the United States”:

Despite India’s long-time policy of non-alignment, Washington has fitfully pursued a closer strategic partnership with Delhi over the past decade. China’s runaway rise and the scourge of large-scale Islamic terrorism have pushed the United States and India into unprecedented strategic cooperation, erasing years of political differences, mistrust, and miscommunication. An economically robust India could muster the confidence and gravitas to become the assertive strategic ally the U.S. has always hoped for. When CNN’s Fareed Zakaria asked Modi, in his first post-election interview, whether such a relationship was possible, the prime minister responded firmly: “I have a one-word answer: Yes.”

Adam Lerner believes that Modi “could turn out to be a tremendous boon to Washington, so long as the relationship doesn’t turn sour”:

Should India emerge from the inflation and slowed growth of the past few years and become an Asian dynamo, its success will inherently promote the oft-stated American goal of a vibrant, growing and democratic continent. In the long run, the biggest threat to unfriendly regimes in the region is not the U.S. military—it is a democratic, secular and growing India, embodying fully the ideals that framed the country’s independence in 1947. Modi provides a fresh start for Indians after the last administration’s corruption and indecision. So long as he avoids the sort of counterproductive Hindu nationalism that many fear is in his bones, there is reason to be optimistic that Modi could help fulfill this promise.

However, Rebecca Leber notes that the US and India may find themselves butting heads on climate change:

When President Barack Obama said “nobody gets a pass” on fighting climate change in a speech last week, he might as well have been speaking directly to India. India’s willingness to reduce greenhouse gases is a major wild card in negotiations for a global climate treaty next year. It’s difficult to imagine a meaningful agreement that doesn’t include some kind of commitment from what is, after all, the country with the second largest population in the world. But Indian officials haven’t been very enthusiastic about the prospect. Just a day after Obama spoke, India’s environment minister Prakash Javadekar told the New York Times, “What cuts? That’s for more developed countries.”

Addressing those differences will be a major topic of discussion on Monday, when Obama and newly elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hold their first-ever meeting in Washington. It’s easy to see why India’s emissions are so important. India is already the world’s fourth-biggest polluter — after China, and the U.S., and European Union combined.

Meanwhile, William J. Antholis puts Modi’s visit to the US in the context of his four-month “diplomatic whirlwind”:

First, he invited leaders from neighboring Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to his inauguration – amidst tense relations with all three.  He then set off to a summit with Japan’s Shinzo Abe and hosted a state visit by Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Mr. Modi seemed intentionally to be setting the stage for his two most important summits – welcoming China’s Xi Jinping to India last week, and then travelling to the United States this week to attend the UN General Assembly meetings and then meet with President Obama.

Across the country – north, south, east and west – his election has uncorked an intoxicating optimism. His summer of summitry has been popular because trade and economics have been his core message. In my own recent trip across India in early September — traversing six cities in 12 days – I met with government officials, BJP and Congress Party members, business leaders, journalists, policy analysts, academics and students. Even Mr. Modi’s opponents concede that the nation’s mood is changed, and many are willing to help seize the moment to advance India’s future, at home and abroad.

In contrast, Hartosh Singh Bal isn’t so taken by Modi:

In India, there is already evidence that his political honeymoon is over. One of the few polling agencies to monitor voter sentiment in the country continuously, Cvoter, has aggregated the answer over time to the question: “Which party can best manage/handle problems facing our country today?” Since Modi was sworn in as India’s prime minister in late May, the levels of trust in his ruling Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) have declined rapidly to where they were a month before the elections, and the BJP—after a national victory that ensured one-party parliamentary rule in India for the first time since 1984—has lost a series of important local elections. The party appears to have misread the votes it got in May as support for its far-right nationalistic tendencies, rather than its economic priorities.

(Photo: A crowd of US-based supporters await the arrival of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India for a community reception September 28, 2014 at Madison Square Garden in New York. By Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

Why Chinese Cops Are More Dangerous Now

In the wake of March’s Kunming train station terrorist attack, in which 33 people died, the Chinese government decided to provide guns to the country’s previously unarmed patrol officers. William Wan warns that “the flood of newly armed police — combined with poor training and the government’s take-no-prisoners attitude – could become as fearful a problem as the terrorism it is intended to combat”:

China’s removal of a ban on police guns came in response to a gruesome attack on a train station several hundred miles from here, but it has given the police almost blanket authority to shoot whenever they see fit. … In the latest police-related violence, at least 40 people died [two Sundays ago] in China’s restive Xinjiang region, according to state-run news media, which attributed the incident to terrorists and identified the deceased as “rioters” shot by police or killed in explosions. By contrast, the sleepy village of Luokan is about as remote and unlikely a place for terrorism as can be found. Yet when police fatally shot a man recently in the middle of a busy market here, they declared him a terrorist as well and abruptly closed the case.

Wan and Xu Jing observe that many newly armed officers express “a surprising aversion” to their guns:

“I’ve never liked guns,” said one nine-year veteran. Until this year, guns were forbidden to most police – except for SWAT units and teams on special missions. “Even in past special operations, when we were ordered to have guns, I let co-workers take them instead. You have to worry about it misfiring, about it getting stolen or someone dying improperly.”

A retired officer from Hangzhou City suggested there’re tricky issues of pride at play. In the past, police were praised for daring to confront criminals without firearms, he said. And whenever bad guys got away or a situation spiraled out of control, police could always fall back on the excuse that they were unarmed, unlike police in many countries. “Now that they have guns, they’re in a tighter spot,” said the retired officer. “If you shoot, the public may question whether it was necessary. If you don’t, they may say, ‘You can’t even control criminals with the power of  a gun?'”

Quote For The Day II

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“Well, I think there’s going to be a generational challenge. I don’t think that this is something that’s going to happen overnight. They have now created an environment in which young men are more concerned whether they’re Shiite or Sunni, rather than whether they are getting a good education or whether they are able to, you know, have a good job. Many of them are poor. Many of them are illiterate and are therefore more subject to these kinds of ideological appeals. And, you know, the beginning of the solution for the entire Middle East is going to be a transformation in how these countries teach their youth. What our military operations can do is to just check and roll back these networks as they appear and make sure that the time and space is provided for a new way of doing things to begin to take root. But it’s going to take some time … But in the meantime, it’s not just buy them time, it’s also making sure that Americans are protected, that our allies are protected …

With the allies, with their ground troops, and if we do our job right and the Iraqis fight, then over time our role can slow down and taper off. And their role, reasserts itself. But all that depends, Steve. And nobody’s clearer than I am about this. That the Iraqis have to be willing to fight. And they have to be willing to fight in a nonsectarian way. Shiite, Sunni and Kurd alongside each other against this cancer in their midst,” – president Obama, Sixty Minutes.

Well, if anything can calm me down, it’s this no-drama president carefully explaining what his strategy is. It’s not about transforming the Middle East, or unseating Assad, or directly intervening to try and achieve in the future what we couldn’t achieve in the past. It appears to be about minimally containing the threat of Jihadist networks so as to create some space for “a new way of doing things to begin to take root”. This is, as Krauthammer put it, containment-plus.

But the same worries persist. What if it becomes impossible to roll back a network like ISIS? What if air bombing campaigns – with civilian casualties – actually galvanize ISIS and empower it with a new global identity with which to draw recruits? What if the broken Iraqi state can never be put back together as a multi-sectarian democracy? What if a “new way of doing things” is actually decades in the future? Are we really going to be bombing for decades? And in how many countries does that formula apply?

The key thing for the president is that the Iraqis fight in a non-sectarian way.

But we already constructed a multi-sectarian government, we already trained a massive Iraqi army, we already ousted a Shiite prime minister – and there are precious few signs of such non-sectarian fighting, least of all in a region now convulsed in either a cold or hot Shi’a-Sunni war. A couple weeks ago, the Iraqi parliament could not overcome sectarian divisions to fill the interior and defense ministries even as an insurgency was nearing Baghdad! If they cannot get there in a real emergency, what chance if the Americans are busy saving their collective asses?

I can see what the president would like to happen. But even he implies it won’t happen for a long, long time. Which means we will be bombing for exactly that long time. And there are unintended consequences to all such wars which he doesn’t even seem to contemplate. Those are my worries – an indefinite military commitment, with no way to achieve the underlying changes that would end such a commitment, with the real possibility of blowback.

The Natural Gas Hype

Natural Gas

Rebecca Leber deflates it:

If you thought of natural gas as a useful “bridge fuel” to help America transition from dirty to clean energy, a new study published in Environmental Research Letters has some disappointing news: Natural gas won’t cure our greenhouse-gas affliction. Rather, the study finds, abundant and cheap gas would cause people to consume more electricity, and since gas competes directly with renewables, it will delay the transition to clean power. The result: natural gas does not noticeably lower emissions.

Brooks Miner adds that “natural gas does have a dark side: It is composed primarily of methane, which has a much stronger climate-warming effect than carbon dioxide.”

Why Did America Turn Right?

Jacob Weisberg pans Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, the latest installment of his history of how conservatism came to dominate American politics in the second half of the twentieth century:

As a political history, The Invisible Bridge suffers from more serious deficiencies: a lack of interest in character, and a failure to engage seriously with ideas. Both Nixon and Reagan appear here as flat figures, for whom the author musters no human sympathy and about whom he offers no fresh understanding. At various points Perlstein calls Reagan a “divider” and accuses him of telling lies. Every politician surely divides and misleads to some extent, but these loaded terms fit his subject badly. They jar because they’re in conflict with Reagan’s fogginess, his lack of cynicism, and with what he accomplished politically, which was to unify divided strands in his party, win over an entire class of Democratic voters, and achieve more bipartisan consensus in Congress than any politician has in the 34 years since he was first elected. The lack of any apparent inner life, about which Edmund Morris expressed his frustration in his Reagan biography, Dutch, makes the fortieth President a confounding biographical subject. But unlike Morris, Perlstein doesn’t wonder about what made Reagan tick. He doesn’t find him an enigmatic figure at all.

The second, more serious problem is the author’s tendency to pathologize conservative views rather than reckon with them.

Perlstein builds his Nixon-Reagan bridge not out of Reagan’s policies, domestic or international, but out of the nostalgia-clouded vision of American life he embodied. He believes Reagan triumphed not because he proposed reining in government but because he told Americans they were fundamentally good and decent and didn’t have to face up to their collective misdeeds. Perlstein writes almost as if Reagan had won the general election in 1976, instead of losing the nomination to Ford. The seeds of Reagan’s appeal may have been planted during his losing campaign. But there was a lot more of the 1970s ahead—four more years of energy shocks and disco infernos—before Reagan triumphed by challenging an incumbent President who told Americans that they weren’t perfect and that they would have to accept limits. Reagan’s broad vision of renewed national possibility made for a powerful contrast with Jimmy Carter, to be sure, but he won in 1980 running on a nationalistic, anti-government platform that was more popular than his opponent’s.

In an interview, Perlstein does his best to explain his understanding of Reagan – which is as the son of an alcoholic father:

Once you wrap your mind around the adult children of alcoholics trying to negotiate the chaos of their lives, they form their characters around that. That’s a very strong foundation for understanding. Most people who cover up their inner wounds with this hard shell of fantasy, once that shell faces adult reality, it cracks, and the result is often trauma and neurosis. I call Reagan an “athlete of the imagination.” He worked out in that mental gymnasium ten times harder than us mortals, right? His shell ended up going all the way down.

He was able to use that set of resources and skills he brought in order to do some pretty powerful things, in order to manage and negotiate and the political and social situations around him in a strikingly effective way, and lead quite effectively. I think previous biographers thought they could crack the shell open and get at the real Reagan. I think this is the real Reagan. There are people like that.

I’m haunted and struck by a story that Ron Reagan tells in his wonderful memoir, My Father at 100. He said that, when his dad was toward the end and wracked by dementia and Alzheimers, he’d wake up in the middle of the night with a start and say “the guys need me, the guys need me.” As Ron points out, it wasn’t that the guys needed him on the set of a Warner Brothers film, or the White House situation room, it was the guys in the locker room needed him on the football film. It really just kind of shows that, at the deepest levels of his being, this projection of himself as a hero on the field of battle went all the way down, for good or ill.

Recent Dish on the book here.

The Friend Of Our Friend Is Our Enemy

The “moderate” Syrian rebels aren’t happy about us bombing their extremist allies:

Thousands of civilians and rebels across Syria protested allied airstrikes against extremist militants that continued on Saturday, underscoring the challenge the U.S.-led campaign faces in dealing with complex ties among rival rebel factions.

Jacob Siegel remarks that “America is competing with al Qaeda for the support of those rebel groups. And so far the momentum is on Qaeda’s side”:

The alliance between America and rebel forces has been strained by the U.S. refusal to directly attack the Assad regime. In some ways, the U.S. and its chosen proxies are fighting different wars, despite sharing a common enemy in ISIS.

The rebels consider the Assad regime, which has slaughtered tens of thousands of Syrians over years of brutal attacks, their primary enemy, while the U.S. has condemned Assad but focused its attacks only on ISIS and al Qaeda.

That tension led to a symbolic break last week when Harakat Hazm, one of the few vetted rebel groups to receive American weapons and training, called the U.S.-led airstrikes “an attack on national sovereignty” that would only strengthen the Assad regime.

Larison saw this coming:

Supporters of expanding the war against ISIS into Syria seem to assume that “moderate” rebels will pursue Washington’s goals, but that isn’t going to happen. Like any proxy group, the “moderate” opposition was always going to pursue its own agenda, and there was never going to be much that the U.S. could do about this, especially when it was so intent on trying to “shape” events. These opposition protests confirm what opponents of arming Syrian rebels have taken for granted from the start: providing arms to rebels isn’t going to gain the U.S. the influence or control that Syria hawks want, and the belief that the U.S. can build up a “moderate” alternative to both the regime and jihadists has always been a fantasy.

Is John Oliver A Journalist?

I have to agree with Asawin Suebsaeng: of course he is.

On some critical public issues – take the scourge of “native advertising” – he has done more to bring the question to light than any other media source (I try but the Dish doesn’t have the mega-reach of a “comedy” show on HBO). That story was almost quintessentially journalism: it took on established interests – the whoring media industry – and called them out on it. It shamed the New York Times for their “re-purposed bovine waste”. That it did so with humor and wit and jokes is neither here nor there. Great journalism should be entertaining. It doesn’t all have to be vegetables. Was Mark Twain merely a humorist? Is Michael Lewis not our finest contemporary non-fiction writer?

Jon Stewart comes close – but the one frustrating aspect of his show is his meek interviewing. It’s as if once he has to enter a more conventional interactive piece of journalism, he panics and turns it into light comedic banter. Or he recoils when he needs to put the boot in – and apologizes for being too mean. Colbert pulls it all off through irony – he plays a fake journalist, but nonetheless exposes real truths and real phonies. But Oliver has taken all this a step further. His extra eight minutes give him a chance for relatively long-form investigative journalism – such as the wonderful bit on the Miss America pageant and its bullshit claim that it grants fellowships to far more women than it does. Yes, it’s funny; yes, it ended with a live comedy skit with Oliver as a losing pageant contestant. But its methods – tracking down massive amounts of documents to prove that Miss America is full of it – were classically journalistic.

And Oliver has a position each time: sponsored content is a massive scam betraying every ethical principle of journalism; the Miss America pageant is an utterly preposterous dinosaur engaged in comedic attempts to cover up its fathomless sexism. It’s opinion journalism at its entertaining best. The closest to it is arguably Real Time with Bill Maher – a comedy show that contains a serious broadcast about current events and ideas.

My own view is that Americans seem unlikely to tune into a weekly, lively show about the week’s events or news – of the kind you get in Britain. They want to be entertained – especially if the show is about the news. But what the brilliance of Maher and Oliver suggests is that there might be room for shows not unlike theirs’ but with less of an escape clause to claim it’s all jokes, never mind, move on … Why not a show that does what Oliver does but a few inches closer to opinionated and witty journalism? A show in which the punchlines are not always jokes but also key arguments to shift the public debate? I suspect Oliver and Maher and Colbert and Stewart have opened a door. Who will go through it?

The Question Of Scotland Isn’t Settled

Scotland Decides - The Result Of the Scottish Referendum On Independence Is Announced

Peter Geoghegan keeps tabs on the situation:

Concerns about Westminster’s ability to deliver on its devolution promises is one of the factors behind the huge surge of people joining pro-independence parties in the wake of the referendum defeat. In one week, more than 35,000 people have joined the SNP, making the nationalists the third-largest party in the United Kingdom. Demand to join the SNP has been so great that the party’s website crashed over the weekend. An emergency hotline has been set up and a dedicated team assigned to cope with the numbers seeking to join. The Scottish Green Party has seen its numbers more than triple too.

Many of these new recruits are people who delivered fliers and tried to convince friends, neighbors, and colleagues to vote yes in the largest grassroots campaign Scotland has ever seen.

In a more recent dispatch, Geoghegan continues:

Far from defeat destroying Scotland’s independence movement (as many thought it would) the disappointment of losing has quickly given way to renewed political engagement, says Michael Rosie, a sociologist at the University of Edinburgh. At the same time, the major pro-UK forces—Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats—have quickly descended into in-fighting about what powers should be offered to Scotland’s devolved parliament at Holyrood in Edinburgh.

“The side that lost is acting like the side that won by being energized, and the side that won is acting like the side that lost by falling into bits,” says Dr. Rosie.

(Photo: A discarded Yes sticker lies on cobble stones along the Royal Mile after the people of Scotland voted no to independence on September 19, 2014 in Edinburgh, Scotland. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

The Senate Swings Toward The GOP

At least that’s what the NYT’s forecast shows:

NYT Forecast

Nate Cohn analyzed the state of affairs on Friday:

Four consecutive surveys have shown Cory Gardner, the Republican candidate in Colorado, in the lead. Two nonpartisan polls — the only two of the last three weeks — showed Dan Sullivan, the Republican candidate in Alaska, also in the lead. The Republicans have not held a consistent lead in Iowa, but the Democrats haven’t led any of the last three polls there, either. As a result, Leo now makes Republicans slight favorites in these states — and that’s the main reason the fight for Senate control has drifted toward the Republicans.

Silver asks, “So what conditions would merit outright panic from Democrats?”:

They should keep a close eye on North Carolina and Kansas. These states have been moving toward Democrats in our forecast, helping them offset Republican gains elsewhere.

But these are also races in which the Democrat is doing better than the “fundamentals” of the states might suggest. The Democratic incumbent in North Carolina, Kay Hagan, is pretty clearly ahead in the polls today (including in a CNN survey that was released on Sunday). However, two other states with vulnerable Democratic incumbents, Colorado and Alaska, have shifted toward Republicans. Perhaps if the Republican challenger Thom Tillis can equalize the ad spending in the Tar Heel State, the polls will show a more even race there as well.

And the Kansas race is still in its formative stages.

Molly Ball profiles Greg Orman, the independent running in Kansas:

Control of the Senate could hinge on this unlikely contest between an insistently nonpartisan, Ivy League-educated former consultant and a Republican incumbent who’s spent 33 years in Washington. If elected, Orman says he would caucus with whichever party has the majority. But if there are 50 Republicans and 49 Democrats, he would play tiebreaker: Joining the GOP would give them 51 votes; joining Democrats would give them 50 votes plus the vice president. In that case, Orman says, he would ask both parties to commit to issues like immigration and tax reform, and join the one that agreed. “We’re going to work with the party that’s willing to solve our country’s problems,” Orman said in an interview.

Almost every ballot has an independent or third-party candidate who blames the two major parties for America’s problems. Most of them are flakes or gadflies who go unnoticed. But Orman has money, he’s run a smart campaign, and he seems to be in the right place at the right time. A weak Republican incumbent, a Democrat willing to get out of the way, and a state whose Republican majority has been badly split by years of toxic intraparty battles—all these factors have made Kansas uniquely receptive to Orman’s message.

Andrew Prokop watches as the various forecasts come into agreement:

In early September, there was an evident split among the six main Senate forecasts. Those that used only polls of individual races — HuffPost Pollster, Daily Kos, and Princeton Election Consortium — showed a small Democratic advantage. But those that also incorporated factors called “fundamentals” —FiveThirtyEight, the Upshot, and the Washington Post — gave the GOP a lead. (These “fundamentals” can include both state-level factors like candidate fundraising and how the state voted in the 2012 presidential race, as well as national factors like the generic ballot.)

Now, though, that split is gone — two of the polls-only models also give the GOP a lead …