Many words, here instead of elsewhere

Most of my annoyance in the last week or two has gotten filtered into facebook posts among friends. But I'm also encountering now some of their own forms of annoyance. I have some thoughts.

Blaming third party voters is a waste of time. This was bad political strategy during the campaign for Clinton and her surrogates to go after Jill Stein or Gary Johnson supporters. It isn't any smarter now after the fact. What appears to have happened in the narrative of the campaign's history is she used those initial attacks, and the debates, and the grab 'em by the pussy statements to consolidate her more liberal support among third party voters (this is suggested by polling at any rate) back in early October which allowed her to get out to a significant polling lead. That left a solid cohort of "true believers", people who almost always vote third party and probably would not vote at all if they were forced to vote for Clinton or Trump, and whatever portion of that vote may have preferred Trump to her but were uneasy about actually voting for him, plus some portion of people who lived in non-competitive states and wished to voice an opinion.

Voters do appear to have engaged in some strategic voting, to reduce the chances of a swing state being carried by Trump as third party vote totals in close states like Florida are extremely low, while states like New Mexico or Utah were not. But what appears to have happened is not that this third party vote preferred Clinton uniformly and thus that the millions of Stein and Johnson voters could have swung the election to her, but that those votes went to Trump instead at the moment of truth in the ballot box. There is some math involved, which I will spare people, but so far it appears Johnson's presence on the ballot, and Evan McMullin's occasional presence, may have flipped Minnesota and New Hampshire to Clinton based on who showed up to vote and who Johnson's support was drawn from. Colorado is a possibility as well. This is in spite of Stein and Johnson possibly flipping Wisconsin and, especially, Michigan to Trump. What does this mean? Well it does not mean Clinton would have won. That would require a very different universe of voters turning out than who did.

There are two major flaws with this argument that the problem for Clinton was third party voters. First that the major party vote is deserved by even this small sliver of protesting voters who may have quixotic political views that are better reflected by minor parties. The best response to that is to make a pitch to appeal to those odd views in some way. Based on what I see Stein putting forward as her views on many issues, that was not very likely to be very similar to Hillary Clinton. In some cases, that's a good thing. She's weird, and her views are weird on a number of issues. Appealing to some of them as a mainstream Democrat, even a farther leftist one, would be weird and probably not ultimately helpful for winning an election. This is also true of Johnson voters and libertarians, except there the typical appeal is from mainstream Republicans. Like many third party candidates, Gary Johnson appears to have been a very awkward and bumbling representative for his overlying philosophy for governance: a bleeding-heart-libertarianism, which has some appeal to younger voters, and younger Republicans or conservatives especially. Still, expecting conservatives to decide Hillary Clinton is a good choice to vote for again suggests a very strange correlation based on the history of conservative media and its coverage of the Clinton family. Based on my understanding of conservative views, there were a great many who did not favor Trump's agenda. But they were not fond of Clinton's either. They may have presumed or calculated that it would be easier to manipulate Trump's than Clinton's into something they would find livable. You can disagree with that calculation, or point out that it does not account for a bunch of other things that you think are important, or point out that Clinton might actually be better for their preferred agenda, but that appeal has to be made. I do not think it was. It was instead assumed that third party votes should just not exist, and that all voters must obviously favor one candidate over the other and should vote accordingly. That this is the prevailing attitude both during the campaign and persisting afterward is not encouraging that Democrats and liberals have learned anything by this experience.

Second, the bigger flaw is to assume that these votes substantially preferred the candidate you did. They do not. "Libertarian" votes historically go to Republican candidates, not Democratic ones. Johnson tried to make a pitch to more socially tolerant or socially liberal voters, Bernie Bros for example, as well as civil libertarians of all political stripes. And maybe that's a chunk of the support he had left. But he also had a chunk of support from anti-Trump voters that didn't like Clinton either. And some who genuinely liked neither. It is not as simple as to look at his vote total and assume it would all go in the Clinton column, or the Trump column.The math from late polls suggests he was no longer drawing evenly, and the math from the disparity of polls and state election results suggests a bunch of his residual anti-Trump voters decided to give in and vote for Trump. What this means, in mathematical terms, is he was suppressing Trump's vote more than he was Clinton's by being on the ballot and attracting votes. It is wishful thinking to assume otherwise.

The appropriate response to all of this was not "third party voters are evil and stupid", and it certainly does not appear to be "third party voters have just created a fascist dictatorship because they're stupid", but rather "my candidate better reflects your agenda than this other person, and here is why". Or perhaps listen a little to why they do not think so. Many of these voters are otherwise normal people with weird habits and views. Some of them have very reasonable disagreements with either of the major political party candidates on issues of substance and significance.

And well. Some are just assholes. I for one will not miss the influence of alt-right, Ayn Rand fans, and the voters thereof upon the libertarian movement in favor of more classically liberal views. Go home to the Republican party and stay there. Libertarians as a political movement seem to be doing just fine at growing their support base without you anyway. I regard that as a good thing. I do not regard it as a good thing that you were apparently this numerous however.

There are some problems with the third party vote. Most notably: that a bunch of people who suggested they might vote for Gary Johnson in polls back in the summer mostly broke to vote for Donald Trump at the last minute, and over the last few weeks. Given there are fairly few policy parallels between these two (you almost can't get a more extreme variation on immigration, abortion, gay marriage, and civil liberties, as examples), I have a hard time understanding what that is based upon. I have this problem almost every election cycle, wondering what people with libertarian-ish views or claim to have libertarian-ish views are doing voting for most Republicans (or Democrats). But Trump appeared to be uniquely incompatible with a political ethos based around freedom or individual liberty and rights. He appealed strongly to authoritarian instincts, and toward the restraint of the rights of "others". Neither of which should be appealing to libertarians, or people who might have otherwise found the variety of libertarianism on offer from Gary Johnson that appealing. I seriously doubt his announced intentions to scale back banking regulations, among other regulatory changes, or to punch a huge hole in the deficit by passing a massive tax cut and not reducing spending was getting that big of a draw from Johnson voters.

What this last part suggests is the real problem for Clinton voters to answer. It is not enough to answer why some small sliver of libertarian-ish voters decide to vote for Trump. Why did people at all want to vote for Trump in the first place? I have not been satisfied so far with many of the answers that are given. Some of them I recognize as likely true, but I find appalling. Vast portions of Trump's agenda should have been regarded as politically disqualifying by a decent society. His avowed, willful, and bombastic ignorance of subjects relevant to governing also should have been regarded as a serious danger. His affinity for attracting support from authoritarians abroad, and from misogynists and racists at home also should have given serious pause (as it did for me with Ron Paul, as an added bonus for finding him too distasteful on a number of policy questions, immigration and abortion key among them).

There are two scary parts to this.

1- People who were aware of these as disqualifiers. Most of the public did not approve of his bombastic cruelties toward women or thought he was unsuited for the job of the President. Some number of these people who thought he was an ignorant asshole of some variety voted for him anyway. This is disturbing. There might be other reasons they preferred him to Clinton, some policy issue (for example, Supreme Court nominations). But then the question mark is why prefer and prop up him over some other more amenable source for advancing those policies? Trump actually got fewer votes than John McCain, in a country with more people and voters in it than 8 years ago. What policies are this important to risk a number of other issues, and to risk depressing voter turnout by having a nominee that disgusted large portions of the general public? Clearly there was a high level of disgust with Clinton as well, for sometimes legitimate concerns and sometimes rather tortured reasons. It is likely a generic Democratic candidate clobbers this fool.

2- People who ignored or embraced these as disqualifiers. Because of the unusual nature of Trump's campaign, lots of studies have already been done examining who his supporters are likely to be. It is not obvious to liberals or the media why he attracted this much support. So studies. There are large sums of people who are racist. Who are sexist and who hold anti-feminist views of a hostile or misogynist nature (rather than benevolent chivalry of a traditionalist view). Who are xenophobic or Islamophobic. Trump did very well with the voters who (still) think Obama wasn't born in the United States, or is secretly Muslim. Trump did very well in counties that George Wallace did well in in the GOP primaries, and often adopted some of the same tones. Democrats were not immune from these issues either. There was considerable racism found among Democratic voters too, just not as pronounced as among Trump's base. His campaign was very much a revanchist and white nationalist view of policy on many issues. It adopted strongly authoritarian tones ("I alone can fix it", among others). Violence was not an uncommon incident from his followers at campaign events, and he did little or nothing to discourage any of these views of himself or his followers, or their behavior. Indeed, his most ardent followers often reveled in being called "deplorable".

The assumption all along by liberals and polls was that voters, even Republican or conservative voters, would reject these as a stated agenda. They did not. Policy elites did, particularly on the issues of national security, where Trump has taken a very unpredictable and probably dangerous long-term stance on the use, goals, and promotion of the American hegemony (to the point that I think the biggest winners of the election were probably Russia and China, our biggest geopolitical rivals). But as it turned out, conservative voters did not care very much about the conservative agenda served up by standard Republicans. The voices of protest or conservative reason abandoned a ship that was ready to toss them off anyway. This is not what they cared about.

I have seen two vaguely laid out perspectives of what they did care about.

1- We want to blow up the system because we think the system sucks (or favors people we do not like/fear.) This is the "economic anxiety" argument for his support. I think most of his policy agenda is apt to foster far more economic anxiety particularly his positions on trade and taxation/spending, with the exception of pretty well off people like himself. But it wasn't like I felt Clinton did a good job messaging how she would do any better. She waffled on trade instead of defending it as something that benefits everyone, or explaining how it could be redistributed to better benefit workers. She waffled on immigration instead of defending it as something that can benefit all Americans by enriching us rather than "taking away jobs". And on and on throughout her agenda. A core problem appeared to be that she was seen as part of the system, someone who wanted to work within its limitations and understood them well, but did not seem able to elaborate what she intended to do. What was she focused on? Who knows? It seemed like anything she could get into and get done. Which is hard to sell in a stump speech, even if there's something in there for almost anyone.

Trump, for all his lack of policy details, it was pretty clear what he intended to do as a set of visionary goals. Build a stupid fucking wall. Kick out Muslims and Mexicans. Start a trade war with China. Isolate ourselves from our traditional allies. Adopt more authoritarian governing cultural norms. Cut taxes drastically for people like himself. And so on. This was an appalling policy vision to many people, but it serves the purpose of "burn down the system" simply because it was not smelling like rank establishment. That most of his actual policies were composed by or will be composed by the establishment Republican party was a fact missed in all of this and is now being arbitrated by his followers claiming that he won't be trying to go after gay marriage rights. He picked Mike Pence as his VP and the party platform was aggressively anti-LGBT, if you don't think he won't go after that question, among others that were feared by his political opponents, you are fooling yourself. Trump's appeals to LGBT voters and other minority groups all took the form of "I'm not anti-gay but", a problem which leads me to the second reason Trump appears to have gathered support.

2- "We don't like being looked down on by elites." This is the "he tells it like it is" version of his support. To an extent I understand some maligned feeling regarding PC speech. There are anecdotes of ridiculousness of speech codes and responses to offensive speech, questions which need more examination for me to get an understanding if this is a broad social trend that needs to be combatted or is just a few really wacky folks. I am also uncomfortable with using laws to try to shutter bigoted cake shop owners who refuse to make cakes for weddings they don't approve of (even as I agree they are most likely bigots and can or should be called such). But. Most of the time when I hear a statement complaining about PC culture and speech policing, what it amounts to is whining that you can no longer be a dick without being called out as one. People who are more offended at being called a racist than the fact that they hold racist views, suggesting that the label is accurate. Statements like "I'm not a racist but....." or "I have great respect for women but..." are heard as "I am a huge asshole and you should have to listen to me anyway". This is largely the methods Trump has employed in his lifetime. His "grab em by the pussy" comments suggesting casual sexual assault were often compared to rap lyrics as though these were similar word crimes (a common punching bag for all manner of right wing talking points seems to be Beyonce, I assume it's because she's really popular with liberals and not with conservatives). All while ignoring that it is the context of words that is suggestive of harmful behavior or intention and thus makes them potentially offensive. Not the existence and use of words that are deemed offensive.

This is not a segment of the population I am all that sympathetic toward as a whole. I think the advance of social norms of tolerance is a good thing in a diverse society. I think it will do so imperfectly, and should be called out when it is acting weird or counterproductively. The use of speech to suppress others speech by coercion is not going to be an easy space to walk in, and will have erstwhile allies on underlying policies, like gay marriage, who wish to go much further than I think is necessary. I do not agree that such norms as politeness or decency toward others should be generally enforced with laws and speech codes, where possible, which is where I often part from more progressive friends. But I do believe they can be beneficial to consider the impact and importance of words and behaviors on others and to treat them with more kindness or tolerance. I do not think that means we should revel in being a racist prick, or a misogynist pig who doesn't believe in rape as a crime. Or that that should be something to aspire to being. There's a middle ground there somewhere that involves the legal functions of using our freedom of speech with the laudable cultural norms of "not being a dick" when we do so, but I don't think we will be seeing it anytime soon. Large segments of Trump's supporters embraced views which are anti-PC. Much of his vote came from voters who have a very serious hatred or fear of Muslims and who somehow believe that calling a war, such as it is one, something different and labeling our opponent as Islam, or at least a portion of it, is somehow a good strategic concept. As but one example. There was a non-trivial sum of his vote that was willing to not only ignore these views and policies, but actively favoured more of them and has been celebratory for the return of a world where such abuses as they wish to hurl at others may do so again. These were abuses they were and still are free to hurl at others generally. The only difference is it is harder to say they are "wrong" when the cultural norm has elected someone who violates the norms (in spite of most voters agreeing this was wrong and unpleasant behavior).

So. Where do we all go from here? For my part, I will continue to argue against most of Mr Trump's agenda. Vociferously. There are portions which do not animate me with disgust, or fear for my fellow Americans, or which do not seem likely to be odious and harmful to millions of people. But not many. Had Mrs Clinton been elected instead, I would have had many disagreements there as well, particularly where it regarded foreign policy and civil liberties. These were issues I felt both candidates were quite awful, and the precise issues on which I normally vote for Presidential candidates. Neither candidate seemed interested in addressing the deficit or debt. Tax reform policies were scarcely discussed. The things I cared about most did not come up much at all (climate change, BLM, long-term fiscal security of the country, etc), in spite of being obviously high stakes between the two candidates for once. And the ones that did come up at all (trade and the appropriate use of American hegemony) came up in a really, really weird way that left me with no favored candidate.

I have the fortune of being in a relatively well off position that most of his policies will not impact me directly, or at least not immediately (his protectionist anti-trade and anti-immigrant stances will be a problem for everyone). That does not mean I feel comfortable waiting to see what he will do and how it will impact people who are much more vulnerable than myself for reasons of ethnicity or religion. He has announced what he intends to do. People for whom he has announced policies that will target people like themselves have every reason to be afraid and to take calls for patience and unity as sanctimonious nonsense. Don't come to them telling them to calm down and not be angry.

In brief discussions so far with friends since election night. Many people are angry, angrier than I am even that the result of this election cycle was this man, in particular, becoming President and the prospect of his agenda being enacted frightens or disgusts them. The thing that occurs to me most is that people should work to defend those causes and issues they care most about. If that is pro-choice abortion rights, find a clinic to volunteer at. If that is Black Lives Matters and general questions of police reform, keep pushing back on police militarization and brutality and violations of civil liberties by police, and assure that the goal is that police can and will do a better job cleaning up crime and violence by citizens rather than rousting and annoying ordinary citizens because they can. If that is gay marriage, work to make sure many people you know who can get married and want to will do so and support those marriages as friends do. If that was immigration or refugees, see what can be done locally to protect people here in this country or seeking to come here. If that was climate change, keep trying to do things that are environmentally friendly personally, or push for local and state action where you can. Broad scale changes in the form of legislation and regulation are coming on these and many other issues. They may not be amenable to your goals as a person for what you want this society to do with its powers and attention. Go forth and defend them on the front lines if you can.

I had also entered this election cycle wondering what would happen with "reasonable" conservatives (and libertarians). I am now left very confused still about that question, with even less clarity than expected. It would seem to me that both major political parties need to have a serious "what the fuck are we doing" discussion, as the political elites in both parties have been annihilated and overturned for the most part. They will (both) need new agendas for long-term stability moving forward as a younger generation comes of age and starts voting at higher rates. Budget hawks, civil libertarians, anti-drug warriors, and anti-interventionists or IR realists have had no homes right now at all as expressed in the major party Presidential candidates or Congressional politics over the last couple of cycles. Those seem like they could be substantial portions of the American polity to attract votes for a political party in several cases. Why aren't they reflected by one party or the other? What happens to anti-Trump voters that ended up voting for him out of a disdain for Clinton? What happens to weak political parties in an era of intense partisanship?

Really the question of what happens with the portion of Trump's voters that were not sexist/racist morons (roughly half of his voters don't fall into those categories, most of the rest do so pretty clearly) had interested me the most. Since they "won", in a close and contentious election at that, I'm now intensely curious what they think they won. I don't see that there was some prize in the box that they will come away with better for. In a few cases, I see some policy wins (pro-life voters for example), but those wins are liable to be very hollow rather than long-term advances. I'm not sure what that leaves. I would have had some similar concerns regarding Clinton had she won. Other than the importance of a symbolic win of a woman over a clearly sexist opponent and rival, that wasn't entirely clear what we were getting either as a country that it would be helpful, or would stand a chance of passage. I have a hard time believing that Trump's support was entirely based on denying this from occurring. But. I am not seeing many coherent and sensible ideas on offer instead.

Gary Johnson and political ignorance

I take it that an interview this morning did not go well for the upstart third party campaign of Johnson-Weld. I have numerous reservations with Johnson's positions on a number of issues as it is, though I still find him broadly preferable to either Trump (who is just awful) and Clinton (who is merely pretty bad). But this kind of event requires some thinking and examination.

To recap. Johnson's "problem" is he has gotten a lot of media coverage this campaign cycle, which means he is getting a broader array of questions than a third party candidate normally gets. He has a habit of deflecting questions he does not understand, whether by brain fart or sheer ignorance, by asking what they are talking about and then formulating some kind of answer. This looks really quite bad when the question is asking about what are deemed to be significant policy details. Such as a city in Syria. I was not happy that he didn't know where Aleppo was.

In voter ignorance terms, most Americans did not know where it was and what significance that question had either. Very few Americans probably knew what that question meant or was in reference to. Had I heard it, as someone who tries to keep abreast of foreign policy and issues in other countries, I would have sought to clarify what they were specifically asking about in regards Aleppo (the fight between Assad's regime and the rebels there? the refugee problem? the general state of affairs in Syria as a whole? the deployment of American special forces there?), suggesting it wasn't a terribly great question anyway. Perhaps the context was helpful and I could have provided a cogent response without seeking clarification, but I am dubious. It is not like "Morning Joe" is likely a space for intelligent commentary and interviews.

As to what that means in political terms.

Probably not very much.

Presidential candidates have gaffes of memory or misspeaking quite often. We have one candidate in particular (Drumpf) who does not seem capable of uttering virtually any factual information correctly whatsoever. I am not happy about it to be sure. Aleppo is, or at least ought to be, pretty well known within discussions about Syria. But it isn't very pertinent to specifically know about it in order to determine overall strategic questions about what should be done in Syria or about Syria by the United States.

It turns out that the media doesn't seem to know where Aleppo is or what it is either. Which is not terribly surprising. Most Americans of all lines of work and persuasion are woefully ill-informed about other countries. Even other countries in which we seem to have a considerable interest in intervening in militarily or diplomatically or are actively doing so. (The old line about "war is god's way of teaching Americans geography", which Bierce or Twain did not ever actually say or write). Getting those kinds of details correct is something Presidential candidates should try very hard do in order to sound well-informed to a public that is usually not well informed. But. Secretary Clinton is nothing if not razor sharp at recalling and reciting facts about policies that might be informative at determining what good policies are and have achieved. This has not generally helped her form what seem to be wise and effective policies where international relations are concerned (see: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Rwanda, Kosovo....). Meanwhile, Donald Trump has more or less gone out of his way to sound uninformed and uninterested in becoming informed on pretty much any policy, in particular international affairs. I would imagine this could leave some room for error in the middle in the minds of many undecided voters.

The current two major party candidates are both pretty unpopular, and American foreign policy is not considered a major issue by many voters. While domestic considerations like terrorism and ISIS are considered important, they're not actually a big deal. I don't think it is automatically disqualifying for how one should vote if one was considering a third party that someone flubs a very specific policy question. Most of his support appears to be from younger voters anyway. Voters who are unlikely to pay much attention to mainstream media coverage and whose main problem would be making sure they might show up to vote in the first place.

This will probably depress Johnson's vote total somewhat, but probably not below the 5% threshold to secure funding and ballot access for the Libertarian party in the future, which is a useful goal for libertarians or libertarian-ish voters to seek out as a means of demonstrating a potential avenue of reform for either political party. If his vote total is subsequently depressed from the current 8-10% nationally in polls to around 6-7% in votes (something I regarded as likely anyway), that will possibly help Clinton in a couple of close states (perhaps Colorado or North Carolina most noticeably). It will also probably keep him from competing as effectively in Utah to try to win any state, something no third party candidate has done for quite a while. And possibly put a damper on his fundraising efforts to some degree in order to run ads or voter registration campaigns in favorable states. But all of that is also unlikely to impact the result of the election simply because the third party vote, while apparently much higher than normal, was pretty unlikely to impact the result of the election already.

I would say that this is a common issue with media and establishment types to deem minor party candidates as "disqualified" by dint of rather minor errors, while writing off rather substantial errors made by the major party figures (see, most everything Trump has done for the last year, as well as his entire public life, for example). That will not help Johnson recover from this blunder. The margin for error is really quite low if one is running an insurgent campaign to garner any public respectability. This was something he should have been aware of. And worked harder to avoid.

For the record: the correct answer on Syria/Aleppo should be something like the following list
1) Take in vastly more than 10000 refugees. Possibly as many as one million. Or basically anyone who wanted to come here. The American refugee system is pretty reliable for both vetting potential refugees to reduce problems of terrorism or criminality or maladjustment, and also for producing high quality immigrants who work hard to assimilate to a new life in a pretty safe and advanced country that took them in from a place of hardship and violent upheaval. Historically it's one of the best weapons we have both against terrorism or violent extremism. And also one of the best faces we can put upon what it means to be "American" is that we will take in people from anywhere and more or less leave them in peace to live their lives once they get here. We should take advantage of that to take in and shelter as many people as we can. This is the most pressing element of the war is the displacement of ordinary people it has created and the vast humanitarian crisis that has unfolded as a result. We should be seeking to do as much as we can to alleviate that by removing people from a position of violence and danger and placing them in the position of trying to build ordinary lives elsewhere.

2) Use diplomatic pressures to try to end the civil war between the Assad forces and various rebel groups who don't like him. This may mean that Assad must step down, the country could be partitioned into autonomous or semi-autonomous states (like the Kurds in Iraq), Russia or Iran would have more influence on the resolution of the situation than is nominally desirable, and so on. I do not mean to suggest that this path is easy, but it seems more likely to have a productive result in ending fighting and violence in Syria than violent intervention and use of force against Assad to remove him militarily, or that the provision of military assistance to forces we might nominally support is likely to guarantee that weapons we provide won't be used against us later, or won't be used internally or regionally for the purposes of brutal repression (as the Saudis have been doing in Yemen and has been mostly ignored).

3) Use diplomatic pressures to try to involve all of the relevant regional parties in suppressing ISIS regional state as a thing that exists within Syria and Iraq and might be of some threat to the outside world, most especially the neighbouring countries and the people within the territories it has control or influence over. This would mean Turkey, Syria/Syrian rebels, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and probably Russia as well.

4) Do not use American foreign policy in the form of bombing campaigns or ground forces to resolve the question of lone wolf style ideologically inspired attacks within the US and the West. That is not how that fight is going to be won. That is a terrible policy formulation. American leaders should take advantage of voter ignorance and indifference on foreign policy to "ignore" problems like that and seek their resolution in other means (intelligence gathering and cooperation with foreign governments, counter-terrorism policies, police investigations, etc).

I side with

isidewith was an interesting attempt started back in 2012 to get some members of the public to think more about matching their policy interests and goals with political candidates who might better support those. I'm rather skeptical that this project is likely to have much fruitful action in and of itself, for reasons that have to do with how most people vote and why not having very much at all to do with policy goals, particularly in a polarized voting environment. But it was a laudable project at the time to try to get people to think about third parties and more rigorously evaluate their policy visions and compare them to something like the actual positions of candidates.

I'm less sure of its current development still fulfilling that mission, but I have other uses for it all the same.

*I don't really have a positive opinion of some of the methods of matching being used, and the site seems to have taken a somewhat more distinguishably liberal tone to some of its questions and answers rather than being more obviously neutral (I say this as someone who on many issues regards Democratic candidates as illiberal squishes rather than anyone invoking a liberal political and policy tradition). A further problem may be the online sampling is likely to skew younger than the overall population. This has implications on a variety of issues more likely to be popular among younger voters than older voters (note these are not necessarily predictable. Support for entitlement reform for instance tends to be greater among older voters than young people). What that may be suggesting is that some of these issues that are closer in appearance here may be possible for reform, but not for several more years as demographics shift to have fewer of the existing older voters still alive.

But there's still some interesting results in looking at the poll results on specific questions that I wanted to pull apart more.

Issues with general agreement of some kind across parties that might actually get something done in the next few years (and not totally annoy me). 

Welfare-work requirements: Pretty popular with both parties. About 3/4 of Democrats and 80% of Republicans are in favor. I think this would make a possible case for an expansion and better tax incidence smoothing of the EITC and other social welfare programs. But not something like a negative income tax (my favored solution instead of min wages and smoothing out transfer payments by eliminating many programs and consolidating them as a cash transfer.)

Paid family/sick leave: Popular with both parties (60-40 Republicans, 90-10 Democrats). I would prefer this be implemented by having the government pay for it, in a way that it operates like disability insurance of a sort, rather than risk providing distorted incentives for employers to fire or not hire people who are more likely to get sick or avoid hiring or promoting fertile aged women capable of reproducing. It is however an issue on which there appears to be some possibility for reforms, which is rare.

Universal background checks for guns: This gets almost 90% support from either party. One caveat to this is that the support for "more gun regulations" is highly split (80-20).

Euthanasia: There's a gap here, but both Republicans (55-45) and Democrats (90-10) supported this as an option.

Issues with odd divides or near uniformity that annoy me:
ISIS - declaration of war ends up being mostly pro. Democrats were split about 35-65. I could see some number of people suggesting a legal procedural problem of allowing the military and President to conduct a conflict without the input of a Congressional vote but this wasn't offered as a legitimizing feature in the "more options" categories. A very similar partisan split occurred in using "ground troops" however, suggesting that if there is some sort of legal procedural voting bloc, it isn't very big.

"Decrease the military budget" - Republicans were almost united in opposing any decrease, but even Democrats were about evenly split. This was utterly horrifying to me given how much money we expend on defense budgets annually and what little return we receive for it (even in reference to what the defense department receives, this is less than clear it is getting what it asked for in exchange for the money allocated).

Foreign aid - reliably, everyone hates this (across both parties). Also reliably, I expect pretty much no one knows how much we are spending and on what.

GMO labels. The only political group that opposed these in substantial numbers is libertarians (and then it was still about 50-50). Both Democrats and Republicans were at 80-20 margins.

Drug testing welfare recipients. Despite considerable evidence this is either unconstitutional or totally ineffective, both parties supported this. Republicans do so to an absurd degree (93-7). But Democrats do themselves no favors (58-42).

Farm subsidies: There's not much of a divide here. Democrats are marginally more supportive of them. Republicans are about 50/50. Again, libertarians were the only political group that opposed these in substantial numbers. There hasn't been a good economic case for these since the Progressive Era under Hoover. Which is to say there is not one.

Prosecuting bankers for the 2008 financial crisis attracted bipartisan support (more from Democrats, but it's about 60-40 from Republicans). I am unclear what good this would do and tends to be pretty hard to do.

Marijuana legalisation: Still pretty opposed by Republicans (60-40). Democrats are up to about 90-10 in favor. I'm constantly annoyed this has not translated at the elite level very much at all. Few Democratic candidates are openly in favor. Drug decriminalisation more broadly (potentially including say, cocaine) has a similar split of around 70-30.

Patriot Act/NSA reforms, not supported very highly by either party. Republicans are more apt to back the existing architecture of the national security state. Libertarians of course hate these powers. The Apple-FBI fight has a similar split in support of demanding Apple hack phones for the government.

Social security. Both parties tended to have about 70-30 opposition to raising the retirement age for Social Security. I had other ideas on how best to fix the problems here (means test the benefits). Others would prefer raising the tax limit for it. But I can't really see a basis for leaving the age where it is either.

Term limits. Both parties support this at nearly 90%. I've never seen a good argument in favor of this idea. It's entirely populist nonsense. Fortunately nobody in office will do anything about it.

Campaign finance laws: both parties oppose the current Citizens United framework. I think the case against this is pretty weak and that greater funding transparency would be of sufficient fix for now. It misdiagnoses the problem as election laws rather than lobbying.

Voter ID laws: Both parties support these. Republicans are at extremely high rates but Democrats are still at around 2/3s. I find there's little or no basis for this form of voter fraud protection and that methods of suppressing or preventing individuals from voting are really poor ideas (even though I think many voters are poorly informed at best, and misinformed at worst).

Death penalty: Supported by both parties. Democrats around 2/3s. Republicans at 90-10. I can conceive of a moral case for killing certain people based on the severity of crimes and the possibility of rehabilitation, but the amount of burden of proof and expense, and the civil libertarian moral case for not killing people who might be innocent or may be otherwise "redeemable", and that there does not appear to be an effect of deterrence for the sort of crimes that we use it for, and the case that we are often using it for racist reasons, all weigh heavily against this being still a good and necessary idea in a modern state.

Issues with odd divides or near uniformity that may annoy partisan elites:

Cuba - There's a partisan split here but it's an odd one for the way Republican elites have been talking about it. Democrats almost universally support this change (95-5), while Republicans come out as almost a 50-50 split. I'm not sure there's much of a cohort available to them to pander toward (neoconservatives?) that it would actually be beneficial to reverse course on this policy trend toward normalizing relations with Cuba. It probably seems pretty clear to almost everyone what we were doing wasn't working.

Global Warming - big partisan split here too, but there's a cohort of Republicans that still favor doing things (about a third). Democrats are almost universally in support of doing something, but almost none of them favor taxing carbon emissions. Which is really disheartening. I think it's probably one of the simplest methods of attacking the problem.

TPP - Both parties voters were about 60-40 against. I have mixed impressions of this because of intellectual property rights law intersecting with the treaty in a way I find undesirable (strengthening and expanding the protections rather than reducing them to be more sensible).

NSA metadata collection - both parties seem to have about a 60-40 opposition to these programs. Further reform to squash them may be possible.

Issues with large partisan divides (things that we should expect to come up in the elections)

Syrian Refugees (accept or not) - For the record I answered this with "we should accept many more than 10k". I'm about as pro-refugee and asylum as someone gets, particularly given all the restrictions and system of checks involved in accepting such people as we already have making it difficult to accept and integrate as many people as we should.

This comes out as a near 50-50 split. But on partisan grounds both parties ended up closer to 80-20 or 20-80 splits. It's likely to be a sore point over which partisans will argue, but no middle ground can occur.

There isn't a cohort that broadly supports overthrowing Assad or preventing Russian support of Assad through their airstrikes. This seems to be a big disconnect between the public, particularly the conservative public, and most of their candidates (Voldemort seems to have tapped into this best, though it isn't a focal point of his blustery word salad presented as a campaign).

Iran - There's a big partisan split over attacking Iran though. Republicans favor airstrikes on nuclear facilities by an 80-20 margin. The polling there is older, but I doubt it has shifted very much since. (For the record, I wouldn't favor airstrikes even if I thought they were building a bomb. Which I do not think is or has been the case for some years now anyway).

College loans/college debt. There's a big partisan split over how to fund these. Sanders plan of a Wall St tax or raising taxes on rich people to fund colleges is very popular among Democrats and liberals. But nobody else likes it.

Immigration: Democrats on virtually any immigration question favored much broader admittance and acceptance. Republicans did not. There was a huge split over whether local law enforcement should detain people based on minor crimes (like traffic violations or other misdemeanors). This is likely because this is believed to be used (and has been shown to be used) for racial profiling purposes rather than immigration enforcement. There was another 80-20 split over birthright citizenship and over the restriction of Muslim immigrants. There was also a gap between Democrats (50-50) and Republicans (96-4) over "border security".

There was no real divide over "immigrants should be required to learn English". Which in practice makes sense, but in terms of the legal system does not.

Unions were regarded negatively by Republicans (70-30) and positively by Democrats (80-20). Which probably explains min wage discussions. Speaking of which, minimum wage increases were along a similar split (80-20 each).

Obamacare: huge partisan divide here. Democrats favored 85-15, Republicans 95-5 against. This essentially forecloses the ability to do either a) reforms to the existing system that make it work better or b) any substantive discussion of further liberal policy choices. It also limits the prospect of conservative policies being put forward instead as the existing system is essentially one put in place by moderate conservatives (Mitt Romney for instance).

Abortion: Remains a pretty strong partisan split. Republicans are "only" coming in at 70-30 "pro-life". Democrats at 90-10 pro-choice. Planned Parenthood funding achieves similar results as a proxy fight in this issue.

Gay marriage: Republicans come in 70-30 against still (Democrats are nearly universally in support).

A set of amusing evaluations

By Christians of atheists. 

There were several interesting elements pulled out for comment by them.

"Skeptics represent one-quarter of all unchurched adults (25%). Nearly one-third of skeptics have never attended a Christian church service in their lives (31%)."
-The first statistic matters because the "nones" are frequently used as a calling card for both the skeptical/atheist community and the Christian community rather than a direct signal of who such people are. If only about a quarter of the "nones" are "skeptics", by that definition, then that's only about 5-6%. Which is about what you'd expect and doesn't sound like a major rise or something to worry about. If the "nones" population is instead more like 20-25% and comprised mostly of atheists/skeptics, then the claims made by religious folk that "we" have too much influence on public policy and they are being "discriminated" against, or otherwise actively repressed start to make more sense. But as it is, it sounds more like a large proportion of people who are bored or disaffected by churches, and just not willing to stick up for those who aren't so disaffected when they wish to impose upon others.

I'd also imagine the non-attendance of a Christian church figure would be somewhat lower if one expanded it to include any religious faction (Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, etc). The narrow focus on Christianity is to be expected from a pro-Christian group but it ignores that people are potentially leaving any religious tradition for similar reasons as they may leave that state of Christendom behind.

"Given their antipathy or indifference toward the Bible, it is remarkable that six out of 10 skeptics own at least one copy. Most have read from it in the past"

This is "remarkable" in the sense that it is worth a remark. It isn't "remarkable" in the sense that it ought to shock or surprise anyone. Yes I've read it. Yes I have a copy (digital, but still). No I wasn't impressed. Indeed, I've talked to many skeptics that the process of reading the "good book" itself was a major factor in their now stated disbelief. So having a copy around is kind of a reminder of that process for most of them. I could not quote chapter and verse myself as it did not make that grand of an impression on me to memorize entire passages. I don't remember Greek myths word for word either yet those were a little more pragmatic and entertaining I found. I also don't bother re-reading them now, decades later.

Given the widespread nature of influence on public policy and sometimes the private lives of others, I perhaps should heed the theological implications and interpretations of scripture (upon others) somewhat more than I do. But in so far as someone identifies a strictly religious basis for their positions as to what the government should do, I rarely find this will be an interesting debate and will rarely draw upon any serious scholarship to back such positions. In many cases, it will not resemble at all the theological writings and interpretations they believe backs their opinion in the first place. This is because I rarely find most religious people take the process of theology all that seriously either. Serious theological study is intended to bring all the text under the same architecture, placing it in context or in interpretative philosophical positions alongside the rest. Most people are not doing this. Most of them pick and choose to their convenience and ignore other matters entirely. Whole passages and indeed entire books within the canon are often ignored or unheeded. I'd say the percentage of people who have even read the entire text is much lower than is commonly believed, much less the percentage of people who are taking the process of how to believe as a serious intellectual pursuit.

"Perhaps the biggest transition of all is the entry of millions of women into the skeptic ranks. In 1993 only 16 percent of atheists and agnostics were women. By 2013 that figure had nearly tripled to 43 percent. This enormous increase is not because the number of skeptic men has declined. In fact, men’s numbers have steadily increased over the last two decades—but not nearly as rapidly as among women."

This should be a little more surprising, and most definitely reassuring for atheists/skeptics. The more prominent figures in the "atheist" community, such as any exists, are typically older white males (Maher, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, etc). "On the ground", there's more women than one would think would be the case from that feature. Keep in mind that women are also becoming "more religious", so the ones who are not leaving are becoming more conservative and more tied to their faith. That may also be true for the men, but on different grounds. I would guess the key appeals for women to leave a religion are most likely not a rejection of church authority in favor of a more anti-authoritarian world but a rejection of the use of that authority to abuse or discriminate against other human beings, including women (based on conversations).

"Churches have done little to convince skeptics to reevaluate. In fact, because more than two-thirds of skeptics have attended Christian churches in the past—most for an extended period of time—their dismissal of God, the Bible and churches is not theoretical in nature." - This is not surprising that the large majority in a largely Christian country have past experience with church.

"Most skeptics think of Christian churches as:
Groups of people who share a common physical space and have some common religious views, but are not personally connected to each other in meaningful or life-changing ways" (sounds about right)
"Organizations that add little, if any, value to their communities; their greatest value stems from the limited times they serve the needy in the community" (definitely true)
"Organizations that stand for the wrong things—wars, preventing gay marriage and a woman’s freedom to control her body, sexual and physical violence perpetrated on people by religious authority figures, mixing religious beliefs with political policy and action" (seems like a major factor for the youth disappearing, and there has been a long tradition of Christians seeking to divide public policy and religion for which such activities are often offensive and divisive. This also doesn't address the possibility of Christianity increasingly being seen as offensive and in opposition to science and research, where it often was not for much of the last century)
"Led by people who have not earned their positions of influence by proving their love of humankind, and are thus not deserving of trust" (this critical attitude toward authority isn't limited to religion, it's heavily involved in many institutions today, but religion and Christianity in particular has done considerable self-harm under this arc certainly).

"The data does lend support to the notion that college campuses are comfortable places for young people to abandon God and assume control of their own lives."

That line I find is telling not because of the college aspect, but the "assuming control of their own lives" part. One implication of it is that "we" are supposed to be telling them what to do and they're not listening anymore.

"One of the unexpected results we uncovered is the limited influence of personal relationships on skeptics. They are considerably less relational and less engaged in social activities than the average American."
I'm not sure what "less relational and less engaged" entirely means. Introverts anonymous unite, each in your own homes? But in as far as skeptics are less likely to do or believe something simply because their friends or families do, yes. I agree.

"It’s a chicken-or-egg conundrum to identify which came first: the atheist celebrity or an uptick in the number of atheists. Whatever the case, atheism has shifted in the past 50 years from cultural anathema to something the “cooler” kids are doing."

I'd like to have seen this pulled apart quite a bit more. The main reason I suspect it was cultural anathema was the association, still but less often casually made, that "atheism" or "godlessness" was for some reason synonymous with "communism". While there's a strong political association among atheists with more progressive policies, particularly on social issues but also on economic positions, this is no longer a common affiliation that most people will make. Or at least, a more neo-liberal economic consensus dominates the landscape, and a variety of policies are available and accessible both to people on the political left and for skeptics to assess and support (or oppose). One way to look at this would be that the end of the Cold War placed "communist" as a dirty word worthy of scorn for the damages it wrecked upon humanity, it no longer left "godless" as a strong affiliation one way or another. European/Western societies have become increasingly secular throughout both the 20th century and the Cold War. While there are non-serious attempts to show they are "socialist", it is rarely declared they're the second coming of Stalin or Mao either. I would suspect that lacking this cultural ability to point to someone's godless nature as an endorsement of the Soviet Union, the great enemy of the last generation, there's not as much compunction to be seen as god-fearing or whatever instead and that this has far more to do with the cultural shift than anything Dawkins is saying or has written. (And indeed, the post-Soviet Russian political landscape includes a reclamation of the Russian Orthodox church both politically and culturally, even as the Russian state remains a considered opponent to US hegemony).

The second aspect is the accessibility of the internet has made information and critiques of Christian apologetic works much more widespread. One doesn't need to have read Dawkins or Hitchens at all where this was probably a much more influential need 20-25 years ago.

Quick thoughts on the election

1) The most interesting thing that happened was how well marijuana did at the ballot (2 states and DC legalizing it entirely and Florida's medical marijuana vote going extremely well, 58%, but not passing). And how poorly anti-abortion or how well minimum wages did as issues. I'm not a fan of minimum wage laws, in that I don't think they're an effective way to address income inequality. Nor do I care if people work at companies full-time and yet still qualify for various social welfare programmes. I think that's actually a net good even though I think the social welfare programmes are inefficiently scaled (and can cause heavy disincentives at the margin), simply because it is more tolerable to almost everyone that we provide social welfare to people who are working (or can't work) but aren't making ends meet at the margins. However, those complicated economic objections aside. The fact that many people do seem to think min wage is somehow effective at helping poor people suggests that many people voting for increases in it were concerned about income distribution or the general economy. Mostly what happened is a lot of liberal-ish sounding things passed but a lot of conservatives won elections. I thought that was very odd.

2) Conservatives did not score as many own goals as they have the last few cycles. Democrats did. The one case that eludes me is how a Congressman with 20 indictments for various forms of corruption can win re-election. That seems like it ought to be a pretty damning own goal problem. Apparently saying dumb things about female anatomy is (and it ought to be pretty damning), as is sending photographs of your own anatomy (if male, this is stupid but doesn't strike me as potentially damning politically), but potentially violating the law is not. Good to know.

3) It is not enough to tell people what your opponent might do that is terrible. You need to have something to sell yourself on. In Colorado, Udall's campaign was running a ton of negative ads relating to an opponent's prior support for strong anti-abortion laws. These apparently turned voters off rather than working as a scare tactic. Meanwhile, Udall's actual record included being a staunch anti-NSA reformer by rhetoric and voting and even opposing expansive foreign policy conduct (by his own party's President). Those may not be broadly popular everywhere, but I'd have to think they could have been popular in Colorado. Various media outlets subsequently endorsed his rival simply because they were so annoyed with the negative portrayals instead of the salesmanship of what he could offer.

This strategy is especially poor at working on liberals and motivating them to vote in large numbers. Fear is a conservative weapon, and they're very good at using it. Liberals also need something to escape their fear with, which they're not as good at using lately. It's possible that Republicans will spend a lot of time trying to kill judicial appointments, overturn or at least sabotage Obamacare, or trying to bring up impeachment and investigations of the Obama administration. But. I think if they want to win in 2016, they won't be able to do that. They need to try to govern in order to not be punished by the general disdain for Republicans (both parties really, but they're especially unpopular) and their best option is to try to pass laws to show what their agenda is and then have Obama veto them or the Senate filibustering them if they're particularly egregious. So talking about these things as fears isn't really that practical because they're more vague and unlikely to be realized as actual problems. Specific policies like anti-abortion laws or attacks on birth control accessibility might be more plausible, but it would still be better still to actually defend birth control accessibility as a thing, or access to abortion rather than simply oppose those who don't want them. They can stand on their own with or without pointing out that someone hates it.

4) Lots of people who voted clearly do not pay attention to politics. While I found the photo bomb on McConnell in Kentucky hilarious, it was pretty obvious a couple months ago he was going to win that race and win it comfortably. It was called almost immediately because it was clearly won months ago. The question mark was the margin, which was higher than polls suggested. That was an ominous sign that portended several other defeats, including some unexpected governorships. Kasich as governor was in a similar boat as that race was settled months ago (and won by an even more comfortable margin as Fitzgerald was one of the "own goal" Democrats). People who don't pay attention to these horse races and just show up to vote don't really have valid complaints to make and their surprise is particularly off-putting as pathetic. What people should be doing is spending some of the time ahead of the elections trying to make the argument against McConnell or Kasich or for their candidate of preference in some conversation with other human beings. This rather quickly establishes how strong a candidacy is even without referencing polling data as you'd know immediately there's a ton of people around who don't share your views and may need to be talked to or argued with or that you live in a bubble of people who agree with you and need to talk to a few strangers for sampling purposes. Instead of showing up on election day and suddenly being surprised there's legions of people who voted for the other guy and calling it a day. There is no actual prohibition against talking about politics and policy matters. Most people just don't like fighting over it because they're usually ill-informed and think they aren't.

5) Something I think liberals don't often realize, and this goes back to the fear element: Politics is not about policy. It's about tribalism. Getting your tribe to stand up and shout down the other one. Sometimes it's about finding some other tribe (in another land) to unify against and shout down. Sometimes it's about picking fights within your own tribe. Mostly it's about shouting at other tribes though. It is not about ideology. It is not about political policy positions. Almost no one pays that much attention to know what those even are. Liberals, or to some extent moderates, and that rare band of independents, do care about those things. Some conservatives care about a few particular policies. But people, and especially conservatives, mostly care whether they are in charge of setting those policies and getting to lord that over their foes. As do many "liberal" political figures (Obama included). It isn't a contest about who has better arguments, who can debate the particulars of policy concerns and constraints, or even who looks better on TV. It's a contest about who gets to do things and try to brag about it and who gets to not do things and complain about what is being done.

Filed under situation normal

all fucked up

Most of these are questions that people who have studied voter habits and biases/prejudices have known about for years. They are systematic biases (against foreigners, against the economy having grown, etc). Most of them make no sense except in the light of some variety of prejudicial thinking (the probable population of immigrants or Muslims being absurdly high in most countries). The most interesting part for most people would be the absurdly high numbers of some of the actual statistics (Spain's unemployment rate, South Korea's life expectancy).

Still I found a couple of these interesting because they're not part of typical voter bias statistics versus just a general knowledge of demographic data. The voter bias research shows that usually people can estimate general knowledge data closer than understanding expert fields like economics or international trade. But these sorts of particular knowledge upset even that comfortable bias toward random and meaningless errors because they are fueled by additional bias concerns.

The teen pregnancy rate. 
I suspect people don't actually understand what the birth rate is and how to calculate it as one problem with asking people to calculate this figure. Such a figure is typically very low. Most women are not giving birth in a given year of life, and fewer still are doing so as teenagers. If people but reflected back on it for a moment, what's the probable number of girls they went to high school with who were pregnant while they were in a given school year. That figure, per year, could be very high at some high schools, and very low at others. But it wouldn't be a quarter of each year's class. Or a fifth. Or maybe even a tenth at the very "worst" cases. It would be amazing if it were more than one or two girls per classroom (say a "room" of 30). So it would be maybe 5% at most, and most probably less. That's how people should estimate it. They don't have this heuristic ready at hand to think about it. Further, since
a) people believe this figure is going up (it's not, it's going down) and
b) people hear about this as a problem or as parents worry about this as a problem, they imagine it must be very common in the way that we inflate all things we worry about as likely risks.
c) We're also bad with estimating low probability events generally. We like to tack on to those with media attention and fear (school shootings, terrorists, etc).
It's likely that the number gets inflated in the minds of those guesstimating it.

Parents should be taking some precautions that their teenage children should take some precautions against these unplanned events, but parents should also know it isn't very common that every 4th daughter out there is getting knocked up. Actually getting and staying pregnant is not that simple, on top of that teenagers (while they certainly talk a game otherwise), are probably not having sex all the time. Many aren't having sex at all, or not until their late teens. Birth control itself moving forward will be easier to use (IUDs) or easier to come by (condoms and access through health insurance, or perhaps OTC).

Religion percentages.

This is well known by people who aren't religious apparently how many people are of some religious sect or that, or not at all. But yes, the US is no danger of becoming a secular-atheist-Muslim-satanist country anytime soon. Most all of you Americans are Christian or some derivation there of (including that "spiritual but not religious" component, which is mostly "Christians who don't like going to their church" as far as I'm concerned. I can't say I blame them).

A big percentage of you apparently don't know that and apparently many of those confused souls think they are Muslims instead. Or perhaps secret Muslims are a thing after all. I realize that whole Jesus-Mohammed worship must be awfully confusing, but I think they're distinct enough for most people to tell the difference and know which one they might be trying to pretend they are following some of what they said with some seriousness.

No other religious group makes up more than 1-2% of the American population. Jews are common in a few cities. Muslims are common in a few cities. Buddhists are common in a few cities. Mormons are in Utah. Atheists or nones are kind of all over, but they're not anywhere near as common as people like to think. Either atheist/nones or Christians. Still, 15-20% isn't bad.

I draw attention to these two because Americans are particularly bad at estimating both. Canada is a little worse on the Muslim question (same with France and Belgium).

I would also draw attention to the immigration question. This is pretty predictable as an expressed bias of voters. Voters have an anti-foreigner bias built into to their ideological narratives. Either as "immigrants are dirty, noisy, lazy, criminals", with maybe an exception for certain Asian or European countries depending. Or as "people in those other countries are stealing our jobs", either through outsourcing/trade or as coming here to work dirt cheap. To be honest 13% seemed actually pretty high to me. That's almost 40 million American residents. For a country that doesn't make it easy to come and live here if you aren't born here. It seems possible, but seemed very high given the obstacles. Witness Australia or Canada's much higher percentages, countries with somewhat more sensible and lessened obstacles.

The net effect of this kind of research is that politicians and people covering or writing for politicians probably cannot go broke if they keep betting against the American public being well educated and informed on a given subject. And they all know this. The question mark is who these people are and whether they vote. Many of the ill-informed do not. But on questions like these, there are fewer and fewer people who are not ill-informed, indeed, the plebs could be said to express views which are not only wrong, but support ideological holdings and demand policies opposite to those fueled by an informed reality. All getting and encouraging more people to vote does in those circumstances is further deepen the divide between reality and imagination. The crisis isn't participation (again, roughly 2/3s of us are showing up to vote). It's information.

People think there are legions of immigrants, and that they hold some "foreign" and "dangerous" faiths.
People think crime is going up, by leaps and bounds in some cases.
People think the economy isn't growing, or that inflation or unemployment are absurdly high.
People think foreign aid makes up an absurd portion of our government spending (or, worse, that Medicare and Social Security do not).

In some cases they think these things because they are actively misinformed by others. The media runs a lot of crime stories, or covers immigration or the economy a lot, and perhaps on these issues it is to blame for misleading the public. In most cases though the public think these things because that's what they want to think. One of the misinterpretations of a lot of "Faux News viewers are more poorly informed than others" is that the problem is necessarily Faux News. The problem is probably in large part the type of person who wants to consume Faux News as a legitimate news organisation in the first place as their primary source of information. That type of person believes a certain set of things, and doesn't want to hear that their comfortable assumptions about the doom of our time coming from non-existent Muslim immigrants crossing the Rio Grande, having sex with their daughters, and shooting at our schools. The problem with that type of person isn't that someone feeds them their demands. The news have always done this service for the body public.

The problem is how we dissuade them of those demands in the first place.

Migration patterns of the not so rich and not so famous

Uh... This sentence: "There's a persistent belief in Washington that there's an easy "compromise" on the question of what to do with America's 11 million unauthorized immigrants: give them legal status instead of deporting them, but don't allow them to pursue citizenship." - is directly contradicted by this one: "76 percent of Americans who think unauthorized immigrants should be eligible for citizenship at some point."

Perhaps, and I know this will be shocking, Washington's persistent beliefs are stupid on this point. The "middle ground" is fixing the existing immigration and citizenship laws to provide a path to citizenship, because that's what most people want in some form. Even most conservatives support such measures. There is no need for a plan which somehow rejects citizenship as an option, or a plan which removes many millions of people. Because that's not actually what most people want. The latter does have a constituency, but it doesn't appear to be a very big one.

For the record I don't even think we should be doing much to keep track of the borders. Basically a lethal pandemic disease is about the only reason I can think of to be all that worried about who comes and goes as a systematic measure of border controls. If you're worried about terrorism border control isn't going to help you, better and more focused intelligence functions are to identify and track potential threats for terrorist acts, plus there are plenty of legal citizen status or native born Americans who do things we could otherwise regard as "terrorism".

As a result much of the problem with this debate is a belief about the borders at all being a point of contention when most of the people who immigrated have been here for years because we have an ineffectual immigration system for turning such people into citizens if they want to be. This probably why there's also a large constituency who demands mass deportations despite the futility, expense, and lack of any plausible benefit to doing so, and who is rarely heard from except during Republican primaries it seems. How this expensive and questionably moral project becomes a demand for a futile and wastefully expensive border control measure also I am less clear on.

Virginia, and why politics is often about things people tell you it is.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-07/republicans-haven-t-lost-women.html

I brought this up in a debate forum recently.

Basically the point is this: abortion is, for all intents and purposes, an irrelevant political topic in most elections. Republicans' problem with abortion has been they have recently run a disproportionate number of unskilled political figures who have said things on the subject, or tangentially related subjects like female anatomy and rape, that are well outside the political mainstream and treated harshly by voters (as they rightly should be). But their fundamental position on abortion, while disagreeable and in my view wrong, isn't a dead weight anchor that prevents them from winning or causes defeat in elections by annoying women in particular. They will not need to adjust it to "win back women" or to win elections overall. They will mostly need to shut up about it.

A closer case can be made for how Republican candidates talk about women (binders full of them!, or Romney's equally repulsive and stupid subsequent claim that women were bought off with free birth control) or have taken positions such as invasive ultrasounds being mandated for abortion procedures which are unpopular. But these issues are likely unpopular with men as well given that abortion politics are basically the same across gender, and at times that men have even evinced higher levels of pro-choice attitudes than women. In the superficial way in which most people, regardless of gender, consume political information and news, gaffes and extreme views are likely to attract attention and perhaps sway opinion when they are inevitably highlighted by press coverage and negative advertising. We could probably say that Cuccinelli's views on invasive ultrasounds or statements and record on sodomy and so on through the sexual panoply of political footballs for him to fumble created an overall attitude and perspective which a) annoyed many putative donors to his campaign and prevented him from raising money and enthusiasm outside of his base, b) annoyed a significant portion of voters into voting against him without regard for the opponent and c) allowed for easier attack advertising by his opponent by using his own words and record to attack him. Allowing a candidate to win an election without really providing a significant platform because they draw large numbers of voters who "hate you" instead should be a cardinal sin in politics. One can argue this is sort of what Obama did in 2008 by running against the Bush legacy and providing a lot of insubstantial promises about a proposed agenda, and that it is also what Romney attempted to do in 2012 but was far less skilled politically and charismatically to pull it off (and/or had poor political views). But the point is that saying dumb things or having a bad or unpopular record on a few issues is a bad idea if winning the election matters as it places a big handicap on your potential vote. This is true regardless of whether the subject is women, abortion, the environment (another issue that annoyed donors), homosexuals, or more simply, the damn roads and traffic.

Back to the abortion point.

There are several reasons it is irrelevant politically.
- Most people do not care, or hold relatively vague positions (that sometimes contradict each other). This is why I consider many Democrats to be effectively pro-life/anti-choice simply because they end up not opposing or even backing many restrictions on accessibility which to the uninterested or uninformed voter seem "reasonable", but which offer limited utility at best (and are unambiguously dumb in most cases). The vast majority of the public holds these squishy mentalities about abortion, with it existing in an uncomfortable moral and political space that they would rather pretend isn't there. When most people do not want to care about an issue in the first place, it is easy to ignore it altogether or say as little as possible or necessary about it and move on.
- The people who do care already have their minds made up, and are generally informed activists who vote on the issue in a more concerted way. They will enter an election cycle already knowing who they will vote for or against based on party heuristics or actual political attention and knowledge. Even extreme statements are unlikely to move their positions because those statements will simply confirm what they already know about the candidates.
- Political opinion on abortion isn't moving or trending significantly and doesn't demonstrate many demographic splits moving forward from age and generational shift. This distinguishes it from other social issues like the drug war (sort of) or gay marriage, where there are huge generational gaps politically that political figures must address or navigate, and requires some amount of attention in more elections because the shifts overall are large and positive in one direction (or another I suppose if one is less favorable to either than I am).
- Extreme statements are rare, that's why they are "newsworthy". Most politicians know not to say that they might consider rape/incest exemptions to be a problem. I personally consider these politicians who violate this third rail commandment of politics to be at least morally consistent, though I disagree with their moral basis and would oppose them for reason #2. Most voters do not and will not give them this credit. Most politicians know which abortion restrictions can be presented with some level of acceptability to a given population (parental notification, sometimes waiting periods, late term restrictions or bans), and which cannot (invasive ultrasounds, complete bans shuttering all or many abortion clinics). Polling data on these issues is readily available and has been relatively consistent for a couple of decades now. Political figures who wish to advance among conservatives can advertise their pro-life concerns but know they can accomplish nothing. This is what the previous GOP gubernatorial candidate in Virginia did (McDonnell), and what various candidates did not do (Cuccinelli, Akin, Mourdock, etc).
- If an extreme statement is not made, abortion will probably not surface as a political issue in any given election. It will surface if it is on a ballot, or if there have been more extreme laws passed (and usually overturned in courts), but it will probably not rise above more serious voter concerns like the economy, health care, crime, war, etc. I do not recall abortion being a serious issue in 2012 for example.
- My general contention would be to agree with a thesis that any actual success in overturning Roe-Wade by conservatives would be a death knell to their position. I think the political/policy elite knows this and knows that they benefit far more in activism and funding from being perceived as a somewhat extreme position that can be more vaguely expressed as "abortion is bad" rather than having to defend other positions like "these women are bad for needing/wanting abortions", or more likely "these women are dead, or suffered some other lesser grievous injustice, from an inability to get a safe and legal abortion", arguments on which the general public does not share the pro-life attitude, or opposes it openly. This means that the general Republican party attitude is to express public support for pro-life causes, perhaps pass a few laws that can restrict access without much opposition, or perhaps pass a few token harsher laws to be overturned in court, complain loudly about the courts and their activism either way, and move on to other things leaving this issue in more or less the status quo that it has been in since the Clinton years.

I find the general thesis that women are motivated to vote on the basis of "lady parts" to be rather disturbing and incorrect. Or it at least should suggest there's some plausible theory that men are voting based on their penis, which seems more likely honestly. Women are just as likely, if not more so, to be confronted with economic challenges in a mixed economy such as finding a job, holding a job, or even starting a business, and likely have grave concerns about the quality of education for children (or themselves), the safety and accessibility of public roads, and so on. To assess the probability of voting on the basis of abortion alone as a significant "women's issue" is first to fail to recognize that women are not distinguished in their views on abortion and the accompanying moral and legal frameworks we have from men, and second to demean women as incapable of having significant political views on a broad range of issues.

At the state level, these politics on abortion are somewhat more or less aggressive, but Virginia is a pretty moderate state thanks to expanding DC suburbs, relative to say, South Dakota or Nebraska or Kansas or Texas or Mississippi. We could say that in this case, Republicans ran someone who offended this status quo, and women perhaps correctly recognized this and voted accordingly, and good for them. Or we could also point out that there were a bunch of transportation and economic issues in the state (along with health care) that still overshadowed public opinion on abortion, and that on these issues, Cuccinelli also seemed out of step to his state's voters. Which is not altogether unlikely either since women still identified these as more pressing issues for their vote.

And this is also not altogether unlikely since Republicans have had a great deal of trouble articulating their economic views or plans for development of infrastructure, or in general a governing philosophy rather than a rhetorical opposition to governing in the first place. I consider this their far greater problem for women and for all voters; that they don't relate on economic grounds what their proposed policies would do or could do for voters at a personal level. Obama, of all people the supposed socialist by their reckoning, was far better at this than Romney at explaining how markets could work for example in a practical way. It's far too much "we need to keep taxes low" without recognizing that for most Americans, taxes are quite low historically (and the main exception is people near the poverty line who can have incredibly high marginal rates on increased earnings). And voters in their infinite wisdom, reject this as an insufficient platform and an insufficient solution to their problems.

How a libertarian is not in the Tea Party, and probably doesn't want to be included in the first place

I've long maintained that the Tea Party is essentially a movement of social conservatives/strong conservative Republicans who reacted rather late to the anti-Bush portions of the initial wave of Paul-ite types opposing the expansive state and executive powers and woke up to these issues upon the ascension of an opposing political figure (Obama) rather than out of some principled conscience. It has always reminded me of a costumed Halloween-Constitution Day theme that has gone on way too long rather than some vibrant anti-statist community that re-assures me I have fellow travelers wishing for a smaller or less invasive state as a broad goal.

Evidence to this effect has been presented in polls for a long time, that the core of the movement holds very strong socially conservative views, and that it is, for the most part, rather anti-libertarian, even sometimes on economic issues for which it is painted as stridently so.

This kind of poll is devastating to that effect. 

I will raise a number of points here (and then raise a few derivations on atheism too, since that concerns me as well).

1) Libertarians have very opposed views on social issues from the Tea Party or Republican party in general. They're virtually the opposite on legalising marijuana (71% for, compared to ~60% opposed), a higher rate than even Democrats and many liberals. They're about as pro-choice as everyone else rather than restrictive on abortion access and rights, and they're much more supportive of physician assisted suicide even than most people, much less conservatives. And finally they're opposed to restrictions on pornography (on the internet in particular). This suggests that candidates who have highlighted such conservative attitudes will not garner much libertarian support or enthusiasm, if not gain outright opposition. This is true regardless of whether the candidate has a D or an R next to them as many Democrats are pro-drug war or will support various restrictions on abortion, for example.

2) Gay marriage remained an outlier to this (roughly 60% opposed, less than Republicans/Tea Party types but much less support than other issues).

I have less of a philosophical appreciation for why this might be, since I am broadly supportive of gay marriage personally. Naturally I am bothered by this polling result and how it reflects upon "my" politics.

I have encountered fairly libertarian-leaning people who have implied that the state shouldn't be involved in marriage in the first place, as yet one more intervention they think is unnecessary. Philosophically there's a great deal of merit to that claim to avoid the state's interventions where ever possible, but practically and legally, it is absurd. Marriage is already defined by the state in too many ways through common law and legal codes to eliminate it in a broad stroke, and is so defined in ways that differ widely from "traditional" notions already (such as the easier availability of divorce) that concerns over protecting "traditional" marriages make little sense to me.

By contrast, similar private contracts made by homosexual couples (such as wills or custody assignments) are often violated or voided by states rather than upheld as the wishes and private arrangements of their citizens. This is a great injustice committed by the state, arguably greater than the injustice of having the state involved in marriage laws in the first place since all that does is standardize contracts which can still be easily amended for particular demands (but not all, since taxation and legal residency status aren't property rights individuals confer by right upon each other as individuals in contract). It might be better if we were to start from scratch avoiding the state interventions in a new system, that argument can be made. That's not the world we live in, where most of those interventions are broadly popular and will not be practically simple to divorce from the powers of the state. It does not impress me as a reason to oppose extending these same legal rights to homosexuals. I would be much more impressed by this argument if a) people making it were to describe specific or particular types of powers in marriage laws that they would prefer to see abolished, including some of those that benefit themselves, b) they would accede to a method of enforcement of these contracts that was less arbitrary in the first place as a means of acknowledging that their own arrangements would likely be respected and favorably treated while other people's might not be so honored, and c) how this method would differ from having the state enforce marriage contracts as it does already. And along with any of that, some evidence that the general public could be persuaded to support such amendments to the structure of marriage contracts or enforcements or already supports such changes. Mostly I just see this expressed as a platitude that the state shouldn't be doing it rather than as a course of action on how it would cease. Which is perhaps philosophically and rhetorically appealing but isn't an objection to amending the status quo arrangement in some modest way.

3) Libertarians seem to identify at least marginally with the Republican party anyway. I suspect this is from some affinity to economic rhetoric which is less hostile to markets and more hostile to regulation and taxes.

I'm not sure it has borne out much fruits however as Republicans have repeatedly and whole-heartedly embraced some foolishly anti-market or anti-economically sensible business-corporate handouts while in office, and have persisted in these habits (see the agriculture bill or transportation votes earlier this year) even as these supposedly anarchistic Tea Party representatives have taken offices. Some have more principled positions (Mike Lee's proposal on transportation and gasoline taxes is not terrible for example) but these are still the minority amongst both Tea Party types and Republicans in general. Other than keeping taxes relatively low but mostly incoherent, I'm not sure what policy victories Republicans can claim here. Opposition to the ACA/ObamaCare is related to this however and may be considered as a major issue of shared concern (given the overwhelming percentage of libertarians who supported a notion that much more health care should be devolved to the individual's economic concern and planning rather than existing as a basic right as liberals or communitarians might claim).

The main questions this raises for me are as follows:
a) Why do libertarians perceive Democrats as poorly as they do. Is this from the hostility of liberal commenters and editorials to libertarian politics and objections as a tribal affiliation (something which many conservatives, particularly social conservatives, often adopt as well)? Or is this from hostility to Democratic policy choices and preferences? Or from ignorance of the similarities of the two parties and their supporters on many issues?
b) It appears libertarians and Tea Party types generally see both Republicans and Democrats as being far more liberal than they actually are. I see both as much less liberal than they are believed to be by others of less libertarian persuasion, curiously. I'm left wondering why there isn't very much of a left-libertarian lean available in expression.
c) Why do libertarians not bow out entirely from Republican politics or, perhaps alternatively, take alliances of convenience with the "most" libertarian candidate running, regardless of whether this is a D or R candidacy, whoever promotes particularly liberty-based preferences in the most categories of importance to the individual voter and can thereby be worked with to advance those into policy changes or the abolition of existing policy. The assumption of both parties seems to be that people voting for libertarians are doing so out of a disaffection with Republicans or conservatives rather than to express a particular strain of policy desires. While that might be accurate for now, as Republicans are increasingly seen as old-white guys, and libertarians are mostly drawing from younger white guys, that may come to a change in the party's stance on some key issues or may come to an abandonment of the party in favor of Democrats who are more flexible on economic concerns or third party candidates who are often more inflexible but much closer to ideological policy preferences.

4) Libertarians had a very unfavorable view overall of immigration and immigrants. Since most of the libertarian leaning scholarship I encounter personally and libertarian leaning commentary on the subject of immigration I consume has a very, very positive view of immigration, both economically and personally/culturally/historically. Perhaps since I came up in a rather diverse group of friends and classmates, descended from recent immigrants in many cases my own views are less suspicious of "others". I suspect this overall trend has to do with the near-universal whiteness of libertarians and some sort of racial hostility to Latinos or Africans, and to a lesser extent various Asian migrants. What confuses is me though is that it is a much stronger hostility than is expressed by even Tea Party constituencies. I do not communicate much with the Ron Paul/Lew Rockwell types but they seem much stronger than I had thought amongst libertarian perspectives. This was disconcerting as it was one of the few negatives that was stronger among libertarians than conservatives.

5) Religion plays a big part in why Tea Party types and Republicans in general differ from libertarians. There's a huge percentage of both evangelicals AND unaffiliated "nones" involved versus the more communitarian Catholic population, but there are still fewer evangelicals than are affiliated with Republicans or the Tea Party. These means that while there are still plenty of "religious right" affiliated types within a given libertarian population, it's very different from the Tea Party or social conservative constituencies that make up larger portions of Republican voter blocs where most such persons see themselves as far right religious voters. This may also reflect the distinctions on social issues being a hands-off from government approach rather than a strict legal regime, a greater tolerance for "good-without-god" morality (than even the general population provides), and a generally less religious outlook governing their politics or perhaps even individual lives.

6) In a less related point, but one which I've raised before here. The population of Americans who express belief in a "personal god" in this poll is over 60%. While this percentage is perhaps lowered to a more tolerable level by excluding evangelical Protestants, it is still much higher than many European secular Democracies or the views of many theological scholars for that matter. Atheists are often told that this belief is limited to the outlandish worldview of the religious right, but this ignores that:
a) the religious right is a very large and substantial portion of the American population, and exerts considerable control over the politics and the subsequent laws and regulations of many states, or within states to the city/town/county level, and up to federal representatives via its ability to mobilize over activism on particular causes and issues and to attempt to hold elected officials to particular mandates over these causes and concerns. It is not an insubstantial percentage of people who really don't matter who are being argued with by atheists on the application of these beliefs to political policies, much less the application of scientific reasoning or empirical deductions about the problems that are faced by individuals and the institutions and social groups they construct (like nation-states). They are quite real and they are quite numerous and they are quite busy.
b) It is not so limited to only crazy-right-wingers as indeed many people guided by communitarian left-wing politics express similar attitudes. That population is probably still significantly larger than the population of libertarians or atheists taken as a whole and still expresses sentiments or broad philosophical agreement with many state interventions based upon religious beliefs. Even if they might oppose some of the more strident objects taken up by the religious right (like legal opposition to gay marriage or abortion say) they may take up often paternalistic sentiments about health or provisions to the poor in kind rather as a raw cash transfer on the basis that some god-figure wants them to set up the state thus instead of out of some empirical assessment that this or that approach could best help the poor or the sick.

I think much of this is that most religious people who hold a more modest or vague view when pressed either lie about holding this view but are far more comfortable with the notion of a personal entity as a deity in their daily lives or just don't hang out that often among more literal Biblical types who take this personal entity far more seriously and assume that they are a rarer commodity in the general public. This second explanation is fairly likely as many people are uncomfortable holding religious conversations anyway and are not extensively skilled in debating theological points or consistently applying them as a practice of their faith.

Shutdown city USA

I have many thoughts on this.

There are actual people, many thousands of them, who are presently out of work because of this. I share a general distaste for the government employing millions of people in the first place, but there are far better ways to trim the rolls and most of the people out of work are not the sort that are doing things I would more strongly disapprove of having in the first place (such as DEA agents, the TSA, the various NSA personnel doing dragnet surveillance on Americans, and most foreign deployed Army forces). It's mostly civilian contractors for defence programmes and some agencies that do "less essential" things, only some of which would fall into those categories of unsavory occupations. Some of these are people who could be in some agency that could be partially or fully privatized and their jobs less subject to partisan budget haggles (some national parks or most of NASA's operations for instance), but that isn't' the state of affairs as yet. And isn't a likely consequence of this whole kerfuffle either. While I think there's some disdain for civilian workers, these are people who were hired under contract to do a job and are largely being dismissed in a haphazard and foolish way, even if only temporarily. This is a form of pain and suffering inflicted on people, and imposes costs for starting and stopping various operations unexpectedly, hiring and training potential replacements if it lasts any appreciable duration, creates unemployment concerns, and so on. The sequester had some similar pain and suffering inflicted but was largely overlooked as this was mostly (but not entirely) impacting poor people. These are mostly middle class professionals now getting hammered. That changes the political impact.

That said, the political impact is that people will hate Congress. But they already hate Congress. A lot. And they had an opportunity to do something about this not long ago, and for the most part, did not. People hate Congress, but mostly think their man in Washington (and it's usually a man) is doing fine. The chances of this are slim in reality, but occur mostly because people have been segregated by years of movement, personal affiliation, and gerrymandering into strong partisan camps for Congressional races. They don't see the problem with their guy because he mostly says things they want to hear, and that's easier to do because they want to hear fewer conflicting things tailored to separate camps (albeit, still plenty of conflicting nonsense is necessary, such as "Medicare shouldn't be cut but deficits are bad"). Republican grassroots backers seem fine with shutting down the government even if the only thing they deign necessary to turn it back on is some concession on ObamaCare. Which isn't a political possibility, and isn't even an effect of shutting down the government.

In general, ObamaCare represents a shift in the economy, but it is not a significant shift in the status quo of health care markets in the US. I don't like all its particulars and would support overturning it, if it were replaced with something more like Wyden-Bennett for instance. But in and of itself, it really isn't that different from what we had before (yet anyway, it could prove more unpredictable, but it's more likely to end up looking like Massachusetts than the UK). So. I'm not really sure why it is the pillar that either party wants to stand and die on. There are more significant deficit busting things the Republicans could have picked in order to be credible on that issue (including, say, the farm subsidies that they voted to increase, but also entitlement reform negotiations or tax reforms, or reductions in defence spending). Portions of the ACA are broadly popular (price transparency, insurance of pre-existing conditions, leaving children on adult insurance longer, etc) and would likely have to be part of any new deal to replace it. So simply getting rid of it will likely turn out less popular than the public imagines for this reason and will not actually be a very effective and popular move for the party that does so. While this idea of tying a delay or a kill it effect to the ACA bill has been floating around a while, the sales job for the general public, rather than the conservative base who already champions the idea, has been very slow in coming around. This makes picking it as a fighting point a very strange move politically. It had zero chance of success, it isn't likely to make the Democrats look like the bad guys to the general public, and so on. There's a possibility of it, simply because this bill isn't that popular either. But the general public wanted a deal, not a shutdown. And that deal wasn't "kill or delay this silly health care law too", it might be some other concession, but something smaller more likely. As a further problem, the bill on the table wasn't even a deal that would solve this problem for a year or two. It was for a few weeks where we would just be back at this same point around Thanksgiving or Christmas. Hurrah for that.

I'm curious what happens now with the default limit in a few weeks. I think most Republican backers (of substantial wealth anyway), are probably okay with a shutdown, if not happy about it. I doubt most of them are okay with a default risk. The business types are in fact, probably pissed about the prospect. I suspect this reflects the division within the Republican party over what to do over the last few months, with party elites trying to push for simple moves to get things over and done with and move on to meaningless symbolic votes against ObamaCare and the like, and the base understanding those symbolic votes won't amount to anything but not understanding that actual votes probably won't either.

In general, I am greatly annoyed that a meaningless potential intrusion into Syria and the government's inability to play together have destroyed the public attention span for the NSA scandals, still ongoing in their revelations. For instance that the NSA decided it may use "enrichment" data without restraint drawn from social media sites, credit cards, insurance records, as part of their investigations and dragnets into American citizens. I don't like having to pay attention to furloughing of civilian workers while the NSA continues unimpeded. It is a distraction from the real business of actual deficit controls and necessary reforms therein, and from the expansion of executive and government power into the lives of ordinary people to have fights over things that do very little of either.