Category Archives: Politics

New York governor says local governments, schools should save money by merging

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo suggested one way local government can save money in this economic crisis: merge or consolidate.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo had tough words Friday for local officials facing fiscal crises and seeking more help from Albany, telling them they should consolidate services or whole governments and school districts rather than looking for relief from Albany.

“If it was really, really tough, you’d see that happen,” Cuomo said in his strongest comments yet on the local fiscal crises. “If you are a school district, or a city, or a town or a county, and you are looking for a fundamental financial reform, consolidation is one of the obvious ones.”

Cuomo said he believes local politics is standing in the way of mergers and consolidations that would save taxpayers money and improve efficiency of services. He said deciding to consolidate should be easy, yet “politically, it’s difficult … I get the politics.”

Despite years of hard times, Cuomo said you can count “on one hand” the number of consolidations among 50,000 local governments, school districts, fire and library taxing districts and more.

School districts and local governments say they are already consolidating and merging, but that’s not enough. They are asking for more laws than Cuomo has offered in his state budget proposal to cut labor costs, pension costs and more funding.

Advocates like Myron Orfield and David Rusk have been pushing for metropolitanization for decades – and if Cuomo is right, it might happen now because local governments will have little choice when faced with tough economic issues. However, there are three major issues standing in the way of government consolidation even when times are tough:

1. Local control and interests. This is part of the foundation of the American governmental system: residents should have some say in local government. Thus, local governments and residents will fight hard before they have to hand off decision-making to outsiders.

2. We could end up with situations where communities and governments that are harder off are pushed to consolidate while wealthier areas can hold out longer. This is then a different kind of inequality: wealthier residents would have more local control while poorer residents would have less control.

3. Consolidation might save money but what happens to the quality of the local services? Merging might lead to a reduction of services and some residents will not be happy about this. This is more of a quality of life issue that could influence crime rates, school performance, garbage pickup, and more.

You can collect lots of Moneyball-type data but it still has to be used well

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Another report from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference provides this useful reminder about statistics and big data:

Politics didn’t come up at the conference, except for a single question to Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight election oracle who got his start doing statistical analysis on baseball players. Silver suggested there wasn’t much comparison between the two worlds.

But even if there’s no direct correlation, there was an underlying message I heard consistently throughout the conference that applies to both: Data is an incredibly valuable resource for organizations, but you must be able to communicate its value to stakeholders making decisions — whether that’s in the pursuit of athletes or voters.

And the Obama 2012 campaign successfully put this together. Here is one example:

Data played a major role. There’s perhaps no better example than the constant testing of email subject lines. The performance of the Obama email with the subject line “I will be outspent” earned the campaign an estimated $2.6 million. Had the campaign gone with the lowest-performing subject line, it would have raised $2.2 million less, according to “Inside the Cave,” a detailed report from Republican strategist Patrick Ruffini and the team at Engage.

This is an important reminder about statistics: they still have to be used well and effectively shared with leaders and the public. We are now in a world where more data is available than ever before but this doesn’t necessarily mean life is getting better.

I recently was in a conversation about the value of statistics. I suggested that if colleges and others were able to effectively train the students of today in statistics and how to use them in the real world, we might be better off as a society in a few decades as these students go on to become leaders who can make statistics a regular part of their decision-making. We’ll see if this happens…

Is it worth holding local elections for less than 15% turnout?

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The Daily Herald asks whether the low turnout for Tuesday’s local elections in the Chicago area means the elections should not be held:

Voter turnout Tuesday was so poor area election officials were calling the effort a waste of tax dollars…

Numbers show no county in the area managed even a 15 percent turnout. Suburban Cook County faired the best overall with a 13.8 percent turnout, according to the summary report available online. Much of even that low number is attributable to interest in the special primary to replace Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. In other places, such as Palatine Township, the top vote-getter was township clerk candidate Lisa Moran with a mere 1,612 votes.

Without a Congressional draw on the ballot, Lake County logged a turnout of a little more than 11 percent. The low total left Lake County Clerk Willard Helander scratching her head…

In DuPage County, a narrowly focused ballot fueled a 3.9 percent voter turnout, officials said. Tuesday’s primary affected voters in only two precincts who could make a choice between five candidates for Aurora Ward 9 alderman…

Kane County Clerk Jack Cunningham took that sentiment one step further. His county logged a 2.9 percent turnout. That works out to about one vote cast per minute in all of the county for the entire election day, Cunningham said. That’s not enough to justify the cost of running the election.

Those are some low turnout totals. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was anything to be voted on in DuPage County and I keep up with local news and regularly read the newspaper. If it hadn’t been for some of the coverage of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg giving money in the race for Jesse Jackson Jr.’s former seat, I may not have known anything was being voted on.

Some obvious points (to me):

1. Why not vote for these offices and other matters during bigger elections? Yes, this may mean there is more for voters to consider at a time and it is hard to keep up with it all, but at least people would have more of an idea to vote.

2. In response to the low turnout, one county clerk asked whether people care about their local government. My short answer: no, not really. Most communities don’t generate the kind of involvement or major issues that consistently divide the community that would drive people to vote. Even in talking to local public officials, some of them will tell you that they got involved in local government because they saw something they wanted to change and then got involved.

3. I would love to see this story include some data about local voter turnout over time. We know that election turnout has dropped even with the bigger elections. What about these smaller elections? Is there a “golden age” when people used to care more about local government and voted?

Correlations that get at why big cities lean toward Democrats

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Richard Florida discusses several reasons, based on correlations, why big cities now so clearly lean toward the Democratic party:

Density played a key role in the metro vote. (To capture it we use a measure we of population-based density, which accounts for the concentration of people in metro). The average Obama metro was more than twice as dense as the average Romney metro, 412 versus 193 people per square mile. With a correlation of .50, density was an even bigger factor than population (where the correlation is .34). The reverse pattern holds for the share of Romney votes; the negative correlation for density (-.51) was significantly higher than that for population (-.33)…

The chart below plots the relationship between a metro’s share of college grads and its share of Obama votes. The line slopes steeply upward showing how the share of Obama votes increase alongside metro density. The share of college grads in a metro is positively correlated with the share of Obama votes (.42) and negatively with the share of Romney votes (-.44)…

The chart above shows the relationship between the share of the creative class and the share of Obama votes across metro areas. The line slopes steeply upward, indicating a considerable positive relationship. The share of creative class workers is positively correlated with the share of Obama votes (.40) and negatively with the share of Romney votes (-.41)…

Republicans may still be the party of the rich, but most of the country’s more-affluent metros lined up squarely in the Obama camp. The correlation between the average wages and salaries of metros and the share of Obama votes is positive (.50) and it is negative for Romney votes (-.51). This makes sense too, as larger metros have greater concentrations of knowledge-based talent and industries and are wealthier to begin with. (The associations we find are even more substantial for metros with more than one million people, with the correlations increasing to .71 for Obama and -.72 for Romney.) This follows the “Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State” pattern identified by Andrew Gelman of Columbia University, who infamously found that while rich voters continue to trend Republican, rich states trend Democratic.

Florida argues this is evidence of class-based differences in American life, specifically, differences between the creative class and those in knowledge industries compared to the rest of the United States.

However, this raises a few questions:

1. The analysis here seems to be done across metropolitan areas while some of these voting patterns break down as we compare cities versus suburbs. For example, there are those who suggest it is really about cities and inner-ring suburbs that vote Democratic while more further flung suburbs and exurbs vote Republican. See earlier posts about the analysis of Joel Kotkin – here and here.

2. Making claims with correlations with tricky. Florida acknowledges this before he rolls out the analysis: “As usual, I point out that correlation points to associations between variables only, not causation.” But, then why stop the analysis at correlations here? Looking at the relationships just between two variables at a time ignores the complex relationships between factors like race, class, location, jobs, and more. Why not quickly run some regressions?

3. If this analysis is correct (and we need more in-depth analysis to check), why are Republicans so bad at appealing to the creative class?

Evaluating the charts and graphics in President Obama’s “enhanced experience” version of the State of the Union

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In addition to the speech, President Obama’s State of the Union involved an “enhanced experience” with plenty of charts and graphics. Here are some thoughts about how well this data and information was presented:

But sometimes, even accuracy can be misleading, especially when it comes to graphics and charts. On Tuesday night, President Obama gave his State of the Union address and the White House launched an “enhanced” experience, a multimedia display with video, 107 slides and 27 charts…

Overall, Few said Obama’s team created well-designed charts that presented information “simply, clearly and honestly.”

On a chart about natural gas wells:

“This graph depicting growth in natural gas wells suffers from a problem related to the quantitative scale, specifically the fact that it does not begin at zero. Although it is not always necessary to begin the scale of a line graph at zero, in this case because the graph was shown to the general public, narrowing the scale to begin at 400,000 probably exaggerated people’s perception of the degree in change.”

On a chart about “energy-related CO2 emissions”:

We found that the data behind this chart match up with what the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports in its table of U.S. Macroeconomic Indicators and CO2 Emissions. But the y-axis is too compressed and as a result the chart exaggerates the trend a bit.

On a chart about American troop levels in Afghanistan:

Annotating discrete data points as this chart does can be helpful to tease out the story in a bunch of numbers, but that’s not a replacement for properly labeled axes. And this chart has none.

It seems like the data was correct but it often was put into a compressed context – not surprisingly, the years Obama has been in office or just a few years beforehand. This is a basic thing to keep in mind with charts and graphs: the range on the axes matters and manipulating these can change people’s perceptions of whether there have been sharp changes or not.

Argument: rural American voters are being disenfranchised

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A member of the Hoover Institution argues rural Americans are losing their right to self-governance:

With each passing election, rural and small town Americans have ever less influence on their state and national governments and ever declining control over the governance of their own communities. Their lives are increasingly controlled from distant state capitals and from the even more distant Washington, D.C., by politicians with little incentive to pay attention to their country cousins. To some extent, their disenfranchisement is the inevitable result of a century of urbanization and economic centralization. But the erosion of self-governance in rural America is also the result of a generally well intentioned but simplistic understanding of democracy and the associated elimination of institutional protections of local democratic governance.

Two ideas have been central to this effective disenfranchisement of rural America. First, that one person/one vote is an inviolable principle of democratic government under the United States Constitution. Second, that the winners of elections owe allegiance only to those who voted for them, no matter how close the margin of victory…

The reality is that rural communities have experienced a declining influence on state governance ever since reapportionment was first mandated in the 1960s. Many will say that this is as it should be. Rural and small town voters constitute minorities in every state, and minorities are supposed to lose in a democracy. But that is the same argument made against the Electoral College, given the possibility that a candidate who wins the popular vote might lose in the Electoral College, and it is an argument that also would condemn the much greater counter-majoritarian nature of the U.S. Senate.

Different and diverse majorities in each state are combined in the U.S. Senate to pursue national policies that are truly national and not just what will serve the interests of the nine states in which the majority of the nation’s population resides. There is no similar safeguard at the state level for different and diverse majorities in small town and rural communities that happen to constitute the red regions of the blue states—though there once was.

Prior to the 1964 United States Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims, most state legislatures included one house apportioned on the basis of population and a second chamber apportioned on the basis of counties or other geographical regions. Many of the former had not been reapportioned for decades, leaving growing urban areas with less representation per capita than rural regions. On the basis of the principle of one person/one vote, the Court found that the failure of most states to regularly reapportion their lower houses put them in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.

The first thing I thought of when reading this argument was that this is a long-standing tension in American history. Thus, we have mechanisms in national government that are meant to limit some of this. From the beginning, the interests of the more urban North were pitted against the interests of the more rural South. These issues still remain even though the geography has changed since then in several important ways: there are plenty of rural areas in mid-America as well as in the West and we have a broad middle category, actually the most populous space for Americans to live, called the suburbs. Additionally, party lines have shifted.

But, we could take this in another direction and think more creatively about how to select elected officials. Huffman argues the Supreme Court limited the voice of rural voters in states when it went to a system of officials per population rather than by geographical boundaries. What might happen if we went to a system where districts were drawn only within a single geographic group: cities, suburbs, and more rural areas? Huffman seems to be suggesting that the interests of a city-dweller in Chicago or Atlanta may be much similar to each other than representatives across northern Illinois where there districts can cover all three geographic types. Suburban legislators across metropolitan regions or states might have similar interests compared to those who represent other types of geographies.

I just have to ask: would conservatives be arguing for the voters in rural areas if it were primarily Democrats in rural areas as opposed to Republicans?

Data suggests cities, suburbs, and rural areas divided about Obama

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Recent data continues to suggest President Obama has quite different levels of support across cities, suburbs, and exurbs:

But the most important Obama divide to keep your eye on this year is the one between urban, suburban and rural places.

Urban America is still strongly in Mr. Obama’s corner, 66% say they are optimistic or satisfied. That’s down from 2009’s 74%, but not sharply. The suburbs have grown more skeptical with only 48% saying they are in the optimistic/satisfied camp. In 2009, 63% of the people in suburbs were feeling positive about Mr. Obama’s first term. And rural America is particularly gloomy about the next four years, with only 35% saying they are optimistic or satisfied. In 2009, 58% in rural America thought Mr. Obama would do a good job in the White House.

This is not a new split; Joel Kotkin, for example, has argued for years that the suburbs are the current battleground for voters as city dwellers tend to lean Democratic and people in rural areas tend to lean Republican. But the persistence of this divide goes beyond a red state, blue state divide that has been at the center of American political discourse for over a decade. It is not just about states, which matter particularly for Congress and electoral votes. Rather there are large divides even within states that lead to all sorts of more local issues about how resources should be allocated and who should be able to make decisions. President Obama is known for calling for a purple America bringing together red and blue states but perhaps he needs to call for an America that bridges the big divides between cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

Call for more social science modeling for Social Security

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An op-ed in the New York Times explains how poorly financial forecasts for Social Security are made and suggests social scientists can help:

Remarkably, since Social Security was created in 1935, the government’s forecasting methods have barely changed, even as a revolution in big data and statistics has transformed everything from baseball to retailing.

This omission can be explained by the fact that the Office of the Chief Actuary, the branch of the Social Security Administration that is responsible for the forecasts, is almost exclusively composed of, well, actuaries — without any serious representation of statisticians or social science methodologists. While these actuaries are highly responsible and careful and do excellent work curating and describing the data that go into the forecasts, their job is not to make statistical predictions. Yet the agency badly needs such expertise.

With considerable help from the actuaries and other officials at the Social Security Administration, we unearthed how the agency makes mortality forecasts and uses them to predict the program’s solvency. We learned that the methods are antiquated, subjective and needlessly complicated — and, as a result, are prone to error and to potential interference from political appointees. This may explain why the agency’s forecasts have, at times, changed significantly from year to year, even when there was little change in the underlying data.

We have made our methods, calculations and software available online at j.mp/SSecurity so that others can replicate or improve our forecasts. The implications of our findings go beyond social science. As the wave of retirement by the baby boomers continues, doing nothing to shore up Social Security’s solvency is irresponsible. If the amount of money coming in through payroll taxes does not increase and if the amount of money going out as benefits remains the same, the trust funds will become insolvent less than 20 years from now.

Sociologists seem to be looking for ways to get involved in major policy issues so perhaps this is one way to do that. It is also interesting to note this op-ed is based on a 2012 article in Demography titled “Statistical Security for Social Security.” Not too many articles can make such a claim…

Also, I’m sure this doesn’t inspire confidence among some for the government’s ability to keep track of all of its data. Does the federal government have the ability to hire and train the kind of people it needs? Can it compete with the private sector or political campaigns (think of what the lauded 2012 Obama campaign big data workers might be able to do)?

The closer look at how the Obama campaign used big data to wage an intimate and winning campaign

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In MIT Technology Review, Sasha Issenberg has a three-part look at how the Obama campaign was effectively able to harness big data. Here are the concluding paragraphs from Part Three:

A few days after the election, as Florida authorities continued to count provisional ballots, a few staff members were directed, as four years before, to remain in Chicago. Their instructions were to produce another post-mortem report summing up the lessons of the past year and a half. The undertaking was called the Legacy Project, a grandiose title inspired by the idea that the innovations of Obama 2012 should be translated not only to the campaign of the next Democratic candidate for president but also to governance. Obama had succeeded in convincing some citizens that a modest adjustment to their behavior would affect, however marginally, the result of an election. Could he make them feel the same way about Congress?

Simas, who had served in the White House before joining the team, marveled at the intimacy of the campaign. Perhaps more than anyone else at headquarters, he appreciated the human aspect of politics. This had been his first presidential election, but before he became a political operative, Simas had been a politician himself, serving on the city council and school board in his hometown of Taunton, Massachusetts. He ran for office by knocking on doors and interacting individually with constituents (or those he hoped would become constituents), trying to track their moods and expectations.

In many respects, analytics had made it possible for the Obama campaign to recapture that style of politics. Though the old guard may have viewed such techniques as a disruptive force in campaigns, they enabled a presidential candidate to view the electorate the way local candidates do: as a collection of people who make up a more perfect union, each of them approachable on his or her terms, their changing levels of support and enthusiasm open to measurement and, thus, to respect. “What that gave us was the ability to run a national presidential campaign the way you’d do a local ward campaign,” Simas says. “You know the people on your block. People have relationships with one another, and you leverage them so you know the way they talk about issues, what they’re discussing at the coffee shop.”

Few events in American life other than a presidential election touch 126 million adults, or even a significant fraction that many, on a single day. Certainly no corporation, no civic institution, and very few government agencies ever do. Obama did so by reducing every American to a series of numbers. Yet those numbers somehow captured the individuality of each voter, and they were not demographic classifications. The scores measured the ability of people to change politics—and to be changed by it.

Combining numbers and a personal appeal made for a winning campaign. Part Two has more on how the Romney campaign watched what the Obama campaign was doing and tried to react and yet couldn’t quite figure it out.

Since this appears to have been the winning formula in 2012, I imagine there will be plenty of others who will try to duplicate it. One way would be to get the Obama campaign database and information and it is not clear who might be able to access that in the future. Another way would be to hire some of the Obama campaign people who made this happen – I imagine they will get some lucrative offers moving forward. A third option would be to try to find another way but this could be tedious, require a lot of resources, and may not come to the same conclusion.