[Posted by Karl] The bloggy thing to do this morning would be to link the results of the new Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll of FL, OH and PA, toss in today’s media focus on VA from ABC News and others, then do some analysis of the strategies the campigns might be to pursue some given set of swing states. Indeed, I have done posts in that vein before (albeit with some nuance I won’t get into here). But today I feel more contrarian and nitpicky. First, these polls and media stories merely confirm what we would have surmised a year ago: FL and OH are going to be close, PA remains a tough get for the GOP, and VA has been trending Democratic but not a sure thing for Obama in light of the 2009 and 2010 elections there. Second, as Nate Silver notes, state polling is still noisy at theis point in the campaign. Third, as political scientist Andrew Gelman notes, the past several decades have seen a steady decline in the variation of statewide vote swings. Come November, the swing in the swing states will likely mirror the swing nationally. Electionate makes a similar point, although I have some disagreement with the underlying reasoning: There’s a growing chorus arguing that Obama has an electoral college advantage. The underlying assumption is that the race is close nationally and yet Obama seems poised to secure well over 300 electoral votes. In my view, that argument is misguided for a simple reason: the race isn’t close nationally, and the electoral college consequently reflects an Obama advantage. Electionate’s claim that the race isn’t close nationally is based in large part on the argument that Rasmussen and Gallup are skewing perceptions of the race. I will not rehash the claims against Rasmussen; some of them are quite reasonable, others less so. Gallup defends its polling here and here . Rather, I will note that Electionate’s plot excluding Gallup and Rasmussen tends to show a slowly tightening race, which is what you see with Gallup and Ras in the mix. Eyeballing the plot suggests Obama currently has an edge of a bit over 4% — but today’s RCP average gives Obama an edge of 3.6%. That’s not much a difference, particularly when considering that head-to-head polls at this point in the election cycle explain less than 50% of eventual results. [ Note: Electionate does not name RCP as an offender on this score .] However, this is another reason to focus more on Obama’s job approval number than any Electoral College map at the moment. The current RCP averages are 48.3% approve, 47.4% disapprove. If you exclude Gallup and Ras, 47.8% approve and 47.3% disapprove. Again, judiciously including Gallup and Ras has no significant effect on the numbers; if anything, they boost Obama’s approval number. For the zombies focused on the 2004 campaign analogy, note that while Bush had declining job approval eight years ago, he went into the election with a 49.8% job approval by the RCP average . None of this will keep we political junkies from obsessing over polls and maps. It’s fun to do that. Just keep in mind that at this point in the campaign, they probably do not tell you what you really want to know. –Karl
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You don’t need to pay much attention to the Electoral College right now
As we’ve noted in recent weeks, there is an effort to bail out the Postal Service with phony accounting measures. Democrats are currently voting on amendments to a bailout bill ( S. 1789 ) that leaves taxpayers on the hook, without reforming the USPS with structural changes that the Postmaster General himself supports. This bill will offer a backhanded channel to grant the USPS $41 billion from the Treasury. This is accomplished in two ways. First, the bill would rebate $11.1 billion in “overpayments” to the Treasury. The problem is that these are not overpayments. Last year, the GAO ruled that the Postal Service was wrong in their assertion that they overpaid for employee retirement benefits. After all, like anyone who pays a fixed amount into a pension fund with a variable rate of interest, there are ups and downs depending on the market. As such, any money recouped from the Treasury would engender more taxpayer funding. Second, this bill would re-amortize the entire prefunded payment structure, denying the Treasury of nearly $30 billion. Supporters of the bill refer to it as an intra-governmental transfer. In reality, it is a backhanded bailout. Even the Postmaster General, Patrick Donahoe, wants to reform the Post Office and cut $22 billion in costs by closing offices and ending Saturday delivery. This bill precludes those reforms and ensures that the USPS will remain insolvent, exposing taxpayers to future bailouts. Earlier in the day, Senator Sessions tried to raise a point of order against the bill, noting that it would violate the Budget Control Act by increasing the debt through reduced funding in the treasury. This is yet another example where Republicans could have blocked a bad piece of legislation by denying Democrats the 60 votes they needed to waive the point of order. But with the help of 9 Republicans , they defeated the point of order and proceeded with debate on the bill that will likely pass. Later on, Senator McCain proposed a substitute amendment (S. 1625), which would create a new postal oversight board (similar to BRAC) to close $3 billion worth of facilities over a two-year period and seize financial authority over the Postal Service if it defaults with more than a $2 billion deficit for more than two years. It would also allow them to make reforms, such as ending Saturday delivery. This will ensure that the USPS either succeeds on its own merits or becomes a private entity – free of government regulations, but also free of its government-sponsored monopoly on first class mail. The bill closely mirrors the Issa-Ross bill in the House. Yet, once again 16 Republicans joined with Democrats to defeat this modest reform bill. This is going to be a long week on the Hill….
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Another Capitulation on Postal “Reform”
CNN weighted the responses to get a nine point Obama lead, 52-43. That’s what they got when they weighted things. The actual count of people saying they’d vote for Obama versus Romney? 484-476. That’s just barely a 1 or 2… View post: Yesterday’s CNN Poll Showing Nine Point Obama Lead Actually Showed Near Tie In Actual Respondent Count
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Yesterday’s CNN Poll Showing Nine Point Obama Lead Actually Showed Near Tie In Actual Respondent Count
[Posted by Karl] It took Rathergate for the NYT to coin the phrase “Fake But Accurate,” but WaPo “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler nearly matches it with his rarest of ratings today: “For far too long women have been left behind in Obama’s job market. Of the 740,000 jobs lost since Obama took office, 683,000 of them were held by women. That is truly unsustainable.” — Statement by Sharon Day, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, April 6, 2012 In an effort to fight back against Democratic claims of a Republican “war on women,” the Republican National Committee has rolled out a new and startling fact—that under Obama, women have lost seven times as many jobs as men. We found this statistic surprising because we had been under the impression that men had fared worse than women in the recession. So do the RNC’s numbers add up? It turns out they do, but Kessler throws a penalty flag anyway: We cannot fault the RNC’s math, as the numbers add up. But at this point this figure doesn’t mean very much. It may simply a function of a coincidence of timing — a brief blip that could have little to do with “Obama’s job market.” If trends hold up over the next few months, then the RNC might have a better case. But at this point we will give this statistic our rarely used label: TRUE BUT FALSE As fundraiser/consultant Nathan Wurtzel quipped: “Fair, but biased.” That the WaPo shuttered its Ministry of Truth while Democrats controlled the elected branches of the federal government was sort of a general tip off. In this particular case, Kessler’s analysis is based on measuring Obama’s jobs record from the end of the recession (which favors Obama) rather than from the date of his inauguration (which Kessler admits is a common political and journalistic metric). Aside from the fairness issue in changing metrics, I would argue that policy lag should warrant not measuring from Day One (although not necessarily from the end of the recession (which artifically assumes a connection between the policy and the recovery). Yet Kessler concedes that even by his own metric, more than 2.2 million gross jobs have been added under Obama, but the gain for women was just 284,000. If we are going into the progressive narrative of identity politics, even Kessler’s narrative is ugly for women. Worse, Kessler does a half-baked analysis of why his narrative is ugly for women: Now that the economy is growing again, men are recovering jobs at a faster pace than women. In fact, the latest employment report shows that male participation in the work force was up 14,000 while female participation fell 177,000, in part because women tend to work in retail or government jobs, which have been cut in recent months. Is this a function of Obama’s policies? It’s unclear at this point, but it certainly is an under-reported phenomenon that the RNC, in its use of this statistic, is trying to highlight. Contra Kessler, this is not unclear. Women far outnumber men on state and local government payrolls (especially in public schools), which were propped up by Obama’s stimulus money . In fact, there is general agreement that the jobs “saved” by the stimulus were primarily in government , and education (which is mostly government). That money was spent. State and local governments then had to at least nod in the direction of rationalizing their spending, as the private sector already had. The result was unemployment for hundreds of thousands of women starting in 2010. Of course, this does not show that Obama is waging a war on women now so much as that he entered office waging a war for government at every level. Bias and sloppy analysis aside, my biggest complaint with establishment media “fact-checking” is the condescension and arrogance involved in pretending political debates are much simpler questions of fact. The Orwellian — or Pythonesque — “True But False” rating is just the poster child for the problems inherent in the effort. –Karl
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Obama’s war on women: True but false!
This morning, despite the stock market being closed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the jobs report for March. The average in surveys of economists was for a gain of about 209,000 non-farm jobs, but the actual report came in at 120,000 jobs (seasonally adjusted data.) There were job gains in many sectors, including manufacturing, finance, restaurants, and health care, with the notable exception of retail which lost more than 30,000 jobs in the month. While the unemployment rate dropped to 8.2 percent, it was primarily because people dropped out of the work force (we typically need over 125,000 jobs in a month just to keep up with population growth.) The participation rate fell by 0.1 percent. In other words, the unemployment rate fell only because the labor force fell by as much (164,000) as the population grew (169,000). The total number of employed people fell and the number of people not in the labor force spiked up. On the other hand, the total number of unemployed fell in the month, and the so-called U-6 unemployment rate which measures unemployed and underemployed fell dramatically — for which my best guess as to an explanation is that people went from looking for work to not looking for work. If someone is not looking for work, they do not count as unemployed. Furthermore, college graduates who have not been able to find their first job also do not count as unemployed in this data. This jobs report is so far below estimates that I would not be surprised to see it revised upwards later. In the meantime, the stock market will be looking at some rough sledding when it opens on Monday. The Obama Administration will trumpet the 0.1 percent downtick in the unemployment rate while Republicans will talk about the low number of actual jobs created, and the high actual number of unemployed people in the US. The real story remains that this is the worst recovery since the Great Depression. Given that recoveries usually roughly mirror the recession that preceded them; this is true outside the US as well as in our history. President Obama’s policies are a wet blanket smothering entrepreneurialism in this country. James Pethokoukis addresses this in a worth-reading article for the NY Post, and Ed Lazear’s article for the Wall Street Journal explains the Obama non-recovery quite well. For economists to be looking for a GDP growth rate under 3 percent for 2012 is a disaster at this point in what should be a strong recovery following a serious recession. Whether it is Obamacare, tax uncertainty, or new EPA regulations, everything this administration does is anti-growth and anti-business. What is remarkable is not that our economic statistics remain so weak at this point during the business cycle but that they are not weaker. For this we have to thank the American entrepreneurial spirit which is stronger even than the most anti-free market administration this nation has seen since FDR, or perhaps ever.
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March Jobs Report Continues Weakest Recovery Ever
