By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, March 4, 2017)

Readers of this blog know that I’ve long argued that, ideologically, the United States is a center-right country. My argument is always capped by the chart that shows the 40-year, 2,000-seat decline of the Democratic Party in the nation’s state legislatures.  Here it is again:

I can respect any hypothesis for why the Democrats have seen this decline, as long as it can cover the last 40 years. Blaming Obama’s neglect of the state parties does not provide enough information to explain the decline. Neither does voter suppression or gerrymandering — though all of these factors can offer some explanation. A more systemic set of factors are required. In my view, its a combination of public mood, party branding  and strategic positioning efforts, and demographic changes.

On the first factor I like to reference Dr. James Stimson’s Public Mood time-series summary of U.S. public opinion since 1950 (Graph Source:  Dr. Larry Bartels):

In combination, these data argue unequivocally that this country is increasingly conservative when compared to the early 1990s.

Well, in retrospect, its not that simple.  I was reminded of this as I plundered through some of my old analytic files on my laptop.  As I was doing a ‘right-click, delete’ dance through my files I came upon a graph that I had created back in 2013 from data taken from the 2012 American National Election Study (Time-Series Panel).

I was asked by a former colleague with developing an attitudinal segmentation of U.S. eligible voters.  The task was to model and graphically display the most analytically distinct segments of the vote eligible population and to map the positions of the Democratic and Republican parties relative to these voter segments.

The analysis of 5,893 U.S. adults from the 2012 ANES was straightforward. We applied a basic K-means clustering algorithm to develop the segments.  While we investigated 12- and 16-cluster solutions, we ended up focusing on the simplest solution:  3 clusters (Left, Middle, Right). As you might imagine, the “Left” cluster tended to consistently agree with Democratic policy positions, the “Right” cluster agreed most often with the Republican policy positions and the “Middle” tended to be…well, in the middle on most policies.  So below is the chart.

Along the vertical-axis are the issue questions from the ANES survey and the horizontal-axis shows the agreement scale where negative values indicate disagreement with the policy statement and positive values indicate agreement.  The key takeaway from this chart is that most eligible voters are in the Middle segment (113 million Americans), shown by the green triangles.  The Left (red circles) and the Right (blue squares) both represent about 62 million people.  Therefore, on any given issue, if you are a Democrat, you want the Middle segment (green triangle) to be closer to the Left (red circle) than the Right (blue square).  In those cases, its the Democrats that have the consensus position.  Of the 24 issue statements below, the Left-Middle consensus occurs 12 times.  Not bad.  The Right-Middle consensus occurs just eight times.  The four other issue statements were too close to call.  It should also be noted that the 24 issues are sorted on the vertical-axis by the gap between the cluster extremes.  Hence, issues where the cluster attitudes are similar are at the top of the graph, while as you go down the vertical-axis the gap becomes greater.  In other words, when it comes to attitudes about the military and middle class people, there is little social differentiation.  On issues like the environment or government-controlled health care, the Left and Right clusters stake out more extreme positions.

The overall result from the above graph seems to argue that we live in a center-left nation. That is, in fact, what I concluded when I presented this data analysis four years ago.  The Left (Democrats) holds strategic advantages over the Right (Republicans) on a broad menu of key social issues: the environment, government support for child care, equal opportunity, and social welfare spending (particularly Social Security).

But, upon closer inspection, it is interesting to look at the eight issues  on which the center-right coalition hold the consensus.  They are: (1) Attitudes towards gays & lesbians, (2) Attitudes towards illegal aliens, (3) Attitudes towards Christian fundamentalists, (4) Level of desire for fewer restrictions on abortions, (5) Support for more defense spending, (6) Attitudes towards the private sector, (7) Desire to decrease the number of immigrants to the U.S., and (8) Attitudes towards the military.

Of those eight issues, five are directly related to issues the public felt were most important in the 2012 election according the Pew Research Center in 2012:  national security, jobs, economic growth, health care and immigration. In other words, while the Left (Democrats) dominated the consensus on issues of civil rights, the environment, and the basic social safety net issues (social security and social welfare programs), the Right (Republicans) dominated on the issues that matter most to election outcomes.  Interestingly, on government-controlled health care, the Middle (at least in 2012) was positioned equidistant from the Left and Right positions.

Of course, we’re talking about 2012 here. While Barack Obama won re-election, down ballot the Republicans held most of the gains they made in the state legislatures in the 2010 midterm elections. Obama was popular, but his charm didn’t transfer well to other Democrats.

But, has the public mood changed since then? The good news is that the 2016 ANES data will be released in April, 2017.  I’ve already set up the R-code to re-run the same segmentation I created in 2012.  I am curious to see what differences we find.  My intuition says, not that much has changed.  We are still a center-right country on the issues that matter most to voters, but there remain many strategic opportunities where the Democrats can regain an electoral advantage over the Republicans.

If the Democrats could ever discover a way to talk about the environment in a way that influenced vote preferences, it would be a game-changer.  But I will save that for another column at a later date.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, February 20, 2017)

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

The Democrats know their party must change. But what kind of change?   If the two front runners for the DNC chair position are any indication, it won’t be much change at all.

The election of a new Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair this week in Atlanta features two Beltway veterans, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison and former Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, as the favorites to be the next DNC chair, though neither appears to have the race locked up heading into the winter meetings starting on February 23rd.

Is there still a chance for the next party leader to come from outsider the Washington establishment?  In joint appearances across the country this past month, the DNC chair candidates agreed on one major problem facing the next chair: The party has become too Beltway-centered, giving too little attention to the state parties, which has led to a steady decline of elected Democrats in the state legislatures.

And while the candidates speak convincingly about their commitment to the state parties, most are themselves part of the same Beltway establishment they are now running away from. That is, except one candidate, who genuinely can claim the “outside the Washington establishment” label. Sally Boynton Brown has served as the Executive Director of the Idaho Democratic Party since 2012 and knows firsthand how the state parties have suffered, particularly state parties in red states like hers.

“We need to take our party out of Washington (and) start making significant investments in our state parties,’ says Boynton Brown. “We must have an expanded state party strategy so we are investing not only in blue states and purple states but also red states like Idaho.”

Boynton Brown also points out that the disinvestment in the state parties was largely driven by changes in campaign finance law. “Since McCain-Feingold (The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002) the focus of the DNC has been to elect a President,” she says. “We need a fundamental shift in the role of the DNC; it needs to become a service organization designed to work as a full partner with state parties.”

Her strategic approach to party-building includes investing in regions currently unfavorable to Democrats.  This strategy is reminiscent of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack’s approach to elections in Iowa. When asked how he broke the 30-year choke-hold Republicans had on the Iowa governor’s seat in 2000, he said, “I went to every county fair and BBQ in those rural counties where the Republicans historically would win by 50 points, but I got it down to 20 points.”

While this ‘99-county” approach made sense for a candidate in a gubernatorial popular vote election, it also paid dividends to the Iowa Democrats in local and state legislative races. After Vilsack’s 2000 victory, the Iowa Democrats began winning more close elections in some of those Republican-dominated rural areas and, by 2007, the Democrats controlled both houses of the Iowa legislature.

Yet, as Vilsack demonstrated how a Democrat can win in a Republican-leaning state like Iowa, the national Democrats went in a different direction. A headline in The Daily Kos declared going into the 2014 midterm elections, “If our voters turn out, we win.” The Democrats lost 13 U.S. House seats and 9 U.S. Senate seats in that election.

The Democrats’ emphasis on getting its voters to vote had solid reasoning behind it. Inspired by the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis advanced by political scientists Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, the Democratic Party in the Obama-era shifted towards using social media and big data analytics to inform GOTV targeting efforts at the expense of efforts to persuade undecideds and weak Republicans.

This strategy worked for a transcendent candidate like Obama who attracted the ideological center of the country. For many of the party’s other candidates, particularly when Obama was not on the ballot, the strategy has failed and the party has paid a steep price for the its “emerging majority” hubris.

Today, the Democratic Party is at a critical juncture. Not since the Great Depression has the party been so removed from power and where it goes from here will be, in part, managed by the person elected as the DNC chair.

While some of the 447 DNC voting members remain deeply divided between the progressive (Bernie Sanders) and pragmatist (Hillary Clinton) camps, the DNC candidates themselves are not separating themselves along ideological or factional lines. Of the ten leading candidates, all to varying degrees describe themselves as progressive.
Raymond Buckley, chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party who has recently dropped out of the race and endorsed Ellison, provided the best summary of the candidates’ ideological unity when he said at the February 4th DNC candidate forum in Detroit, “There is not a word that anybody is saying that we do not agree with.” The Borg on Star Trek wasn’t that unified.

Instead, the distinctions rendered by the candidates are more on their strategic priorities, managerial accomplishments and field experience. In announcing his candidacy, former Labor Secretary Tom Perez distinguished himself from the other candidates by noting his experience running the 17,000-person labor department. “I have had a lot of experience in trying to build one Department of Labor where we all have our oars in the water, rowing in synchrony.”

Taking a more decentralized management approach, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg said, “We’ve got to recognize that not all of the (Resistance movement) energy needs to funnel through the Democratic Party.” Instead, Buttigieg contends the DNC must support the protest movement without attempting to own it.

Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison emphasizes his congressional district’s grassroots organizing success and calls for recharging the party’s ground game by “knocking on every door in this country if we can.” At the Detroit forum, Ellison also emphasized the need for the Democrats to reconnect with working families. “We start with the idea that the Democratic Party is the party that works for working people all the time and never lets up,” said Ellison.

“We lost of a lot of trust in this past election,” said Jaime Harrison, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, in Detroit. “This party has to go to where the people are instead of hoping that people will come to where we are.”  Harrison’s advice is particularly credible given his party leadership experience in South Carolina, a state that has been under unified Republican control since 2002. But it also highlights where most of the candidates lack any distinctiveness and why Boynton Brown is exceptionally positioned to move the DNC in a new direction. All but Boynton Brown have spent most of their political careers either in Washington, D.C. or in an area with a strong Democratic party presence.

In contrast, Boynton Brown leads the party in a state the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll identifies as the 3rd most Republican state in the country. Boynton Brown operational skills have been tempered in a western, deep red state.

While Fox News analyst Jehmu Greene and Voto Latino President Maria Teresa Kumar hail from Texas and Harrison is from South Carolina, these red states have seen Democratic control of its state house or the governorship since 2000. Idaho’s last Democratic governor was Cecil Andrus, who left office in 1995 after first being elected in 1971, and the state legislature has been comfortably controlled by the Republicans since 1992.

Yes, South Carolina and Texas are tough for Democrats, but nothing like Idaho. Prior to the 2016 election, Gallup estimated Republicans had a 25 percent advantage in Idaho (% Republican-leaning minus % Democrat-leaning). The Republican advantages in South Carolina and Texas were less than 10 percent.

And nowhere do your party’s strengths and weaknesses (and those of your opponent) become more vivid as when you are fighting for your very survival. Where the national party is only now accepting the depth and scope of its electoral problem, Boynton Brown has spent her political career behind enemy lines fighting this existential battle.

Activists like director Michael Moore and TV comedian Bill Maher peddle an ‘alternative fact’ that is harmful to the Democrats’ cause: The notion that America is a center-left country more closely aligned with the Democrats’ policy preferences than with the Republicans’. While true on many civil rights and social justice issues, on the issues that drive elections, this simply isn’t true.

“America itself remains a fundamentally center-right nation,” Democratic pollster Doug Schoen recently wrote on FoxNews.com. “A fundamental belief in national sovereignty and individual responsibility, married to cautious skepticism of government and deeply held moral convictions, continues to govern how most Americans think about politics.

New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, provides an even more sobering message to the Democrats. “Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51 percent of the electorate to buy,” says Haidt. “Most Democrats don’t understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.” This disconnect is a significant reason why Clinton’s massive big data efforts in 2016, built largely around consumer and online behavior databases, failed to capture the critical weaknesses in Clinton’s support.

The Democrats have other problems as well. In his book, E Pluribus Unum, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam finds an emphasis on ethnic diversity can reduce social cohesion which can lessen a community’s capacity for collective action. Haidt references Putnam when suggesting that, by emphasizing diversity, the Democrats are at a disadvantage to Republican’s “rally around the flag” messaging when building electoral coalitions.

Haidt counsels Democrats to do more to build a shared sense of national identity across the diverse groups in its coalition. This recalibrated message would be controversial among many Democrats and would represent a big challenge as they try to build a durable electoral coalition.

It is here where Boynton Brown would be most relevant to fixing the DNC’s problems. In her Blueprint for the DNC, she says the DNC needs to “have fully staffed regional offices that are steeped in the political realities of the states they work with.”

As part of her call for a more decentralized party structure, she does not think the DNC chair should be driving changes in the party’s policy platform positions. In her view, that is where the party’s candidates and elected leaders must bring their local and regional perspectives to the national party’s platform deliberations.

Is Boynton Brown’s decentralization plan contradictory to Haidt’s advice that the Democrats need to build a unifying, national strategic message? That will be the challenge regardless of who is elected the next DNC chair. As Vilsack experienced in Iowa’s Republican-dominated rural counties, by committing sustained resources to those areas the Iowa Democratic Party was soon viewed as more connected to the issues of rural, conservative Iowa, even as the party maintained its strong support in Iowa’s urban centers.

“Our party narrative must be built from rural values – when we spend time talking to every American, we win,” says Boynton Brown. “When we silo off our communications to certain segments we will always suffer somewhere. Changing the hearts-and-minds of voters requires building our relationships with our neighbors and once we begin doing this work we can first start to lose by less which will lead to future wins.”

Taking Vilsack’s approach to the national level is where Boynton Brown offers the clearest vision on how to make the Democrats a 50-state party again.

The Democrats now see the consequences of its lack of investment in state parties, but Boynton Brown understands the inherent conflict in a coastal-elite-driven party agenda centered on identity politics at a time when the party also needs to develop a compelling, unifying principle that attracts a broader segment of Americans.

If the Democrats do not listen closely to Boynton Brown and other Democrats from red-state America, the Democrats may be years away from making the kinds of strategic changes necessary to be the nation’s preeminent political party again.

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, February 8, 2017)

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

I was born a Beatles fan – or so my family tells me.  And, as a fan, I find myself occasionally taking current events and asking things like,  “What is an eggman?” or “I wonder how John Lennon would describe Donald Trump?”

That second question is an easy one.  I think John would call him ‘daft’ or use some other everyday Liverpoolian idiom that an American like me would consider charming and funny.

And then there are times when I’m really bored and seriously overthink about the relevance of The Beatles.

For example, during the halftime of Super Bowl LI when I really thought the game was over, I began to think about how Beatle songs could help the Democrats win more elections.

By the late 3rd Quarter, when Tom Brady was about to bring the Patriots back from the dead, I was in Pepperland.  Or, rather, in the no-man’s-land between Pepperland and  Trumpland (USA).

It is there that I see the Democrats residing today – at the gates of Trumpland (USA) in a stand-off between The Beatles and their arch enemies, the Blue Meanies and the Apple Bonkers.

Seriously, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, it might be best if you either Google ‘Yellow Submarine movie characters’ or just move on from this essay.  For the rest of you, sit back and picture yourself in a boat on a river contemplating how The Beatles can save the Democrats.

Let me take you down…

In an election where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump took their charm deficits and untrustworthiness to thermonuclear levels and where their surrogates’ daily press avails usually left me feeling sick, I often turned to music to settle my mind down at nights.

It is easy to exaggerate the significance of our favorite songs, but we all have those lyrics or melodies that, for various reasons, bring us back into an emotional equilibrium.

In this last election, I have found the Fab Four especially relevant, particularly with regards to the state of the Democratic Party.

Even as the Democrats are regaining some of their footing as an opposition party to the Trump administration, the cold truth is that they still find themselves out of power in a way they haven’t seen since just prior to the Great Depression.  And, inevitably, pundits and experts offer Democrats advice on how to re-emerge from their voter-imposed exile:  “Move to the center.”  “Don’t move to the center.”  “Organize.”  “Mobilize.”  “Resist!”  “Change the message.”  “Change the leadership.”  And, on and on.

For better or worse, Donald Trump has launched the classic laws of politics into space at escape velocity.  We will never see those laws again, leaving the Democrats to ask, “What do we do when the laws of political physics no longer work?

Welcome to Pepperland.

In my experience, during times of disequilibrium, you turn to long-trusted heuristic devices to make sense of events.  And for me, that means The Beatles and their hook-driven, aural salves that drown out life’s unsettling noises.  And nowhere has Beatles music become more relevant to me than in the realm of politics.  Many of the principles I bring to politics are reinforced by a Beatles song, sometimes through a simple lyric, the overall mood the song generates, or an unexpected vocalization (…I still find John’s breathing on the song ‘Girl’ unsettling).

With the cruelty of this past election, and I mean that from both sides of the political aisle, the relevance of The Beatles to our political culture is greater than ever and can, I truly believe, help stabilize a Democratic Party that, according to Ohio congressman Tim Ryan, is lost.

Every Beatles fan has their own carte du jour of Fab Four songs that speak to them personally.  My list is specific to me.  What wisdom I pull from a song may have nothing to do with the songwriter’s intent.  Besides, finding life’s truths from popular music is an apophenic exercise where we often see meaningful patterns from what is, in reality, random nonsense.  “I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the Walrus” is not a meaningful statement about anything, including eggs or Walruses.  It is nonsense.  Funny nonsense.  But, nonsense nonetheless.

So, with this caveat, here are the specific political lessons I believe The Beatles offer today’s Democratic Party

Nobody likes taxes!

“If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat
If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet”

George Harrison’s song, Taxman, is not subtle.  George hated taxes, for good reason.

The top tax rate in Britain when George wrote this song in the mid-1960s was 83 percent.  Let that number sink in for a moment.  It really is staggering.  Yet, at that time, Harold Wilson’s Labour government decided to introduce a supertax rate of 95 percent for extremely high money earners – which The Beatles had become.

There is a good reason John Lennon moved to New York City and fought to get his green card so he could stay there.

Despite the image some have of The Beatles as irreverent prophets of the flower generation, The Beatles, particularly George, had an emphatically middle-class, bourgeois understanding of the world.  When George visited San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in the 1967’s Summer of Love, his description of the place when he returned to London was, “It turned out to be just a lot of bums…dropping acid.”  Pat Buchanan or Billy Graham could have just easily had that reaction.

My father use to say, “There is no problem the Democrats aren’t willing to use your money to solve.”  And he was a Democrat!  When I hear politicians, regardless of party, talk about social problems and the budgetary tools at their disposal to address them, George’s Taxman immediately comes to mind.  For good reason:  Polling in this country consistently shows the resistance of independent voters to raising taxes, increasing spending, or creating new regulations to solve our nation’s problems.  You don’t have to agree with them, but understand, these are the people that often decide who wins our elections.

We live in a country where its public debt exceeds its annual GDP – about 105 percent of GDP, according to the most recent estimate by Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.  Only five other major economies have a larger public debt (in decreasing order):  Japan (229%), Greece (179%), Italy (132%), Ireland (118%) and Singapore (111%).  Economically, this not good company to keep.

A week after Barack Obama’s 2008 election, amid a deep worldwide recession, Newsweek declared a ‘new era of big government’ had returned.  The exact opposite was true and the Democrats have yet to realize this fact.  The governments in the advanced economies cannot account for much more of the total economy than they already do.  There is no money to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.  You can talk about a $1 trillion infrastructure program all you want, but it is not going to happen in today’s economic reality.  We, the U.S., do not have $1 trillion to spare for infrastructure.

Republicans say it’s a tax-and-spend problem; Democrats says the top 1 percent aren’t paying their fair share.  In truth, it’s a problem they jointly created and perpetuate.  So, my advice to the Democrats is to listen to George’s Taxman where he takes on the government’s voice, “Should five percent appear too small, be thankful I don’t take it all.” Voters know what George was talking about – the government will take it all — if you let them.

When the marching is done, can you show us a plan?

John Lennon’s Revolution, written in 1968, was The Beatles’ second overt political song and probably the band’s most dissected.

“You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

…But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out”

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re all doing what we can

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait

Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”

These lyrics hardly sound like those of a leftist  revolutionary.  They weren’t.  The song’s overt skepticism about the U.S. antiwar movement led many self-described “Trotskyist,” “Leninist” and “Maoist” activists to spurn Lennon (and the Beatles) in the last 1960s.  The Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man was much more to their liking.

Though Lennon was hardly a conservative, he had the common sense to put a substantive gap between his personal views and those of the radical left.

Lennon, like his fellow Beatles, grew up a working-class kid with the political sensibilities that came with such an upbringing.  Since his single mother couldn’t take care of him, John was raised by his aunt and uncle, Mimi and George Smith, the latter making his career in the bookmaking business.  John’s uncle would ultimately gamble away the family’s meager savings and John took that experience with him as he gained his own substantial wealth.  In fact, as John’s fortunes grew, more and more political groups would ask him for financial support, assuming his left-leaning politics meant he would happily part with his newly-acquired financial largess.  They would be disappointed.  He was more than happy to donate a song (e.g., “Give Peace a Chance”), but give money?  Don’t forget one of John’s favorite childhood songs was Berry Gordy’s Motown song, Money, which included the lyric: ‘Money don’t get everything, it’s true, but what it don’t get, I can’t use. I need money, that’s what I want.’

British journalist, Maurice Hindle, who first interviewed Lennon in 1968, said “Lennon much regretted his earlier associations with the radical left.”  The song Revolution was Lennon’s sharp reply to these activists that he viewed as directionless and inherently prone to violence.

If I were the Democrats, I would share Lennon’s skepticism when viewing today’s resistance movement against the Trump administration.  This is not the same as saying that the Democrats shouldn’t oppose Trump.  Of course, when appropriate, they should.  But, what it means is keeping the “resist movement” at a safe distance and even as you borrow its energy.

But Revolution’s most poignant line is in its chorus: “Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”  If there is one message The Beatles can impart to partisan activists of all persuasions, it is that even where serious problems persist, very few of them are existential.

When I hear this Lennon line, I immediately think about global overpopulation.  Really, I do.

While appearing on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, John Lennon was asked by a female audience member about whether he was concerned about overpopulation.  Lennon’s answer surprised her and Cavett:  “I don’t really believe it,” Lennon said. “I think whatever happens will balance itself out.  It’s alright for us all living to say, ‘Well, there’s enough of us so we won’t have any more.’. I don’t believe in that.”

The issue of overpopulation was popular on the Left in 1971.  Three years earlier, Stanford biologist Dr. Paul Ehrlich predicted in his book, “The Population Bomb,” that half of Americans would die by the late 1980s due to overpopulation and the resulting famine.

Over 40 years removed from Lennon’s critique of Ehrlich’s overpopulation thesis, the intuition of an art school-educated rock star was far more accurate than that of the Stanford biologist.

I can’t help but wonder what Lennon’s reaction would be to the current global warming debate.  I suspect he would have a similar reaction as he did to overpopulation.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe the science on global warming.  The current rise in global temperatures is real and is primarily caused by human activities.  Since the start of the industrial revolution, the planet’s average temperature has risen about 1° Celsius.  Scientists predict the next 1° Celsius increase will occur between 2040 and 2100, depending on the climatological prediction model you choose.

The likely consequences of global warming will be more and deadlier summer heatwaves, higher sea levels forcing significant changes for people living along shorelines, more and longer droughts leaving the world’s agricultural output under increased stress, and increased numbers and durations of famines and water shortages.  All bad outcomes that should be addressed now through smarter, forward-thinking energy use policies, particularly by the largest economies.  But, the following is also true.  Our nation – our planet – will survive global warming.  Environmental activists want you to believe otherwise because if you do, you are more likely to give them your money to spend on saving the planet.

Here’s the downside to an overly aggressive climate change policy agenda and why the Democrats need to keep the climate change militants at arm’s length.  Climate change policies disproportionately hurt poor people that depend on cheap energy to move themselves out of poverty.  Due to even the possibility of this economic consequence, you are not going to see China, India or Brazil move fast enough on converting to renewable energy.  Carbon credits will not change this economic outcome, either, even if some of the revenues raised go to reducing the impact of higher energy costs on lower-income households.

Adding to the intransigence of the climate change movement, the climate scientists refuse to acknowledge two of their own facts:  (1) Their ability to predict global temperatures is deeply flawed given past performance (though it is getting better), (2) and this ability falls off a cliff when they try to predict higher order effects.  The science of climate change begs for caution, not reckless investments in technologies that are still decades away from practical deployment and levels of regulation that will undoubtedly harm the economy, if only through their impact on energy costs and job growth.

If the climate change activists really believed what they peddle, they would be at the front of the line begging the advanced economies to balance their government budgets NOW so that we will have the monetary resources available when the actual consequences of global warming are realized.

So, Democrats, fell free to worry about American energy policy.  It does matter and we can change the world for the better if we change our energy consumption behavior.  But you are going to fail in attracting the support of most Americans if you try to turn the dubious scare tactics of today’s versions of Dr. Ehrlich into a national energy policy.  The extreme predictions are probably wrong and to spend public money based on those predictions will waster more money than it saves.  So, when you feel the urge to label some Republican congressperson as an ignorant “climate change denier,” I hope you hear John Lennon’s words:  “Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”

To know your enemies is to know yourself

With a nod to Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, Lennon and McCartney’s lyrics often had an introspective quality that allowed for some healthy self-critiques, even as they were making broader social criticisms.

That is why I’ve always found Lennon’s Nowhere Man and McCartney’s The Fool on the Hill to be nice companion pieces, even though written years apart.  Each song contains a lyrical twist of perspective that makes the listener look back at themselves just as they’ve become comfortable judging the nowhere man and the fool on the hill:

Doesn’t have a point of view
Knows not where he’s going to
Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere man please listen 

He never listens to them
He knows that they’re the fools
They don’t like him —The fool on the hill

Sun Tzu’s point was that you won’t make big mistakes (in war) if you are aware of both your enemies’ motivations and abilities as well as your own.  But I think the Lennon and McCartney spin Is even more profound in that Lennon’s Nowhere Man calls for our own humility to temper our tendency to judge others.  McCartney’s Fool on the Hill, likewise, shows empathy for the beleaguered target of the people’s ire.

Both are beautiful statements with relevance to politics which is all about judgments — often harsh in nature and effect.  In the real world of politics, there are winners and losers and people are dedicated on both sides to fight the ‘good fight’ to the bitter end.  In Trumpland (USA) compromise and humility is for losers, literally.

If you’ve spent any meaningful time on Twitter or Facebook and tried to have a civil political conversation about a topic-of-the-day, you’ve undoubtedly experienced this: Mean, ugly people.  Strict partisans unwilling to even consider your point of view as it is a direct attack on their self-esteem and is promptly rejected, often punctuated with a lively dash of F-bombs and other forms of profanity and ill-will.

In practical terms, the lessons from Nowhere Man and The Fool on the Hill are simple to articulate but hard to implement.  The next time you argue a Democratic position, such as ‘pro-choice,’ attempt to not only understand the ‘pro-life’ argument, but spend time marinating in it.  Read about it and live it.  Argue its central tenants with your ‘pro-choice’ friends.  Remove yourself from the argument and dive into someone’s point of view, regardless of your perception of its legitimacy.  Its more than just the “walking in another person’s shoes” aphorism.  It’s the conscious removal of one’s own biases and experiences from the question at hand and doing so without condescension or pre-judgment.  Easy said, but hard to do.

For the Democrats to unilaterally break the rhetorical toxins that have polluted the well of American political discourse, I suggest a little Nowhere Man humility and Foot on the Hill empathy.   Try it and it might help break our current political logjam.  And I believe the party that breaks this logjam will be rewarded by the voters.

Democrats:   Problems are best resolved locally

For those of us that know what an ‘A-side and B-side of a 45’ means, there is no single music record as influential in the Pop Music-era as The Beatles’ Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever.  Released February 1967, prior to the Summer of Love, these two songs represented Lennon and McCartney at the peak of their creative talent and worldwide influence.  They were at the top– the tippermost of the toppermost, as they would say.

For political wisdom, people often refer to John’s line in Strawberry Fields that goes: “Living is easy with eyes closed; misunderstanding all you see.”  And, while that is a great line with obvious political meaning, that is not what comes to my mind for me.

I find the relevance of those two songs in that Lennon and McCartney were writing specifically about their childhood homes and their common roots.  And not just as a nostalgic indulgence for two men that were now the most famous people to ever come from Liverpool, England.  [The Titanic doesn’t count as it was a ship].  The two songs are charming and evocative:

In Penny Lane there is a fireman with an hourglass,
And in his pocket is a portrait of the Queen.
He likes to keep his fire engine clean,
It’s a clean machine.

Let me take you down
‘Cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever

When I hear the two songs today, I know they are singing about Liverpool, but in my mind I see my hometown, Cedar Falls, Iowa.  I’m 10-years-old and in my friend’s unfinished basement roller skating on the concrete floor as we play Strawberry Fields Forever over and over and over again.  With each listening, trying to decide, is Paul really dead?  Is John really singing, “I buried Paul.”  What is LSD?

More pertinent to the discussion at hand, these two songs also remind me of a time when problems were solved and they stayed that way.  I broke the neighbor’s window.  I earned the money to fix it.  Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill is famous for saying, “All politics is local.”  I would offer this addendum:  All problems are local.

Of course, neither statement is exactly true.  However, I believe they offer a wisdom that today’s Democrats tend to reject for the wrong reasons.  [Note:  If your Twitter account description includes anything like: “Resist!”, “I’m with Her” or “He’s not my President,” you may need to skip to the next paragraph.  Consider yourself warned.]  Here it goes:  The federal government does not solve problems.  It institutionalizes problems.  It builds a bureaucracy around problems and constantly reminds us about how great they are at solving these problems while at the same time telling us these problems will not go away until we build an even bigger bureaucracy around these same problems.  Yes, we have cleaner water today than we did 50 years ago — unless, of course, you live in Flint, Michigan.  And, yes, we did beat the tar out of the Nazis.  But, generally, the endemic problems – poverty, the national debt, crime, terrorism – never go away.  And the federal government will never make them go away.  I’ll take bets on that right now.

Donald Trump is the visceral reaction of a large percentage of the population (about 46 percent of the population) to this realization regarding the inefficacy of the federal government.  They just aren’t buying the con anymore – and it is not just angry white men or the women that marry them that are saying this to our political leaders.  As a pollster, I’m hearing similar sentiments across a diverse swath of the American populace.  Black and Hispanic voters are saying the same things, they’re just not voting in large numbers for Republicans…yet.

I view the current state of the Democratic Party as a branding problem.  To be frank, their brand is stale and outdated.  Even as with each day we learn that Donald Trump and his closest advisers do not know how to run an executive branch of government, the fact remains that the Democrats are not going to fully reap the benefits of any future Trump mistakes without a brand update.  The Democrats remain moored to the dock of ‘big government’ and independent voters are not about to let them walk away from this image.  And Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show no inclination to walk away from this image.

But they must.  The economic realities have changed.  The Trump administration will not be able to take the U.S. economy back to the 1950s.  At the same time, the Democrats can no longer attack every social problem with a government-focused response.  We can’t simultaneously fight a hot war in Asia, a Cold War with Russia, and a War on Poverty back home as we did in the 1960s.  In the remainder of our political lifetimes, the trend is towards moving solutions to the local level because that is where they are more likely to get solved.  Yet, the very idea of localism turns many Democrats red-in-the-face because it means taking power away from the party’s Washington, D.C. elites.  To them, localism means surrender.

Yet, for the Democrats to be perceived as they party that can solve problems, they must return home.  They must regain power by going local.  That doesn’t mean ceding control of the federal government to the Republicans.  It does mean changing the party’s current DNA programming that dedicates itself to pushing as many resources as possible to the federal level.

And, no, this is not a call for the Democrats to do more grassroots organizing.  The last time grassroots organizing made any real difference it was led by an impossibly handsome guy in comfortable footwear named Jesus Christ.  And, in the end, the government got him too.  OK, Martin Luther King also led a successful grassroots effort.  But, Democrats, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, there is no Martin Luther King-level talent in your party right now.  I love Bernie Sanders. He is genuine and it says a lot about him that even when I disagree with him I still like him.  He doesn’t lie.  However, Bernie is not the Democrats’ way forward.  Not unless you are prepared to cut the Department of Defense budget it half.  I’m not.

Instead, the Democrats need to organically reconnect with voters.  Find local solutions to national problems (health care, voting rights, Planned Parenthood, student debt, etc.). Democrats, each of you must go home and find your own Penny Lane.

At the end of the day politics is about making people’s lives better

I shared my thoughts on this essay with my wife, who happens to be a liberal Democrat right out of central casting:  A Unitarian.  A Ph.D. in French literature.  Finds ways to work tofu into everything we eat.

Her reaction to my Beatles-thesis was immediate:  “You can’t ask Democrats to stop being themselves, to stop acting on their values.  We don’t need a second Republican Party that just wants limited government and lower taxes.”

She is right.  The Democrats aren’t going to become the party of limited government.  Which brings me to one of The Beatles’ great signature songs, Hey Jude.  The McCartney-penned anthem was originally meant to be a tender ballad of encouragement for John’s son, Julian, who was in the middle of his parent’s divorce at the time.  It’s the first verse in the song that, for me, summons the most meaning:

Hey Jude, don’t make it bad, 

Take a sad song and make it better.

Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders
For well you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder

There you have it.  Whatever the Democrats and its leadership decide about the path forward, you cannot go wrong by occasionally asking yourself, “Am I really making things better or am I just making the world a little colder?  Maybe that question and its answer doesn’t change a single thing you believe or do.  Nonetheless, I believe if you genuinely put in the effort to answer the question in an intellectually honest manner, you may be surprised at what you find out about yourself and your party.

The Democrats have done many great things.  Social Security.  Medicare.  Voting Rights.  Anti-Discrimination laws.  Pell Grants.  Unemployment insurance.  But that is all very much in the past.  Defending those programs and rights are important, but I do not believe, collectively, they inspire most Americans anymore.

Instead, you need to clear some intellectual brush to create a new path for the next generation of Democrats.  And, in that effort, take a journey back to Pepperland so you will remember these simple political truths:  (1) People don’t like taxes (and the big government that comes with it), (2) you should not trust ideological militants, (3) ask for a plan, (4) doomsday predictions are always wrong, (5) show genuine humility and empathy even as you criticize others, (6) start problem-solving from the premise that ‘all solutions are local,’ (7) always try to make things better, (8) and, figuratively speaking, don’t make your world colder.

So, there you go Democrats.  The Beatles just solved your party’s problems by giving you eight simple rules to follow going forward.  Donald Trump typically violates at least five of them with every tweet.

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

By Robert Dresden (Source:  NuQum.com, January 19, 2017)

After reading my colleague’s column, “Reality Sucks for the Next DNC Chair,” I am compelled to reply:

In his January 17th article, he made a couple of points with which I strongly disagree. First, he claims the Democrats have become increasingly a ‘presidential party’ at the expense of down-ballot offices. This point has been made by many other pundits, most recently in Politico by Edward-Isaac Dovere. While the claim is defensible, the campaign finance evidence is mixed, if not contradictory.

Have the Democrats’ increasingly funneled money to the party’s presidential campaign when some of that money should have gone to Democrats in down-ballot races? The problem is with the data.  Its difficult to prove this claim one way or the other, in part, because there is no central resource for knowing exactly how much money is spent by politicians in state and local races.  Campaign finance compliance and reporting rules vary by state and aggregating all of this money into a total number is problematic.

Yet, we can look at the percentage of federal election campaign expenditures that go to the party’s presidential campaign versus the U.S. House and Senate races.  If the Democrats have become more of a ‘presidential party’ we should see a higher percentage of campaign expenditures spent by Democratic presidential candidates compared to the total spent by Democrats running for the U.S. House and Senate.

The chart below summarizes the campaign expenditures of Democratic presidential candidates relative to other federal races since 1976.  It may surprise some that Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign accounted for a higher proportion of total Democratic campaign spending than any campaign since.  Only the two Obama campaigns come close (56 and 54 percent, respectively).  Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign accounted for only 42 percent of all Democratic federal campaign expenditures — which is about average.

If you want to argue that the Democrats are losing U.S. congressional and state legislative elections because of an over-emphasis on presidential campaigns, it will require a more sophisticated understanding of how campaign dollars impact elections at all levels and how this spending interacts. For example, do local and state candidate gain more or less synergy from higher presidential-level spending than they do from spending by U.S. House and Senate campaign?  Or perhaps there is no relationship?

Its also important to note that the loss of local, state, and U.S. congressional seats also occurred for Democrats in midterm elections which are not affected by a presidential race. So, blaming the fundraising prowess of Democrats’ presidential candidates for the party’s declining success in other races seems unwarranted.

The second point from the Kroeger article that eats my grain is the contention that the Democrats are so far behind the Republicans at all levels of government that it will take a decade to recover.

When you recite the current numbers it does sound bad:  the Democrats are down 47 seats in the U.S. House, down three in the U.S. Senate, have just 16 Governors and control only 18 state legislatures.  But I will contend that the party’s troubles are exaggerated at all levels of government, but particularly at the national level.

I agree that the Clinton popular vote is a biased measure of the Democrats’ national strength, but it is equally foolish to think the Democrats aren’t close to having a winning presidential coalition.  They are close.  Very close.  And only minor shifts in turnout and support levels in a few key demographic segments (most notably working-class voters) would have changed the 2016 results in Clinton’s favor.

The task for the Democrats is greater at the congressional level, but far from irreversible. Regaining the Senate will have to wait until after the 2018 midterms where the Democrats are protecting 10 incumbent Senators in states Trump won.  They will be lucky to hold serve in 2018.  It’s 2020 where the Democrats will need to focus on getting back the Senate.

As for the U.S. House, it will take 24 seat flips for the Democrats to regain power. If we look to history as our guide, that is not a big number to turn in just one election cycle. Since Eisenhower, four out of nine midterm elections under a Republican president saw the Republicans lose at least 24 seats to the Democrats.

I do not dispute that the Democrats are in the political wilderness right now. Their most prominent leaders are old, they rely too much on a patchwork of unconnected issue positions, and don’t provide a coherent organizing principle voters can use as a heuristic device to navigate the political environment.

Yes, the Democrats are in the forest, but its Virginia’s Shenandoah Forest not Alaska’s Tongass Forest. They are close to regaining power at the national level and are far from facing an existential crisis at the local and state levels. Add to this optimistic view that the long-term demographic changes in the U.S. will most likely work in the favor of Democrats and it is hard to feel to bad for them.  The greater challenge may be convincing the Republicans that can’t continue their success without winning the support of more women, minority, and younger voters. In my view, those are the battle lines that will define future elections and the Democrats are more than capable of winning on those fronts.

Democrats, here’s my short-term advice:  Don’t watch TV tomorrow or this weekend.  Go to the movies and see Rogue One for the second time, or just go to dinner and relax.

R-E-L-A-X.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, January 17, 2017)

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

“The Democratic Party has always represented the people and now more than ever we must blow the walls off our tent so everyone feels welcome,” Sally Boynton Brown said as she announced her candidacy for the leadership of the Democratic National Committee. “If people haven’t noticed, our country is becoming more Republican.”

Boynton Brown’s last comment shouldn’t startle most people. But within the Democratic Party and its scholar-bureaucrat class, her voice is almost alone in contending that this country has taken a definitive turn to the right.  In fact, the Democrat literati continue to push an astigmatic fiction that this country is becoming more liberal and the American people are more aligned with the Democrats than the Republicans on an issue-by-issue basis.

Issie Lapowsky’s Wired article, “Don’t Let Trump’s Win Fool You – America’s Getting More Liberal,” provides one of the better attempts at justifying this conclusion, but there are others as well.  Peter Beinart’s Atlantic article, “Why America is Moving Left,” comes to mind because it came out just as the 2016 primary season started and seemed destined to find its own proof in the election of a Democrat (or reasonable Republican) president in November.  Ooops.

But more people are probably exposed to the ‘liberal America’ case from the news entertainment class, where the argument burns white hot. Filmmaker Michael Moore made the claim in 2011, and did it again recently with Bill Maher in their 2016 post-election wake.  Moore even suggested firing the pollsters, which is a good idea if you want the policy preferences of Americans to be determined by media decree rather than by listening to the American people themselves.  Understand, I love Michael Moore.  He’s not just talented and funny, but unlike his ideological counterparts, he actually understands the lives of people outside the east and west coast elite circles.

If Hillary Clinton had heeded his advice in this past election, she would be the president-elect today, instead eating over-priced New York City hamburgers with billionaire designer Ralph Lauren.  And for those of you hard-working, 9-to-5 Democrats that thought Hillary Clinton understood your life and your issues, trust me, she’ll be spending the rest of her life avoiding people like you and your issues.  Only billionaires and Hollywood celebs need apply to be her next dinner companion.

Clinton’s tin ear to working-class people is a sharp contrast to Moore who is an empathic savant with respect to their daily lives.  Yet, when Moore says we live in a liberal nation, he is just plain wrong.

To refute his and others’ notion of  ‘liberal America,’ I turn to Lapowsky’s article as she offers the most compelling argument in its favor.  And, in her defense, I enthusiastically agree with her conclusion that America is increasingly a tolerant, inclusive society that welcomes immigrants, supports women’s privacy, is open to reasonable gun control legislation and expects the rights and dignity of all of our citizens to be protected, regardless of sexual orientation, religious preference, gender, race, and ethnicity.  That is the America we live in, even if it did just elect Donald Trump.

However, here’s the problem. Lapowsky (like others making the same claim) cherry-pick those issues where this country is more liberal and tolerant and subsequently avoid most of the bread-and-butter issues — attitudes towards taxes, regulations, national security, crime and the role of government — that play a much bigger factor in people’s vote decision.  When analysts and academics look at a broader palette of issues they see a country that is more conservative today than at anytime since 1980.  The chart below shows one such analysis conducted by the University of North Carolina’s James Stimson who has created a “policy mood’ index derived from thousands of responses to hundreds of specific policy questions over time.  A more detailed description of his methodology can be found on his website.

In contrast to Lapowsky’s selection bias problem, Stimson’s comprehensive accounting for a much wider range of policy opinions reveals meaningful changes in America’s public mood that correlate with shifts in political and policy outcomes.  For example, we see the peak of conservatism in the late 1970s leading to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.  Subsequently, as Reagan’s policies were implemented, we see a public mood swing back in the liberal direction, a predictable “correction” process that often occurs when new presidents take office and inevitably over-reach in their pursuit of their preferred policy initiatives.  This correction process is also evident soon after Bill Clinton took office in 1993 and after Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009.

Quite markedly after Bill Clinton’s first presidential election, the change in public mood (in the conservative direction) has tracked  closely with the secular decline of Democrats in our nation’s state legislatures (see chart below).  Apart from a temporary recovery during Obama’s rise, the trend for Democrats has been a virtually uninterrupted, monotonic decline in our state legislatures.

Today, there are almost 1,000 fewer Democratic state legislators than Republican.  If past variation is an indicator, it will take a decade for the Democrats to close that gap.  Of course, an over-reaching Trump administration accompanied by disastrous results could speed up that recovery process; but at this point, if I were the Democrats, I make no assumptions in that regard.

The current obsession among Democrats with Russian electoral shenanigans and FBI Director James Comey’s letter postpones their need to assay their electoral decline.  Whatever the final conclusion of the likely congressional inquiries into Russian interference in this last election, it will not provide information about the health of the Democratic Party.  The impact of the Russians and the Comey letter are limited to 2016. They tell us nothing about why, at every level of government, the Democrats are worse off than any time since the Great Depression.  The Democrats’ problems are deep-rooted, not transitory phenomena.

Boynton Brown’s competition for the chairmanship include Minnesota U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, South Carolina chairman Jaime Harrison, and New Hampshire party head Ray Buckley.  Among them, only Boynton Brown has taken the first step necessary to solve any problem.  She recognizes the problem.  The Democrats are in decline, in a serious way.

I’m not surprised someone from a red state like Idaho would be speak so realistically about her party.  In my own experience, having recently managed a Democrat challenger’s state legislative campaign in Iowa in 2016, I saw up close the disconnect many working-class Democrats feel with their national and state party.  The Democrats just don’t talk to them anymore.  Virginia Senator James Webb summarized this attitude best:  “They don’t think Democrats like them.”  Boynton Brown is correct when she says the Democrats need to do more than just expand their tent, they need to “blow the walls” off their tent.

So when Ellison talks about “championing the challenges of working families and giving voters a reason to show up at the polls in 2018 and beyond,” or Perez says,”I’m in this race because we’ve got a lot of fighting to do, we’ve got a lot of advocating to do,” it demonstrates their poor understanding of the Democrats’ intrinsic problem.  The Democrats have a strategic problem, not a tactical one.  By deceiving themselves into thinking they are still the majority in this country and if they just work harder they will return to power, the Democrats are avoiding the tough questions.  Boynton Brown nailed the issue right out of the gate:  This country IS becoming more Republican and if the party leadership doesn’t recognize that reality, the Democrats will be a minority party for a long, long time.

Many Democrats will now often respond, “Didn’t Hillary Clinton win the popular vote by almost 3 million votes and doesn’t that prove we out-number the other side?”  No, it doesn’t, and here’s why:

Yes, 66 million people voted for Clinton to Trump’s 63 million.  But, overall, 71 million people voted against her.  Furthermore, Clinton’s popular vote advantage reflects the significantly more money she had to spend on national TV advertising; such that, in states like California or New York, the presidential campaign they saw was measurably different from the election voters witnessed in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  Include the national media’s total coverage of Clinton being more positive than Trump‘s (even with the help he received from the Russians and Comey), and you can see why Clinton had a quantitative advantage in the non-swing states.  That is the source of Clinton’s popular vote victory.  It was not a function of the Democrats being more popular than Republicans; and by not realizing that, the Democrats postpone their own recovery going forward.

The Russians and Comey are tactical factors specific to one election.  To explain the 40-year decline in Democratic state legislators one must investigate strategic factors such as the Democrats’ core messages or the disproportionate share of fundraising dollars going to presidential campaigns (Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama) at the expense of local and state races.

The Clinton’s were master fundraisers.  By aligning their messages (especially their private ones) with the financial, high technology, pharmaceutical, and entertainment industries, the Clintons beat the Republicans at their own game.  It was brilliant and it kept them in control of the Democratic Party right up until they were eclipsed by Obama who had improved on their fundraising model.  This strategy was great for the Clintons and Obama. Unfortunately, it also sucked the oxygen out of the rest of the party.  For the Democrats to rebound in the legislatures and governors offices that fundraising model must change.

But the Democrat’s decline isn’t just caused by the flaws in their money model.  The core Democratic message is out-of-date.  Ellison and Perez, along with most other Democratic elites, seem to think message tweaks and redoubling organizational efforts to mobilize core constituencies (including working-class voters) will turn the tide.   The Daily Kos even posted recently a renewed call for Democrats to read Saul Alinsky’s seminal activist guidebook, “Rules for Radicals.”  “This classic work of political strategy not only explains much about our current dilemma but more importantly, provides a path forward to escape it,” writes the Daily Kos.  This is the “classic work” with such utter condescension for working-class people that it writes:  “(the working class) are a fearful people, who feel threatened from all sides (and whose) emotions can go either to the far right of totalitarianism or forward to Act II of the American Revolution.”

Put aside the book’s title that already alienates most voters, that attitude towards the working-class is indicative of a viewpoint that sees working-class people as lab rats to be manipulated, not as human beings.

Furthermore, the polling data and the empirical research continually show how un-radical most Americans are when it comes to politics.  And that’s a good thing because when the Trump administration over-reaches, it will be punished by the American voter.  You can count on it.

Sadly, that mainstream view Democrats can’t pull their messages from the same playbook and expect the electoral outcomes to be any different.  They must throw out the playbook and reinvent itself.  That will take new leadership from outside the beltway, be it someone like Boynton Brown, and a willingness to set aside past assumptions and to look at the American political landscape as if seeing it for the first time.

That means the stilted rhetoric that still dominates Democratic communications must be abandoned.  Through an open-minded inquiry, the Democrats must rebuild their brand by locating the strategic weaknesses in the Republicans’ brand — and there are many — and setting forth a vision that combines the party’s highest ideals, on the one hand, with the realities of governance, on the other.

In Part 2 of this essay, I will provide some empirical evidence to show that whatever policies are advocated by the Democrats and Republicans in the future, they will be severely constrained by demographic and economic realities.  As we stand today, the Republicans have a core message that works as well in today’s economic environment as it did when Ronald Reagan rolled it out in 1976 when he took on the American political establishment:  Less government, more freedom.

That message sells.  If you don’t think so, you need to stare at that second chart in this article showing the rise of the Republicans in the state legislatures.  The Republicans are growing their market share; the Democrats are not.  This didn’t just happen.  Its been going on since 1980.  And now the Democrats must finally address the problem.

The governments in today’s advanced economies are about as big and intrusive as they can get relative to their total size.  What voters will expect, therefore, is a party that can address the seen and unforeseen needs endemic to all societies (security, growth, opportunity, health), hold the government and its elected officials accountable when it fails to address those needs, all while ensuring the long-term fiscal health of the state well into the future.

Not an easy task.  And it will require ending government intrusions where they fail to help and moving some government functions to the lowest level of jurisdiction possible so that people can once again feel like they have some control over their lives.

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

Questions and press inquiries regarding this article and the data analysis contained within can be directed to:  info@olsonkroeger.com or call Kent Kroeger at 515 512 2776

By NuQum.com Analytic Team (Source:  NuQum.com, January 5, 2017)

One Los Angeles Times writer called it the “scorched-earth” campaign.  Even his critics will agree, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was like no other in American political history.

Yes, we’ve had negative campaigns before this one.  In the 1828 campaign, John Quincy Adams called Andrew Jackson’s mother a prostitute and Jackson’s wife an adulteress.  More recently, George W. Bush’s 2000 primary campaign was accused of indirectly promulgating a rumor among South Carolina Republicans that John McCain had a “black baby” out of wedlock.

But most examples, like those, were ancillary to broader campaign motifs that generally leaned more positive.  In 1988, George H.W. Bush’s campaign infamously used the “Willie Horton” ad to accuse his opponent, Michael Dukakis, of being soft on crime. But, even in that election, Bush’s message was much more about “no new taxes” than it was about attacking his opponent.

But now comes along Donald Trump who seemed to change the rules of American political campaigns that, heretofore, were assumed to be inviolable.  Trump’s most notable deviation was in his ground game, or lack thereof, according to many political campaign experts.  Where the political consultants expected door-knockers and phone banks, Trump gave us campaign rallies and more campaign rallies.  And not just rallies, but human waves, often more than 10,000 attendees, that strode across cornfields and stadium parking lots, often waiting hours just to see their new political liberator.  Trump rallies were events, similar to the atmosphere one experiences while tailgating prior to a Big 10 or SEC football game.

In contrast, Hillary Clinton ran a more traditional campaign that put a much higher premium on advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts than did the Trump campaign.  This difference in campaign strategy was, in part, a function of Clinton having more money and a more established campaign organization; but, it was also a function of expectations.  Modern presidential campaigns are supposed to look like Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  Who needs creativity when you have a proven model for winning presidential elections.  Barack Obama didn’t re-create how modern campaigns are structured.  He simply did it better than anyone else in 2008 and 2012.

Trump has changed the rules.  So what if he was outspent by $600 million.  He’d make up for it through free media (euphemistically called “earned media” nowadays by the media) and campaign rallies.  He also employed a level of negativity unseen in modern presidential elections.

“(Trump) sketched out conspiracies involving global bankers, casually threatened to jail his political opponent, and warned in increasingly specific terms that a loss by him would spell the end of civilization,” wrote Los Angeles Times writer, Noah Bierman.

Here is an example of a Trump rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan:

Yes, this campaign was different.  But did it really make a difference in the final election outcome?

Using state-level event data from the website  www.nationalpopularvote.com and aggregated polling data from RealClearPolitics.com, we analyzed the relationship between the candidates’ travel schedules and changes in their state-level of support.

Since over 95 percent of 2016 candidate events and most state-level polling occurred in just 15 “swing states,” our analysis is restricted to those states (see list of states in table below).  The table shows the opinion polling data averages at the state-level at the beginning of October (RCP Poll Avg. as of Oct. 1^st,) and the candidate’s actual vote percentage on Election Day (Actual Vote %).  The column on the far-right summarizes this information by showing the extent to which Trump’s support changed between Oct. 1^st and Election Day.  As you can see, in the final month of the campaign, Trump gained support in all by two of the 15 swing states (Colorado and Nevada).

Based on this evidence alone, you might conclude that Trump had the superior campaign.  However, it is fair to ask, was this domination simply the result of two exogeneous factors:  The Comey letter and the Podesta emails?

If those two factors alone drove Trump’s dominance, we’d expect the impact to be similar across all 15 swing states.  After all, voters’ exposure to these two factors come primarily from national media outlets, not local or state-level sources.

Yet, we see from the table above that Trump’s support gains were not evenly distributed across the “swing” states.  In fact, there is a lot of state-level variation that warrants explanation.

The next table shows the number of post-convention candidate visits for each of the swing states and the percentage of the eligible voter population that was Hispanic/Latino as of January, 2016.  Without formally testing the relationships, it is evident that in states where the Hispanic voting population was large (>10%), Trump did not make significant inroads into Clinton’s early October lead (Arizona +1.1%, Colorado -3.4%, and Nevada -2.6%).

Less evident is the relationship between the number of candidate events and the relative change in Trump’s support.  In Ohio, where Trump’s relative position improved by 10.6% between Oct. 1^st and Election Day, the Trump campaign had 12 more events than Clinton’s campaign.  Yet, in Colorado where Trump’s campaign had 13 more visits, his relative vote position deteriorated by 3.4%.   The bivariate correlation (p = 0.45) between the number of Trump campaign events and the size of the Hispanic/Latino population (p = -0.60) with changes in vote support were statistically significant; however, the number of Clinton events and the relative difference in the number of events were not statistically significant in the bivariate correlations.  Without a more formal test, it is difficult to know the relative contribution of each factor to changes candidate support.

THE MODEL:

We estimated a linear model to explain the vote change in the 15 “swing” states (the full regression model summary and dataset can be accessed here).  We included four variables in the initial regression model:  (1) Number of Clinton campaign events in each, (2) Number of Trump campaign events, (3) Percentage of Hispanic/Latinos in the voter eligible population, and (4) a indicator variable for Colorado.  Given the small sample size (n=15) it was not feasible to include more than four variables (see the Methodological Note at the end of this article for other issues related to our regression model).

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL MODEL OUTPUT

The regression model revealed two significant findings.  The number of Trump campaign events was significantly related to changes in support for Trump.  All else equal, one Trump event translated into an increase of 0.2 percent in Trump’s vote support relative to Clinton’s.  Conversely, given the small sample size, the impact of Clinton’s events was too small to be distinguished from zero, though it was negative (-0.17) as expected.  The regression also revealed a strong negative relationship between the size of the Hispanic/Latino voter eligible population and changes in voter support for Trump.  In Colorado, Trump’s campaign events were particularly ineffectual.

Our model’s implications are summarized in the table below.  By setting the Hispanic/Latino population at two levels – 17.8% (for large Hispanic/Latino population states) and 3.2% (for low Hispanic/Latino population states – we analyzed the impact on Trump’s relative vote support given different numbers of Trump campaign visits.  In low Hispanic/Latino population states, five Trump events translated into a 3.1 percentage-point increase in his support relative to Clinton’s.  Twenty events gave Trump a 5.7 percentage-point bump up in those states.

In contrast, in high Hispanic/Latino population states, the impact of Trump events were dampened.  It would take more than 10 Trump campaign events to overcome his disadvantage in those states.

A final note, while we did not include the impact of advertising and news coverage in our regression model, we do believe those factors might help explain the intrinsic and pervasive disadvantage Trump had with Hispanic/Latino voters on a national level.  Whatever the strategic and tactical flaws in the Clinton campaign overall, it does appear her campaign was very successful at checking Trump’s support gains in states with large numbers of Hispanic/Latino eligible voters.

As for the impact of the Comey Letter or the Podesta emails, that will be left for a more thorough analysis.  Again, we do not believe inclusion of these factors would change our state-level findings.  Those are national events filtered through national media sources.  In our four-variable model, the impact of those factors may be buried in the ‘regression intercept’ which represents the starting point for changes in Trump’s support, setting all other factors to zero.  Here, the intercept was estimated to be 3.2.  That is, Trump would have gained about a three percentage-points versus Clinton in October even if all other factors — candidate visits and the size of the Hispanic/Latino vote eligible population — were non-factors.  If there is a Comey and/or Podesta effect, it is in there somewhere.  In a close election, like the last one, those could have been decisive factors, even if they weren’t the biggest determinants of the election outcome.

DISCUSSION:

It is fair to ask, how does a candidate visit change voter opinions (or, more likely, the likelihood that the voter will vote) given that so few people attend a campaign rally?  Even Trump rallies attracted only about 5,000 people per event – and most of those people were already Trump supporters.  How does a really change an election outcome?

We see it as a multi-stage process powered by word-of-mouth and television coverage.  We don’t think many voters change their vote choice because they attended a rally.  Instead, based on telephone interviews NuQum.com conducted with Trump supporters in late October in Polk County, Iowa, we heard Trump supporters repeatedly talk about the excitement surrounding the Trump campaign.  Had they attended a Trump rally?  In all but a few cases, no.  Instead, their sense of the excitement came from television coverage and world-of-mouth from family, friends, and work colleagues, some of whom had attended a Trump event.  That is a one-two-punch that, anecdotally at least, leads us to believe a single campaign event can indirectly move voters into the voter booth in favor of one candidate over another.  It’s a dynamic that we don’t think worked as consistently or as often in the Clinton campaign’s favor.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Admittedly, our analysis doesn’t address the impact of news coverage and advertising (TV, radio, direct mail).  We know those campaign factors matter – a lot.  Nonetheless, we can explain over 63 percent of the variation in the state-level vote change during the last month of the campaign by referencing just three variables:  The number of Trump visits, the relative size of the Hispanic population in each state and a deflation factor unique to Colorado.

The Clinton campaign spent much more money on advertising, according to Kagan Media; and, we have yet to see an analysis suggesting Clinton’s TV and radio were of a lower quality than Trump’s.  In our judgement, Clinton’s TV and radios were qualitatively superior to Trump’s – and we would say, it is not even close.  Clinton’s TV spots were brilliantly produced and powerful.  As the father of an autistic son, the Clinton spot with the mother of an autistic child lamenting Trump’s mocking of a handicapped New York Times reporter, was as moving as any political ad I’ve ever seen.

Furthermore, contrary to the current media narrative, Trump’s news media coverage in the general election period was significantly more negative than Clinton’s (see the charts below provided by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center).  The ‘horse-race” coverage was particularly tilted in Clinton’s favor.

Thus, we are skeptical that the inclusion of advertising or the tone of media coverage would change our main finding that campaign events were a significant factor in Trump’s electoral college triumph.

Combine the impact of Trump’s rallies with the cold-hearted efficiency of the Trump campaign’s allocation of campaign resources into the key “swing” states, and you get the most improbable electoral victory in US. Presidential history.

Questions and press inquiries regarding this article and the data analysis contained within can be directed to:  info@olsonkroeger.com or call Kent Kroeger at 515 512 2776

METHODOLOGICAL NOTES:  There are a number of caveats to our analysis.  First, we did not include state-level media buys by the two campaigns.  Our initial source for media buy data (The University of Maryland’s Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership) lacked the fidelity we required at the state-level; therefore, we did not formally test for the impact of media buys.  However, in the media data we did obtain, the variation between non-swing states and swing states far exceeded variation between each of the 15 swing states.  We are confident that the inclusion of the media buy data would not change the results reported here.  Second, the candidate event data includes both the presidential nominee visits (Trump, Clinton) and vice-presidential nominee visits (Pence, Kaine).  Third, we only have 15 data points (one for each state) making it difficult to discern weaker relationships within the data.  For example, we find Clinton campaign visits had no significant impact on voter support.  We believe an analysis at the state and weekly levels might better reveal the nature of that relationship.

By Kent Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, December 22, 2016)

“I believe that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an existential necessity if Israel is to remain a Jewish homeland,” recently wrote Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder and president of J Street, a nonprofit advocacy group that lobbies to end the Israel–Palestinian conflict peacefully and diplomatically. “As important, I believe ruling as an occupying power over millions of Palestinians for 50 years while denying them their rights is not only strategically unwise but also morally unjustifiable.”

“Never before has a diplomatic novice been placed in this sensitive post, where a single wrong word or move could pour fuel on fires already burning in the region,” wrote Ben-Ami in a Washington Post editorial opposing the nomination of David Friedman, a New York bankruptcy lawyer, as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel by President-elect Donald Trump.

Friedman’s response to Ben-Ami and his other Jewish-American critics has been harsh, to say the least.  He’s even included a particularly ugly and noxious slur that relates Ben-Ami and J Street supporters to “Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps.” I don’t know Mr. Ben-Ami but what I’ve read and heard from him — in his own words — does not strike me as deviant from the mainstream opinions within the American-Jewish community.

In Pew Research’s October 2013 survey of Jewish Americans, 61 percent of Jewish Americans said they were optimistic that there is a way for Israel and an Independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully, compared to only 50 percent of adults in the U.S. In the same survey, 44 percent of Jewish Americans said Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories “hurt” Israel’s security, compared to only 17 percent who said the settlements helped.

Interestingly, Ben-Ami’s position on the necessity of the “two-state solution” is also consistent with the stated position of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in May 2016 said, “We are willing to negotiate with the Arab states’ revisions to the (Arab Peace) initiative so that it reflects the dramatic changes in our region since 2002, but maintains the agreed goal of two states for two peoples.”

I am not suggesting Ben-Ami and Netanyahu are of a like mind on how to achieve a two-state solution, but at a minimum their stated goal for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not deviate from the UN resolutions on the “Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine” that date back to 1974.

I know little about David Friedman, except what he wrote about Ben-Ami and J Street and what I’ve heard and read about him in the media.

My general rule is:  Don’t make a judgement about someone through what you hear or read about them through the media.  I have also learned with age that sometimes people we don’t agree with (or even like) can be that shock to your own system of beliefs that moves you into a new and more productive direction. Friedman may fill that role if he becomes the U.S. Ambassador to Israel.

In a June 2016 interview on Israeli TV, Friedman said: “I think if you look at the Palestinians, they share something in common with the entire Muslim world, which is 90% or so of them are perfectly fine, good people. They’ve been hijacked by the 10% that observes radical, Islamic jihad. I think if you went to those 90% and said to them, ‘Would you rather live under an Israeli regime or under a new Palestinian state,’ I would be shocked if the majority of them wouldn’t prefer Israeli rule,” he said.

Prepare to be shocked, Mr. Friedman. I don’t think 90 percent Palestinians will agree with you on that. However, more and more Israeli and Palestinian activists, sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, are also saying that the two-solution is O.B.E. (Overtaken by Events) and that the resolution to the conflict requires a new paradigm.

In a recent conversation with a young Palestinian, currently studying at Iowa State University, he gave me his diagnosis on the two-state solution.

“It is dead,” he said.

“What replaces it? The one-state solution?” I asked.

“Right now, nothing. It’s the status quo – which is the most unacceptable version of the one-state solution.”

But, unlike even five years ago, when it was hard to find anyone talking about a ‘one-state solution,’ there are now prominent activists sharing the same sentiment as that ISU student. Scholars Noura Erakat and Leila Farsakh, after attending a meeting with European Union leaders in 2013, concluded that the failure of the two-state solution has left the region with a de facto one-state solution. Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, has been quoted as saying, “Good riddance! The two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finally dead.”

In his eulogy for the two-state solution during a book tour in 2013, U.S. religious scholar, Reza Aslan, gave what may be the simplest explanation for its demise:

“When Oslo was signed (in 1993) there were about 100,000 settlers living in Palestine. That was when the peace process was started. And 20 years of the peace process has led to 500,000 Israelis living on Palestinian land. The two-state solution is over.”

On that conclusion, Aslan, Barghouti, Erakat, Farsakh, Friedman and likely Netanyahu, too, aren’t that far apart. Obviously, the nature and future direction of this de facto one-state solution substantially separates Friedman and Netanyahu from the aforementioned academics and social activists. Nonetheless, Trump’s consciously provocative nominee for the U.S. ambassadorship may at least serve the purpose of cutting through the cynicism and unrealistic posturing that continues to dominate the mainstream rhetoric of Israeli, American and Palestinian leaders.

After eight years of failed American leadership with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is time for change.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, February 6, 2016)

We would love to brag that we were the only data-driven political forecasters to predict Cruz’ victory in the Iowa’s Republican caucuses.  We won’t.  Not that we don’t want to, but the truth is a bit more complicated than “we got it right and they didn’t.”

No, it would be wrong for us to highlight the logical flaws in J. Ann Selzer’s Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll, who was deemed our nation’s most accurate pollster by Nate Silver, whose own FiveThirtyEight.com forecast was similarly off the mark in Iowa’s Republican caucuses.  No, we will not boast because we would have to ignore the facts…and the facts actually support the pollsters and data modelers who predicted Trump would win the Iowa Republican caucuses.

What?  But, Cruz beat Trump 28 percent to 24 percent while the polls, summarized by RCPs rolling average, said Trump would beat Cruz 30 percent to 24 percent.  Selzer’s Iowa Poll had Trump winning 28 percent to 23 percent over Cruz, as of the weekend before the Monday caucuses.  The surface evidence indicates they missed.  But I would argue the pollsters were right given what they asked respondents and it was the caucus results that perverted the true sentiments among Iowa caucus-attending Republicans.

You may recall a similar argument about the Florida election results in the 2000 presidential election in which the final tallied results indicated George W. Bush beat Al Gore even though the exit polls indicated a majority of voters preferred Gore to Bush.  The exit polls were most likely correct; it was the vote tally that was wrong.

The argument that the caucus process perverts the true sentiments of Iowa caucus voters starts with my own experience at an Iowa Democratic caucus.  My wife and I moved to Des Moines, Iowa four years ago and she’s always been curious about how an Iowa caucus works.  While Iowans find the process a democracy-affirming experience, outsiders often find the process confusing and even undemocratic.  Further complicating things, the Republicans and Democrats have different caucus processes with the Republicans using a secret ballot and the Democrats using a multi-stage, non-secret balloting system.  The end result however makes the two processes more the same than different.  Though the Republicans use a secret ballot to cast caucus votes, the first step in the process has supporters for each candidate grouping together so they can select someone to speak on behalf of their preferred candidate before everyone casts their “secret” ballot.  The actual result is that each caucus voter discovers very quickly who their neighbors are voting for and that is start of the problem.

Back to my experience in the Democratic caucus.  I am kind when I say the process started out disorganized and devolved at each step.  The precinct chair’s first problem was the unusually large number of caucus-goers in attendance.  Over four hundred.  At least that is what the signed register indicated.  But even that official count of qualified voters was under suspicion when the first head-count of candidate preferences was taken after everyone moved to a specific section of the high school auditorium depending on their candidate preference.  Soon after the head-count, the precinct chair announced that the total number of first ballot voters exceeded the registered total by almost 30 voters.  Voters were counted that had not officially registered.  Did they forget to register?  Did they sneak in?  Sneaking in would not have been hard to do.  We were in a 600-seat auditorium with over eight separate doors to enter and exit and no security to speak of.  Yes, there were people standing at some of the doors, but they didn’t seem stop anybody from entering since there was no way to know if their eligibility had been validated and they had signed the register.  It was an honor system.

The register and vote total discrepancy was not a problem, said the precinct chair.  He asked that anyone who had failed to sign the register should do so before the next head-count vote.  We waited about 20 minutes while that process was completed and counted heads a second time.  We were off by only 20 or so people the second time.  Um.  A less trusting precinct chair would have read off the names from the register and kicked out anyone whose name wasn’t called.  But not this precinct chair.  Not on this night.  He declared the vote total, the one that exceeded the official register by over twenty voters, to be the final vote total and the Clinton and Sanders delegates were divided up proportionately, six for Sanders and four for Clinton.

Did I mention I, along with 27 other people, caucused for Martin O’Malley?  No matter.  We didn’t have enough O’Malley supporters to earn a delegate.  We weren’t viable.  Technically, we should have been allowed to select another “viable” candidate, but this precinct chair wasn’t about to introduce more complications into an already deteriorating situation.  We went with the 6-to-4 delegate result and walked out of the auditorium.  My wife had experienced her first Iowa caucus and as she left the auditorium wondering out-loud why Iowa should be given the honor of starting our country’s presidential selection process.  I told my wife that Stanford-educated elitists like herself are not in any position to judge our time-tested caucus system.  We also agreed not to talk about what we saw that night ever again.  We willingly participated so we felt somewhat responsible.  We felt unclean.

How does my experience relate to Cruz beating Trump?  Perhaps it doesn’t.  Maybe I just wanted to get it off my chest.  What I do know is that the Iowa caucus system is a disaster and more people, not just in Iowa, need to voice this opinion each time Iowans go through the process.  As to why Cruz beat Trump, we need to remember where Cruz drew his support — people who self-identified as “very strong conservatives.”  And these voters tend to be very religious and tend to live in rural areas.  Iowa’s rural communities are tight.  Every family knows every other family.  You know how much your neighbor owes on their house; you know how many cars they’ve owned; you know where they go to church on Sunday; and you know if they don’t.  Small Iowa communities exert a palpable pressure on its citizens not to deviate from local norms.  Of course, some do anyway.  They’re called Democrats.

The rest are Republicans and this leads us back to our original thesis:  The Iowa caucus process perverts the true sentiments among Iowa caucus-goers.  And so we get to caucus night, February 1, 2016.  Ted Cruz went from 23 percent in the Iowa Poll to 28 percent in the actual caucus results.  One theory is that conservative evangelicals in Iowa are far more organized in their get-out-the-vote efforts than other constituencies.  This is true.  But the Iowa Poll measures vote turnout intentions and its predicted evangelical turnout did not vary significantly from the actual turnout (for those details, go here).  No, the answer to the question “why did the polls get the result wrong?” lies not with differentials in socio-demographic turnouts and candidate ground-games.  The answer lies in the process itself.

People change their intended vote preferences when they see their neighbors (and their religious leaders) standing for a specific candidate.  This year it was Ted Cruz. Four years ago it was Rick Santorum.  In 2008, it was Rev. Mike Huckabee.  How do I know this?  Because I’ve seen it.  Not as much in the 2016 Democratic caucus I attended, but I saw it in 2012 when I caucused for Ron Paul and watched the Santorum contingent grow minute-by-minute as caucus voters walked in and saw neighbors and fellow parishioners standing together.  The arm-twisting was congenial but unmistakable.  “Are you supporting Santorum?”  In various forms, I heard the same question over and over.  It was not nefarious.  It is the caucus process.  It is not that much different from the peer-pressure dynamics in high school.  In fact, it is exactly the same.  Only in high school, it determines what clothes you wear, not who should be the next President of the United States.

The polls were correct leading into the February 1st caucuses. It was the Iowa caucus process that got things wrong.  The Iowa caucus system needs to end.