Tag: Election 2020

Adventures in Punditry

Exploring the Question: Has American Politics Gone Insane? | Political Pundit Night

It’s funny how your sense of time changes as you get older. In my head, this whole “going on the internet and saying stuff” thing is pretty new, but I’ve actually been at it for a while. My first gig on Coleman and Company was, unbelievably, about five years ago, and Stars End: A Foundation Podcast is over three years old!

The Coleman and Company Header

There’s a bit of a gap. That first gig on Coleman and Company was in September 2019, just as the 2020 Election was heating up. I was unable to Join Dr. Coleman and his Company again until March 2023, about three-and-a-half years later. When Steve asked me to pitch in again and told me the topic was “Has American Politics Gone Insane,” I couldn’t say “no.” The new status quo is a very different format than my first appearance, with many more voices; looking at the Zoom screen I felt like I was on Hollywood Squares. It was also two hours long instead of thirty minutes. This allowed us to explore the question with more depth.

You can watch the first hour right here.

The first hour of Dr. Coleman’s Political Pundit Night: Has American Politics Gone Insane. 23 March 2023

My favorite bit might have been in Steve Sprague’s opening statement (and I’m paraphrasing here) where he opined that perhaps American politics aren’t clinically insane, but it sure seems like a bunch of people have rabies and a bunch of other people are in a cult. My short answer to the question was “Of course it has,” but ultimately I am more interested in the cure than the mere diagnosis.

If you’re interested in finding my bits, I’m at about 22 minutes and 49 minutes in hour one.

Here’s the second hour.

The second hour of Dr. Coleman’s Political Pundit Night: Has American Politics Gone Insane. 23 March 2023

In hour two, about six minutes in, Steve asks “Has journalism let the American people down?” An interesting discussion ensues. This is all the more relevant as we saw in the recent Biden/Trump debate that some national news organizations are not fact-checking the candidates in real-time. The conversation winds through the weaponizing of journalism, court cases against major cable news outlets, and the War on Woke. It continued into the balkanization of the American public into political camps. We wrap the hour up on some fundamental structural issues like how we vote and gerrymandering. I pop up at 20:30, 25:15, 44:20, 55:05, 55:55, and 57:55 but all of those need some context.

This was a great group of people to have this conversation with! I’m honored to have been included and even happier to have become a regular contributor. The next Political Pundit Night is at 7:00 pm EDT on 15 August 2024 and can be found on <MyTwinTiers.com/coleman-and-company>.

The images and videos above are the property of WETM-TV and <MyTwinTiers.com>.

Stop Top-Two in Florida

I’ve been trying to find time to write about the election, but that seems more impossible by the day. On the other hand, I already have friends and family who are voting in Florida and the top-two primary system is on the ballot there. This one is time-sensitive.

Top-two simply isn’t a good idea. Our country desperately needs voting reform, but top-two isn’t voting reform, it’s doubling down on all the inherent problems of the plurality vote and making them a bit worse. Do you want real voting reform? Look for a group promoting instant run-off voting like they do in Maine, even better IMO, approval voting. The links take you to organizations doing just that.

But first, do no harm. Here’s an opinion piece I wrote ten(!) years ago about the so-called “Jungle Primary.” It ran in the Star-Gazette, our local Elmira paper and the Binghamton paper and possibly one or two others across the state.

Biden v. Trump Round 1

If I don’t force the issue from time to time there will be nothing new on this blog for months at a time. Most of my energy at the moment goes into preparing to teach, teaching, recuperating from teaching, grading, and tech support as we adapt again to our new online environment. Now I’m relearning stuff I had figured out back in May.

But I’d set the precedent of live blogging the debates and this one seems important enough that it’s worth a later night than usual. I probably won’t have the chance to make this one look pretty for a few days. So far I know that the debate was going to be at Notre Dame but it isn’t because COVID. Now it’s in Cleveland. Moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday.

Leading into the debate, it seems to me that things aren’t going too well for President Trump. The NYT released his taxes over the weekend and it does not look good. That followed revelations about the President making some unfortunate comments about the military and the comments about possibly refusing to respect the results of the election are not a good look.

At this moment, the election looks like it’s Vice President Biden’s to lose. But I think he’s lost a step or two in the last few years. I think he needs to perform the way he did in the debate against Paul Ryan in 2012, but I wonder if he still has that in him. In any event, it’s a mistake to underestimate Donald Trump. He did nothing but exceed expectations in the 2016 election.

8:45

Hillary Clinton is on MSNBC giving advice. I’m having second thoughts already.

9:06

We start with SCOTUS, the elephant in the room. This is more reserved than I’m used to. Trump’s arguments here are already disingenuous.

9:08

Biden is sedate this evening, but the argument he’s making about the SCOTUS nomination is the right one.

9:11

This is an interesting exchange.

9:15

Trump is fighting with the moderator which is an interesting strategy. He rails against the individual mandate which is the thing that makes the ACA work.

9:18

Biden calls out Trump’s lies. Good line about getting lucky.

9:20

Trump is repeating things he said in 2016 that never played out. Biden: “Will you shut up man” and “This is so unpresidential.”

9:25

Trump is claiming that he saved thousands of lives and is blaming the “Fake News.”

H1N1 was a disaster??

9:33

Trump is claiming that Biden isn’t smart.

9:38

Trump seems to be especially transparent tonight. I think Biden’s hitting the right tone by just laughing at the President.

9:42

“I brought back football.” Hilarious.

9:44

Trump claims he paid millions in taxes in 2016.

Biden: “You’re the worst president this country has ever had.” My money’s still on Bush, but that made me laugh really hard.

9:50

I think the only way we could have a real debate between these two is to put them in separate rooms.

9:55

Decency. Yes. More of that, please.

9:57

Right at the racism. Nice. And the puzzled look on Biden’s face is priceless.

10:04

I need to train for these. One hour in and I’m fried.

10:11

“There has never been a president who has done more than I’ve done.” Is it because of the number of Judges? That ignores the obstruction under McConnell.

10:26

“Stand back and stand by” is easily the most chilling moment of this debate.

10:29

Biden’s been good on election security. But “We’ve caught them all?” Trump is incoherent on election security.

10:36

Trump refuses to ask his supporters to stay calm during an extended count. That’s troubling. Biden is strong here again.

Analysis:

I don’t think this will change anyone’s mind. It was a mess. Just watching it was exhausting. At best I think Trump was playing to his base which isn’t going to be enough.

I was going to say that this was a draw, but now I think the more we unpack what Trump said here the better Biden is going to look.

Super Tuesday, Live.

It’s like a regular Tuesday except from Krypton. Well, not really. Actually, it’s like a regular Tuesday except with a genuinely life-threatening number of fries.

I published these predictions a few minutes ago on Facebook and it looks fairly even. There’s not a whole lot of analysis there on my part; I mostly just took the 538.com favorite. Thus, this is as much of a benchmark as anything else. We can use this to look for surprises.

The exception is Texas. Sanders had a pretty big lead there before South Carolina, but Biden seems to be getting a boost of his big win last Saturday. He was gaining fast; that one could really go either way.

What’s the status quo? Biden has Momentum, which changes things dramatically. Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Steyer have dropped out of the race in the last few days which is good news for Biden.

Warren is still in. It’s perplexing that she hasn’t caught on more than she did. I still think that she would have been the Democrats best bet against Trump. She is the Quintessential anti-Trump and that contrast would have been her best argument. Sadly, if the predictions above are correct, this might be her campaign’s last gasp.

7:08 pm. I’ll be switching over to coverage soon.

7:30 pm. It’s a big win for Biden in VA. That sounds good for him. His bounce must be pretty big. NC is called for Biden at the moment the polls closed. Sanders wins in Vermont. No surprise there.

Tom Perez was just talking about the Jones election as a sign of Democratic Party strength, That’s a real misread of the situation.

And Bloomberg wins American Samoa. Did not see that coming. Is the tide turning? No.

7:55 pm. Five Poll closings coming up at 8. Alabama, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee. That’s probably 3 for Biden and 2 for Sanders.

8:00 pm. Alabama is called for Biden. Oklahoma, Maine, Massachusetts are all to early to call. All the early calls for Biden should help him. Arkansas will go his way as well.

8:10 pm. Biden is competitive in Massachusetts. That’s a sign that he could run the table. And yeah, that’s ignoring a lot of voting theory vote-splitting arguments.

8:40 pm. No call in Arkansas yet (did I miss it?). Texas is closing soon. There’s a huge line of college students in Austin still waiting to vote. I hope they’re all able to stick it out.

8:57 pm. Watching how everything else is going tonight, I think Texas is going to go to Biden.

9:00 pm. “To early to call” is not a call. “To close to call” is not a call.

9:21 pm. AL SC NC TN OK. Biden is running up a big delegate lead, mostly in states that Democrats won’t win in November.

9:40 pm. NBC’s finally caught up and called Colorado for Sanders.

9:45 pm. James Clybern is on MSNBC right now. Damn, that guy is good. He might be the MVP of the entire 2020 election for better or for worse.

9:47 pm. If Biden’s “officially leading” in Minnesota, that’s devastating for Sanders if it holds up.

10:14 pm. It looks like Biden wins Massachusetts. This is officially a rout.

10:19 pm. And now Minnesota. Crap.

11:40 pm. California is called for Sanders. Too little too late.

12:13 am. So much for Super Tuesday; it’s now Fatigued Wednesday. There’s got to be a better name for it than that. It looks at this point that Biden will win both Texas and Maine. I thought I saw an official call on Texas, but I can’t verify that. What’s the headline for the evening? Biden Wins Big. Biden won everywhere he was supposed to and a lot of places that Bernie was supposed to.

What’s the Matter with Iowa

This was initially published yesterday as part of Prelude to Iowa. It looks like this scenario is playing out in real time so it deserves to be out on its own.

Beware of Paradoxical Results

You might think that first-past-the-post or the plurality vote is the worst voting system ever. You’d be wrong. In 2017, my student, Brandon Payne studied the Iowa Caucuses. He determined that the caucuses violate all sorts of mathematical “fairness criteria.” One example is the Condorcet criterion which states that if one candidate beats every other candidate in head-to-head match-ups, that candidate should be the overall winner. Such a candidate might not win the Iowa Caucuses.

Turns out, the viability constraint can also lead to seemingly contradictory results, which I’ll call the “viability paradox.” As a quick example, suppose that in some state, the voters have the following preferences.

Candidate A35%
Candidate B30%
Candidate C12%
Candidate D12%
Candidate E11%

In a primary election, this would be a clear victory for candidate A.

Now let’s divide our state into five precincts of 100 voters each and let’s assign each precinct 10 delegates. We’ll conduct a caucus to allocate the delegates.

Suppose that the voters are arranged within the caucuses according to the graphic below.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image.png

Notice that there are non-viable candidate preference groups in each precinct. These voters will have to join a viable group in order to participate. They may reorganize themselves as shown below.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image-1.png

And so, in this case, Candidate B actually wins pretty decisively, probably 23 delegates to 15 delegates for A. Candidates C, D and E should get 4 delegates each.

There might be good reasons to decide that either candidate A or B is the rightful winner here, but one point is that there is a significant difference. Systems like this can lead to chaotic or paradoxical results. One important take away is that, right or wrong, geography can have a lot of influence on who the victor will be. Even if a candidate seems to be ahead in the polls, they can lose without any shenanigans going on, simply because how their voters are distributed across the state. Surprising results aren’t necessarily nefarious or even necessarily surprising.

You might even want to argue that results like this are a good thing because a lot of voters got to express their second choices. Here’s why you’d be wrong. It’s not systematic. In Instant Run-Off voting, for example, everybody’s second choice is counted unless their first choice is. In the caucus exactly whose second choices are counted is determined by an accident of geography. In deciding a winner between candidates A and B above, should the second choices of voters who picked candidate C in precinct 1 be less important than those in precinct 3? They shouldn’t be but in the current system they are. This is worse than a plurality vote because this could be taking us even farther away from a good collective decision.

In fact, it’s a bit worse than that. Apparently, the state weighs the delegate counts in rural counties a bit more heavily than their urban counties. If the Democrats who think we should dump the Electoral College are to have any intellectual consistency, they should reject these results and work to reform this process.

References

  • Payne, B., The Iowa Democratic Caucuses: A Mathematical Analysis of the “Vote,” Unpublished Manuscript.

Adventures in Punditry

I like trying things I haven’t done before. A few years ago I got my one and only speeding ticket and I attended the court date. I’d never been to court before and it was interesting.

About two weeks ago, Steve Coleman, who was a Vice-President at Elmira College, invited me to be a guest on his local public affairs program. Steve’s been doing this sort of thing for years as a self-styled “Ph. D. of Politics.” Coleman and Company is now a weekly half-hour webcast that appears on Sunday evenings on MyTwinTiers.com, the website for the local WETM-18 news. Steve puts together an interesting show and it’s worth checking out.

And this isn’t just something new, this is something I’ve always wanted to try. I’m a politics junkie and I’ve been watching things like the McLaughlin Group or Face the Nation or The Rachel Maddow Show for years. I’ve done my share of groaning at the teevee and doing armchair punditry inside my own brain (“Eleanor! Pat’s just trying to wind you up! Don’t take the bait!!”). I always thought it looked like fun.

If you’re at all curious, the process was straightforward. Steve e-mailed his plan for the show to us on Sunday with an update on Tuesday so we’d know what to expect: presidential politics, impeachment, Iran, and then our own chance to sound off on something.

Over-Preparation

I was probably over-prepared. Joanne and I showed up at the studio about a half hour before we were set to tape on Thursday. We got to meet Denis Kingsley, the other guest, who is a real gentleman. Seeing the inside of the studio reminded me of my trip to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The tour took us through Mission Control and standing in these spaces is utterly unlike what you’d expect.

We took our places and started the taping; taped, incidentally, “before a live studio audience” thanks to Joanne.

I probably should have cut Eleanor some slack. A lot of the stuff I’d thought about beforehand got left on the table because it was nowhere in my brain to be found when I needed it. I guess my biggest missed opportunity was after Denis asserted that Elizabeth Warren would be unelectable if she got the nomination. I should have pointed out that the person the Democrats really wanted to run against in 1980 was Ronald Reagan; they thought he’d be easy to beat. And no one seemed to honestly believe that Donald Trump could get the Republican nomination much less win the presidency in 2016. Some folks remained in denial until the electoral college actually voted. That, too, is why we have elections.

But this was a lovely experience. It was great fun and I really have to thank Steve for the opportunity. Unlike traffic court, I’d happily do this again.

So now I’m a bona fide “political analyst and commentator.” Coleman and Company featuring yours truly in the role of “company” is available on TwinTiers.com.

The 2020 Democratic Debate Round 3

This isn’t a live reaction to the third debate. Life happened. But I do want to look at the debate and have my own reactions before I really dive into the coverage. Thanks to the magic of TiVo, I can watch this debate today, or any day. Now where’s that damn remote? Here we go!

This debate was sponsored by ABC News and the moderators are George Stephanopoulos, Linsey Davis, David Muir and Jorge Ramos.

Who was in round 3? The contestants… er… candidates on the stage are:

  • Former Vice-President Joe Biden
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren
  • Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders
  • California Senator Kamala Harris
  • South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigeig
  • Entrepreneur Andrew Yang
  • Former Representative Beto O’Rourke
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker
  • Former Cabinet Secretary Julián Castro, and
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.

That should be close to ABC’s (or the DNC’s?) perceived ranking of the candidates with the more prominent candidates taking center stage. We know that the “big ticket” tonight is Warren vs. Biden. Biden is the ostensible front runner while Warren seems to be the challenger who is gaining ground the quickest. Those two haven’t been on a stage together yet and folks are curious how the encounter will play out.

Booker came out strong and Yang is going to give $1000/month to 12 families for 12 months. Buttigeig seemed taken aback by that before regaining his footing. I can’t put my finger on why, but I’m not impressed by Harris. Bernie sounds like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, at the end of the famous filibuster. He must be working hard; he’s lost his voice. Warren’s opening was excellent and got a good response from the audience. Biden is in good form, but the “we refuse to postpone” riff was a little flat.

Early on, Warren is better on the will-you-raise-taxes question this time. The only relevant question is: taxes + premiums, will the total be more? Will the average family be paying less? Biden is doing well so far, but I don’t know if he will be able to stand up to the tag team of Sanders and Warren. Klobuchar gets the first word aside from the Biden/Sanders/Warren center stage. I don’t feel like she’d playing at the same level. Warren is making the argument that people will keep their current doctors in a more efficient system.

Buttigeig weighs in. “I trust the American People to choose what’s best for them.” He’s got a progressive idea expressed in terms that should ring true for conservatives. He does that alot and it’s pretty good.

And here’s the sort of thing that makes me uncomfortable about Harris. A Medicare-For-All Plan that’s part public and part private fundamentally isn’t Medicare-For-All. She either doesn’t understand that or she wants to have her cake and eat it too.

Biden’s definitely doing better this time around, but he looks like a muppet nodding along with O’Rourke.

Castro’s going after Biden pretty hard. It seems desperate and the crowd doesn’t like it. And Buttigeig is right; Castro’s coming across like a jackass and its going to turn people off.

Yang: “I am asian, so I know a lot of doctors.” Hilarious.

Booker’s pretty good making the “don’t let the best be the enemy of the good” argument and later on racism. He’d clearly thought that through. Buttigeig is strong there as well; I want to know more about his Douglas Plan. Castro, Harris, O’Rourke all pretty good here.

But unlike in his Senate run, Beto always seems to be trying too hard.

This debate seems pretty friendly; there are some squabbles and there are folks promoting themselves, but it’s cordial.

I would have expected these guys to be reflexively anti-tariff but it’s more nuanced than that. Buttigeig is again performing much better than you’d expect based on his office.

Wait! Did Harris just make a dick joke? Backing up… well, no but “that guy in the Wizard of Oz” who turned out to be “a really small dude” was the actual Wizard of Oz. If you’re going to evoke the movie, watch the damn thing. Also, turning the moment into an implied short joke aimed at the moderator is not smart. Also also, that’s kind of a Trump move and he’s much better at that than she is.

OTOH, if you’re going to sneak in a dick joke, trade policy might be the safest spot.

Everybody sounded pretty good on Trade, National Security, Education. Nothing seemed particularly surprising.

Biden got a question on reparations. It sounded pretty tone deaf to me. Using social workers “to confront the problems that come from home.” Might have been meant innocently, but doesn’t come across that way in context. It reminds me of when he called Barack Obama an “African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy .”

Protesters. What are they yelling about? I want to know!

Boy, hearing Biden talk about losing family members was both gut wrenching and compelling.

Analysis:

This was, for the most part another respectful cordial debate. It was palpable from the audience and the other candidates that wanted it that way when Castro tried to go after Biden. That did not go the way Castro thought it would.

So, no real fireworks and I think, again, this debate is unlikely to shake things up much. The “top 5” in the polling, Biden, Warren, Sanders, Harris and Buttigeig, will probably remain the top five. If anyone is likely to drop in the polls based on this debate, I think it would be Harris; this might have been her weakest performance so far. Of the remaining five candidates on the stage, I think Booker is the most likely to break out of the pack.

I might have more to add after I absorb some of the coverage.

Picture Credits:

  • Featured Image: TampaBay.com
  • Biden and Warren: LA Times