Nate Silver

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Following up on Tea Parties

Here are some observations on the April 15 Tea Parties.  In all the news clips, I saw not a single person of color.  I think this is because they were basically anti-Obama demonstrations with more than a tinge of racism.  These demontrations were mostly not about taxes.  They were about how President Obama is not a citizen, was not legitimately elected, and will take away your Second Amendment rights. 

Then there is the question of attendance.  Nate Silver who has been tracking this at fivethirtyeight.com reports his final total to be more than 300,000.  He writes

 promised that I wasn’t going to put much more work into estimating crowd sizes for yesterday’s tea party events, but here is one last update. The important thing is that we now have a credible estimate for Atlanta at 15,000 persons; we were previously relying on an estimate of 7,000 that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had initially made yesterday evening but then pulled back upon.

It’s not surprising that Atlanta had the largest turnout (in fact, the largest turnout by far, according to our collection of nonpartisan estimates). Turnout was much higher in state capitals than in other cities, and seems to have been much larger in the South than in other regions of the country. Atlanta, being by far the largest Southern state capital, therefore did very well.

His list ranges from the high point in Atlanta to 12 at the Fort Point, NY tea party.  300,000 is really not a lot of people when you think about it.  Maybe the rest of us should be glad of that.  As for the larger turnouts in the South,  I believe that Southern whites just cannot believe that a black man is really President.

So what exactly do the Republicans do with this Fox New movement?

Dan Baltz wrote in today’s Washington Post

The teabag protests that marked tax day on April 15 represent an opportunity and a risk for the Republican Party. Opportunity because they offer a jolt of energy for a battered party after two dismal elections. Risk because they supply at best only a partial answer to what ails the Republicans

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For now standing back and saying no to Obama may be enough. But opposition to Obama’s policies represents an incomplete message for a party seeking to regain power. Republicans still must confront larger questions of how they can appeal nationally and how they would govern were they given the opportunity again.

Will the Republican Party try to use the issues of the Tea Parties to try to revive?  I don’t think that is the road back.  I hope and believe that Americans are beginning slowly to more past issues of race and gender.  Certainly the youngsters I see on the subway in Boston are often in mixed groups and couples are often interracial.  Maybe the race issue and the anti-Obamaism is why more people turned out in the South.  Plus we have that black president with very high approval ratings.  We will probably find out how tea parties work as a strategy when we know the results of the Kay Bailey Hutchinson v. Rick Perry (king of the Texas Tea Party) race for the Republican nomination for Texas governor.

Here are two final looks are the Tea Parties.  Tom Toles from the Washington Post

The Republicans should maybe remember Jim Jones.

And last but not least a link to Jon Stewart.

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Election updates

Remember Minnesota where poor Amy Klobachar is trying to fill the the shoes of two Senators?  The election may be coming to a close – finally.  While Norm Coleman is going to appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court it doesn’t seem likely that they will overturn the results of the panel of judges that has been overseeing things.  At this point, Al Franken’s lead is 312 votes. 

This from Franken’s lawyer on April 7

At post-court press conference, lead Franken attorney Marc Elias commented that the election contest is essentially over, with Al Franken the winner after the court had 351 previously-rejected ballots counted, which boosted Franken’s lead from 225 votes to 312.

“Today is a very important step, as we now know the outcome of the election contest,” said Elias, “and that is the same outcome as the recount, which is that Al Franken has more votes than Norm Coleman.”

When asked whether he expected Coleman to appeal, Elias said: “That’s a question at this point for former Sen. Coleman. I guess I would say the same thing about his appeal as I said about his case: That the U.S. court system is a wonderful thing, as it’s open to people with non-meritorious claims.”

It really is time for Norm Coleman to hang it up.

 

 

 

 

 

In Illinois, there was no surpise in the 5th Congressional District.  Michael Quigley, a Democrat, replaced Rahm Emanuel, another Democrat.

The other close election is in New York State’s 20th Congressional District.  Politico’s Scorecard  reports as of today

According to the latest unofficial combined machine and paper results released this afternoon, Democrat Scott Murphy has a 35-vote lead over Republican Jim Tedisco in New York’s 20th District.

The following counties have finished counting their domestic absentee ballots: Delaware, Essex, Greene, Otsego, and Rensselaer counties. No numbers have been reported to the state from Saratoga and Washington counties

The interesting thing about this is comparing the counties left to be counted and Nate Silver’s analysis.  Washington County is heavily Democratic while Saratoga is Republican.  Saratoga, however, had fewer absentee ballots.

One thing that seems fairly clear is that there tend to be a relatively higher proportion of absentee ballots returned in counties where Murphy performed well on election night. For example, Columbia County, where Murphy won 56.3 percent of the of the vote last week, accounted for 9.8 percent of ballots on election night, but accounts for 15.3 percent of absentees. Conversely, Saratoga County, which is a Tedisco stronghold, represented 36 percent of ballots on election night but only 27.2 percent of absentees:
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If I simply apportion the absentee ballots based on the distribution of the election day vote in each county, I show Murphy gaining a net of 173 ballots during the absentee counting phase. In addition, as Michael Barone has noted, although a plurality of the absentee ballot returns are Republican, they are somewhat less Republican than registration in the district as a whole.

If Murphy hangs on, it looks like a trifecta for the Dems.  Two holds and one gain.

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More on the Party of Zero

In case you haven’t been reading fivethirtyeight.com since the Presidental election, you really should check in once in a while.  There is Nate Silver’s advance look at the the details to be released later.

Eric Cantor is said to want to eliminate North Dakota rather than Idaho, while Thaddeus McCotter has suggested using the balance of TARP funds to purchase scratch-off tickets

You have to see the diagram to get the rest.

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The Obama Code

George Lakoff on the the Obama Code is a new post (February 24) on Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com.  As Nate says, it is very long but worth reading and thinking about.  Here is my attempt to excerpt and summarize.  George Lakoff is a professor of professor of linguistics and cognitive science at the University of California at Berkley.

As President Obama prepares to address a joint session of Congress, what can we expect to hear?

The pundits will stress the nuts-and-bolts policy issues: the banking system, education, energy, health care. But beyond policy, there will be a vision of America—a moral vision and a view of unity that the pundits often miss.

What they miss is the Obama Code. For the sake of unity, the President tends to express his moral vision indirectly. Like other self-aware and highly articulate speakers, he connects with his audience using what cognitive scientists call the “cognitive unconscious.” Speaking naturally, he lets his deepest ideas simply structure what he is saying. If you follow him, the deep ideas are communicated unconsciously and automatically. The Code is his most effective way to bring the country together around fundamental American values.

For supporters of the President, it is crucial to understand the Code in order to talk overtly about the old values our new president is communicating. It is necessary because tens of millions of Americans—both conservatives and progressives—don’t yet perceive the vital sea change that Obama is bringing about.

The word “code” can refer to a system of either communication or morality. President Obama has integrated the two. The Obama Code is both moral and linguistic at once. The President is using his enormous skills as a communicator to express a moral system. As he has said, budgets are moral documents. His economic program is tied to his moral system and is discussed in the Code, as are just about all of his other policies.

Lakoff continues

Behind the Obama Code are seven crucial intellectual moves that I believe are historically, practically, and cognitively appropriate, as well as politically astute. They are not all obvious, and jointly they may seem mysterious. That is why it is worth sorting them out one-by-one.

The seven elements are:  values over programs; progressive values are American values; biconceptualism and the new bipartisanship; protection and empowerment; morality and economics; systemic causation and systemic risk; contested concepts and patriotic language.  Lakoff dissects each of these in turn.  A few of his more interesting observations

Every policy has a material aspect—the nuts and bolts of how it works— plus a typically implicit cognitive aspect that represents the values and ideas behind the nuts and bolts. The President knows the difference. He understands that those who see themselves as “progressive” or “conservative” all too often define those words in terms of programs rather than values. Even the programs championed by progressives may not fit what the President sees as the fundamental values of the country. He is seeking to align the programs of his administration with those values.
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Progressive thought rests, first, on the value of empathy —- putting oneself in other people’s shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, and therefore caring about them. The second principle is acting on that care, taking responsibility both for oneself and others, social as well as individual responsibility. The third is acting to make oneself, the country, and the world better—what Obama has called an “ethic of excellence” toward creating “a more perfect union” politically.

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Biconceptualism lay behind his invitation to Rick Warren to speak at the inaugural. Warren is a biconceptual, like many younger evangelicals. He shares Obama’s views of the environment, poverty, health, and social responsibility, though he is otherwise a conservative. Biconceptualism is behind his “courting” of Republican members of Congress. The idea is not to accept conservative moral views, but to find those issues where individual Republicans already share what he sees as fundamentally American values. He has “reached across the aisle” to Richard Luger on nuclear proliferation, but not on economics.….

Biconceptualism is central to Obama’s attempts to achieve unity —a unity based on his understanding of American values. The current economic failure gives him an opening to speak about the economy in terms of those ideals: caring about all, prosperity for all, responsibility for all by all, and good jobs for all who want to work.

Crises are times of opportunity. Budgets are moral statements. President Obama has put these ideas together. His economic program is a moral program and conversely. Why the quartet of leading economic issues—education, energy, health, banking? Because they are at the heart of government’s moral mission of protection and empowerment, and correspondingly, they are what is needed to act on empathy, social and personal responsibility, and making the future better. The economic crisis is also an opportunity. It requires him to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the right things to do.

And then the summary

The Obama Code is based on seven deep, insightful, and subtle intellectual moves. What President Obama has been attempting in his speeches is a return to the original frames of the Framers, reconstituting what it means to be an American, to be patriotic, to be a citizen and to share in both the sacrifices and the glories of our country. In seeking “bipartisan” support, he is looking beyond political affiliations to those who share those values on particular issues. In his economic plan, he is attempting to realign our economy with the moral missions of government: protection and empowerment for all.

I don’t really think I’ve done justice to Dr. Lakoff in my summary and editing.  If this is interesting to you go to fivethirtyeight.com (link on my blogroll) and find Nate Silver’s post and spend some time reading it for yourself.