By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, August 8, 2019)

Medicare-4-All was the discriminating issue in the last two Democratic debates with Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren the most vocal proponents and the remaining candidates (less Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio) taking up the opposition.

To likely Democratic primary voters watching the two debates, Elizabeth Warren’s performance was particularly strong — though Tulsi Gabbard’s Cool Hand Luke impersonation offered us the best moment from either debate when she calmly exposed Senator Kamala Harris’ record as California Attorney General as incompatible with her presidential stump speech rhetoric. How could Kamala have been so unprepared to defend her own record?

However, most striking about the debate were the candidates relying on historically conservative talking points to dismiss not just Medicare-4-All, but the Green New Deal and college debt forgiveness, among other progressive policy priorities. At one point during the debate, my wife asked if Republicans were also being included in the debate. “No, honey. John Delaney is a Democrat.”

The Twitter accounts of these “Democrats” croon love poems to private insurance companies, market capitalism and ‘choice,’ while mixing in enough disinformation about progressive ideas to truly confound anyone trying to understand the disputed issues.

This is how they talk about Medicare-4-All:

The Republican National Committee couldn’t have written Tweets as dishonest as those about Sanders’ Medicare-4-All plan — a plan a Koch Brother-funded think tank concluded would reduce total U.S. health care spending by about $2 trillion over 10 years, relative to the current healthcare system. That is likely an under-estimate of the savings from Medicare-4-All.

A note to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Tom Perez and the Democratic National Committee: You know your party is out of energy and ideas when the talking points for some of your leading presidential candidate could pass for something Bill O’Reilly might write:

If you don’t believe our country can afford universal healthcare for all or that we can get off fossil fuels sooner rather than later, you are not a Democrat anymore. You are a Republican. Which is fine. There is a party for that.

There is nothing wrong with Republicans running as Democrats and Democrats running as Republicans (though I cannot think of a single example in my lifetime of the latter happening…John Anderson in 1980?).

Who has the right to tell anyone what party they should belong to. This is a democracy after all? Right?

Who is driving the Democratic Party train?

Years ago, the first assignment I gave undergraduate students in my introductory political science classes was to describe, in a short paragraph, how the American democracy works.

The students’ paragraphs were earnest, typically focusing on voters and elections and describing a system where people’s policy preferences are reflected, if only loosely, in the policies passed by their elected representatives. Most of the students’ paragraphs were held aloft with Jeffersonian/Madisonian language (‘all people created equal,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘consent of the governed,’ ‘freedom’) and mixed with a healthy dose of American exceptionalism (‘the freest country in the world’).

But there would always be at least one student that would write something along these lines:

We don’t live in a democracy. The corporations pick the candidates and the government reflects corporate interests.

No, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was never in one of my classes — She was a toddler when I taught at the university-level.

As a young instructor, I felt a duty to guide students away from cynical views on our democracy and towards something realistic, but also optimistic. In one the class slides I provided a definition of democracy by which to judge the American version:

A government, existing at the consent of the people, who, through elected representatives, satisfy these conditions: (1) Full participation — all citizens are included in the political system and have the capacity to participate, (2) Voting equality — each citizen’s vote is equal to another’s, (3) Full knowledge of choices — citizens understand all available political choices, (4) Popular agenda control — citizens control the political agenda.

The paragraph was just a reformulation of political scientist Robert Dahl’s definition of an ‘ideal’ democracy from his 1989 book, Democracy and Its Critics. As an exemplar, no democracy could meet Dahl’s idealized version, and that was his point. All democracies are imperfect, some more so than others.

My conclusion at the time was the American democracy, while flawed, fulfilled all four of those observable conditions.

Over the years, however, my views have crept closer to the cynical view, perhaps to an even darker place. And nowhere has my own cynicism grown darker than when observing the corporate news media’s current role in the democratic process.

The recent Democratic debates are illustrative. In the July 31st debate sponsored by CNN, former Vice President Joe Biden spoke for 22.5 minutes, Senator Kamala Harris for 17 minutes, and Senator Cory Booker for 13 minutes. The other seven candidates each spoke between 9 and 11 minutes. These differences are not products of chance. The debate was designed by CNN to give the top 2 or 3 candidates — in terms of polling numbers — the most face time with the 11.3 million Americans viewing the debate. Campaigns will pay around $200,000 for only 30 seconds on a national cable TV network. In essence, CNN gifted Joe Biden about $4.5 million in advertising and to Harris about $2.5 million.

Lesser known presidential candidates already struggle to gain traction with voters and donors. By tilting the process towards the “popular” candidates, CNN is effectively enforcing an Overton window among political candidates.

The cable news media’s sentinel role is apparent when looking at its coverage of the 2020 Democratic nomination candidates over the first seven months of the race (see Figure 1). Over that period, Biden has received 35 percent of all candidate mentions, followed by Sanders (15%), Warren (12%), and Harris (11%). A significant drop-off occurs after that, as almost three-quarters of mentions go to the top four candidates. That may be the maximum number candidates a news network can handle at one time.

Figure 1: Weekly cable news clips from Dec. 30, 2018 to July 21, 2019 (28 weeks).

A different relationship exists for online news candidate mentions (see Appendix Figure A.1), as there is no clear leader and the top four candidates are more bunched together. Over the same seven-month period, Sanders received 15 percent of all candidate mentions, followed by Warren (14%), Biden (14%), and Harris (11%).

Is it wrong for cable news networks to be political gatekeepers? Isn’t that one of the core functions of the press? Who wants to learn about John Delaney or John Hickenlooper or Michael Bennet if they don’t need to?

There is a strong argument rooted in microeconomic and decision theory literature that journalists should be filtering out minor candidates and focus their reporting on more viable ones. There are over 20 Democratic candidates, after all. We can’t possibly get to know every one of them with any meaningful depth. The cable networks are providing a genuine service when they ignore some candidates and direct their attention towards others.

“Somewhere, somehow, professional journalists have to decide who gets covered — and any formula they could choose is going to appear biased to someone,” concludes journalist Jonathan Stray. “In the end, the candidates who attack the media are right about one thing: The press is a political player in its own right. There’s just no way to avoid that when attention is valuable.

Yet, why don’t I trust the cable networks and now the high tech and social media companies to make these decisions?

I think back to my most cynical students. How can we defend a democratic system that systematically marginalizes voices outside the mainstream? Perhaps we don’t live in a democracy. Perhaps the corporate news organizations really are the ones picking our presidential candidates and Election Day is simply a tool to legitimize the their choices.

An over-simplification? Obviously. Wholly inaccurate? I think not. And is this power restricted to the corporate news media? Absolutely not, as the high tech and social media giants also have become active participants in the American electoral system and evidence of their power is rapidly being documented by researchers.

Is Google already too powerful?

Speaking at New York City research summit in January 2013 organized by Google, Robert Epstein, a Harvard Ph.D. in psychology and behavioral sciences, said, “Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015.”

The same academic, testifying in mid-July before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, said that Google’s search algorithm produces a Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) which likely changed vote decisions among undecided voters in 2016 to the net benefit of 2.6 million votes for Hillary Clinton. Looking towards the 2020 election, Epstein testified:

“SEME…leaves people thinking they have made up their own minds, which is very much an illusion. It also leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace. Worse still, the very few people who can detect bias in search results shift even farther in the direction of the bias, so merely being able to see the bias doesn’t protect you from it. Bottom line: biased search results can easily produce shifts in the opinions and voting preference of undecided voters by 20 percent or more — up to 80 percent in some demographic groups.”

Skepticism is always advisable before accepting social science findings, but shouldn’t the burden of proof be on Google, rather than social scientists, to show that the SEME does not systematically alter election outcomes? Can you imagine if pharmaceutical companies were allowed to market drugs to the public before doing research on their safety? No, of course not. So, why should the standard be different for Google or the giant social media companies?

But before we go to Mountain View, California, breaking down the doors at Google headquarters to seize their search algorithms — which we should do at some point — let us not forget the older and probably bigger dog in this fight…television news, particularly the cable networks (CNN, MSNBC and Fox News).

Political science research has generally found that national news outlets are powerful actors in shaping our political environment (Summaries of this research can be found here, here, here and here). Not only do the media expose us to events and people we would not otherwise experience directly, they frame and interpret the political world for us as well — and that may be their greatest influence on our political system: Frame the policy agenda and change the electoral outcome.

But don’t take academia’s word for the importance of the news media on politics — just ask Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, about his news network’s role in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

While stopping short of saying CNN unduly influenced the 2016 election outcome, in a 2018 CNN interview with former Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod, Zucker admitted his network televised too many Trump election rallies unfiltered and in their entirety. No other 2016 candidate was gifted so much free publicity — some estimates indicate Trump received a $1 billion advantage over Hillary Clinton in free media coverage. More certainly, Trump’s challengers for the 2016 Republican nomination never had a chance to gain traction with voters as long as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News kept broadcasting Trump rallies live (see Figure 2). In another study, researchers found that CNN, specifically, provided Trump with eight times as much coverage as the number two candidate in the 2016 Republican nomination race, Ted Cruz.

Figure 2: Bought versus Free Media in the 2016 Presidential Election

“I do not believe that’s why he’s president of the United States,” Zucker told Axelrod. “A lot of people want to assign that blame to us and to me. If only we had that much power, especially on the Republican side. I do not believe that’s why he’s president of the United States. But I do think we made a mistake.”

Zucker is being too modest. Along with MSNBC, headed by Zucker’s former understudy, Phil Griffin, CNN showered Trump with attention from the moment Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy. They may not have realized what they were doing — in part, because many at the news networks believed Trump was more of a sideshow than a serious presidential candidate — but by the time it became apparent Trump had a punchers chance of winning the presidency over Clinton, the damage had been done.

In an interview with TheWrap.com last year, media critic Stephen Miller said, “There is no figure in media more responsible for Donald Trump’s legitimacy in media, which led to his rise in politics and to the presidency, than Jeff Zucker.”

And you thought the Russians and their $100,000 Facebook advertising buy elected Trump.

Candidate popularity and cable news coverage move in lock-step

A cross-sectional analysis of recent data from RealClearPolitics’ presidential poll databases, cable news content (i.e., candidate mentions) from the GDELT project, and Google search trends data reveals the strong relationship between the cable news media and candidate popularity. And we also see evidence of a relationship between candidate popularity and Google search trends. This first relationship is not news. Data journalist pioneer Nate Silver and other researchers have measured the strong relationship between cable news and candidate popularity.

In my 2020 Democratic nomination data, cable news coverage of candidates explains 95 percent of the variance in average levels of support between Dec. 30, 2018 and July 21, 2019 for the 12 candidates in my dataset (see Figure 3). All candidates are near the regression line — the only exception being Sanders who over performs in popularity given his level of cable news coverage. One explanation for that could be that Sanders is a known quantity given his 2016 presidential run and the news media doesn’t find him as ‘newsworthy.’ However, Biden is perhaps even better known than Sanders, yet his news mentions and public support level are well explained by the regression model. Sanders is most likely different for reasons other than just name recognition.

Figure 3: Cable TV news coverage and Democratic candidate popularity

In contrast, Google search volume, while highly correlated with candidate popularity (see Figure 4), does not offer any new information regarding candidate support. When both cable news mentions and Google searches are included in the same regression model as explanatory variables, only cable news mentions maintains statistical significance (see Figure A.3 in the Appendix below). Google search volume also appears to have a diminishing return on candidate popularity as a search volume’s relative index approaches 100 (its maximum possible value for any single candidate).

Figure 4: Google search volume index and Democratic candidate popularity

Interestingly, Google search volume on candidate names generates a divergent candidate ordering from the amount of cable/online news coverage a candidate receives (see Appendix Figure A.2). Since late-December 2018, Biden has received 19 percent of all candidate name searches on Google, followed by Harris (15%), Sanders (14%), South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (11%) and Senator Beto O’Rourke (10%). New candidates receive relatively more attention on Google than they do within the news media.

It is important to note that my data cannot tell us much about the direction of causation. Is media coverage causing candidate popularity? Or is candidate popularity driving media coverage? The answer is likely that both statements are true, which could explain why the correlation between the cable news coverage and popularity is is so strong. As a candidate becomes more popular, the cable news media adjusts their own coverage to meet the apparent public demand. Similarly, a candidate’s popularity can rise dramatically when cable news dedicates its coverage to a relatively unknown candidate —Mayor Buttigieg is a good example.

We haven’t even mentioned the role of big donors within the Democratic Party. Harris famously courted Hillary Clinton’s mega-donors in the Hamptons in Summer 2017, a time when she was relatively unknown nationwide. Any understanding of the nomination process cannot ignore where the money comes from and the expectations that follow.

“Maybe Harris has what it takes and will surge ahead of the pack in a few years to win the right to dethrone Donald Trump,” The Guardian’s Ross Barkan wrote two years ago. “It’s too early to tell. But her Hamptons gallivant with Clinton plutocrats is a dispiriting reminder that the Democratic party thinks all can be as it once was, and the status quo isn’t worth being ruffled. Donors can still vet candidates and propel them forward in the press. Anyone beyond the upper crust isn’t a serious agenda setter.”

It is no longer too early to tell. Yes, mega-donors can create viable presidential candidates at a brie and Chablis-filled party nestled in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in America. Would we be talking about Harris now if the Democratic Party’s donor class hadn’t sanctioned her run? Of course not.

Should we be worried?

I refuse to contribute to the angst industry, so forgive me if I am not worried about Google now, or in the future, controlling our political system. Google picking our president is no more or less loathsome to me than CNN doing it. Cloistered elites have been picking U.S. presidential candidates since the country’s inception — why would it change now?

Still, the possibility of Silicon Valley tech czars deciding who gets access to the nuclear launch codes should not sit well with anyone. Do we resign ourselves to the notion that voters are just ancillary participants, by the Founders’ design or due to their own human limitations, in a political system where their role is more adjunctive than substantive? Are we mere driftwood being carried along in the political currents?

A 2014 study I’ve cited many times remains my bedrock evidence when arguing that the U.S. is not a democracy if the policies passed by our representatives don’t reflect our collective interests. The study by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern has its critics (as it should), but the daily anecdotal evidence only strengthens its core finding: “When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” concluded Gilens and Page.

As Johns Hopkins associate professor Yascha Mounk wrote in The Atlantic, “Public policy does not reflect the preferences of the majority of Americans. If it did…Marijuana would be legal and campaign contributions more tightly regulated; paid parental leave would be the law of the land and public colleges free; the minimum wage would be higher and gun control much stricter; abortions would be more accessible in the early stages of pregnancy and illegal in the third trimester.”

At the risk of blaming the victim…

We live in a technology environment that deliberately herds news consumers to a relatively small set of news sites, despite consumers having — theoretically — hundreds of news websites from which to choose. In the process, voters have grown more partisan and less tolerant of alternative points of view.

Regina Lawrence, executive director of the University of Oregon’s Agora Journalism Center and George S. Turnbull Portland Center, cites citizens’ own selection bias as an important factor in the polarization trend. “Selective exposure is the tendency many of us have to seek out news sources that don’t fundamentally challenge what we believe about the world,” according to Lawrence. “We know there’s a relationship between selective exposure and the growing divide in political attitudes in this country. And that gap is clearly related to the rise of more partisan media sources.”

However, search engines like Google also contribute to this cycle by reinforcing people’s news consumption patterns through their profiling algorithms (i.e., your Google search history impacts what you see every time you use Google).

It doesn’t need to be this way and the best place to start changing that dynamic is by regularly putting ourselves in a position to hear perspectives much different from our own. Don’t use Google every time you search for news stories or information. Other search engines exist, such as DuckDuckGo.com and StartPage.com (both of whom protect your privacy by not storing your search history).

Information source diversity is our greatest defense against elite domination of our political system. The power of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Facebook, Twitter and Google, among others, to control our opinions would be significantly mitigated if we sought alternative news sources.

Forcing yourself to seek out new viewpoints sounds nice in theory but is difficult in practice. It rubs against our basic human nature. Even for myself, as I preach the importance of opinion diversity, my own news consumption patterns in the past three years have grown narrower (…does The Jimmy Dore Show even count as a news show? The fact that this is even a legitimate question indicates how far mainstream news has fallen.).

We need to fight our instinct to drift towards conformity and predictability. If we don’t, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and Google will indeed pick our next president.

• K.R.K.

Comments and data requests can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

APPENDIX: Summary Data Tables

Figure A.1: Weekly online news clips from Dec. 30, 2018 to July 21, 2019 (28 weeks).

Figure A.2: Google search volume (on a relative scale with a maximum value of 100) from Dec. 30, 2018 to July 29, 2019 (29 weeks).

Figure A.3: Linear regression model for RCP poll average (Dec. 30, 2018 to July 21, 2019) with Google search relative volume and cable news coverage as explanatory variables (n=12 candidates).

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, July 25, 2019)

Who is Thomas Massie (R-KY) and why is he the only Republican who voted against U.S. House Resolution 246 (Opposing efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement targeting Israel)?

H.R. 246, in a non-binding resolution approved 398–17, condemns the movement to boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) Israel for its policies regarding the Palestinians. Who says bipartisanship is dead? When it comes to pissing on Palestinians, Democrats and Republicans have no trouble coming together.

The resolution, backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, also enshrines the long irrelevant two-state-solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in a presumably sharp rebuke of current Trump administration and Israeli policy.

Additionally, H.R. 246 says Americans have a “right to petition in opposition to government policy,” soothing some Democrats who oppose a stronger Senate anti-BDS bill that penalizes companies and individuals for supporting boycotts, divestment or sanctions directed towards Israel.

Massie ignored the rhetorical smoke screen and recognized H.R. 246 for what it was — a government-led effort to discourage the exercise of free speech. If only more Democrats looked upon the Constitution with the same respect Massie does.

Massie, an M.I.T. grad, is the kind of ‘maverick’ politician other ‘maverick’ politicians keep at arm’s length. He is both predictable and hard to predict. An unfailing anti-interventionist and strong deficit-hawk since entering Congress in 2012, Massie was endorsed by former Texas Representative Ron Paul and his son Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.

He’s the male Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), skeptical of U.S. strategy in the Middle East and the hundreds of other military commitments spread throughout the globe. In May, with Congressman Andy Levin (D-MI), he introduced the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) Clarification Act, designed to require the Trump Administration to receive an explicit authorization from Congress before engaging in military action against Iran.

“Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution clearly gives Congress the sole power to declare war,” Massie said. “Our Founding Fathers believed that Congress — not the President — should possess this power, and that giving such authority to the executive branch presents a direct threat to liberty. As the AUMF Clarification Act states, Congress has never authorized military force against Iran, and any such action would be illegal and unconstitutional without an up-or-down vote.”

The AUMF Clarification Act argues that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, nor any other existing law gives the Trump administration the legal authority to use force against Iran. Only a direct authorization by the Congress would give the administration authority.

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration points on current Iran policy, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, disagree.

Both Gabbard and Massie don’t blindly cheerlead U.S. military adventurism lacking sufficient predicate or well-defined goals. However, since he’s not a woman, Massie doesn’t get smeared as being soft on dictators and tyrants as Gabbard does. He’s ‘thoughtful’ and ‘highly-principled’ according to his congressional colleagues, while Gabbard is ‘weak’ and easily “manipulated” by totalitarian rulers, according to her fellow Democratic Party critics. If you ever want examples of palpable sexism and bias, spend just a few days listening Democrats talk about other Democrats.

Which is why H.R. 246 has been a disturbing outcome for many progressives who fight for the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation or substantive control. What made the House vote on H.R. 246 so striking is that Massie was on the only Republican to vote against it, while Gabbard and most progressive Democrats, to the dismay of many of their supporters, voted in favor.

Independent journalist and documentary filmmaker Abby Martin, whose film “Gaza Fights for Freedom” was released in June, didn’t hesitate to call out the rank hypocrisy of progressives with respect to H.R. 246:

Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) spent a good part of Wednesday on Twitter explaining their ‘yea’ votes to constituents and followers:

If groveling contrition were an Olympic sport, Khanna and Pressley just won the gold and silver in the ‘How to Betray Palestinians While Pretending You are Their Biggest Supporter.” Spare us your mental gymnastics Ro and Ayanna.

When the U.S. government criticizes free speech (e.g., boycotts) — even without legislating against it — it is discouraging free speech. As a First Amendment-hawk, Massie didn’t need to parse out political considerations from his principles, He knew how to vote on H.R. 246.

And accusing Massie of anti-Semitism over this vote would be like calling Santa Claus the Grinch that stole Christmas. The accusation would never stick. He has no ill-expressed criticisms of Israel that can be misinterpreted as anti-Semitic or any other kind of demonstrable religious, racial or ethnic bias. He criticizes policies, not people, religions or countries.

Unfortunately, for many Democrats, the fear of such a charge has led them down a dark path that not only chips away at our Constitutional freedoms, but makes it increasingly likely that the U.S. will get involved in a prolonged military action against Iran at the urging of the Israeli and Saudi Arabian governments — just one more military commitment to add to our current participation in conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

But what is most problematic about support for H.R. 246 is that it normalizes anti-BDS sentiments — including the association of pro-Palestinian activists as anti-Semitic hate groups on par with the neo-Nazis and KKK — and clears the path for more draconian anti-BDS legislation to become law at the state-level.

While 16 Democratic House members voted against H.R. 246, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Massie may be the lone North Star in the Republican Party, along with the few remaining in the Democratic Party, still pointing us towards the protection of our constitutional freedoms and recognizing the human rights and dignity of the Palestinian people.

• K.R.K.

Send thoughts and criticisms to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, July 20, 2019)

When presented with complex or too much information, willful ignorance often feels like the best option.

“If the cost of educating oneself outweighs the benefit of obtaining deeper or more accurate information, then it is rational to simply ignore contradictory inputs,” argues Kathleen Schaefer in the Journal of International Service. “Economists describe this acceptance of narratives at face value as part of rational ignorance.”

Schaefer’s focus was immigration, but her words just as easily apply to the U.S. healthcare system. Constituting almost 20 percent of the U.S. economy, few issues are as complex as healthcare.

Indeed, it is that narrative about ‘health care policy being too complex for easy solutions’ that is keeping good policy ideas from being embraced by otherwise competent political, news media and economic elites.

Rational ignorance loves the status quo or, if forced, the adoption of incremental policy changes — policies such as Obamacare.

So when former Vice President Joe Biden says of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan that “all the Medicare you have is gone. It’s a new Medicare system. It may be as good, you may like it as well, it may or may not, but the transition of dropping 300 million people on a totally new plan, I think is a little risky at this point.”

Biden is putting on display his own rational ignorance — and it is not just him. A recent MSNBC panel discussion hosted by Stephanie Ruhl kept throwing out terms and phrases like “risky,” “too costly,” “starting from scratch,” and “revolutionary” to describe Sanders’ plan, and calling Biden’s proposal to build off of Obamacare and offer a public option as “safe,” “reasonable” and more “achievable.”

In fact, the opposite may be true and to understand why it important first to understand the gravity of the problems facing our current U.S. healthcare system.

The U.S. healthcare system is broken

No matter how many times Fox News’ Sean Hannity says “the U.S. has the best healthcare system in the world,” it doesn’t make it true. To the contrary, the U.S. healthcare system is a significant outlier among other advanced economies — but not in a good way.

Americans pay twice as much for healthcare (Figure 1), yet, in the aggregate, achieve markedly inferior health outcomes. For example, we die younger (Figure 2) and have a higher infant mortality rate (Figure 2) than most other advanced economies.

Figure 1: Health spending as a % of GDP (Source: OECD, 2018)

Figure 2: Life expectancy at birth (Source: OECD, 2018)

Figure 3: Infant mortality rates for selected countries (Source: OECD, 2018)

Even more discouraging, life expectancy in the U.S. has declined in recent years, largely due to the opioid drug crisis and a higher suicide rate (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Trend in life expectancy at birth in the U.S. (Source: OECD, 2017)

These statistics are not the result of an analytic sleight-of-hand. They are straightforward metrics long measured and commonly used for cross-national comparisons. And the conclusion drawn from them is unmistakable: the U.S. healthcare system underperforms relative to other advanced economies.

Why?

The reasons are many and better described elsewhere, but health economists generally agree that one reason is the U.S. private insurance industry adding a layer of administrative costs not present (to the same degree, at least) in most other advanced economies. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimate the U.S. private insurance industry accounts for 34 percent of the health insurance dollars (Figure 5) — which translates to nearly $1 trillion.

Figure 5: The Source of U.S. Healthcare Dollars

And while private insurance’s share of the health insurance dollars will likely decline as the U.S. population ages, their financial bottom line will not necessarily suffer if recent performance is an indicator. According to Berkshire Hathaway, through third-quarter 2018, health insurers’ net income grew by 19 percent to $25.8 billion compared with the same prior-year period. Zacks Equity Research reports that the private health insurance industry generated returns higher than the S&P 500 index in each year from 2012 to 2017, returning an impressive 257 percent compared with the S&P 500 index’s gain of 91 percent. This is a good time to be the health insurance industry.

It is not, however, a good time to need medical care. While the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) significantly reduced the percentage of Americans without insurance from 18 percent in 2013 to 11 percent in 2016, that percentage has since risen to almost 14 percent in late 2018, according to the Gallup Organization. In addition, The Commonwealth Fund recently reported that the percent of underinsured American adults (aged 19–64) has risen from 10 percent in 2003 to 28 percent in 2018 (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Underinsured American Adults (ages 19–64)

And for those Americans with private health insurance — either through their employer or through an individual plan — costs have risen prohibitively over the past 20 years. In 2018 the average annual premium for employer-based family coverage was $19,600 (up 5 percent from 2017) and was $6,900 for single coverage (up 3 percent from 2017), according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 1999, the average annual premium for family coverage was only $6,000, and for single coverage around $2,500.

There is only one rational conclusion: The U.S. healthcare system is under-delivering, whether in comparison to other advanced economies or to its own past performance.

The media, politicians, and Sanders himself are misrepresenting Medicare-for-All

In this context, Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan is hardly ‘revolutionary,’ ‘radical’ or a ‘fundamental transformation’ of the U.S. healthcare system. It takes an existing, successful public health program — Medicare — and, over time, expands it to the remaining segments of the population.

But its critics drive home a contrasting picture of Medicare-for-All:

Medicare-for-All requires starting from scratch!

As seen in Figure 5 above, public health programs (Medicare/Medicaid, CHIPs, DoD’s Tricare, the Veterans Administration healthcare system) already account for two-thirds of U.S. health insurance dollars and, even without Medicare-for-All, will likely increase its share over time as the American population ages. And with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning, scaling up the current Medicare system to the rest of the population should become easier. Medicare-for-All is the exact opposite of starting from scratch.

It’s too expensive!

Medicare-for-All critics also instill doubt by suggesting the program’s expansion will lead to substantially higher taxes and potentially national bankruptcy. Sanders’ senior economic advisor, economist Stephanie Kelton, has a direct response:

Most estimates of Medicare-for-All’s costs over its first 10 years range from $32 trillion to over $40 trillion. Yes, that is a big number, but remember that our current healthcare system is going to cost between $34 trillion and $47 trillion.

Any forecast about healthcare spending is built upon debatable assumptions, but, at a minimum, we should be able to answer with confidence, “Will Medicare-for-All increase or decrease healthcare spending overall?”

Based on Sanders’ description of his Medicare-for-All plan, cost savings will occur in four primary areas: (1) reduced drug prices through increased price competition, (2) reduction in administrative costs (i.e., elimination of private health insurance), (3) constraints on provider payment rates (i.e., what doctors and hospitals are paid), and (4) increased use of preventive medicine (resulting in a healthier population and less demand for high-cost medical services).

Forecasts on Medicare-for-All costs are sensitive to assumptions, particularly regarding whether or not Medicare-for-All will pay current Medicare/Medicaid rates (which are generally below actual costs).

Assuming Medicare-for-All reimbursement rates remain near current Medicare/Medicaid rates, the real problem with Medicare-for-All is that it shrinks 20 percent of the U.S. economy.

How will economic growth be affected, particularly in the short-term, if cost rationality is brought to our healthcare system? How do you eliminate an entire industry (supplemental, private-based insurance notwithstanding) and not cause a recession?

As described by the Sanders campaign, Medicare-for-All is more likely to put downward pressure on what this country spends on healthcare.

It will require the government to raise taxes on the middle class!

Similarly, the claim that middle class taxes will rise under Medicare-for-All dovetails with the ‘too expensive’ argument and rests on the same question: Can we achieve total cost savings through Medicare-for-All?

Regrettably, Bernie Sanders didn’t help his cause by telling the Associated Press that his healthcare plan could cost up to $40 trillion over a decade and that he’d consider raising taxes on the middle class “in exchange for healthcare without co-payments or deductibles.” Lost in the translation is that Sanders believes the savings to households by eliminating co-payments and deductibles would exceed any tax hike.

Still, he did say he’d consider raising middle class taxes and that is all his critics needed to hear.

Setting aside the distinction between families sending their money to insurance companies through payroll deductions, deductibles and copays versus paying a healthcare tax, the probability of tax increases pivots on whether Medicare-for-All can reduce costs.

If ‘yes,’ then the Medicare-for-All tax will merely be replacing premiums, deductibles and copays and perhaps even leave households more disposable income. If ‘no,’ then tax increases will be necessary — and taxing the rich probably won’t be enough if Medicare-for-All cost estimates by Urban Institute healthcare analysts John Holahan and Linda J. Blumberg are accurate. They estimate Medicare-for-All over 10 years will cost $33 trillion and will be entirely financed by taxes on individuals and businesses. Even research by the Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank funded by the Koch brothers, assessed that Medicare-for-All could save $2 trillion in total spending, costing around $32 trillion over a 10-year period.

Predictably, Joe Biden has picked up on this area of disputatiousness within Sanders plan and is declaring that “Bidencare” — in contrast — will expand healthcare coverage and lower costs without raising taxes on the middle class (the details on how he will do that are still pending). The Biden attack on Medicare-for-All has also been reinforced by the news media, with the Washington Post poo-pooing the Mercatus Center savings conclusion as being cherry-picked from that study.

So why am I not convinced that Medicare-for-All will lead to higher healthcare-related spending by households?

There is one incontrovertible fact that the American news media, policy analysts, business lobbies and political class continue to ignore: Every advanced economy with universal coverage delivers better healthcare to their citizens and does so at a unit cost significantly lower than the U.S. (see Figure 1 above).

Germany does it. France does it. Canada does it. The United Kingdom does it. Japan does it. And there is no inherent reason the United States can’t do it, if the political will exists to do so.

Many of these countries pay higher tax rates than Americans, but that does not explain why they deliver healthcare at lower cost and with superior outcomes.

As taxpayers, we should fight paying higher taxes for healthcare as long powerful special interests groups co-opt our healthcare system, bloating its costs for exorbitant private gain and leaving Americans in significantly poorer health than comparable populations in other countries.

The ‘middle class tax increase’ canard is a distraction with one purpose: scare Americans away from thinking a single-payer healthcare system is possible.

But it is possible. California Representative Ro Khanna recently responded to Biden’s tax increase criticism by noting that if the healthcare status quo persists it will cost us $49 trillion over the next 10 years. If Medicare-for-All were to come anywhere close to the $32 trillion price tag estimated by the Mercatus Center and The Urban Institute, middle class Americans won’t be worrying about a tax increase, but rather how to spend the money they’ve saved under Medicare-for-All.

It’s socialized medicine that will lead to healthcare rationing!

The irony of the ‘healthcare rationing’ critique is that our current system already has significant levels of healthcare rationing. Anytime someone doesn’t buy health insurance or has inadequate health insurance coverage because of high premiums, that is a textbook example of healthcare rationing.

The challenge for Medicare-for-All will be predicting the initial surge in utilization rates with the rollout of Medicare-for-All, as people start getting the basic and preventive care they chose not to receive under the private insurance-based system. In the long-run, higher utilization rates will save money as people get more preventive care services and address potentially expensive health issues earlier in their development.

Second, Medicare-for-All isn’t socialized medicine. The doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical companies, and medical equipment manufacturers all remain in the private sector under Medicare-for-All. Only the administrative function for U.S. healthcare, currently handled by private insurance, will be rolled into the public sector. A patient under Medicare-for-All is unlikely to ever talk to a public employee during a treatment or service delivery. Medicare-for-All is statism, but not socialism. The British National Health Service is socialized medicine.

It is too complex!

This is my favorite complaint about Medicare-for-All, especially coming from Democrats proposing a public option and other tweeks to Obamacare. On the day it was passed, ACA contained 2,300 pages and would soon include over 16,000 more pages in additional rules and regulations. The section of the Social Security Act of 1965 creating Medicare contained only 138 pages. Complex is the arcane, special interest laden maze that Obamacare has grafted onto our system. Medicare-for-All simplifies everything by blowing all that up, leaving us with a familiar healthcare system under Medicare that is already established and functioning.

Medicare-for-All proponents need to address rational ignorance

Unfortunately, the portrayal of Medicare-for-All as radical reform is, in part, due to Sanders himself and how he sells the idea to Democratic voters — who generally support the concept, even among many of Sanders’ non-supporters.

“If you support Medicare-for-All, you have to be willing to end the greed of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries,” Sanders says in his current stump speech. “That means boldly transforming our dysfunctional system by ending the use of private health insurance. It is imperative that we remain steadfast in our commitment to guarantee healthcare as a human right and no longer private corporations to make billions of dollars in profits off Americans’ healthcare.”

Drama sells and Sanders understandably presents his healthcare proposal in that light. But while bold rhetoric may work for Democratic activists, it may be counterproductive in persuading those on the fence with respect to Medicare-for-All.

Before he died, Fox News analyst Charles Krauthammer conceded that this country was heading towards a Medicare-for-All system. He wasn’t a fan, even as he acknowledged its legitimate political attraction.

“I think, historically speaking, we’re at the midpoint,” he told Fox News’ Chris Wallace in May 2017 as Congress was debating whether to end Obamacare. . “We had seven years of ObamaCare, a change in expectations, and I would predict in less than seven years we’ll be in a single-payer system.”

Predicting that whatever Congress and President Trump came up with in 2017 would be ‘rickety,’ Krauthammer concluded: “It’s likely that Republicans are going to suffer at the polls, and as a result of that — if that happens — you’re going to get a sea-change in opinion. Then there’s only two ways to go: to a radically individualist system, where the market rules, or to single-payer. And the country is not going to go back to radically individualist.”

Unlike Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg or Kamala Harris, Krauthammer educated himself on single-payer systems (e.g., Medicare-for-All). He consciously went beyond rational ignorance, though he remained a critic of the statist approach to healthcare. The radical approach to healthcare is our current private insurance-based, individualist system. It has failed and Krauthammer grudgingly acknowledged as much.

Medicare-for-All is the prudent expansion of a well-established program to other segments in the population that are, on average, healthier than those currently covered by Medicare. The overall cost effectiveness of Medicare should increase as it covers younger, healthier population segments.

In truth, Medicare-for-All is the most prudent, safest, and least complicated way to bring meaningfully improvement to the U.S. healthcare system. Tinkering on the margins by offering a public option (of unknown price competitiveness) within an already bloated, inefficient healthcare system is far costlier and riskier.

• K.R.K.

Comments and suggestions can be send to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, July 8, 2019)

Growing up in America’s farm belt, weather proverbs were commonly heard and taken seriously. The one I always remember I first heard from my grandmother: “Frogs croaking on the lake, means an umbrella one must take.” Or something like that.

She didn’t live near a lake, so I’m not sure how useful that piece of folk wisdom was for her, but it stuck with me. And, as it turns out, the proverb has some basis in fact. Frogs do croak more on hot, humid days — which is a good predictor of stormy weather.

But the way my grandmother used the proverb, or at least how my child’s mind interpreted it, I believed for years that croaking frogs caused thunderstorms. Croaking frogs, of course, do not have such power.

Years later, I would realize my grandmother offered me my first lesson in spurious correlations, and I’ve used the croaking frogs proverb in statistics classes many times since.

The lesson is one most people hear many times during their education: Correlation is not causation. Two events (x and y in the graphic below) can be statistically correlated but not be causally related, as they are both impacted by the true causal factor (z).

Frogs are affected by the same forces — temperature, humidity and air pressure — that cause thunderstorms. There is no causal relationship. To this day, I still call these relationships croaking frogs.

We may have a new example of this inferential deficiency concerning an analytic question of current importance: Did meddling by Russia’s Internet Research Agency(IRA) impact the final outcome of the 2016 election?

Four University of Tennessee researchers, Damian J. Ruck, Natalie Manaeva Rice, Joshua Borycz, and R. Alexander Bentley, have concluded, based upon a time-series analysis of IRA tweets and their diffusion within the Twittersphere during that election, that IRA Twitter activity predicted the 2016 election results. In their study released in July, they concluded:

“We find that changes in opinion poll numbers for one of the candidates were consistently preceded by corresponding changes in IRA re-tweet volume, at an optimum interval of one week before. In contrast, the opinion poll numbers did not correlate with future re-tweets or ‘likes’ of the IRA tweets. We find that the release of these tweets parallel significant political events of 2016 and that approximately every 25,000 additional IRA re-tweets predicted a one percent increase in election opinion polls for one candidate. As these tweets were part of a larger, multimedia campaign, it is plausible that the IRA was successful in influencing U.S. public opinion in 2016.”

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wasted no time in challenging the Ruck et al. study for its failure to account for other causal factors that may have acted on both IRA Twitter activity and Trump’s public support:

“It’s important to note that the researchers focused on retweets and not overall tweets from the IRA. (In fact, they found that “we see weak evidence for an effect in the opposite direction, suggesting the possibility that IRA Twitter activity is increasing in response to Trump’s polling.”) This suggests that, if there was a meaningful correlation between Twitter activity and poll data, both were driven by some outside engagement. People becoming active on Twitter also may have happened as they were demonstrating more support for Trump. This is what’s known as a causal fork: Both the IRA retweets and Trump support may have been caused by the same external thing. If there’s a correlation here, that is. Which is . . . up for debate.”

Bump also noted that the magnitude and targeting of IRA’s Twitter and Facebook activity was not large or precise enough to plausibly move public opinion:

“It’s important to note that, on its face, the idea that 25,000 retweets could drive national political polls by a percentage point seems highly unlikely. Over the course of the 2016 election, there were 75 million tweets directly related to the election itself. If only 1 percent of those were retweeted 10 times, that means that the 25,000 retweets are fitting into a flood of 75 million original and 7.5 million retweeted tweets. It means, in other words, that the requisite 25,000 retweets make up 0.03 percent of all of that Twitter activity.”

“There’s very little evidence that Russia effectively targeted American voters with messages that powered Trump’s victory. Russia paid for a lot of Facebook ads in the populous states of New York and Texas in the last five weeks of the campaign, but its ads targeting the three states that handed Trump the election — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — were seen by only 1,000 people. There’s no evidence at all that Russia used Twitter to target people in particular places or demographic groups, targeting that would have left fingerprints in the form of receipts for payment.”

To the credit of the University of Tennessee researchers, they acknowledged the limitations of their study when they write, “Causation is not proven by this analysis, but certain directions of causality can be ruled out when one time series does not predict the other…We take the view that IRA Twitter activity was representative of a larger, multimedia disinformation campaign.”

Ruck et al. also write that their intent was to test “prediction, not causality,” as they admitted it is unlikely that “25,000 retweets could influence one percent of the electorate in isolation.” And, most appropriately, they recognize their study cannot rule out the importance of unmeasured factors that could render their findings spurious. They write in the study’s concluding section:

“Any correlation established by an observational study could be spurious. Though our main finding has proved robust and our time series analysis excludes reverse causation, there could still be a third variable driving the relationship between IRA Twitter success and U.S. election opinion polls. We controlled for one of these — the success of Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account — but there are others that are more difficult to measure; including exposure to the U.S domestic media.”

This is where the Ruck et al. research makes its biggest analytic error. What they call the ‘third variable’ is probably a set of variables — unmeasured and uncontrolled for in the Ruck et al. study — that, had they been included in the study, would likely washout the statistical significance of the IRA retweets.

By the Mueller investigation’s own estimate, IRA spent $100,000 between 2015 and 2017, with only $46,000 dedicated to Russian-linked Facebook ads purchased prior to the 2016 election. According to freelance journalist Aaron Maté, “That amounts to about 0.05 percent of the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Clinton and Trump campaigns combined — which is itself a tiny fraction of the estimated $2 billion spent by the candidates and their supporting PACS.”

There is, however, an obvious candidate for the honor of being the “larger, multimedia disinformation campaign” Ruck et al. consider as the more likely driving force behind the “manipulation” of the 2016 electorate. That third variable is the Trump campaign’s social media campaign, powered by Cambridge Analytica’s massive data warehouse, which included data harvested from over 50 million Facebook user profiles.

Unlike IRA’s use of Twitter and Facebook, where the hard evidence shows little sophistication in both content and targeting, Cambridge Analytica engineered one of the most sophisticated Big Data-driven social media campaigns in presidential history.

In an interview with CNBC, the 2016 Trump campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, detailed how his team, including Cambridge Analytica, created highly targeted Facebook advertising based on scientific testing to optimize each advertisement’s click rate. “We were making hundreds of thousands of them (ads on Facebook) programmatically. … (On an) average day (we would make) 50,000 to 60,000 ads, … changing language, words, colors, changing things because certain people like a green button better than a blue button, some people like the word ‘donate’ over ‘contribute,’” Parscale told CNBC.

Just on scale, IRA’s efforts pale in comparison to Parscale/Cambridge Analytica’s. Add to that the much higher level of campaign sophistication by Parscale/Cambridge Analytica, and it begs the question, how could any serious research on the impact of Russian meddling in 2016 not include measures of the Trump’s campaigns social media efforts (and Hillary Clinton’s as well for that matter)?

Ignoring Cambridge Analytica’s social media campaign, Ruck et al. have given us a croaking frog-level analysis. It is as if the Ruck et al. research team, while sitting in a small row boat on a lake, experienced a large wake and attributed it to an 8-meter motor boat passing by, ignoring the fact that a 100-meter, 6,700 gross tonnage yacht passed by at the exact same time.

While their forthrightness on their study’s flaws is admirable, Ruck et al. have not done the measurements and work necessary to release any meaningful results on a subject as politically volatile as Russia’s influence on the 2016 election. As it stands today, their study offers little to the conversation.

• K.R.K.

Comments and criticisms can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, July 2, 2019)

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1150 a.d.)

The original intent behind federally-mandated desegregation busing was noble: ‘Separate but equal’ was not working for many African-American students in the 1950s and 60s. Busing policies were designed to improve the educational opportunities of African-American children by integrating them systematically into predominantly white school districts.

The desegregation busing concept was predicated upon research conducted in the 1960s, specifically the Coleman Report published in 1966. In that study, including more than 150,000 students, it was found that learning within mixed-race classrooms was more important to the academic achievement of socially disadvantaged African-American children than was per-pupil funding.

According to the researchers, it wasn’t enough to improve funding to schools in economically disadvantaged school districts. The students in these districts would achieve better educational outcomes if they were educated in predominantly white school districts.

But it took the 1971 Supreme Court ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education to provide the final impetus for desegregation busing to advance nationwide. In ruling in favor of Swann, the Supreme Court decided that for a school district to achieve racial balance it meant redrawing school boundaries and the use of busing in that aim was a legitimate legal tool.

So began the liberal project to integrate the American school system through federally-mandated (forced) busing. In the 1970s, busing designed to desegregate mostly urban school districts began. School districts in Boston (MA), Kansas City (MO), Las Vegas (NV), Los Angeles (CA), Nashville (TN), Prince George’s County (MD), Richmond (VA), and Wilmington (DE), among others, instituted mandatory busing where a select number of students were assigned and transported to racially segregated schools.

Reducing racial segregation in public schools became a federal requirement following the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, but, for many reasons, mandatory busing did not achieve this goal.

From 1972 to 1980, despite desegregation busing in many urban school jurisdictions, the percentage of blacks attending mostly-black schools barely changed, moving from 63.6 percent to 63.3 percent, noted David Frum in his 2000 book, How We Got Here: The 1970s (The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse).

As to the impact of busing on academic achievement, a 1992 Harvard study found no discernable improvement among black and Hispanic students as a result of court-ordered busing.

Busing did, however, leave a political mark, especially on liberal Democrats who had championed the policy since its inception. Many white families whose children were bused to predominately African-American schools resented the government’s intrusion. For many families, the quality of local neighborhood schools was a major factor in deciding where to buy or rent a home. Children selected for busing programs often had to travel more than an hour to get to school, though, in many cases, their neighborhood school was within walking distance.

Public Opinion on Busing in the 1970s

Public opinion data collected between 1972 and 1996 by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) shows the level of discontent among whites with respect to busing was always high (see Figure 1).

In the 1970s, while African-Americans were evenly split in their support for busing, whites opposition to the policy never fell below 75 percent. Public opinion on busing has changed little since 1996 (the last year NORC asked a busing question on its General Social Survey [GSS]). A more recent 2007 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 59 percent of Americans would prefer that students stay in their local schools, even if that meant most students would be of the same race.

Figure 1: Public attitudes over time regarding mandatory busing

Amid other social issues that dominated politics in the 1970s (e.g., abortion, prayer in school, the Equal Rights Amendment, etc.), few were as potent as busing. In his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan told the Sacramento Press Club:

“Federal control of education has become a reality. If I am elected President it would be my intention to issue strict instructions to the Department of HEW and other federal departments to get off the back of state and local school systems, to leave the setting of policies and the administration of school affairs to local boards of education.”

When Reagan won the 1980 election, many attributed his victory, at least in part, to the public’s opposition to federal programs such as busing. And it was within this political environment that then U.S. Senator Joe Biden (DE) actively worked with some southern Democrats, including avowed segregationists, to end federally-mandated busing. At the time, Biden supported the concept of school desegregation, but not the use of federal directives to do so. Though not a southern state, Delaware’s electorate (while friendly to Democrats) shares some conservative attitudinal characteristics with many southern states, enough so that Biden’s political career might have derailed prematurely had he not publicly opposed federally-mandated busing.

A yes-vote on busing in the mid- to late-1970s might well have ended Biden’s Senate career with the 1978 Senate race — part of a national election where five Democratic incumbent Senators lost their seats: Floyd Haskell (Colorado), Dick Clark (Iowa), William Hathaway (Maine), Wendell Anderson (Minnesota), and Thomas McIntyre (New Hampshire).

To attack Biden in 2019 over a policy position he took in 1977 that was both defensible on merit and popular with his Delaware constituents is cynical by even modern political standards.

Is Support for Busing Trending Up?

If we accept the polling numbers at face value, public support for busing trended upwards after the tumultuous 70s, particularly among young African-Americans and whites (see Figures 2 and 3). Support among African-Americans between 18 and 29 years old rose from 50 percent in the 1970s to 65 percent in the 1990s; among whites, support grew significantly in all age groups, though never exceeding 50 percent for any single group.

Figure 2: African-American attitudes regarding busing by age and decade

Figure 3: White attitudes regarding busing by age and decade

The positive trend in busing support even extended across ideological groups (see Figure 4). For ‘extremely liberal’ GSS respondents, which make up about two percent of the U.S. adult population, support for busing grew from 53 percent to 72 percent.

At the other end, ‘extremely conservative’ Americans, accounting for two to three percent of the U.S. adult population, support for busing increased from 23 percent to 30 percent between 1974 and 1996.

Among a more populous segment of the population, moderates, support for busing nearly doubled from 21 percent to 41 percent.

Figure 4: Change in Attitudes Towards Busing by Ideological Group (1974 to 1996)

Granted, 1996 is over 20 years ago. A lot can change; but as pointed out, a 2007 Pew Research found similar attitudes regarding busing. A majority of Americans prefer children going to their neighborhood schools, even if that means they will not experience as much ethnic and racial diversity during their education. This finding is not controversial. Most parents prefer their children to go to their neighborhood schools — even as there are parents that are willing to bus their children to schools that offer opportunities their neighborhood school may not offer (e.g., music, sports, advanced math/science, cultural diversity, etc.).

As many mandated busing programs either being discontinued or transitioned to voluntary programs through the 1990s, the visceral component to the public’s opposition to federally-mandated busing waned. Moreover, by the 1990s, fewer and fewer Americans had personal experiences with the busing controversies of the 1970s. Temporal distance does make the heart grow fonder in this case.

Yet, the residual effects of the 1970s are still evident in the polling data from the 1990s. Using the numbers from Figures 2 and 3 (above), the change in the proportion of respondents supporting busing from the 1970s to 1990s is reported in the first two columns in Figure 5. Again, the biggest increases in support for busing occurred among white and younger Americans — demographic groups in the 1990s least likely to have firsthand experience with the controversies surrounding busing in the 1970s.

However, if we observe the age and race cohorts, we see indications that those memories lingered with those who most likely experienced — directly or indirectly — busing in the 1970s, particularly among African-Americans. For example, the cohort of African-Americans who were 30 to 39 years old in the 1970s — an age most likely to have small children in a public school system — were 50 to 59 years old in the 1990s. This cohort’s support for busing increased one percentage point from the 1970s to 1990s (not statistically significant). Among the cohort of African-Americans between 40 to 49 years years old in the 1970s — an age segment most likely to have older children in a public school system — support for busing actually declined six percentage points by the 1990s.

Figure 5: Change in Attitudes Towards Busing by Age/Race Cohorts (1974 to 1996)

Do the Democrats Really Want to Bring Back Mandated Busing?

Federally-mandated busing was a traumatic experience for many parents and children, black and white, even if there are cases such as entrepreneur Robert F. Smith where the experience brought positive results to their lives (Note: Senator Kamala Harris participated in a voluntary busing program in Berkeley, California — a policy Joe Biden does not oppose).

More pointedly, federally-mandated busing didn’t work. In the aggregate, it didn’t improve the academic performance of African-American children bused to mainly white schools, nor did it lead to a significant drop in school segregation. But it did create massive amounts of resentment towards the federal government.

As a federally-mandated program, the entire enterprise failed.

But that hasn’t stopped political opportunists today from casting judgment on those that lived through busing controversy in the 1970s.

The Nation’s Jonathan Kozol offers an ahistorical rebuke of Joe Biden’s political positioning on busing in the 1970s, using the very real plight of African-American parents that know their children will not get the education they deserve if they can only attend an inner city school, suggesting to his readers that Biden was nothing less than a closet sympathizer with racists:

“As the mainstream media repeatedly reminds us, Biden is a likable man in many ways. Even his critics often speak about his graciousness. But his likability will not help Julia Walker’s grandkids and her great-grandchildren and the children of her neighbors go to schools where they can get an equal shot at a first-rate education and where their young white classmates have a chance to get to know and value them and learn from them, as children do in ordinary ways when we take away the structures that divide them.”

Kozol’s admirable tenure teaching fifth grade for two years in Boston’s suburban interdistrict program, the longest-lasting voluntary integration effort in the nation, turns out to be further evidence that experience does not equate to knowledge or wisdom.

The Los Angeles Time’s Howard Blume is no more charitable towards Biden:

“Regardless of Biden’s intent, he was among the politicians who successfully surfed the surge of anti-busing populism. This wave included parents who were horrified by overt racism, but who opposed putting their children on buses. And this wave also included avowed racists and opportunists who, in their opposition to busing, hid behind self-righteous platitudes.”

Biden wasn’t representing his constituents, he was cynically ‘surfing’ the issue so as to not anger overt and closet racists, implies Blume.

Only Chairman Mao has achieved such moral and ideological purity as Messrs. Kozol and Blume, whose unexamined platitudes on race and segregation offer little substance to build an actual policy around. That federally-mandated busing hurt the cause of ending school segregation is beside the point to today’s social justice vanguard. That voluntary busing programs achieve better results than federally-mandated programs ever did is also inadmissible. Uncle Joe must be shame-punished, sans evidence or reason.

To Biden’s credit, he hasn’t backed down on how he explains his busing position in 1977. But he will. It is only a matter of time before he apologizes for not being properly enlightened back in the day. He’ll come to Jesus and all will be good until he again says something racially insensitive or awkward [Note: The Biden campaign speechwriter(s) responsible for Biden’s most recent ‘kid wearing a hoodie’ comment need(s) to be fired. If the writer is Biden, himself, well…]

Very few political writers and Democratic party operatives were alive during the 1970s, much less experienced the social upheaval federally-mandated busing caused. They would well-advised to talk to people that lived through it from all perspectives — positive and negative. Their own perspective might change as a result.

But if a new federally-mandated busing initiative to integrate America’s public schools is what they want, good luck to any 2020 Democratic candidate willing to run on that idea. They’ll need it.

• K.R.K.

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, June 29, 2019)

Speaking Friday in Leesburg, Virgina, former President Jimmy Carter’s asserted that a full investigation into how the Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential election would reveal Donald Trump did not win the election.

“There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election. And I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf,” Carter said at the Carter Center’s annual retreat.

His words carry significant weight, not as a former president, but because his most significant post-presidency project, The Carter Center, is one of the world’s leading nongovernmental organizations dedicated to election monitoring and democratic institution-building. The Carter Center has documented election fraud all over the world. They know it when they see it.

My great respect for the former President aside, he is wrong on two counts, recklessly so, when suggesting President Trump was illegitimately elected. First, researchers have tried to quantify the impact of Russian interference (myself included) and there is no definitive evidence that the Russians changed the 2016 outcome. More importantly, it is unlikely, given the data available, that such a determination could ever be made. Second, Carter’s claim further distracts us from a far more important need to have a public inquiry into the U.S. intelligence community’s (USIC) failure to detect and deter the Russian interference in 2016 in a timely manner.

This country has never had a full awakening about the depth of the USIC’s inability to defend the 2016 election and its subsequent attempt remove a sitting president. They compounded one failure with another.

Former Obama administration officials do not deny that the administration made grave mistakes prior to the election.

As reported by the New York Times:

The Obama administration feared that acknowledging Russian meddling in the 2016 election would reveal too much about intelligence gathering and be interpreted as “taking sides” in the race, the former secretary of homeland security ( Jeh Johnson) said Wednesday.

Mr. Johnson said he became increasingly concerned about the vulnerabilities of the nation’s election infrastructure, particularly after the hacking at the Democratic National Committee last summer. The administration formally accused the Russian government of hacking into emails from the D.N.C. and other institutions and individuals on Oct. 7.

Around mid-August, Mr. Johnson said, federal officials began hearing reports of “scanning and probing” of some state voter database registries. In the weeks after, intelligence officials became convinced the Russians were behind those efforts, though he said it was not until January (my emphasis) that they were “in a position to say” that.

In light of the Mueller investigation’s inability to find compelling evidence of a conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign and the USIC’s known reliance on the unverified, partisan-funded Steele dossier to justify surveillance of a U.S. person, a reasonable conclusion is that the USIC tried to compensate for its intelligence failures before Election Day by building, post hoc, a conspiracy case against President Trump sufficient to have him removed from office.

The USIC failed twice.

Russian meddling did affect the 2016 election

Quantitative journalists at FiveThirtyEight.com and at least two significant academic studies have offered empirical evidence that the Russians had some impact on the 2016 election (you can find them here and here); but, collectively, their findings are not definitive.

As pointed out by FiveThirtyEight.com founder Nate Silver, the Russian interference was not a discrete event and therefore hard to model.

“The interference campaign had been underway for years (since at least 2014) and gradually evolved from a more general-purpose trolling operation into something that sought to undermine Clinton while promoting Trump (and to a lesser degree, Bernie Sanders). To the extent it mattered, it would have blended into the background and had a cumulative effect over the entirety of the campaign,” Silver concluded.

Political scientist Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed online activity during the 2016 campaign and found that cyber-messaging targeting convertible, low-information voters were sufficient in volume to change the final vote result.

However, by Jamieson’s own admission, it is impossible to know exactly what specific aspects of the Russian social media activities changed vote intentions. The volume of Russian-created social media messages paled in size to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on social media by the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns.

Likewise, the Ruck, Rice, Borycz, and Bentley study relies on highly-aggregated Twitter data (i.e., weekly retweet counts associated with the Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency [IRA]) to make inferences about how the Russians manipulated Twitter traffic to affect polling data. By their own admission, they admit they cannot declare a causal link between IRA Twitter retweets and poll data as there remains the strong possibility of some unmeasured factor that affected both Twitter behavior (e.g., retweets) and poll numbers. As I’ve argued in my own research, that ‘unmeasured’ factor is the social media campaign designed and executed by Cambridge Analytica.

Think of it this way: If Russian trolls armed with a few million dollars can be so efficient and skilled at strategically changing enough votes to alter an national election outcome, as Jamieson and Ruck, et. al., want us to believe, the American democracy has far bigger problems than Russian meddling. If true, the Democrats need to hire the Russians to train them on how to win an American presidential election in the social media age.

But they don’t need to bother. We know the most likely star of the 2016 election: Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica exploited Facebook profile data to maximum value. Its innovation (largely modeled on the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns) was to pull in Facebook users’ friends to expand its analytic base. By harvesting 50 million Facebook user profiles it built a massive database for communications targeting.

The result, according to my research using the 2016 American National Election Study, was to systematically change attitudes towards Clinton among older, weakly partisan voters (see Figure 1). In rating Hillary Clinton on a 0 to 100 favorability scale, on average, “slightly conservative” adults aged 40 or older who used Facebook or Twitter to share political information gave her a rating of 20.7, compared to 32.1 among otherwise similar adults who had not used Facebook or Twitter for sharing political information. A similar relationship emerged among “conservative” adults (aged 40 or older).

Figure 1: Clinton Thermometer Rating by Facebook/Twitter use and Self-reported Ideology

In my volumetric estimation, the net impact of these attitudinal differences were almost sufficient to change enough votes in the key battleground states to alter the 2016 outcome. Of course, I could not determine whether it was Cambridge Analytic-sourced or Russian-sourced social media messaging that most impacted these anti-Clinton attitudes. But again, in terms of sheer budget volume, Cambridge Analytica’s efforts were much more likely to be the bigger causal factor.

The more probable Russian impact on the 2016 election came from the email hacks, specifically, the Podesta emails. As I reported on NuQum.com in September 2018, the Podesta emails dampened the positive impact Clinton’s debate performances would have had in October 2016, sans the Russian meddling.

Using Google Trends search data as a proxy measure for the campaign issues most interesting to Americans over time, Figure 2 shows that variation in these inquiries were highly correlated with the probability Hillary Clinton would win the election (as measured by futures contract prices on the Iowa Electronic Markets). Furthermore, when we identify the subjects of Google searches for each week, we see that the weeks where the Clinton win probabilities fell the most were weeks where the Clinton/Podesta emails dominated Google searches.

Figure 2. Relationship between relative Google search volume & Clinton win probabilities during the 2016 general election period (weekly-level data)

The Russian-hacked emails stunted Clinton’s post-debate momentum and made it difficult for her campaign to control the media agenda at a crucial time in the election.

Still, we cannot make definitive causal assertions based on the results in Figure 2; though, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. Based on the data I’ve seen, the Russian email hacks, released in October 2016, are that duck.

So why is Jimmy Carter wrong?

It may seem like I’ve just argued that Carter was right to suggest an in-depth analysis of the 2016 election would reveal Trump didn’t win fair and square.

But he wasn’t right to say what he said and here’s why:

His statement served no purpose but to inflame sentiments in a country already hopelessly divided. There will never be irrefutable proof that Russian meddling changed the 2016 outcome. So what is the point in keeping that hope alive among Democrats (and anti-Trump Republicans) who still — in their traumatized hearts — believe they can get this current president removed from office and avoid the risk of him being re-elected?

Furthermore, even if there was proof about the impact of Russian meddling, as long as the Trump campaign didn’t participate in the fraud, is it fair to hold them accountable?

Our country has spent over two years investigating the possibility of a conspiracy between the Russians and Trump campaign. Every Hollywood celebrity can read the Mueller Report ten times over and they still won’t find evidence of a conspiracy. The Mueller Report revealed the Trump campaign as a bumbling, indiscreet cabal of political amateurs desperately seeking their holy grail (Hillary Clinton’s 30,000+ illegally deleted emails). But there was no conspiracy, only a metric-ton of stupidity. And, at least as of now, stupidity alone is not an impeachable offense.

Carter’s inappropriate attack on Trump does more one piece of damage to the American political dialogue. It diverts attention from the real problem: How could our intelligence agencies — the most capable, most highly-funded in the world — let the Russians interfere to the extent they did?

There can be only one answer: incompetence.

If Jimmy Carter wants to poke at the still open wounds from 2016, that is what he should have been talking about in Leesburg, Virginia last Friday.

• K.R.K.

As always, comments, insults and requests for data can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; June 28, 2019)

Tornadoes have been a fascination of mine since my childhood. Growing up in Iowa, in ‘Tornado Alley,’ one of my earliest memories is that piercing warning sound our local TV station, WMT-TV (now KGAN), would broadcast when a tornado warning had been issued in the area. Meteorologist Conrad Johnson’s deep voice would boom over a live, black-and-white weather radar image, its round shape like a vintage Tektronics oscilloscope, and something very few local TV stations had available in the late 1960s. Just white blobs on a dark background. White is rain. Black is not rain.

Johnson, a tall, almost father-like figure to anyone growing up in Eastern Iowa in the 60s and 70s, was a national pioneer of broadcast meteorology. When few local TV stations had their own weather radar systems (I have yet to find one earlier than WMT-TVs), Johnson personally re-purposed a military radar system for use by the Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based TV station. I was no more than five years old when I first learned how a hook shape in a storm’s radar image could indicate an active tornado. For me, Johnson made tornadoes exciting, even as they were terrifying.

Johnson also led the national effort to build the National Weather Service tornado watch/warning system which has since saved, conservatively, thousands of lives. This YouTube video is a reminder to me that things low-tech by today’s standards didn’t mean we were getting less information. Quite the opposite, Johnson made us all smarter:

After tornadoes had struck our area, Johnson considered it his job to explain what happened and how we might be able to prepare better for future storms.

“On the synoptic situation that preceded the tornado which struck Cedar Rapids on early Wednesday morning, we go back and reconstruct a little bit,” started Johnson’s on-air class on tornadoes. (I still don’t know what ‘synoptic’ means.)

When I watch TV meteorologists today, Johnson is still my gold standard. He was more scientist than polished media personality. His words carried weight.

I thought this essay was about trends in tornadoes. Why do I reminisce about this now?

The simple answer is, I think today’s meteorologists and climate scientists get a shitty rap from climate change skeptics (a group that I have some sympathies with when they challenge climate change activists for their ‘sky-is-falling’ rhetoric). I hate hyperbole, always have, and Conrad Johnson was everything but hyperbole and he was far more effective at education for that reason.

But today’s social media-driven political dialogues reward the exact opposite behavior. Here is a recent tweet from the Sunrise Movement, a climate change activist organization.

It is an eye-catching statement to make. I have no doubt it motivates the true believers. But they are jumping way ahead of the science. And don’t take my word for it. Listen to the one of the scientists most knowledgeable about the issue, Northern Illinois Professor Dr. Victor Gensini:

“No, climate change did not cause the recent rash of US tornadoes. Climate change does not cause any given extreme weather event. It does alter background probabilities of the PDF curve.

Most of the literature has focused on severe convective storms in the aggregate sense due to the lack of a good discriminator among hazards using regional climate models….These studies suggest that severe weather environments and surrogate severe will increase in the spring and become more variable from year to year. This is not (yet) specific to any specific severe convective system.”

That is statistician-speak for: low-probability, extreme events are hard to explain and predict using highly aggregated predictors.

In layman’s speak: you can’t say a baseball player uses steroids because he hit a lot of home runs last week.

It may be decades before scientists can show a statistically-significant link between global warming and tornadoes.

I end this essay with the most recent data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on U.S. tornadoes. Figure 1 shows the frequency counts by year, and Figure 2 shows the average number of tornadoes per daily outbreak.

Figure 1: U.S. Tornado Annual Frequencies from 1954 to 2019*

Figure 2: Average Number of EF3 or Higher Tornadoes per Daily Outbreak

Figure 1 indicate no discernible trend in annual tornado frequencies (EF1 or higher) since 1954. You can’t even squint a trend from that data series. Figure 2, however, does suggest a small increase in the frequency of large tornado outbreaks (EF3 or higher). But the trend signal is still too hard to distinguish from normal year-to-year noise.

It is too easy to exaggerate the significance of extreme, isolated events in today’s highly politicized media environment. Perhaps my own childhood memories have exaggerated the wisdom of my favorite TV meteorologist, but I believe he’d be cautioning us today about exaggerating the link between tornadoes and climate change.

• K.R.K.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; June 27, 2019)

The news media generally likes simple narratives. It makes their job easier and makes the news more digestible for consumers.

And while there is no shame in making one’s job less complicated or work product more consumable, it can easily misrepresent reality.

The latest example is from the 2020 Democratic nomination race and the simplified narrative goes something like this: Since offering more practical and concrete progressive policy proposals, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is challenging Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the hearts and minds of progressive Democrats.

The simplifying assumption is that Sanders and Warren are fighting for the same progressive voters. But is that true?

Of course, on a reductive level, this narrative is true by definition. All Democratic candidates are competing for the same voters in the Party’s base. But as documented in an earlier analysis of the December 2018 American National Election Study (ANES), Warren’s core supporters are demographically and attitudinally different from Sanders’ core supporters. Contrary to the media storylines, Warren’s support has always been concentrated among the most elite segments of the Democratic Party. She is slowly rebuilding Hillary Clinton’s 2016 coalition: highly-educated, upwardly mobile, urban/suburban women (and the men that love them).

In the December 2018 ANES, Warren supporters were significantly more likely to be older, upper-middle-class, educated, white females in comparison to Sanders supporters. Likewise, attitudinally, Warren supporters were more centrist in their views. Warren, the candidate, might be progressive on bank reform or student debt forgiveness, but her core supporters were more aligned with the Third Way Clintonians than the Berniecrats.

Further underwriting the Warren versus Sanders narrative is Warren’s recent rise in the polls among likely Democratic primary voters (see Figure 1).

Figure 1:  RealClearPolitics.com Poll Averages for the 2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination Candidates

 

Warren’s poll numbers (the brown line) have risen consistently since early May, reaching a high of 13 percent in the latest RealClearPolitics.com poll average, while support for Sanders (the blue line) has remained relatively constant at around 17 percent. Warren most certainly is taking some potential supporters from Sanders, but do they really share the same ‘progressive’ voter base?

Well, it depends.

It is just as likely Warren is gaining support from former supporters of other candidates who have seen their support slacken recently — candidates like Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker. Indeed, as we see in the aggregate data, Warren’s rise is coming at the expense of those two candidates and with little relationship to changes in Sanders support.

But the Warren versus Sanders narrative is stronger than ever.

“By running a campaign heavy on both policy and biographical details, she has wrested some high-profile liberal supporters away from Mr. Sanders, and in some polls, has shown signs of ticking upward,” writes New York Timesreporters Astead W. Herndon and Sydney Ember. “But while Ms. Warren has gained ground, she has not yet cast a shadow of her own. Mr. Sanders still holds a large advantage in the polls — a point his advisers eagerly highlight — and his supporters say he remains the clear progressive standard-bearer among the larger electorate.”

“They both have a crusader mentality around correcting what is wrong,” says Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a prominent member of the House Democratic Progressive Caucus. “They understand they are speaking to a similar vision of the country, and obviously they are trying to distinguish themselves from each other.”

“The challenge for both candidates is that, since they’re appealing to many of the same voters, any critiques must be handled delicately to avoid alienating possible backers,” writes Washington Post political reporter Sean Sullivan.

These largely data-free conclusions are plausible, but when we look at changes over time in aggregate support for each candidate it is evident that many of these media-driven storylines are more assumption than fact.

Allies and Antagonists

The tactical relationships between the candidates emerge when their support is viewed in the aggregate over time (see Figure 1). Across the major candidates (i.e., polling over 5 percent consistently), some candidates rise and fall together (allies) and some rise at the expense of other candidates (antagonists). And, of course, those relationships can — and do — change over time.

For example, starting in late April, around the time of Biden’s entrance into the race, Biden and Sanders became clear antagonists — as Biden rises, Sanders falls. Some of those Sanders supporters certainly went to Warren, some to Biden, and probably a few went to the other candidates. It is hard to know without individual-level panel data.

But aggregate data has a nice characteristic: it tends to cancel the noise inherent at the individual-level. Yes, we do care about who is going where with their support. If Sanders is losing support among women, his team needs to know that. But, in the aggregate, the inter-candidate dynamics become observable.

Using RealClearPolitics.com’s polling database (containing 69 separate national surveys since October 2018), we can see which candidates move together in aggregate support (allies) and which move in opposite directions (antagonists).

Figure 2 shows the bivariate correlations among the top-tier Democratic candidates over the period from October 2018 to mid-June 2019. The relationship of most interest — Warren and Sanders — indicates no obvious relationship. Sanders support levels do not change in concert with Warren’s over this period.

That is not the case between Biden and Sanders, where, if one goes up, the other goes down. While not a strong statistical relationship, it has grown stronger since Biden’s official announcement.

Conversely, Sanders’ aggregate support moves in tandem with Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, and Amy Klobuchar — three candidates most often associated with corporate-friendly centrism. Up to this point in the race, at least, growing support for centrist candidates not named Biden helps the Sanders campaign.

Tactically, as a candidate, that is good information to know.

Figure 2:  Correlations of Democratic Candidate Support in the 2020 Democratic Nomination Race

 

Figure 3 simply summarizes the Figure 2 correlations by assigning the antagonist and allies labels to each candidate pair. Such that, Biden and Sanders are antagonists. As one goes up, the other goes down. The same is true for Biden-Beto, Warren-Beto, Warren-Booker, Buttigieg-Beto, and Buttigieg-Booker.

Besides the Sanders allies described previously, the other allied pairs include: Biden-Buttigieg, Warren-Buttigieg, Harris-Klobuchar, and Booker-Klobuchar.

 

Figure 3:  Allies & Antagonists in the 2020 Democratic Nomination Race (Oct. 2018 to June 2019)

 

All of these pairings could change overnight. As of now it appears, Harris, Beto and Klobuchar rise jointly with Sanders. Likewise, Buttigieg’s fortunes seem tied to Warren and Biden.

But as candidates drop out, these dynamics can change instantly. In the end, should it come down to just two candidates — which nomination races normally do — the last two standing will most certainly be an antagonist pair.

Correlation is not Causation

The correlations in Figure 2 are not, of course, evidence of causation. Biden’s rise in the polls does not cause Buttigieg’s support to rise. It may. But we can’t say that from the looking at contemporaneous correlations.

For a little extracurricular exercise, I generated a *very exploratory* vector autoregressive model (VAR) of candidate support using the weekly time-series data for the top four candidates (see Figure 4). Given the small sample size (n = 37 weeks), I cannot draw any strong conclusions; but, it is fun to conjecture when there is a little bit of data behind it — no matter how sketchy.

Figure 4:  A Causal Model of Democratic Candidate Support in the 2020 Democratic Nomination Race

 

With the small sample size caveat in mind, the estimated VAR model shows evidence of a causal system in which a rise in Warren’s support depresses Buttigieg’s support… which helps Sanders…which hurts Biden. In other words, if this causal model is correct, Warren’s rise up to now may be helping Sanders by moderating Buttigieg’s rise, which comes at Sanders’ expense, according to the VAR model. If true, the Sanders campaign may need Warren to stay in the race at least until Buttigieg drops out.

Last thoughts

The biggest mistake we often make is the assumption that voters choose candidates based on the issues. Yes, issues matter. But, often, only indirectly. There are many vote decision paths and, as research as shown, voters often adjust their policy views after they pick a favorite candidate or party.

Warren may be a genuine progressive — closer to Sanders than Biden in her policy views — but her supporters are not necessarily as progressive. Many are the same centrists that lined up in 2016 for Clinton over Sanders.

Over the next year, as candidates drop out of the race, we may see a 2016 redux with Warren and Sanders the last candidates standing, battling for the soul of the Democratic Party.

The lazy conclusion would call that outcome a victory for the Democrats’ progressive wing, but more likely it is merely the reformation of the same 2016 alliances: Centrist (corporatist) Democrats behind Warren versus the Berniecrat progressives.

That is not as exciting an interpretation, perhaps, but probably the more accurate one.

• K.R.K.

Vector Autoregression Model Output (SAS)

The data source is RealClearPolitics.com’s polling averages for the top four Democratic candidates since October 2018. The data series for each candidate was differenced in order to make it stationary. In total, there were 37 weeks of data. All data and SAS computer code is available upon request (kroeger98@yahoo.com).

This is a follow-up essay to my previous posting on whether or not the cable news channels are deliberately ignoring Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; June 25, 2019)

I’ve noted in the past how two subjects elicit the most hate mail: Climate change and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We can now add a third: Tulsi Gabbard

Two days ago I posted an essay on my analysis of the relationship between candidate support and news coverage. Based on the data, I concluded that Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard does not receive the amount of news coverage she deserves.

After posting the essay, angry replies hit my inbox within hours. The meanest ones I won’t dignify with a response, but one complaint found within more than one email does deserve an response: Why would the news media single out Tulsi Gabbard?

I believe there are three reasons Gabbard is targeted: (1) She challenged the Obama administration’s informal policy not to use the term ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ when talking about the War on Terror, (2) she’s a vocal critic of the military-industrial complex, and (3) she sharply criticized Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at a critical point for Clinton in the 2016 primary season.

Here are some of the specifics behind those three reasons…

The abridged story of Tulsi Gabbard

Defying Obama’s guidance on referring to Middle East terrorism

When Gabbard was first elected to the U.S. House from Hawaii’s 2nd district in 2012, she was a rising star. A combat veteran that served in a medical unit during the Iraq War, she has a polished, even temperament that presents well on television.

At the start of her congressional career, Gabbard was rising within a political party desperately looking for young stars. The Obama years saw the number of elected Democrats dwindle to its lowest levels in decades and to reverse that trend, the party needed new blood.

In her first term, she was assigned to the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees, an almost unprecedented honor for a freshman legislator. She also became a vice chair for the Democratic National Committee — again, an unusually fast rise for a legislator that was only 32 when first elected to the House.

However, there were early signs that Gabbard was not (and is not) a lock-step Democrat partisan. In 2015, she openly disagreed with the Obama administration’s reluctance to use the term ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ to describe the War on Terror’s primary adversary.

According to Gabbard, you cannot fight the enemy if you don’t understand their motivation. To ignore the role of radical Islamic theology (Wahhabism) in terrorism is to misunderstand the problem altogether. The Young Turk’s Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian and others in the progressive left cried Islamophobe!, particularly as Gabbard become a more frequent guest on Fox News where producers began to see her as a useful ally in discrediting the Obama administration’s handling of Middle East events. Though hardly Gabbard’s intent, she represented disunity in a party obsessed with unity.

Strike one.

Embarrassing Hillary Clinton in 2016

If that had been the only thing, Gabbard would probably be in good standing with the Democratic Party today. But it wasn’t. Her next apostasy was a big one.

During the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination race she resigned from the DNC and endorsed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. Among one of the first super-delegates to break free from the Clinton orbit, Gabbard again became the poster child for Democratic Party division.

All the same, the endorsement of Sanders isn’t what made her persona non grata at the DNC holiday party. It was how and when she did it.

She resigned on February 28, 2016, the day after Clinton had won a convincing victory over Sanders in South Carolina (73% to 26%, respectively), and endorsed Sanders in the process. Appearing on MSNBC, Gabbard declared that the DNC was not an even-handed umpire in the 2016 nomination race, as evidenced by their unwillingness to have more candidate debates between Clinton and Sanders.

In other words, Gabbard said the DNC was rigging the nomination race in favor of Clinton, long before the Russian-hacked DNC emails revealed in greater detail exactly how intertwined the Clinton campaign and DNC had become. Score another one for Gabbard.

Gabbard’s timing could not have been worse for Clinton, as Sanders was under increasing (and understandable) pressure to get out of the race, particularly by the party’s big donors who did not care for Sanders’ unapologetic Democratic socialism.

But with Gabbard’s announcement, the momentum and media narrative immediately turned against Clinton.

Gabbard knee-capped Hillary Clinton when it looked like the nomination race was over. Clinton never fully recovered after Gabbard’s Sanders endorsement. In contrast, Sanders surged, winning 15 out of the next 31 state races, punctuated by a unexpected win in Michigan. From there, Sanders carried his progressive message to the Democratic National Convention in July. I don’t believe that happens without Tulsi’s surprise resignation from the DNC.

Strike two.

Challenging the establishment’s love for regime change wars

Soon after Donald Trump was elected, Gabbard visited Syria on a fact-finding mission and met personally (and unexpectedly) with Syrian leader Bashar al Assad. The party establishment was apoplectic — still in a deep depression over Trump’s victory — and the Syria trip just added to their view that Gabbard wasn’t a team player. Though it would take almost two years, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi removed Gabbard from the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the start of the 116th U.S. Congress.

Rubbing salt into an open wound, Gabbard, along with Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, would be one of the few voices to urge the Trump administration to be cautious before launching air attacks on Syria following a chlorine chemical attack in Douma, Syria, allegedly by the Assad regime.

The U.S. attacked anyway and now, over a year later, Gabbard’s skepticism about the origin of the Douma chemical attack has been possibly validated by an engineering report leaked from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons suggesting the Douma attack may have been staged by anti-Assad rebel fighters.

It is unlikely the Douma incident will ever be understood with certainty, but Gabbard has maintained a consistent position on U.S. military and foreign relations issues: No more counterproductive regime change wars.

When the Trump administration began its intimidation campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Gabbard called it out as reckless. And even as MSNBC and CNN news celebrities implied (or stated directly in some cases) that Gabbard is friendly towards dictators (just like Trump!), she shook off the criticism and maintained her position — regime wars don’t work.

With this same dynamic going on now with Iran, Gabbard has again led among national Democrats in opposing U.S. aggression towards Iran. While Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have made some relatively good, though ultimately tepid, statements on Iran, they lack the confidence and gravitas Gabbard brings to the issue.

To be clear, Gabbard is not a pacifist — she believes when the U.S. is attacked (such as on 9–11), using the military is an appropriate form of reprisal. Gabbard is not anti-war. When the U.S. and its vital interests are attacked, the U.S. must respond, with appropriate force, says Gabbard, who also believes the U.S. must always pursue a dialogue with our adversaries such as North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and Syria.

Strike three.

Other possible causes as to why Gabbard is ignored

On other policy fronts, Gabbard was the first presidential candidate to voice support for Wikileak’s founder Julian Assange when he was taken into custody by the British and subsequently charged by the U.S. with aiding and abetting an act of espionage, recognizing that his case was a direct assault on Americans’ First Amendment rights.

When New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled the “Green New Deal” — a highly abstract statement on how the U.S. can aggressively address climate change — Gabbard chose not to co-sponsor Ocasio-Cortez’ bill. Why? Gabbard had sponsored the 2017 OFFACT bill, a significantly more concrete plan to convert the U.S. energy profile to 100-percent renewable energy.

Gabbard’s willingness to lean forward on controversial domestic and foreign policy issues — and high success rate on being right — has created a small, but vocal fan base among anti-war activists and civil libertarians.

Finally, Gabbard is hard to place on a one-dimensional ideological scale (liberal-conservative). She operates on a different vector, independent of the Left versus Right rubric. At one moment she might defend fellow candidate Joe Biden, and the next criticize the Obama administration’s Middle East policies. Gabbard is the closest person we have to a non-partisan politician.

And when these reasons are viewed as a whole, it is easy to conjecture why establishment Democrats and, in turn, the Democrat-aligned new media, might consider Gabbard a genuine threat to their power status.

• K.R.K.

Send comments to: kroeger98@yahoo.com (and, please, no insults).

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; June 24, 2019)

One of the thought eddies spiraling around Twitter lately has been a claim offered by supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, Tulsicrats as they are called, that the cable news networks are deliberately ignoring Gabbard’s campaign.

Jake Mercier wrote on Medium.com recently about the lack of television news coverage for the Gabbard presidential campaign (and Mike Gravel’s as well), despite her higher polling numbers relative to other more frequently covered campaigns (Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker, for example).

One of the charts from his article was drawn from FiveThirtyEight.com’s recurrent analysis of GDELT Project data. According to the project’s website, it is supported by Google Jigsaw and “monitors the world’s broadcast, print, and web news from nearly every corner of every country in over 100 languages and identifies the people, locations, organizations, themes, sources, emotions, counts, quotes, images and events driving our global society every second of every day, creating a free open platform for computing on the entire world.” [If you love data, and lots of it, this is a project you will want to become acquainted with as soon as possible.]

For FiveThirtyEight.com’s analysis, GDELT’s data extract from Vanderbilt University’s TV News Archive is queried for how often the 2020 Democratic candidates are mentioned in cable news since December 30, 2018 across CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.

Figure 1 shows the results for the first two weeks of June. The results are striking. Gabbard received just one mention in the week of June 2nd and just eight in the week of June 9th. Only Mike Gravel’s campaign was mentioned less. The most mentioned candidate was, of course, Joe Biden’s (1,706 and 2,642 mentions, respectively).

Figure 1: Television news coverage of the Democratic candidates (early June)

If Gabbard were significantly less popular than Marianne Williamson or John Hickenlooper or Jay Inslee or John Delaney or Seth Moulton, her campaign would have little to complain about in the volume of its network coverage.

But she is even with or ahead of these candidates, according to the RealClearPolitics.com’s most recent rolling poll average (see Figure 2). For certain, Gabbard is in the lower tier of candidates with an RCP poll average at a mere 0.6 percent.

Yet, it is hard to explain how former Colorado John Hickenlooper, who doesn’t break above 0.4 percent in the RCP poll average, should be getting 10 times the cable news mentions as Gabbard. Unless, the news media really is deliberately ignoring Tulsi Gabbard.

Figure 2: RealClearPolitics.com’s Poll Average for the 2020 Democratic candidates (June 6 — June 18)

Still, Gabbard’s critics and news media apologists will rightfully point out that any candidate with polling that low is not likely to get significant coverage and the observed differences in mentions among the lower-tier candidates is probably noise. They have a seductive argument, but it is a tautological one.

Candidate support, as measured by the polls, is directly influenced by the amount news coverage the candidates receive, according to a study of the 2016 presidential race. And, while there is also a feedback loop where a candidate’s popular support influences how much media coverage they receive, the quantitative research tends to show the strongest direction of influence is from media coverage to candidate/party support.

Which is why Figure 3 (below) is interesting. Using Google Trend’s open data on Google searches and comparing that data to the relative volume of cable TV mentions, we find that the public’s interest in Gabbard (as measured by Google searches) far exceeds her mentions in the cable news media. Since the data in Figure 3 covers the period from May 1 to June 9, 2019, some of the variation is affected by the candidates that announced their candidacy in this period (e.g., New York Mayor Bill de Blasio).

However, for Gabbard, it is apparent that public interest in her campaign is greater than its news media coverage — a four percent gap, to be exact (4.2 percent versus 0.2 percent, respectively), which is among the highest across the Democratic candidates. In fact, only South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg may have a bigger complaint with the news media, where he received 14.3 percent of Google searches from May 1 to June 9, but only 6.3 percent of cable TV news mentions. [I realize, it feels like Buttigieg is mentioned every 10 seconds on MSNBC and CNN; but, in truth, he’s seen a significant drop in relative coverage since his initial burst on to the scene.]

Figure 3: Comparing Google searches on candidates with candidates’ mentions on cable TV news

And which candidates should not be complaining right now? Joe Biden (24.7% of Google searches versus 43.4 percent of cable TV news mentions), and to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Warren (7.3% of Google searches versus 10.8 percent of cable TV news mentions).

The cable TV news networks, at least from May to mid-June, were pushing Joe Biden more than any other candidate…by far. Bernie Sanders was second in cable TV news mentions at 13.1 percent. Admittedly, this cross-sectional data cannot prove causation. But it is consistent with more rigorous methodologies (pooled-individual and aggregate time-series studies) that demonstrate how media coverage moves poll numbers.

And why do we care? As pointed out, news coverage can change poll numbers and Figure 4 shows that relationship. And that relationship is strong, explaining 98 percent of the variance in the Figure 4 graph. Also notable is Bernie Sanders’ numbers. He polls higher than his news coverage would suggest he should (i.e., he is located above the polynomial regression line). This could be the result of his being a well-known quantity arising from the 2016 campaign. He may not need the coverage to the extent as a candidate like Gabbard.

Figure 4: Relationship between candidates’ RCP poll averages with their mentions on cable TV news

It may have diminishing returns as candidates become more popular, but the cable TV networks are unmistakably in a very powerful position to change the fortunes of any candidate they chose to cover.

Figure 5 shows the number of cable TV news mentions for the top-tier Democratic candidates and Tulsi Gabbard. The average candidates received 186 mentions from May 1 to June 9. Gabbard received 45. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker polls about 4 times higher than Gabbard but received 15 times the news coverage.

Figure 5: Cable news coverage (mentions) for a selection of Democratic presidential candidates

If we convert the percent of news coverage (the x-axis in Figure 4) to number of clips, for every 300 mentions over a six-week period, a candidate can expect a lift of about 1 percentage point in their polling average.

At 45 mentions over the six-week period (May 1 to June 9), Gabbard is not going to start rising in the polls any time soon. She simply does not receive the news coverage necessary to move her public support numbers.

Is that the cable news media’s fault?

Based on this cross-sectional data, the answer is an emphatic ‘yes.’

• K.R.K.

Send comments to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; June 20, 2019)

Another week, another media-generated faux controversy.

When asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he’d accept negative information about an opponent from a foreign source, President Donald Trump said, “I think you might want to listen, there isn’t anything wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, [and said] ‘we have information on your opponent’ — oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”

The American political and media establishment immediately went mad.

Former Republican congressman David Jolly told MSNBC’s Brian Williams that Trump’s comment about potentially accepting from a foreign power political ‘dirt’ on a political opponent is an “impeachable moment.”

Congressional Democrats had their own response.

“I am headed to the Senate floor with (Virginia Senator) Mark Warner to try to pass legislation to make it a campaign’s legal duty to report to the FBI when a foreign power offers assistance,” Schumer tweeted soon after Trump’s comments became public. “There is no good reason for anyone to object.”

“Undemocratic. Unconscionable. Unbelievable,” complained New York Senator Chuck Schumer after the Warner election interference bill was blocked from a floor vote by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “President Donald Trump is laying out the welcome wagon for Russia to interfere in our elections again.”

Some pundits didn’t need a new law to declare Trump the “traitor-in-chief.” Rachel Maddow…Don Lemon…Joe Scarborough…Jimmy Kimmel…The hosts of The View…In their opinions, Trump was already a law-breaker, but was now — ex post facto — admitting it. And he is prepared to do it again!

However, exactly what law would be broken if the president accepted dirt on an opponent from ‘somebody’ of foreign origin? [Who most likely would not identify themselves as a foreign intelligence agent, if they were one.]

The law most commonly cited is Title 52 U.S. Code § 30121 (Contributions and donations by foreign nationals), a conclusion supported by the current chair of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Ellen L. Weintraub, who tweeted:

“Let me make something 100 percent clear to the American public and anyone running for public office: It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election (emphasis mine). This is not a novel concept. Electoral intervention from foreign governments has been considered unacceptable since the beginnings of our nation. Our Founding Fathers sounded the alarm about ‘foreign Interference, Intrigue, and Influence.’ They knew that when foreign governments seek to influence American politics, it is always to advance their own interests, not America’s. Anyone who solicits or accepts foreign assistance risks being on the wrong end of a federal investigation. Any political campaign that receives an offer of a prohibited donation from a foreign source should report that offer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

It all hinges on one question within federal election law: Is information (‘dirt’) a thing of value?

The specific law being cited by Weintraub reads as follows:

Other former FEC officials corroborate Weintraub’s conclusion that political ‘dirt’ is a thing of value.

CNN contributor Larry Noble, the former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission (1987–2000), concluded about the 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Trump campaign operatives and a Russian lawyer, “When Donald Trump Jr. replied he loved it to the offer of free Russian opposition research intended to help his father win the election, and then attended a meeting that included Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort to receive that information, he solicited an illegal contribution from a foreign government.”

According to Noble, Mueller didn’t indict anyone on this criminal offense for two reasons: (1) The “government could not prove Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort were familiar with the foreign-contribution ban or the application of federal law to the relevant factual context,” and (2) Mueller “believes the government might encounter difficulty in determining the value of a contribution that took the form of factual derogatory information.”

But Weintraub, a Democrat, and other former FEC officials offer an interpretation of 52 U.S. Code § 30121 that has not been tested by the higher courts, according to Robert Mueller III and his special investigatory team.

The Mueller Report (p. 195) addresses the issue directly, and it hardly supports the D.C. establishment take on the legality of obtaining pertinent campaign information from foreign sources:

…no judicial decision has treated the voluntary provision of uncompensated opposition research or similar information as a thing of value that could amount to a contribution under campaign-finance law.

Such an interpretation could have implications beyond the foreign-source ban, see 52 U.S.C. § 30116(a) (imposing monetary limits on campaign contributions), and raise First Amendment questions (emphasis mine). Those questions could be especially difficult where the information consisted simply of the recounting of historically accurate facts (again, emphasis mine). It is uncertain how courts would resolve those issues.

The second paragraph is remarkable as it is Mueller telling us that using foreign-sourced information in the context of a presidential campaign is most likely legal, as long as it is factually accurate or does not abridge a presidential campaign’s free speech rights.

Yes, presidential campaigns have free speech rights. In fact, the area where higher courts have been most consistent in interpreting the First Amendment is regarding political speech; in contrast to other legal questions surrounding speech and press freedoms.

“After a century of academic debate…the meanings of speech and press freedoms at the Founding remain remarkably hazy,” writes Jud Campbell, an assistant professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. “Most scholars view these freedoms as equivalent, together enshrining a freedom of expression. But others assert that the freedom of speech, unlike press freedom, emerged from the legislative privilege of speech and debate, thus providing more robust protection for political speech (emphasis mine).”

Where most scholars and courts agree, however, is that deliberate efforts to mislead the public does deserve punishment and it is here where the Trump campaign could have gone south of the law very fast. But in the 2016 election, Mueller found no evidence that the campaign distributed false information obtained from foreign actors. [Since when does Donald Trump need help from others to make stuff up?]

Mueller’s reluctance to indict Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort pivoted, not on whether the foreign-sourced information they sought was a ‘thing of value’ and therefore in violation of 52 U.S. Code § 30121 as Noble asserts, but on whether there was a reasonable expectation that the Russian lawyer in the Trump Tower meeting had factual information concerning Hillary Clinton.

If a presidential candidate breaks the law or engages in unethical behavior outside U.S. borders (which is exactly what much of the Steele dossier asserts about Trump), it serves the public interest to include this information in the public debate, regardless of its source. A presidential campaign can’t steal such information, or aid and abet in the theft, but receiving it is most likely not a violation of any U.S. federal law — which is why Senator Warner’s bill would make it a criminal act if an attempted exchange of information from a foreign actor is not reported to the FBI.

Ironically, none other than Hillary Clinton offers support for the legality of using foreign-sourced information as part of a campaign’s opposition research activities.

“It happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful, and you try to make sure anything you put out in the public arena is accurate,” Hillary Clinton told The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah in November 2017. “So, this (Steele dossier) didn’t come out until after the election and its still being evaluated. When Trump got the nomination for the Republican Party, the people (compiling the Steele dossier) came to my campaign lawyer and said, ‘Would you like us to continue it?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ He’s an experienced lawyer. He knows what the law is. He knows what opposition research is.”

The Clinton campaign lawyer’s interpretation of federal election law isn’t a legal sleight of hand or exploiting a loophole in the rules guiding political campaigns. Americans have the right to know if their political candidates have engaged in illegal or unethical behavior.

We already have a reason for journalists and the 2020 Trump campaign to send investigators to Ukraine and China in pursuit of a story that so far has received little attention from the mainstream media. In a June 3 editorial for The Hill, John Solomon reported that Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, was paid upwards of $166,000 per month to sit on the board of Burisma, an energy company, from spring 2014 through fall 2015. This happened to be at the same time Vice President Joe Biden allegedly directed $1.8 billion in aid money to Ukraine on the condition that the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time. Hunter Biden also procured similarly lucrative deals with the government for China while his dad was vice president.

This may have all been legal and the U.S. Justice Department has not opened a new investigation into this matter. But that should not rule out the American people gaining a full understanding of the Biden family’s financial connections to the Ukraine and China. We are owed that information. Our democracy is stronger by learning as much as possible regarding Biden’s ethical standards.

There was a time when journalists actively investigated the ethics of presidential candidates and other political elites — even going abroad if necessary. Those days, however, seem to be vanishing (if not completely gone).

Still, political campaigns, journalists, and all U.S. citizens have the constitutionally protected right to legally engage in information-seeking in the their exercise of free speech.

Who most opposes the right of Americans to seek and publicize such ‘dirt’ on politicians? Politicians, of course! And working hardest to tear down these rights, at least for now, are the Democrats.

I care little about the day-to-day partisan squabbling that defines the our current American political system. I do care about whether we live in a free country and rolling back our constitutional freedoms in the cause of undermining the Trump presidency is not worth it.

It is unfortunate that the Democrats can’t see the bigger picture at the moment.

• K.R.K.

For comments and questions, you can contact me at: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; June 14, 2019)

Has the Yemen Civil War entered into its final stages or is it about to get worse?

The long-term decline in Saudi-UAE air attacks in Yemen suggest the former, but recent Houthi rebel missile attacks on Saudi Arabia’s Abha airport and the subsequent promise by the Saudi-UAE coalition to retaliate would indicate otherwise.

As I write, the Saudi’s are claiming this morning (June 14) to have shot down five Houthi-fired unmanned drones near the same airport.

Shadowing this conflict are the increasing tensions between the U.S. and Iran, who backs the Houthi rebels in Yemen, punctuated in the past few days by mine attacks on Persian Gulf oil tankers, which the U.S. blames on Iran.

Until this week, the trend in Yemen was looking positive

These regional setbacks notwithstanding, the long-term trends in Saudi-UAE coalition air raids on Houthi-held areas of western Yemen have been showing a distinct downward trend (see Figures 1 and 2). In April and May, the coalition launched its fewest air raids since May 2016, a period in which a cease fire was in place. Similarly, the number of civilian deaths caused by the coalition air raids and the lethality of these raids are near three-year lows.

Figure 1: Saudi-UAE Coalition Air Raids on Yemen (March 2015 to May 2019)

Figure 2: Deaths caused by Saudi-UAE Coalition Air Raids on Yemen (March 2015 to May 2019)

Given the Houthis have relinquished little of the territory they seized at the start of the civil war in 2015, any resolution to the conflict, with the status on-the-ground as it is, will most likely favor the rebels.

Writing in Foreign Affairs last month in support of continued U.S. cooperation with the Saudi-UAE coalition, Michael Knights, Kenneth Pollack, and Barbara Walter acknowledged that the “the fighting will go on, and innocent Yemenis will continue to die until one side — most likely the Houthis — have won.”

Last December, the Houthi rebels and the Saudi-UAE coalition agreed to a limited ceasefire and withdrawal of forces from Red Sea port city of Hudaydah, a Red Sea port city where most humanitarian aid enters Yemen.

Still, the Saudi-UAE forces (with U.S. assistance) continue to attack civilian, non-military targets (see Figure 3). Since the war began, around one-quarter of all coalition air raids have targeted civilians. This level has been relatively constant, though it surged past 40 percent in the Summer of 2018 when coalition forces started a large offensive to retake Hudaydah. The coalition failed and, in the process, committed one of its worst atrocities yet when an air strike hit a bus in Dahyan, in Yemen’s Saada province, killing over 50 people, including dozens of children.

Figure 3: Target Mixture of Saudi-UAE Coalition Air Raids on Yemen (March 2015 to May 2019)

Can an escalation in the Yemen War be avoided?

With the probability of a hot war between the U.S. and Iran rising substantially since the U.S. exited the Iran nuclear deal and imposed new sanctions against Tehran, the prospects for a peaceful resolution in Yemen seem remote.

But there is cause for optimism. For one, the harsh economic realities now facing Iran will significantly constrain its ability to increase its military assistance to the Houthis. This week’s Houthi attacks on the Saudi airport may have been about sending a message to the Saudi-UAE coalition: With or without Iran’s help, the Houthis are not going away.

At the same time, the reality of a weaker Iran may push the Houthis to negotiate a resolution to the War in Yemen. The Houthis, who are Shia Muslims, represent the majority in northwestern Yemen, which is also where the capital, Sanaa, is located. [Approximately 45 percent of Yemen’s population is Shia, the remaining mostly Sunni Muslims]

When the Houthi rebels removed Saudi-aligned President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi from power in Yemen in 2015, ostensibly over Hadi’s decision to raise fuel subsidies, the rebellion was more about Houthi resentment over the undemocratic means by which Hadi, a Sunni, was placed into power by the Saudis.

The 2011 Arab Spring led to a revolution in Yemen in which the people forced their long-time leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh, generally considered allied with the West, from power. Hadi’s subsequent rise with Saudi support, however, only heightened tensions.

But the ability of the Houthis to unify Yemen is no more credible than Hadi’s attempt. At some point, all sides will need to negotiate a new political consensus if Yemen is to become a unified nation again, according to one of Yemen’s most prominent activists. Speaking at forum in Doha, Qatar last November, Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner, was optimistic about ending the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen, but it will require an international effort, starting with the ending of arms shipments to Yemen by the Saudi-UAE coalition and Iran.

She described the 2011 Yemen revolution as dedicated to the rule of law, freedom and peaceful coexistence and that it was external forces (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, etc.) that overturned the revolution’s initial positive results.

In contrast to most Western observers, Karman blames both the Saudi-UAE coalition and the Iranians for the humanitarian crisis in Yemen today. The United Nations estimates around 10 million people in Yemen suffer from malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water. Since the war started, an estimated 85,000 Yemeni children under the age of five have died, according to the aid organization Save the Children. Left unaddressed, the UN estimates the world’s worst humanitarian disaster today could witness over 14 million Yemenis at risk of starvation.

“Children are falling like the leaves of autumn under the bombardments of the Saudi-led coalition,” Karman told the Doha audience.

To stop this ongoing tragedy, Karman believes the Yemeni constitution drafted during the 2011 revolution is the place to start. In it, regional autonomy for groups like the Houthis would be established while still maintaining a national structure for preventing any dominate sectarian interest from subjugating other groups.

But for that process to have a chance, the weapons have to stop pouring into Yemen, according to Karman.

The events in the Persian Gulf this week do not inspire confidence that a reduction in arms entering Yemen is going to happen soon. More likely, the Houthis and Saudi-UAE coalition will become even more entrenched.

However, with the Trump administration incautiously blowing up the regional status quo, the futility of the Yemen War may become apparent to both sides. The Houthis are going to lose significant materiel support from the Iranians, while the Saudi-led Gulf States are going to be increasingly distracted by a potentially larger conflict with Iran.

Now may be the best time for both sides to come to the negotiating table and start the slow process of re-building the democratic institutions started in Yemen after the 2011 revolution.

We can hope.

• K.R.K.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; June 10, 2019)

The hashtag #NoMiddleGround regularly trends on Twitter these days, as Democratic Party progressives continue to react to candidate Joe Biden’s unapologetic embrace of centrist policy ideas — when he’s not flip-flopping.

As one Bernie Sanders supporter put it: “The common threads between almost all #centrists are self righteousness and a complete lack of moral integrity.”

“They are the Democrats’ version of deplorables,” another added.

That is rather harsh. And, unfortunately, a dangerous misunderstanding of how electoral politics work in this country and is a large reason why the Democrats often find ways to lose elections they should otherwise win.

Centrists are not necessarily moderates

Some definitional clarity will help before we move forward. Centrists are not necessarily Moderates. The center is a relative concept. By definition, there is always a center point in a one- or multidimensional distribution. There may not be a lot of voters in the center, but there is still a center. On the other hand, being a ‘moderate’ is a self-description of where people put themselves on an ideological scale. In this essay, for the most part, I use the term ‘center’ or ‘centrist’ to indicate the relative positions of voters within an ideological distribution of all voters.

As an example, Hillary Clinton won among self-described moderates in 2016 — but she did not appeal to the nation’s center-of-gravity, which in that election was significantly to the right of where the country’s voters stand today.

With that distinction in mind, there are three rules that generally apply in presidential politics:

(1) You can’t win if you don’t excite the party’s ideological base.

(2) Centrist voters are important to winning most presidential elections.

(3) Ideological voters don’t necessarily prefer ideological candidates and centrist voters do not necessarily prefer centrist candidates.

That last rule is the tricky one. And therein lies the challenge facing presidential candidates, regardless of their placement on the ideological* spectrum. *(Ideology is not the same as partisanship)

Starting with Obama’s 2008 campaign, the Democratic Party’s research brain trust has mostly rejected the ‘centrist’ strategy in favor of a ‘turnout’ strategy that emphasizes “Get-Out-The-Vote” (GOTV) efforts focused on loyal and ideological Democrats (Rule #1). Still, to address Rule #2, they picked a centrist presidential candidate.

But they stumbled on Rule #3, as there is no certain way to approach it. Rule #3 is often why charisma is considered crucial to any presidential candidate. But what is that? For all the talk and effort trying to define charisma, it is not easily quantified or identifiable.

Rule #3 is the sticky wicket and why presidential campaigns tend to focus on the first two rules, often to their downfall.

Centrists are the new ‘deplorables’

It is a sentence that will follow Hillary Clinton to the grave: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’”

With those words, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton augured her own defeat in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Though more than a few pundits and social scientists pointed out she wasn’t entirely wrong, as a political strategy it was an arrogant failure.

She didn’t just write off over 20 percent of the electorate, she gave ‘undeplorable’ centrists and #NeverTrumpers the political cover to hold their noses and vote for Donald Trump. Clinton — known for her discipline — committed an unforced error from which there was no easy recovery.

Perhaps she was over-confident? Barack Obama said basically the same thing with his 2008 comment about conservatives clinging to ‘their guns and religion’ and he won twice. But Obama was a generationally transcendent candidate. He had some margin of error to work with in 2008 and 2012. Hillary did not.

Though their words on the campaign trail were ill-considered, Obama and Clinton were merely bringing relatable imagery to the Democrats’ dominate campaign strategy over the past twenty years: Win the turnout battle and Democrats win the election.

It is John B. Judis’ and Ruy Teixeira’s Emerging Democratic Majority thesis, which says Democrats have such a growing and increasingly dominate demographic advantage over the Republicans, all they need to do to win elections is to get their voters to the polls.

In practice, it becomes…Damn the deplorables and religious gun clingers! We don’t need them. And that is true. They don’t.

And yet they still lose. Why? The answer may lie in the bad rhetorical habits that develop when candidates (and political parties) assume a third of the voter population is irredeemable, coupled with selecting a centrist candidate that may work against the GOTV strategy.

The perfect candidate for the Democrats (and Republicans) is an ideologically-distinctive candidate that also appeals to the center. Easier said than done.

The ‘anti-deplorable’ strategy fostered during Clinton’s 2016 campaign went too far in its over-interpretation of Judis and Teixeira’s research and compromised the candidate’s appeal to the center.

Winning national elections requires broad appeal.

The Democrats have learned nothing from 2016

Clinton’s ‘anti-deplorable’ rally cry has morphed into an even worse ‘anti-centrist’ approach within the Democrats’ most progressive wing. New Yorkmagazine’s Eric Levitz wrote soon after the 2016 election that the Democrats don’t need to appeal to the center because “the center no longer exists.”

Oddly, Levitz supported his argument by presenting a Dr. Lee Drutman (YouGov.com) generated graph showing a significant and decisive percentage of the 2016 electorate holding centrist opinions on economics and social issues. The graph makes one clear point: If Clinton had won a majority of their affections, the cable news networks would probably be talking about impeaching President Clinton right now.

Instead, progressive Democrats are deciding if even centrists are acceptable. To the far-left, centrists are the neo-deplorables and spend even a little time on social media and you will see how corrosive this debate has become and how it is splitting the party.

“Centrists are actually SQWs: status quo warriors,” says progressive activist Sally Hunt (@sallybhunt). “Their energy, passion, and motivation always lies in trying to shut down and invalidate every single important discussion about oppression, abuse, injustice, power imbalances, and exploitation in society.”

In response, the centrist-aligned media implores Democrats to believe Trump’s base is not impregnable and that the ‘right candidate’ can win them over to the Democrats in 2020.

“The number one thing I would say is winning elections isn’t just about mobilization,” Yair Ghitza, chief scientist at Democratic voter-targeting firm Catalist, said in an interview with CNN. “I do think that’s something some people argue, and it’s gained a bit of traction. What I try to point out here is that mobilization is incredibly important. But the idea that there are literally no swing voters left, is, I think, a misreading of a lot of the data that’s out there.”

That fact that Ghitza needs to address whether there are any swing voters left tells us how disconnected from reality many in the Democratic Party have become over the past two years.

In this dispute, the Democratic Party establishment has only themselves to blame for the internecine warfare. By using the Russiagate investigation and other apocalyptic tropes to confront Trump, they have goaded the far-left elements in their party to accept nothing less than the removal of Trump from office — which isn’t going to happen until, at the earliest, Election Day. Until then, the establishment will be holding a pit viper by the back of the head and unable to let go.

Is mobilizing progressives enough?

A recent article by GQ’s Alex Kotch offers a nice counterpose to Ghitza’s research and the centrist strategy. Using YouGov.com survey data, Kotch argues the Democrats would have won in 2016 had they just convinced more of their progressive base to vote.

“When Democrats mobilize their base, they win,” writes Kotch. “Mobilizing the Democratic party base means standing up for progressive values, principles, and policies — and reaching out to the people it claims to represent. In the Data for Progress and YouGov Blue “What The Hell Happened” survey, we found overwhelming support among 2018 voters for policies like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and free college.”

To support his case, Kotch offered this chart (Figure 1) from the Data for Progress survey showing how, had progressive voters in 2012 not sat out in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won in four battleground states. She would have won the election.

In Florida, slightly more than 300,000 progressive voters that voted in 2012 did not vote in 2016. Given the 100,000 vote gap between Trump and Clinton, that is compelling evidence to support the base mobilization strategy. These ‘defectors’ made up two percent of the all registered voters in Florida, and a similar percentage in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It is not a huge proportion of the population, but large enough to target cost-effectively with GOTV campaigns.

Figure 1: Progressive Turnout in 2016 from Four Key States

Attention to Kotch’s article blossomed after New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quickly tweeted back with this comment:

“This is why I say that expanding the electorate is a more effective strategy than burning (dollars) to win over a tiny slice of the people,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez. ‘It’s entitled to demand ‘vote Blue not matter who’ — no matter how ‘right’ that is. You HAVE to deliver a real platform that improves people’s lives.”

Soon after her first tweet, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted again emphasizing her belief that focusing on swing voters is a mistake: “& I mean improve ALL people’s lives, not only “swing voters” lives.”

Kotch and Ocasio-Cortez have good reason to lament how Clinton failed to energize progressive voters. She did not mobilize her party’s base and she paid a price for it. But mobilizing the base is only part of the story (recall the Three Rules from above). The Democrats need a more holistic view of the electorate. And, yes, that means paying attention to centrists and the dreaded “swing voters.”

Using survey data from the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES), I categorized eligible voters along three factors: (1) Their self-described political ideology, (2) their 2012 presidential vote decision, and (3) their 2016 presidential vote decision.

[Note: Data for Progress constructed an index using policy-based survey items in order to identify ‘progressive’ voters. For the purposes of this essay, ANES’ self-described ideology survey item is sufficient to identify ‘progressive’ voters. For the ideological extremes, there is a strong correlation between constructed policy-based ideology indexes and self-reported survey items (e.g., ‘Progressives’ are far more likely to call themselves ‘very liberal’ or ‘liberal’ compared to other respondents — my own research documenting this can be found here).]

From the perspective of the Democratic Party, there are only three things an eligible voter can do: (1) Vote for the Democrat, (2) Vote for the Republican, or (3) Not vote (including voting for a third party candidate — which is equivalent to not voting from a major party perspective). Over two election cycles, that leaves nine possible categories (see Figure 2).

Klotch and Data for Progress focused on the ‘progressive’ defectors. In my analysis I identified an equivalent group — ‘liberal’ defectors — who accounted for two percent of all eligible voters in 2016, according to the ANES data. This proportion is consistent with the Data for Progress/Klotch numbers. As a comparison, the Republicans had their own defector group in 2016: Conservative Romney Republicans who voted for Clinton (or did not vote) in 2016. They were similar in size to the ‘liberal’ defectors.

Figure 2: Summary of ANES Respondents’ Presidential Vote Decisions in 2012 and 2016.

But there was another important group of eligible voters in 2016 that should not be ignored in 2020 by the Democrats: Centrist defectors to the GOP. These were ‘slightly liberal’ or ‘moderate’ voters that had voted for Obama in 2012 but did not support Clinton in 2016. This group made up five percent of eligible voters — at least twice the size of the ‘liberal’ defectors. Is that a group the Democrats think they can ignore in the next election because they voted for Trump and its a waste of money and energy to give them a reason to come back to the Democratic Party?

Ocasio-Cortez is correct about this: It is much more time consuming and expensive to canvass centrists and moderates than it is to target the party’s base in GOTV efforts. That is how a business thinks. That is how an economist thinks. But that is not how a presidential campaign should think.

The goal is to win an election, not have the biggest campaign bank account on election day. Does Democratic Party nominee want to say the day after the election, “We lost, but we did have the most cost-effective campaign in history!”?

Both presidential candidates and parties will have a campaign chest north of $2 billion in the general election. Without doubt, the Democrats can set aside significant money to communicate with working class centrists/moderates in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who defected to the Republicans in 2016. And if the Democrats don’t, the Republicans most certainly will.

If the Klotch/Ocasio-Cortez argument were merely an argument about emphasis and not a call to disregard working class Democrats that voted for Trump, I’d would not be alarmed. The Democrats cannot afford to have anyone in their progressive to stay home in 2020.

But they also cannot allow the Republicans to once again pick their pocket and walk away with five percent of eligible voters that should vote Democrat, all else equal. Ocasio-Cortez can call them a “tiny slice of the people,” but that tiny slice likely outnumbered progressive base defectors by 2-to-1.

Add to this equation the roughly six percent of eligible voters that defected to the Democrats in 2016 (conservative and centrist Republican voters in 2012). Even if they call themselves #NeverTrumpers, ignoring their interests and issue preferences does not feel like a sound strategy for the Democrats.

Centrists don’t necessarily prefer centrist candidates

Suggesting the Democrats are less likely to win in 2020 without support from centrist and moderate voters may sound like a sellout to the Democrats’ corporatist wing, but it is more like a bland truism.

The real dilemma facing the Democratic party (both parties, really) is picking a candidate that inspires the base and attracts moderates and centrists. That is not a contradiction. Quite the opposite, it is a template for victory repeated over and over in American presidential elections: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W.Bush, and Barack Obama.

This electoral challenge has been known for years and was perfectly summarized recently by Salon.com’s Amanda Marcotte:

“…voters aren’t really inspired by playing it safe or moving to the center. Instead, candidates do better by convincing voters that this election is a historic moment and they don’t want to be left on the sidelines. There are a number of 2020 candidates who have that juice for different reasons: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris all seem to be generating excitement at their rallies. It could be catastrophic if Democratic voters, laboring under the panicky delusion that only a “centrist” can win, blow their chance to beat Trump by nominating exactly the wrong kind of candidate.”

While I disagree with some on her list of candidates with ‘juice,’ her point captures the disconnect that continues within the mainstream media when the topic becomes ‘Can Bernie or Biden unite the party’?

What Marcotte gets wrong — as do most political pundits — is that inspiring, historically relevant candidates don’t tend to be those that peddle empty platitudes. They must have a purpose for being a candidate. They must have some concrete reason for being president besides saying, ‘Trump is unfit to be president and I can beat him.’

Bernie Sanders leads on this front. I’ve interviewed hundreds of voters since 2016 and the issue that invariably gets mentioned as the most important is health care. Rich or poor, health care consumes their attention. And Sanders has a plan.

Tulsi Gabbard wants to end counterproductive regime change wars and is the least partisan-driven candidate I’ve ever met. Elizabeth Warren nails it on why the big social media companies need to be broken up and knows more about banking and finance than any other candidate since Bill Clinton. Jay Inslee has tangible ideas on addressing climate change. Andrew Yang wants universal basic income. As for the other candidates, their raison d’être is a mystery. Why are they running for president? They have answers to that question, but do you remember them?

Assuming a centrist candidate will broaden the party’s electoral coalition, or that a progressive candidate will shrink it, is not rooted in reality. Likewise, thinking a focus on turning out the progressive base will guarantee an electoral victory is not demonstrably better.

That is why attempts to tag ‘centrists’ as being unfit for the Democratic Party coalition serves no purpose. It demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates most voters. Centrist voters are Democratic voters in good Democratic years. So why would they be the enemy in any other year?

We saw firsthand in 2016 that labeling any voter a ‘deplorable’ serves no tangible strategic purpose except to allow undecided voters to sympathize with them and either vote for the opposing party candidate or not vote at all. Broadening that category to include ‘centrist’ voters is political suicide. It won’t work and, quite possibly, will splinter the Democratic Party.

Progressive Democrats don’t need to compromise on their policy ideas, but they do need to open their minds on who they think are open to their ideas.

• K.R.K.