Category Archives: elections

would we be better off without any horse-race polls?

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A “horse-race” poll is one that asks people whether they plan to vote and, if so, for whom. These surveys are appearing at the rate of half a dozen per day right now. I don’t think the tide can be stemmed, because we have a constitutional right to ask other people about the election and print the results. And I acknowledge that I follow polls obsessively, checking them several times a day and reading all about the minutiae of party weighting, robocalls versus live calls, and “house effects.” CIRCLE will even ask horse-race questions on our own youth poll, soon in the field.

But what if they all just went away?

Although there would be pros and cons, I think we’d be much better off. The theoretical framework that helps explain why is Jürgen Habermas‘ distinction between instrumental and communicative reason.

With instrumental reason, you know what you want and you deploy resources, including speech, to get what you want. For that purpose, horse-race polls are very useful. For instance:

  • If you are Karl Rove, you are now moving money to House races instead of supporting Mitt Romney, because the presidential race looks lost to the GOP, while the House is more “in play.”
  • If you are a leftish critic of Barack Obama and you live in a blue state, you are probably contemplating not voting (in response to the Pakistan drone bombings and many other issues). You might feel differently if you thought that Romney was about to take your state and the national election was close.
  • If you work for the president’s re-election campaign, you’re not paying any attention to uncompetitive states, like California, Texas, and New York (combined population = 83 million), but you’re suddenly very interested in Nevada (pop. 2.7 million).
  • If you are Barack Obama, you think you’re ahead, and so you’re inclined to run out the clock, rather than, for example, explain what you propose to do about difficult public problems.
  • It’s possible that if you are a Republican, you are losing interest in voting for president, which would make the polls a self-fulfilling prophesy.

One way to assess instrumental action is in terms of the outcomes. From my perspective, Karl Rove’s targeting his millions is bad because he is supporting the wrong people. But lefties’ boycotting an uncompetitive election is fine, even though I am not personally moved to protest this president. (For the record: I voted for Nader in 1996, when I was certain that Clinton would win. This election is closer, and I much prefer Obama to Clinton.)

But we shouldn’t simply assess instrumental action by its outcomes, because that damages other values. In politics, one of the fundamental values is equality: everyone should count for the same. Another value is some version of integrity: you should say what you believe. And deliberation is a value: we should exchange reasons with our fellow citizens and give everyone a hearing. We should deliberate out of respect for other people and also because we might be wrong: deliberation is an opportunity to learn.

If you are sure what you want to happen and you have a pretty accurate sense of how your fellow citizens are going to vote, reasons become relatively unimportant, and some citizens count more than others. Forget about reasoning with all those New Yorkers and Texans: the electoral college outcomes in their states are utterly predictable. Forget about what should count as the best argument for your core positions, because those may not be  tactically valuable things to say. Pick the issues and arguments (no matter how trivial) that seem most likely to win you electoral college votes.

That’s advice for candidates and PACs, but individual citizens may regard the election as a spectator sport and believe that it’s interesting and worth their attention just insofar as the outcome looks close. That is wrong because our job is to decide how to vote and then move on to making other decisions that improve the world. Horse-race polls just distract us.

the youth vote on PBS NewsHour and elsewhere in the media

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Below is a thoughtful and well-reported segment on the youth vote. Judy Woodruff has been covering youth issues with depth and consistency for several cycles and goes beneath the simple, horse-race question (“Will they vote for Obama or not?”) that most reporters ask. She also has a recent blog post with more information. I’m in this clip for a little while, but CIRCLE’s influence on the reporters’ fieldwork and agenda satisfies me much more than my own quotes. (That was also the case with a recent New York Times piece by Susan Saulny.)

Watch In Swing States, Elusive Youth Voters are Jaded, Undecided on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Here are some other recent articles that use our work:

the most redistribution since the Johnson Administration

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In today’s Times, Eduardo Porter argues,

Future historians could well conclude that Mr. Obama led the biggest redistribution of wealth in decades.

The Affordable Care Act, which levies new taxes on the wealthy to expand access to health care for the near poor, seems on track to become the biggest increase in government redistribution since the Johnson administration. …

The Obama fiscal stimulus also did much to assist the most vulnerable Americans. It expanded the food stamp program and the earned-income tax credit. It extended unemployment insurance and sent $800 checks to poor and middle-class families. Over all, the Congressional Budget Office found that total government taxes and transfers reduced the nation’s income inequality by more than a quarter in 2009, the most in at least 30 years.

I think this story has been unaccountably overlooked by upper-middle-class liberals who are remote from welfare programs and over-influenced by symbolic issues, such as the “public option” (which was dropped from the health care bill). They use symbolic issues to measure the administration’s economic progressivism, when the graph above is a much better index. I was on a bus full of liberal academics when the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act last summer, and I was the only one who cheered–not because the decision would help Barack Obama, but because, as Porter notes, the top 1% of taxpayers will each pay $52,000 under the ACA to fund up to $2,000 for each family in the bottom 50%.

The graph is full of paradoxes and challenges. Note, for example, that even though Bill Clinton presided over growth and low unemployment, inequality (both before and after government taxes and transfers) grew rapidly during his eight years, echoing the trends first seen under Reagan. On the other hand, both pre-tax and post-tax inequality fell in the last years of GW Bush–perhaps just as a result of the money that rich people lost in the markets.

Of course, factors well beyond the control of a president affect inequality, but Porter cites evidence that the intentional policies of the Obama administration have helped cut inequality substantially.

I cite this graph because I think it displays important and overlooked trends. I do not mean to imply that redistribution is a good in itself, or that a reduction in the GINI inequality coefficient is necessarily a sign of progress. (Consider the fall between 2007 and 2009: bad years for everyone.) Government spending is only beneficial if the people who get the money benefit broadly, in terms of agency, freedom, and well-being as well as cash. But the argument about the Obama administration should begin with the premise that it has redistributed wealth–just as Romney charges, and left-liberals often deny.

game theory and the super PACs

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Imagine that you lead a conservative super-PAC like American Crossroads, Restore Our Future, the Koch network, or the US Chamber of Commerce, which collectively planned to spend a $1 billion on this fall’s election. Of course, you must accommodate a bunch of separate and strong-willed donors, but I think these are the goals you will balance:

  1. Support the person you most want to see win, which is probably Mitt Romney, because you most want to see Barack Obama lose.
  2. Make the greatest marginal difference in the election by supporting candidates who are in a position to benefit from your dollars.
  3. Support candidates who will maximize your members’ after-tax profits. Whom to choose is debatable–it could even be the Democrats, if you believe they have a better macroeconomic policy–but leaders of conservative super-PACs presumably believe the answer is fiscally conservative Republicans.
  4. Support candidates who are likely to win, because if they win without your money, you have no pull with them. There’s a debate about how much access and influence money buys, but you have something else to worry about besides influence. If Democrats win despite your spending $1 billion for Republicans, you will send a clear message that you are weak and the Democrats can build a coalition without you.

Now, consider that the odds of Barack Obama’s winning in November are 90% according to Sam Wang, 77.6% according to Nate Silver, and 71.7% according to Intrade. Consider also that both the House and Senate are in play, with numerous unpredictable races.

No wonder Karl Rove is spending his money on behalf of Senate Republicans. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that conservative super-PACS were spending $10 million/week on behalf of Mitt Romney until a few weeks ago, but they are down to just $2.07 million in the last week.  CRP also calculates that Restore Our Future has spent $84 million on congressional races, American crossroads has spent $34 million, and Americans for prosperity has spent $31 million.  Meanwhile, an industry like financial services (including real estate and insurance) demonstrates how to distribute your cash if you are mainly concerned about your own after-tax profits plus mollifying the winner. They’ve given $221 million to Republicans, of which only $29 million had gone to Romney. They have also given $116 million to Democrats, including an ingratiating $12 million to Obama.

Conversely, if you are a liberal Democrat, I think your favorite outcomes, in descending order of priority, are: 1) win Congress, 2) win the presidency with no help from corporate donors, and 3) win the presidency with some corporate support.

the nucleus of our society (on Paul Ryan, liberals, and We the People)

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The nucleus of our society, of our economy, it’s not government, it’s us, it’s We the People, it’s the individual, it’s the family, it’s those of us who live in Racine, in Janesville, all across this state.

— Rep. Paul Ryan at a Racine Tea Party Rally (transcribed from here)

I agree with Ryan that some forms of liberalism or progressivism are excessively state-centered. For instance, in a recent post, I argued that the individual reader drops out of Martha Nussbaum’s work; the government is her only agent of justice, her only guarantor of rights and capabilities. Nussbaum says (in effect) “there should be a government that protects rights”–without explaining how we are going to get such a thing. If she implies a responsibility for us (her readers), it’s limited to forming correct opinions about the rights that individuals should bear and then voting for the policies and politicians that will deliver those rights.

That’s an example from high theory, but when I served on two 2008 Obama campaign policy committees, I observed that liberal policymakers and policy wonks also have little appetite for public participation and voice.

Thus I agree with Ryan that the nucleus of any democratic society is its people, and the government is just one tool among many. But note how Ryan equates “We the People” with individuals and families. It’s reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s remark that “there is no such thing as Society.” Libertarian-leaning conservatives, just like state-centric liberals, see only two things in the world: governments and individuals. They disagree about the relationship between the two sectors, but both miss the role of collective civic or political action. Collaborative action is the role of “We the People.” In turn, the government ought to be one of our collaborative projects.

To be fair, Ryan has said (through his official Twitter account), “Limited, effective government should do what it does well, not suffocate the economy and crowd out civil society.” Possibly he holds a robust conception of civil society to complement his economic theory. But classical libertarians and the Supreme Court, in Citizens United, view civil society simply as a collection of private voluntary groups, defined by their independence from the state. The Court has defined corporations not as people–that’s a myth–but as associations, thereby eliding the difference between markets and civil society. I suspect Ryan shares the same view. The missing alternative is civil society as the domain in which We the People deliberate and solve public problems together, choosing when and whether to use the state as our tool. One of the most eloquent proponents of that view has been Barack Obama, at least in his pre-presidential writings and speeches.