Category Archives: Politics

Indiana moving away from “Illinoyed” campaign to attract businesses?

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Indiana continues campaigns to catch the attention of Illinois firms but it may soon take a different tone:

For three years, in an economic development strategy aimed squarely at jobs and revenue in higher-tax states, Indiana has been trying to poach Illinois businesses. While they say the tactic has succeeded wildly, officials in Illinois say the impact of cross-border moves largely has been a wash, more political theater than anything substantive…

Kelly Harrington Nicholl, head of marketing at the development corporation since 2009, is the woman behind Indiana’s most memorably catty catchphrases: “Illinoyed” and “Stillinoyed.” But after years of poking fun at its fiscally challenged neighbor, Indiana is about to soften its tone. “We’re not going to beat up on Chicago anymore,” Smith says.

This means that a cluster of billboards along I-90 cautioning northbound drivers that higher taxes lie ahead will come down soon, Nicholl says. “It’s time to play nice,” she says. She declines to say whether Illinois’ newly elected Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, has anything to do with it. “There is a sunset to everything.”…

Despite Indiana’s bravado, the number of state-to-state moves are increasing in both directions, according to an analysis of preliminary data by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. The data, supplied by New Jersey-based research firm Dun & Bradstreet, show 70 companies in Illinois relocated their entire business or branches of their business to Indiana in 2013, up from 40 in 2012. During the same period, 48 companies in Indiana moved all or portions of their businesses to Illinois, up from 39 in 2012.

The shift in political theater is noteworthy. Did everyone in Indiana get the political things they wanted? While the shift may be due to Rauner’s election, I wonder if it could also be due to (1) the Illinoyed campaign wearing out (marketing campaigns have a limited shelf life before people stop responding and (2) recognition that, according to the data, the campaign has been a wash (even popular lines can’t hold up forever if not supported by evidence). The competition between the states is likely not completely over but it is interesting to consider how Illinois and Indiana might cooperate to enhance the economies of both states…

“Why Congress won’t raise the gas tax”

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Gas prices are lower and the money is needed for highways but one writer suggests Congress is nowhere near raising the gas tax:

Fuel prices are plunging to their lowest level in years. The Highway Trust Fund is broke, and Congress faces a spring deadline to replenish it. The obvious answer—the only answer, according to many in Washington—is to raise the 18.4 cent-per-gallon gas tax, which hasn’t gone up in more than 20 years. Since prices at the pump have dropped more than a dollar per gallon in some areas, drivers would barely notice the extra nickel they’d be forced initially to pay as a result of the tax hike. That wasn’t true until recently: For years, the pocketbook punch of the Great Recession combined with gas prices that peaked above $4 made an increase both politically and economically untenable.

Yet even with prices at a four-year low, the odds of Congress touching the gas tax are as long as ever. “I think it’s too toxic and continues to be too toxic,” said Steve LaTourette, the former Republican congressman best known for his close friendship with his fellow Ohioan, Speaker John Boehner. “I see no political will to get this done.”…

Advocates on and off Capitol Hill are mounting a new push to lift the gas tax as Republicans prepare to assume full control of Congress in January. Funding for the Highway Trust Fund will run out May 31. On 60 Minutes last month, officials including former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell used the specter of a major bridge or highway collapse to warn of the need for new investments. LaHood, a Republican who was once rebuked by the Obama White House for suggesting a switch to a mileage-based tax, is now going public on the gas tax, in his typically colorful style. “The best argument for doing it is is that America is one big pothole,” he told me in a phone interview, “and America’s infrastructure is in the worst shape that we’ve seen in decades.”…

In a separate interview, Blumenauer said the administration had recently “dialed back” its opposition, with senior officials telling lawmakers that if Congress could somehow pass a gas tax hike, he would sign it. Yet just a few hours after his and Petri’s press conference, Obama himself seemed to put their plan back on ice. At a business roundtable at the White House, FedEx CEO Frederick Smith asked Obama why Congress couldn’t just raise the gas tax and solve the infrastructure problem. “In fairness to members of Congress, votes on the gas tax are really tough,” the president replied, after first chuckling that if it he were in charge on Capitol Hill, “I probably already would have done it.”

It sounds like Congress thinks that such a move would be very unpopular. Americans like driving (even if they have cut back in recent years), prefer cheaper gas, believe the country is still experiencing tough economic times, and many don’t want to personally pay more in taxes. Yet, it makes some sense that highways should be funded by the gas tax: if you use the highways and associated infrastructure, you should help bear some of the cost.

Is Congress responsible for this or the American people? The article suggests Congress won’t act but Congress suggests the American people wouldn’t want it. Are both groups pretty blind to infrastructure needs or long-term investments? In the short-term, few people want to pay the necessary costs but no one will like it if the situation becomes dire.

Threatening to cut off the NSA’s water supply in Utah

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Here’s one way to fight a political battle against the NSA: consider stopping the flow of water to a facility you don’t like.

Lawmakers are considering a bill that would shut off the water spigot to the massive data center operated by the National Security Agency in Bluffdale, Utah.

The legislation, proposed by Utah lawmaker Marc Roberts, is due to go to the floor of the Utah House of Representatives early next year, but it was debated in a Public Utilities and Technology Interim Committee meeting on Wednesday. The bill, H.B. 161, directs municipalities like Bluffdale to “refuse support to any federal agency which collects electronic data within this state.”

The NSA brought its Bluffdale data center online about a year ago, taking advantage Utah’s cheap power and a cut-rate deal for millions of gallons of local water, used to cool the 1-million-square-foot building’s servers. Roberts’ bill, however, would prohibit the NSA from negotiating new water deals when its current Bluffdale agreement runs out in 2021.

The law seems like a long-shot to clear legislative hurdles when Utah’s legislature re-convenes next year, but Wednesday’s committee hearing was remarkable, nonetheless, says Nate Carlisle, a reporter with the Salt Lake Tribune who has waged a fight with the NSA and Bluffdale officials to determine how much water the data center is actually using. “What’s noteworthy is no one on the panel said: ‘Hey, wait a minute, we can’t do this,’” he says. “They had some specific concerns about the language of the bill, but there was no outright opposition.”

All of this does suggest an interesting tactic in the arsenal of local governments yet I have a hard time imagining the possible outcomes. The federal government finds an independent water supply? There is a massive lawsuit about whether a local government can limit the water supply to a federal agency? The threat pushes the federal government to move their facilities elsewhere? The federal government ensures any new facility has much longer contracts for basic services? Regardless, I would guess this situation wouldn’t be resolved quickly.

Related thought: given serious droughts – like the one in California – could the government require a larger share of water to maintain “critical” functions over the needs of other users?

 

A sociologist discusses the political leanings of Katniss Everdeen

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Would Katniss fit in with political progressives, the Tea Party, or libertarians? One sociologist weighs in:

“I was convinced to read them by a vegan radical historian I knew from Japanese camp,” she says. While reading it in the context of the growing income gap, and the frustration that was causing, in the States, Armstrong-Hough recalls that it was impossible not to notice the social commentary, nor to untie the strands of it from the plot. And yet, particularly given the flipped switch of Mockingjay, wherein the revolutionaries show their own capacity for cruelty and depravity, she says, “I don’t think the franchise is promoting any particular kind of society.”Instead, according to Armstrong-Hough, it’s a model of total resistance. “We see politicking, corruption, and unjustified violence from both the guardians of the status quo in the Capitol and the architects of the rebellion,” she says. “Katniss, whom we naturally align ourselves with, rejects both these systems.”

This double rejection feels timely, Armstrong-Hough notes. “So many Americans are disenchanted with politics itself, not just one side of the aisle or the other.”

“What I did see, though, was a sort of theory of social change that I found surprisingly sophisticated,” she says, adding that the books remind her of the ideas of James C. Scott, a Yale-based social and political theorist. An influential, self-described “crude Marxist” professor who lives on a farm and raises animals in between publishing tomes about anarchism, Scott is a figure of interest to people on both ends of the ideological spectrum. The New York Times called one of Scott’s books “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning that has been cited, and debated, by the free-market libertarians of the Cato Institute… development economists and partisans of Occupy Wall Street alike.”…

Beyond just advocating personal resistance to forces of political control, she says the books put forth the idea that “violence breeds docility.” “I don’t mean that threatening people with violence makes them docile, because it doesn’t. I mean that teaching people to be violent and consume violence makes them docile,” she explains. “The Games institutionalize a political docility not so much because they threaten violence to the districts’ children, but because they create a society in which people think they must choose survival over solidarity. I think a lot of people, regardless of their political affiliation, feel like there has been a lot of being forced to choose survival over solidarity going around in the US.”

So The Hunger Games is a Marxist critique where the games distract everyone from the oppression from the Capitol? Or is it at the end primarily about not giving into revenge and instead establishing a stable society (since Katniss shoots Coin rather than Snow)?

The book ends like a lot of these kinds of stories often do: the heroine returns home, troubled by all the conflict, settled into “normal” family life. In fact, there isn’t much vision at the end of what Panem has become. We are told that kids are taught about the Hunger Games. But, what kind of government do they have? How do all the districts get along? The story isn’t terribly concerned with all of this; much of the energy of the series is about fighting the long battle, not about depicting the better society.

 

The bias toward one party in 2014 election polls is a common problem

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Nate Silver writes that 2014 election polls were generally skewed toward Democrats. However, this isn’t an unusual problem in election years:

This type of error is not unprecedented — instead it’s rather common. As I mentioned, a similar error occurred in 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2012. It’s been about as likely as not, historically. That the polls had relatively little bias in a number of recent election years — including 2004, 2008 and 2010 — may have lulled some analysts into a false sense of security about the polls.

Interestingly, this year’s polls were not especially inaccurate. Between gubernatorial and Senate races, the average poll missed the final result by an average of about 5 percentage points — well in line with the recent average. The problem is that almost all of the misses were in the same direction. That reduces the benefit of aggregating or averaging different polls together. It’s crucially important for psephologists to recognize that the error in polls is often correlated. It’s correlated both within states (literally every nonpartisan poll called the Maryland governor’s race wrong, for example) and amongst them (misses often do come in the same direction in most or all close races across the country).

This is something we’ve studied a lot in constructing the FiveThirtyEight model, and it’s something we’ll take another look at before 2016. It may be that pollster “herding” — the tendency of polls to mirror one another’s results rather than being independent — has become a more pronounced problem. Polling aggregators, including FiveThirtyEight, may be contributing to it. A fly-by-night pollster using a dubious methodology can look up the FiveThirtyEight or Upshot or HuffPost Pollster or Real Clear Politics polling consensus and tweak their assumptions so as to match it — but sometimes the polling consensus is wrong.

It’s equally important for polling analysts to recognize that this bias can just as easily run in either direction. It probably isn’t predictable ahead of time.

The key to the issue here seems to be the assumptions that pollsters make before the election: who is going to turn out? Who is most energized? How do we predict who exactly is a likely voter? What percentage of a voting district identifies as Republican, Democrat, or Independent?

One thing that Silver doesn’t address is how this affects both perceptions of and reliance on such political polls. To have a large number of these polls lean in one direction (or lean in Republican directions in previous election cycles) suggests there is more work to do in perfecting such polls. All of this isn’t an exact science yet the numbers seem to matter more than ever; both parties jump on the results to either trumpet their coming success or to try to get their base out to reverse the tide. I’ll be curious to see what innovations are introduced heading into 2016 when the polls matter even more for a presidential race.

Why do more liberal cities have more expensive housing?

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After providing evidence that more liberal American cities have higher-priced housing, several explanations are offered for the phenomenon:

Kolko’s theory isn’t an outlier. There is a deep literature tying liberal residents to illiberal housing policies that create affordability crunches for the middle class. In 2010, UCLA economist Matthew Kahn published a study of California cities, which found that liberal metros issued fewer new housing permits. The correlation held over time: As California cities became more liberal, he said, they built fewer homes….

“All homeowners have an incentive to stop new housing,” Kahn told me, “because if developers build too many homes, prices fall, and housing is many families’ main asset. But in cities with many Democrats and Green Party members, environmental concerns might also be a factor. The movement might be too eager to preserve the past.”

The deeper you look, the more complex the relationship between blue cities and unaffordable housing becomes. In 2008, economist Albert Saiz used satellite-generated maps to show that the most regulated housing markets tend to have geographical constraints—that is, they are built along sloping mountains, in narrow peninsulas, and against nature’s least developable real estate: the ocean. (By comparison, many conservative cities, particularly in Texas, are surrounded by flatter land.) “Democratic, high-tax metropolitan areas… tend to constrain new development more,” Saiz concluded, and “historic areas seem to be more regulated.” He also found that cities with high home values tend to have more restrictive development policies…

“Developers pursue their own self-interest,” Kahn said. “If a developer has an acre, and he thinks it should be a shopping mall, he won’t think about neighborhood charm, or historic continuity. Liberals might say that the developer acting in his own self-interest ignores certain externalities, and they’ll apply restrictions. But these restrictions [e.g. historic preservation, environmental preservation, and height ceilings] add up, across a city, even if they’re well-intentioned. The affordability issue will rear its head.”

The options presented above include: (1) fewer housing permits; (2) environmental concerns; certain geographies that limit space, particularly along coastlines; (4) high taxes and high home values and (5) generally having more restrictions. Even though these factors are likely intertwined, it seems like it would be possible to look at the individual effects even when controlling for the other factors. One issue may be the relatively small sample size as such analyses are often limited to the 100 largest metropolitan areas. Even within the 100 biggest cities, there could be very different processes at work as Boise, Richmond, and San Bernadino are #98-100.

One common theme of these findings – outside of the geography argument – involves regulation and restrictions. Regulation doesn’t necessarily have to lead to less affordable housing. Regulations could also be used to push developers to include some units of affordable housing. Yet, it is hard for communities to turn down the big real estate money that can flow in; just see the recent happenings in New York City where high-priced units are still being built at a furious pace.

Political campaigns combining big data, ground games

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Close elections mean both political parties are combining ground games and big data to try to eke out victories:

Workers like Ms. Wellington and Mr. Noble are, in the end, critical to any ground campaign, no matter how sophisticated data collection and targeting models are, said Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.”

“The great irony of the modern ground game is it’s this meeting of incredibly modern analytics and data married to very old-fashioned delivery devices,” he said. “It’s people knocking on doors; it’s people making phone calls out of phone banks; but the calculations that are determining which door and which phone are different.”…

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ramped up its commitment, creating the “Bannock Street project,” a multimillion dollar, data-driven effort to persuade, register and turn out voters.

“The easiest way to look at it is our strategy to winning is expanding the voting universe,” said Preston Elliott, Hagan’s campaign manager, in an interview in his Greensboro office. “It’s a little more machineish than just catching a wave and riding momentum.”

Republicans say they are catching up. In Raleigh, campaign workers and volunteers showed off a new smartphone app that helps canvassers target their door knocks. But Republican officials refused to reveal volunteer numbers, paid staff totals, field office locations or a tabulation of voter contacts. Nor would they allow reporters to recount the phone-bank pitch, “the secret sauce,” as they called it.

This is taking new information about voters – something political parties always want – and putting it into real-time (or close) models in order to produce more effective targeted efforts with limited time and efforts before elections.

Two other thoughts:

1. It would be interesting to then see how these new efforts fit with broad appeals politicians make to the public. Does this new kind of information and targeting mean that politicians will spend less time making big claims and instead focus on smaller segments of voters?

2. Americans aren’t always thrilled with the kind of information corporations or tech companies have about them. Are they happy with political parties having more information? Of course, people don’t have to give out this information but this information is going into the hands of political parties who don’t exactly have the highest ratings these days.

New way of measuring poverty gives California highest rate

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The Census Bureau tried changing the definition of poverty and it put California at the top of the list for poverty:

California continues to have – by far – the nation’s highest level of poverty under an alternative method devised by the Census Bureau that takes into account both broader measures of income and the cost of living.

Nearly a quarter of the state’s 38 million residents (8.9 million) live in poverty, a new Census Bureau report says, a level virtually unchanged since the agency first began reporting on the method’s effects.

Under the traditional method of gauging poverty, adopted a half-century ago, California’s rate is 16 percent (6.1 million residents), somewhat above the national rate of 14.9 percent but by no means the highest. That dubious honor goes to New Mexico at 21.5 percent.

But under the alternative method, California rises to the top at 23.4 percent while New Mexico drops to 16 percent and other states decline to as low as 8.7 percent in Iowa.

Not surprisingly, the new methodology has become political:

It’s now routinely cited in official reports and legislative documents, and Neel Kashkari, the Republican candidate for governor, has tried to make it an issue in his uphill challenge to Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, even spending several days in Fresno posing as a homeless person to dramatize it.

The definition of poverty is an interesting methodological topic that certainly has social and political implications. I assume the Census Bureau argues the new definition is a better one since it accounts for more information and adjusts for regional variation. But, “better” could also mean one that either reduces or increases the official number which then can be used for different ends.

Democratic McMansion in Maryland

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A newly renovated home in Maryland may just be a Democratic McMansion:

If you are a Democratic politician getting wined and dined in D.C., chances are you’ve spent an evening or two at the Norton Manor, a faux-Old European estate in Potomac, Maryland that arrived seemingly out of nowhere last year. After a six-year renovation, the extravagant Neoclassical McMansion on nine acres, owned by the Indian-American technology entrepreneur Frank Islam and his philanthropist wife Debbie Driesman, is now fêting guests like Vice President Joe Biden and the Afghan ambassador. Apparently all you have to do to get well-connected politicians at your dinner table is build a pastiche of a Gilded Age mansion, an 18th-century French chateau, and (of course!) the gardens of Versailles in a rich suburb of D.C. Fittingly, the couple says they built Norton Manor as a tribute to the American dream. The Washington Post recently profiled the house, unloading a slew of facts about the place. Here now, 10 of the most interesting details:…

10. This couple prefers Democrats. Just this year, they’ve hosted a dinner for Vice President Biden, a fundraiser for Senator Al Franken, and an event for Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, among other important left-leaning politicos…

6. $1.5M was spent on landscaping, and now there are 1,600 boxwoods, 11,000 outdoor lights, several artificial streams, waterfalls, and stone bridges. Also, there’s a backyard teahouse with a koi pond and a reflecting pool…

2. The house was built by GTM Architects, and decorated by DC interior designer Skip Sroka, who is known for his methods for hiding electronic appliances (so as to not detract from faux-Old European flourishes). He spent three years decorating this “American palace,” as he called it in the Washington Post.

Two quick thoughts:

1. This is definitely a mansion, not a McMansion. Given the costs, 40,000 square feet, and the extra features, this is beyond normal McMansion territory. Indeed, I suspect a normal McMansion would definitely not be up to par for hosting important politicians.

2. I thought McMansions were for conservatives? The headline may be playing around with these stereotypes by suggesting that Democrats with money also live in and visit such homes. Going further, I would guess the homes of wealthy Republicans and Democrats may not differ all that much.

2014 Democrats echo 2012 Republicans in arguing political polls are skewed

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Apparently, this is a strategy common to both political parties: when the poll numbers aren’t in your favor on the national stage, argue that the numbers are flawed.

The [Democratic] party is stoking skepticism in the final stretch of the midterm campaign, providing a mirror image of conservative complaints in 2012 about “skewed” polls in the presidential race between President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney.

Democrats who do not want their party faithful to lose hope — particularly in a midterm election that will be largely decided on voter turnout — are taking aim at the pollsters, arguing that they are underestimating the party’s chances in November.

At the center of the storm, just as he was in 2012, is Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com…

This year, Democrats have been upset with Silver’s predictions that Republicans are likely to retake the Senate. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) mocked Silver at a fundraising luncheon in Seattle that was also addressed by Vice President Biden, according to a White House pool report on Thursday.

“Pollsters and polling have sort of elbowed their way to the table in terms of coverage,” Berkovitz said. “Pollsters have become high profile: They are showing up on cable TV all the time.”

This phenomenon, in turn, has led to greatly increased media coverage of the differences between polling analyses. In recent days, a public spat played out between Silver and the Princeton Election Consortium’s Sam Wang, which in turn elicited headlines such as The Daily Beast’s “Why is Nate Silver so afraid of Sam Wang?”

There are lots of good questions to ask about political polls, including looking at their sampling, the questions they ask, and how they make their projections. Yet, that doesn’t automatically mean that everything has been manipulated to lead to a certain outcome.

One way around this? Try to aggregate among various polls and projections. RealClearPolitics has a variety of polls in many races for the 2014 elections. Aggregation also helps get around the issue of celebrity where people like Nate Silver build careers on being right – until they are wrong.

At the most basic level, the argument about flawed polls is probably about turning out the base to vote. If some people won’t vote because they think their vote won’t overturn the majority, then you have to find ways to convince them that their vote still matters.