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

Another week, another media-generated faux controversy.

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

The American political and media establishment immediately went mad.

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

Congressional Democrats had their own response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The specific law being cited by Weintraub reads as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• K.R.K.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until this week, the trend in Yemen was looking positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can an escalation in the Yemen War be avoided?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can hope.

• K.R.K.

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

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

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

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

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

Centrists are not necessarily moderates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Centrists are the new ‘deplorables’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winning national elections requires broad appeal.

The Democrats have learned nothing from 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is mobilizing progressives enough?

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

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

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

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

Figure 1: Progressive Turnout in 2016 from Four Key States

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Centrists don’t necessarily prefer centrist candidates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• K.R.K.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; June 1, 2019)

If I didn’t know better, I’d think the mainstream media is trying to undercut the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

“Polls show Sanders losing support, as others such as Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris gain ground,” argues CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson.

The Morning Consult headlined in its recent Democratic nomination poll summary: “Sanders on the decline with 18–29 year-olds. Throughout March, Bernie Sanders had 45 percent of the first choice vote share among America’s youngest voters. That support has steadily declined and currently sits at 33 percent.”

“He can’t grow, and if he can’t hold his most important supporters? His path to the nomination, already near-zero, becomes effectively zero,” concludes The DailyKos.com.

‘Bernie is so 2016′ echoes around dinner conversations from Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side. The liberal establishment can hardly contain their collective grin.

“He (Bernie Sanders) evokes an ersatz George McGovern: a candidate who inspires great passion among a slice of the electorate just large enough to win his party’s nomination, before losing to an incumbent president steeped in criminality. In more ways than one, America cannot afford him,” writes Richard North Patterson. “Sanders is a political tooth fairy, asking voters to chase a fantasy down a rabbit hole to nowhere. But magical thinking won’t beat Trump. The reckoning of 2020 demands a candidate with the discipline, talent, realism and resolve to make our collective reality better. Whoever that might be, it isn’t Bernie Sanders.”

But are these stories of Bernie’s demise true?

Similar to the Trump-Russia collusion myth, the ‘Bernie is fading’ narrative is based more on wishful thinking than reality.

The truth is….

According to RealClearPolitics’ polling averages, Sanders was pulling just under 20 percent of likely Democratic primary voters when consistent polling on the nomination started late last year (see Figure 1). Apart from a period around his candidacy announcement, when his support grew into the mid-20s, Sanders’ polling has hovered within 5 percentage points of 20 percent.

In fact, the top four candidates — Joe Biden, Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris — have seen few substantive changes in their support levels since last year, though Biden’s support has grown somewhat (about 10 percentage points since the beginning of 2019). And contrary Nia-Malika Henderson’s claim about Harris and Warren’s surge, neither has seen any support growth.

Figure 1: Weekly Polling Averages for 2020 Democratic Nomination Race

However, Sanders’ critics are correct about one thing: 20 percent is not enough to win the Democratic nomination. He must grow his support beyond his current base (which consists of much more than just millennials and left-wing progressives, when you dig deeper into the data). And with over 20 candidates in the race, building upon his base is not going to be easy in the near-term.

But this is still early June and the Democrats have not even held a debate yet. To argue Sanders’ chance for the nomination is ‘effectively zero’ isn’t just wrong, it is unfair. Deliberately so, I would add.

“The Democratic nomination will be about who can most likely beat Trump,” said one Democratic pundit during a recent roundtable discussion on the nomination race. And Bernie Sanders can’t beat Trump was the implication.

Substance and policy be damned, the Democratic Party is saying to its core voters, ignoring that fact that the 2020 Democrat nominee employed the same policy-free strategy — and lost to the Orange Mephistopheles.

This is the message the Democratic Party establishment wants every Democrat to internalize between now and the February 2020 caucus in Iowa.

But will it work this time?

• K.R.K.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; May 29, 2019)

Recently, three major renewable energy milestones passed virtually unnoticed as the mainstream media continues to obsess about the 2020 presidential race, the aftermath of the Mueller Report, and the possible impeachment of President Donald Trump.

The first milestone was announced by the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis (IEEFA), when it reported that, in April and May,renewable energy sources, including hydroelectricity, will for the first time generate more U.S. electricity than coal-fired plants, signaling a “tipping point” in the advance of renewable energy as this nation’s primary source of electricity generation.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), all renewables will produce 18 percent of U.S. electricity in 2019, and almost 20 percent in 2020. “Renewable generation is catching up to coal, and faster than forecast,” says Utility Dive editor Robert Walton.

The second milestone was announced by India’s Central Electricity Authority, when it reported India’s solar power industry generated 11.3 terawatt-hours (TWh) of solar power during the 1st quarter of 2019. This is a 16.5 percent increase from the previous quarter and a 57 percent increase from the same quarter in 2018. More significantly, it is the first time solar power in India has surpassed 10 TWh in a quarter, representing about 3 percent of all electricity generation. In total, renewable energy sources account for around 9 percent of all electricity generation in India.

Nine percent may seem small, but the long-term trajectory for renewables in India is on the rapid upswing. Without such progress by India (and China), any hope of achieving zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on a global scale is lost.

The third milestone is less obvious but perhaps the most important. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently announced that, despite fast Asian economic growth making coal more popular than ever as an electricity generation source, final investment decisions (FIDs) for coal plants have declined annually from 88 Gigawatts (GW) in 2015 to just 22 GW in 2018, the IEA announced in early May. Given that 30 GW of coal plants were retired last year and this retirement rate will continue into the foreseeable future, more coal capacity will be retired than approved each year going forward.

“This is a sneak preview of where we’ll be in three to four years time,” says Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a renewable energy advocacy group. “If closures stay where they are, we’re at peak (coal) by 2021.”

The future is bleak for fossil fuels (especially coal)

Peak coal is finally visible on the horizon and the world is inexorably marching towards net zero GHG emissions with certainty in the latter half of this century. While still facing many technological challenges —advances in battery storage being among the biggest— the world’s path to zero-emissions electricity generation by 2050 is not wishful thinking (see Figure 1). And the green transformation of other major GHG sources — transportation and industry— won’t be far behind. Electric vehicles, in fact, may be cheaper than internal combustion engine vehicles by 2022, significantly accelerating the transition.

Figure 1: International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) Forecasts for Renewable Energy through 2050

Of course, forecasts can be wrong as they are dependent on a myriad of factors, not all under our control. And the potential for policy changes and economic shocks to stunt our progress can never be ruled out.

Still, even with the Trump administration’s open hostility to climate change science, the U.S. continues its conversion to renewable energy which accelerated during the Obama administration and, according to recent figures from the EIA, has continued in the Trump administration’s first two years (see Figure 2). Indeed, as a source for electricity generation, renewable energy has grown faster annually in Trump’s first two years than during Obama’s eight years (8.2% avg. annual growth vs. 6.3% avg. annual growth, respectively). In comparison, renewable energy’s annual growth during George W. Bush’s tenure was only 1.4 percent.

Figure 2: U.S. Renewable Electricity Generation (Actual and Forecast)

Why the gloom and doom among climate change activists?

If these recent headlines are any indication, the dominate political-media narrative is oblivious to the real progress being made on renewable energy:

Climate change WARNING: Oceans could rise 7 FEET putting 200 MILLION at risk (The Daily and Sunday Express, May 24, 2019)

It is absolutely time to panic about climate change: Author David Wallace-Wells on the dystopian hellscape that awaits us (Vox.com, February 24, 2019)

The grave threat to US civilisation is not China, but climate change (South China Morning Post, May 28, 2019)

“It is, I promise, worse than you think,” environmental author David Wallace-Wells warned in 2017 about climate change’s impact.

How could a dystopian hellscape be anything else but worse than expected?

“Last year in the summer of 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere you had this unprecedented heat wave that killed people all around the world. You had the crazy hurricane season. In California, wildfires burned more than a million acres. And we’re really only just beginning to see these sorts of effects,” Wallace-Wells recently told Vox.com. “If we continue on the track we’re on now, in terms of emissions, and we just take the wildfire example, conventional wisdom says that by the end of the century we could be seeing roughly 64 times as much land burned every year as we saw in 2018, a year that felt completely unprecedented and inflicted unimaginable damage in California.”

Apocalyptic jeremiads like Wallace-Wells’ new book, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” demoralize readers and feed a sense of hopelessness at the precise moment we need to motivate them. Up to now, such climate change alarmism has been an ineffective strategy to build broad public support for policies that will fundamentally reorganize the world economy.

In spite of that, alarmism remains front-and-center in the 2020 U.S. presidential race. In a thinly-veiled response to former Vice President Joe Biden’s recent suggestion of a “middle ground” approach to climate change, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “I will be damned if the same politicians who refused to act (in past decades) are going to try to come back today and say we need a middle of the road approach to save our lives.”

At least on paper, Ocasio-Cortez has backed up her climate change rhetoric with a wide-ranging manifesto, the Green New Deal (GND). On a scale far grander than Obamacare, the last significant government program passed by Congress, the GND envisions the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by 2030 with renewable and zero-emission energy sources, including nuclear power, making up 100 percent of U.S. power demand. Ambitious on paper, the GND is the ultimate stretch-goal. That is what saving the planet and the people on it will require, says Ocasio-Cortez.

Backbreaking to the U.S. economy is how Republicans describe the GND. “It is quite amazing that someone that is in government — actually elected to the government of the United States of America — would propose that we eliminate all fossil fuels in 12 years,” said Greenpeace Co-Founder Patrick Moore in an interview with The New American. “If we did it on a global level, it would result in the decimation of the human population from 7-odd billion down to who knows how few people.”

With the GND, the progressive movement’s over-stimulated ego meets the Republican’s science agnostic id. Its a septic brew not conducive to successful policymaking.

Yet, we make progress anyway.

To ignore the real advances made in expanding renewable energy capacity in the U.S. (and around the world) is to mischaracterize reality. Furthermore, the momentum in the U.S. has occurred against a hyperpartisan political backdrop where very little substantive climate change legislation has been passed in the past two decades. To the contrary, according to the International Monetary Fund, U.S. direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas reached $649 billion in 2015. That is more than we spend on national defense.

In an odd way, that should be reason for optimism moving forward. Imagine what this country could do on renewable energy if it stopped distorting the marketplace in favor of fossil fuels and let the free market decide.

That is a project even Republicans might get behind.

• K.R.K.

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

I last wrote the about Trump-Russia collusion investigation in August 2018, promising to myself I wouldn’t return to the story unless genuinely new information emerged.

Since then, with respect to a conspiracy with Russia, the sectarian news media has proffered no new, inculpating evidence against President Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign.

None. Zippo. Nada.

Instead, they recycled old news (e.g., Powerpoint summaries of Trump campaign survey data given to Russian-allied operatives) or blatantly false news (e.g., secret Manafort-Assange meetings in an Ecuadorian embassy) to keep the story alive.

Despite the demonstrably poor journalism, Figure 1 shows how the American public’s interest in Russiagate — as measured by their Google search frequencies on related key terms — has not waned since the start of the story in 2016. If anything, it has increased.

Figure 1: Google Search Trends Related to Russiagate

And why? The obvious source of the continued Russiagate interest is the news media itself, which in the past two years has taken only brief respites from Russiagate to cover stories such as Syria, Venezuela, school shootings, immigration and the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination race.

Jointly, the news media and its consumers are engaged in a strategy investors call ‘averaging down.’ This is an investment approach where, as the value of an asset declines from its original purchase price, the investor buys additional units of that asset in the expectation that it will eventually recover some or all its original value. It is the investor equivalent of continuously moving the bar lower.

Is it a good strategy? Yes, if the asset’s value recovers. Should it not recover, the investor is royally screwed.

In that context, Russiagate, as a common stock, would be valued in pennies right now, having plunged precipitously after the April release of the redacted Mueller report which confirmed what objective observers already suspected: the Trump campaign was amateurish, disorganized, prone to poor judgment, and unethical at times, but it did not conspire with the Russians in the 2016 election to defraud the American people.

Trump’s campaign was unquestionably probed and approached by Russian intelligence operatives (and by Western intelligence operatives as well — as we will find out in the near future), but there was no conspiracy.

The Mueller report is unequivocal on this point:

Suggestions that the Mueller investigation found evidence of a conspiracy — but not enough to indict — is merely the news media employing the ‘averaging down’ strategy and choosing to stay in its advocacy journalism comfort zone, even if it risks losing whatever credibility they still possess.

Left at the conspiracy theory alter by Mueller, the Democrats and the news media are now feverishly trying to convert their shares of the Trump-Russia conspiracy into shares of Trump obstructed justice and must be impeached.

Cable news has become a 24–7 symposium on the legal definitions of obstruction of justice and constitutional theories on impeachment. And if the last two years is an indication, they probably are misleading us on that story too.

Independent journalist Michael Tracey aptly explains the psychology of why the Democrats and the national news media can’t move on from Russiagate and its conspiratorial subsidiaries: “Since 2016, liberals/leftists have perpetuated a moral panic to validate their own parochial political and personal obsessions. They’ve done a lot of damage in the process, not least to people’s psyches. Don’t count on the fever dream ending any time soon.”

Russiagate’s damage is real. This country is not having a constructive dialogue on Libya (where the U.S. seems to be embracing the general — a Virginia resident — trying to take over the country), Yemen (an ongoing humanitarian disaster where there is a lot of blame to pass around), regime change wars(pick any country with oil that the U.S. doesn’t control — Norway, we’re watching you), Medicare-4-All (it is less costly than our current health care system, but if you’ve been watching Jake Tapper, Chris Matthews or Fox News, you wouldn’t know that), climate change (yeah, I would avoid buying coastal or riverbank property going forward), consumer debt (Why does Joe Biden support the Delaware-incorporated bank lenders over student borrowers and credit card consumers? I may have just answered my own question), growing income inequality (that is what a $700 billion defense budget buys), and the list goes on.

Instead, such concerns are mocked for taking our attention away from the media-embellished crisis called Donald Trump (see cartoon below).

Who is stopping these conversations? It is not Donald Trump or Fox News. You are far more likely to get a balanced discussion on Venezuela from Tucker Carlson than you are from Rachel Maddow or Chris Cuomo.

Who is stopping debates on the most important topics of the day? It is the Democratic Party establishment. They are terrified of genuine policy discussions on health care, Venezuela or Iran. Feel free to talk about Peter Buttigieg’s articulateness or Kamala Harris’s favorite music. But ask questions about Venezuela or the dysfunction of our current health care system? Kein Kommentar, says the Democratic Party.

Still, there is hope. The American people are starting to disengage from the mainstream media.

MSNBC and CNN’s ratings are plunging — post-Mueller report.

If we are lucky, this may augur an era of new thinking by the news media. Perhaps they will finally realize it is time to move on from 2016.

• K.R.K.

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

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com; May 16, 2019)

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

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; May 8, 2019)

My previous essay investigated whether tropical cyclones since 1960 have grown more intense. Admittedly, my finding that the minimum central pressure of the average tropical cyclone was dropping by .09 millibars (mb) every year was exploratory. I am a statistician, not a climatologist — which means I’m comfortable enough with climate data to do real damage.

Intellectual limitations aside, my earlier conclusion is consistent with other climatological studies whose models predict a higher frequency of high-intensity storms in the South Indian Ocean, the Northern Atlantic and worldwide.

My motive for analyzing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) tropical cyclone data was not about challenging climate science, but rather a demonstration of how much high-quality, globally comprehensive climate data is available to the public for analysis.

And to confirm, to my own satisfaction, many of claims being made by climate researchers regarding tropical cyclones.

To the credit of the climate science community, they put their data online. They don’t hide it. And when they systematically adjust it for historical inaccuracies and systematic measurement errors, they document it. Climate science isn’t a secret society and they aren’t hiding anything substantive from public scrutiny.

So when critics of my storm intensity article were actual, PhD-minted climatologists, not just amateur schleps like myself, I took notice.

According to one climatologist critical of my essay, I didn’t properly convey the natural mechanisms involved in tropical cyclone development and intensification which explain why a rapidly warming earth is not experiencing dramatically stronger cyclones (yet). While I did mention how warmer oceans provide more energy for cyclone development (which is true), it is also true that higher atmospheric temperatures create more wind shear which weakens storms. Climatologists, therefore, are not surprised that tropical cyclones have not significantly increased in intensity through the present.

Another critic directed my attention to data compiled by Colorado State University (using the same IBTrACS database I used for my analysis) showing that the annual accumulated cyclone energy (which combines frequency, size and intensity measures of cyclone strength) has not increased worldwide since 1980 (see Figure 1). Again, this is not a surprise to the climate science community.

Figure 1: Global Accumulated Cyclone Energy (Annual)

Finally, one other critic noted that I filtered my tropical cyclone dataset down to storms with sustained winds of at least 39 knots in order to minimize missing pressure data (particularly in the North Indian Ocean basin and for storms in the 1960s); however, I did not impute missing pressure values for the remaining 12 percent of tropical cyclones that still had missing data.

The missing data issue does give me pause as it is one of my consistent complaints about many statistical analyses reported in the popular media. The problem is too important to casually wave off (as I did in my tropical cyclone analysis).

Therefore, I have gone back and re-done my analysis with three major analytic changes: (1) I did not filter out smaller storms below 40 knots, (2) I restricted my analysis to 4,224 storms from the period 1980 to 2018 in order to minimize the occurrence of missing data, and (3) where there was still missing data (12% of storms, n=526), I imputed maximum sustained wind and minimum central pressure for all IBTrACS documented storms using a multiple imputation linear regression model.

For the minimum central pressure missing data model, the predictors were basin, storm duration, and maximum sustained winds (plus random error). For missing maximum wind data, the predictor variables were minimum central pressure, basin, and storm duration (plus random error). In cases where both pressure and wind data were missing (low information cases, n=179), the imputation models included only storm duration and basin (plus random error). Where pressure or wind data were available, the imputation models predicted 90 percent of the variance. For the low information cases, the imputation model predicted just over 30 percent of the variance.

To compare the revised results, Figure 2 shows the original pressure data series with a observed trend of -0.092 mb in minimum central pressure for the average tropical cyclone.

Figure 2: Average Minimum Central Pressure (millibars) per Tropical Cyclone (Without Missing Data Imputation)

Figure 3 shows the revised data series for minimum central pressure (globally) from 1960 to 2018. The revised model — with all missing cases imputed — reveals an even steeper decline per year in average minimum central pressure (b = -0.159). This is not surprising as most of the missing cases were among smaller cyclones occurring in the 1980s.

Figure 3: Average Minimum Central Pressure (millibars) per Tropical Cyclone (With Missing Data Imputation) and linear trend regression

If this linear trend continues, by 2100, the average tropical cyclone will have a minimum central pressure almost 13 mb lower than today. As noted in my previous essay, that can be the difference between a Category 1 storm and a Category 3 storm, though factors other than pressure also impact a storm’s maximum sustained winds.

Nonetheless, according to the linear trend model in Figure 3, tropical cyclones are going to be incrementally stronger over time, assuming the generating process (such as global warming) remains unchanged.

Consistent with decreasing central pressures, maximum sustained winds per storm are also rising (see Figure 4) by 0.166 knots every year. If this linear trend continues, by 2100, the average tropical cyclone will have maximum sustained winds almost 14 knots higher than today.

Figure 4: Average Maximum Sustained Winds (knots) per Tropical Cyclone and linear trend regression

Also consistent with theory and existing research by NASA, the number tropical cyclone days — which is annually a function of the number of tropical storms multiplied by the average cyclone’s lifespan — is declining (see Figure 5). The globe is seeing 4.4 fewer tropical cyclone days each year and if this trend continues, by 2100, the globe will experience 364 fewer cyclone days each year compared to today. That will be over half of the 590 cyclone days the global experienced in 2018.

Figure 5: Tropical Cyclone Days Annually (1980 to 2018) and linear trend regression

But the IBTrACS data reveals something else. Tropical cyclones are not just getting more intense, they may also be getting bigger.

With the strong caveat that there is significantly more missing data with the storm size parameters in the IBTrACS database, an exploratory analysis of the radius of the outermost closed isobar (ROCI) and the radius of maximum winds (RMW) indicates, since 2001, tropical cyclones may be getting larger.

Though the trend does not achieve statistical significance, the average tropical cyclone’s ROCI may be growing by 1.85 nautical miles per year worldwide (see Figure 6). By 2100, the average tropical cyclone could be wider by about 155 nautical miles — about one and a half Long Islands (NY) — and almost double the size of an average tropical cyclone today.

Figure 6: Average Radius of Outermost Closed Isobar (in nautical miles)

Similarly, within the North Atlantic basin where more complete data is available in IBTrACS, the radius of maximum winds for the average storm may be growing by 0.63 nautical miles each year — more than double the RMW of an average tropical cyclone today (see Figure 7). Again, this trend is not statistically significant, but possibly indicative of a longer term trend that would be in line with current theory and forecasts regarding global warming’s impact on tropical cyclones.

Figure 7: Average Radius of Maximum Winds (in nautical miles)

What does this all mean?

First, of all the assertions made in the mainstream media about climate change, much of it inaccurate, speculative and over-dramatized, we should not discount the real changes we are witnessing in the global occurrence of tropical cyclones. These storms may be less frequent, but they are getting stronger and bigger.

Second, my analysis here is simply modeling the behavior over time of selected tropical storm metrics, not the underlying causal mechanisms generating these trends. The strong assumption accompanying this approach is that the generating process behind each trend is constant and will persist into the future. That is not likely to be the case. Global warming is not a linear process and its impact over time is not either.

Finally, this non-peer-reviewed research on my part treats tropical storms as a singular phenomenon, which is a substantial over-simplification.

“You have to remember that storms aren’t one-dimensional,” according to NASA climatologist Dr. Anthony Del Genio. “There are many types of storms, and sorting out how aspects of each type respond to warming is where the science really gets interesting.”

The real research is going on at that level and explicitly modeling the impact of a warming planet on these complex meteorological phenomena.

What I am comfortable concluding from a statistical perspective, using data vetted by the climate science community, is that tropical cyclones are changing in frequency, size and intensity. Whether these trends continue and how these trends might change are the questions challenging climate scientists going forward.

• K.R.K.

Additional information

Good online resources for current climate science research are the following:

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/

AGU Publications: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/

NOAA Climate Resources: https://www.noaa.gov/climate

UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Online Report Library: https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/

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

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; April 13, 2019)

The mainstream media and the U.S. government tell us the indictment of Julian Assange is merely a case of prosecuting a man for aiding and abetting a felonious act and has little to do with press freedoms. Civil libertarians, in contrast, say the U.S. Attorney’s Office action is a clear-cut attack on the constitutional right of journalists to investigate and publish information that exposes government wrongdoing.

The reality is messier than either side want to believe.

Since the website’s inception over a decade ago, I have been uneasy about the WikiLeaks journalism model: Publishing large quantities of private (usually stolen) information under the rationale that it brings necessary transparency to important institutions in our society.

Assange sits in a British jail cell today because the U.S. government wants to prosecute him for aiding and abetting Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, in removing Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and diplomatic cables from a classified U.S. Dept. of Defense computer network (SIPRNet) in 2010. Manning, as well, sits in a Virginia jail cell today for refusing to testify before a grand jury regarding the Assange case.

The critical legal question (as of now) facing Assange is not whether he (WikiLeaks) had the right to publish the classified information that embarrassed the U.S. government in its revealing a significantly larger number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan than had been previously disclosed by the U.S. military, and also exposing sensitive communications within the U.S. and foreign diplomatic communities. The Trump Justice Department is emphasizing that they are not challenging WikiLeaks’ right to publish, but merely prosecuting Assange for his encouraging and materially helping Manning commit an illegal act.

Those cheering Arrange’s arrest have long argued that he (and Manning) did substantive damage to U.S. security by exposing the identities of Iraqi and Afghan informants working with the U.S. military and by exposing confidential and critical conversations within the diplomatic community.

“There is blood on their hands” is a common refrain in the national security establishment.

As for the actual Assange indictment, it is a little less dramatic. The conspiracy indictment issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office (Eastern District of Virginia) alleges that:

“Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning…to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications. Manning, who had access to the computers in connection with her duties as an intelligence analyst, was using the computers to download classified records to transmit to WikiLeaks. Cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log on to the computers under a username that did not belong to her. Such a deceptive measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to determine the source of the illegal disclosures…

…During the conspiracy, Manning and Assange engaged in real-time discussions regarding Manning’s transmission of classified records to Assange. The discussions also reflect Assange actively encouraging Manning to provide more information.”

But First Amendment defenders are eager to point out that what Assange is accused of doing is done by investigation journalists every day in the execution of their jobs.

Never shy about exposing the hypocrisy of the mainstream news media, journalist Glenn Greenwald points out that news organizations routinely assist in the discovery, delivery and concealment of stolen goods and information.

“The New York Times implemented a system to allow stolen materials to be delivered to it without the thief getting caught,” tweeted Greenwald to New York Time journalist Katie Benner, who defends Assange’s arrest.

“The New York Times actively aids stealing,” says Greenwald.

Furthermore, investigative journalists are not passive actors in bringing transparency to private and public institutions in the name of the public good. They are proactive participants in seeking, discovering and publishing such information. They don’t sit at their desks waiting for whistle blowers to deliver ‘stolen’ information that exposes potential wrongdoing — they identify, pursue, and talk to potential sources with access to such information.

Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein entered journalism lore because they weren’t afraid to prod, beg, and even shame potential sources into obtaining damning information about the Nixon administration.

But they still didn’t steal the information themselves — which is where the Assange case gets murky. To what extent are journalists are protected through the First Amendment to provide the incentives, tools and cover to help whistle blowers?

My no-law-background gut feeling says the U.S. Supreme Court will give tremendous latitude to journalists pursing the public interest. There is something about that Constitution of ours that swamps the temporary requirements of partisan bias and political convenience.

As for damage to U.S. security, the evidence against Manning and WikiLeaks is sparse. A 2011 DoD report concluded “with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former US leadership in Iraq.”

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave reporters in 2010 a similar assessment:

“The fact is governments deal with the United States because its in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us and not because they believe we can keep secrets,” he said. “Some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially …. the indispensable nation.”

“So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.”

More probable harm was done to intelligence informants cultivated through the U.S. military and intelligence efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Despite efforts by WikiLeaks to expunge identifying information regarding intelligence sources — for example, initially about 15,000 of the 92,000 documents obtained from Manning were not released in order to protect individuals cooperating with the U.S. military — Assange as subsequently asserted however that WikiLeaks is “not obligated to protect other people’s sources…unless it is from unjust retribution.”

And, in practice, it is almost impossible to remove enough information to protect all informants, particularly considering Manning lifted more than 740,000 pages of classified information from military servers.

“The lives of cooperating Afghans, Iraqis, and other foreign interlocutors have been placed at increased risk,” read a June 2011 Defense Intelligence Agency(DIA) executive summary regrading the impact of the Manning leaks.

I cannot categorically condone everything Assange and Manning did in releasing classified information — even as some of that information revealed likely war crimes committed by my government and its agents. It was likely a war crime when U.S. military personnel knowingly killed medical personnel (and two Reuters journalists) responding to a U.S. military attack on an adversarial target. [You can learn more about this attack and the accompanying video here.]

Without Manning and Assange’s actions, we may never have found about this now documented attack — and others like it. In my pedestrian view, learning of that attack is worth risking the lives of U.S. informants, who, after all, knowingly entered into that relationship cognizant of the risks involved.

Thus, at the end of the day, I stand with the Obama Dept. of Justice decision not to prosecute Assange on the belief that doing so would do significant harm to press freedom.

Nothing factual has changed since that Obama administration decision.

Furthermore, since WikiLeaks released the Manning materials, the U.S. security state has only grown bigger and more capable at invading the privacy of Americans and other persons protected by our Constitution. We must consider proportionality when deciding to prosecute and jail threats to a security state that far outweighs those threats in terms of power and ability to hide their illegal actions.

Adding to my inclination to defend Assange is that in over 10 years of WikLeaks’ existence, there is no concrete evidence suggesting it has ever published documents that were not authentic and accurate. CNN can’t seem to go 10 days without retracting a false story.

But the issue remains, to what extent is WikiLeaks responsible for protecting innocent people referenced in materials it publishes and to what extent is Assange, personally, responsible for aiding and abetting the theft of government property?

For Julian Assange’s own sake and reputation, he needs to have his case argued in the American court system, where I believe extenuating circumstances will lead to his acquittal.

But I don’t know that for a fact, and nor does anybody else.

• K.R.K.

Please send all comments, questions and federal indictments to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; April 9, 2019)

President Donald Trump was in prime free-styling mode while speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition last week in Las Vegas:

“I stood with Prime Minister Netanyahu…Benjamin Netanyahu…How’s the race going by the way? How is it? Whose going to win the race? Tell me. I don’t know. Well, its gonna be close. I think its gonna be close. Two good people. Two good people. But I stood with your prime minister (emphasis mine) at the White House to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the GOLAN! (emphasis Trump’s) Heights. The Golan Heights is something I’ve been hearing about for a long time…(extended applause)…The Golan Heights. So, I was talking to Ambassador (David) Freidman and — not about this — they’ve been trying to get that approved, as you know, for 52 years ’cause they’ve wanted recognition from…” (Trump’s stream of consciousness continued on for another 30 minutes)

The speech quickly went viral, with Trump’s critics focusing on the anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty implied by his saying “your prime minister.”

“Mr. President, words matter,” tweeted Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. “As with all elected officials, its critical for you to avoid language that leads people to believe Jews aren’t loyal Americans.”

Trump knew he was talking to Americans. After all, he was in Las Vegas. How could he not know? The only rational conclusion is that Trump thought his audience’s loyalties to Israel equaled, if not eclipsed, other loyalties.

Rep. Omar’s Controversial Statements on Israel

Even with a generous interpretation, Trump’s slur was patently more offensive than Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s suggestion in a February town hall meetingthat, after she had criticized Israeli policies towards Palestinians, she had been pressured from both sides of the political spectrum to confirm her loyalty to Israel.

“I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress,” responded Omar to criticisms of her town hall comments. “I have not said anything about the loyalty of others, but spoke about the loyalty expected of me.”

[Personally, I found Omar’s comment about U.S. support for Israel being all ‘about the Benjamins’ to be more offensive and interpretable as anti-Semitic.]

But for some, Omar’s clarification was insufficient.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said of Rep. Omar: “She is casting Jewish Americans as the other, suggesting a dual loyalty that calls our devotion to America into question.”

But Trump’s use of “your prime minister” is doing exactly that, directly. There is no nuance in Trump’s phrasing. He assumed his Las Vegas audience considered the political leader of another sovereign country to be their leader as well.

That is the definition of the dual loyalty slur. But was the deep-rooted anti-Semitism of Trump’s comment to the Republican Jewish Coalition ever acknowledged as such by the GOP and Israelis?

Of course not. After all, Trump has pretty much given Netanyahu everything he’s asked for, short of a war against Iran — and with two more years left in his term, that could still happen.

Despite Protestations from Party Elites, Israel is Now a Partisan Issue in U.S. Politics

Trump’s oratorical word salads have never been funny and, as president, the misinterpretations they invite only raise the possibility that he could do real damage to our national security and interests. Such solecisms in the context of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has killed 9,876 Palestinians and 1,263Israelis since 2000, over 2,300 being children, are particularly reckless.

Making the situation even more unpredictable is the Israeli policy under Netanyahu’s leadership to aggressively support and reinforce Trump’s leadership in the region.

By any objective measure, Netanyahu and Trump are besties. But to what end for the Israelis? So far, just short-term political gains, such as U.S. recognition of the Golan Heights and the U.S. Embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Those are purely symbolic outcomes from Israel’s perspective. Before Trump entered office, the U.S. Embassy was already, functionally, working out of Jerusalem and Israel’s control of the Golan Heights has been secure since 1974. Even Palestinian protestations over these U.S. policy moves have been muted and perfunctory.

But with the introduction of partisan politics into the U.S.-Israeli equation in the past 10 years, the Israeli alliance with the Republicans, and now Trump, may be effecting immeasurable damage to Israel’s (and U.S.) long-term interests.

Recent events on the 2020 presidential campaign trail illustrate this potential.

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, not exactly a risk taker when it comes to stating concrete policy ideas, said during a campaign stop in Iowa recently that the U.S.-Israeli relationship, to be successful, “must transcend partisanship in the United States, and it must be able to transcend a prime minister who is racist, as he warns about Arabs coming to the polls, who wants to defy any prospect for peace as he threatens to annex the West Bank, and who has sided with a far-right, racist party in order to maintain his hold on power.”

Holy Moses!

For anyone following the U.S.-Israeli relationship over the years, O’Rourke’s statement was unprecedented for a mainstream politician with presidential hopes. American politicians don’t call Israeli prime ministers racist (not even strong Netanyahu critics such as former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry or Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders). But, in the post-Obama world, the U.S.-Israeli relationship has fundamentally changed — even as U.S. foreign policy towards Israel is as supportive as it has ever been.

Should Israel annex large sections of the West Bank, as Netanyahu has promised should he form the next government after the April elections, the Two-State Solution, which is already on life-support, will be OBE (Overtaken-By-Events). There is no viable Palestinian state on the West Bank where Israel controls 60 percent of the land (see Figure 1). Even as most U.S. foreign policy experts still cling to the Two-State-Solution, on the ground, it is as dead as Jussie Smollet’s career.

Figure 1: Israeli Settlements on the West Bank

Trump’s Implicit Anti-Semitism Has Consequences

When Trump implies that American Jews are as loyal to Israel as they are to the U.S., he is not only saying something that is demonstrably untrue, he is reinforcing one of anti-Semitism’s bedrock falsehoods.

Ironically, he is also doing measurable harm to Israel’s support among American Jews.

“A growing number of American Jews look at Israel and see a country that is occupying Palestinian territory and breaking up peaceful Palestinian protests using force,” writes journalist Zack Beauchamp, a Jewish American with familial connections to Israel. “They also see a Jewish state that only recognizes one socially conservative strand of Jewry, Orthodox Judaism, as legitimate — which manifests in things like preventing liberal American Jews from praying in mixed-gender groups at the Western Wall, the holiest prayer site in Judaism.”

Trump’s politicization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has also impacted support for Israel across all Americans, and these opinions are dividing along party lines.

In a University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll, conducted in September and October of 2018 among a nationally representative sample of 2,352 Americans, a majority of Republicans (57%) indicated they want U.S. policy to lean in favor of Israel over the Palestinians, while a substantial majority of Democrats (82%) want it to lean toward neither side, and 8 percent want it to lean toward the Palestinians.

As Trump said many times on the 2016 campaign trail, “I will do more for Israel than any president in history,” after two years, he believes he has made good on that promise. But he also done great harm, not just to Palestinians who saw a significant increase in fatalities by Israeli forces in 2018, but to Israel itself by overtly linking U.S. policy towards Israel to his political fortunes.

Given Trump’s demonstrable propensity for perpetuating anti-Semitic tropes, that is a political marriage the Israelis may well regret.

• K.R.K.

Comments can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

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This is the fifth essay in a series dedicated to analyzing the U.S. eligible-voter population using the 2018 American National Election Study (ANES), an online survey administered in Dec. 2018 by researchers from the Univ. of Michigan & Stanford Univ. 

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By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; April 5, 2019)

Nothing makes a Democrat happier than describing the ‘average’ conservative Republican:

“The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all-reactionary, all-backward, ‘there-is-no-global-warming’ rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled,” says author and filmmaker Frank Schaeffer, a conservative Christian in his youth who became a liberal Democrat as an adult. “…the Republican Party — as it is now — must be utterly destroyed in 2020. The word euthanized comes to mind.”

Sean McElwee, a researcher for dataforprogress.org, offers a more balanced, less provocative description of the GOP’s conservative base:

“While non-college whites do indeed make up a significant portion of (Donald) Trump’s base, they also make up a non-trivial share of (Hillary) Clinton voters…

…If we define the base as a group making up a non-trivial share of the electorate that overwhelmingly prefers one party, it is fair to call white evangelicals Trump’s base. If we define the base purely by the size of the coalition, we might prefer instead white non-college voters or whites over 50, both of whom make up more than half of Trump’s voters.”

And New York Magazine writer Eric Levitz takes a variant approach by summarizing what motivates this conservative base — but the implication about who is being motivated is crystal clear:

“For decades now, the conservative movement has sought to keep its core voters confined to a carefully curated media ecosystem — one where the Democratic Party is a Marxist–Islamist organization, America is the world’s most over-taxed nation, illegal immigrants bear sole responsibility for the stagnation of middle-class wages (and/or all violent crime), and there’s never been a better time to buy gold coins.”

Schaeffer and Levitz’ descriptions wouldn’t be funny if they weren’t somewhat accurate.

These are stereotypes about Donald Trump’s conservative base — rooted in reality — but deeply misleading at the same time.

Summarizing 62 million Trump voters is a Sisyphean task even for statisticians and strategic consultants, much less for the average political journalist, which is why stereotyping is so seductive, as it is often based on kernels of truth.

Using the attitudinal segmentation detailed in my previous essays, I computed within each political segment the percentage who were white and did not have a 4-year college degree. As seen in Figure 1, the majority of the conservative base (also referred to as ‘Trump’s conservative base’ in this essay) fit this demographic description (63%). In comparison, only 31 percent of the Democratic progressive base shares those attributes.

On the surface, it appears fine to categorize — or, rather, stereotype — conservatives as less-educated, white people.

Figure 1: Prevalence of Whites without a 4-year College Degree by Political Segment

Data Source: 2018 American National Election Study (Pilot); Analytics & Segmentation by Kent R. Kroeger

But this characterization is not precise.

Anytime we use stereotypes as a heuristic device to save analytic time and energy, we risk mischaracterizing the world we’re trying to explain.

That is the case with many who try to describe Trump’s conservative base.

Stereotyping is lazy analytics

Stereotypes are cognitive short-cuts that help simplify our lives. We engage in stereotyping because it often works across a wide of range of daily activities.

When we choose a new restaurant, we judge it by location, cuisine, and price. That is stereotyping.

When we seek partners, we consider diction, education level, religious background, and even someone’s accent. That is stereotyping.

Stereotyping saves us time and effort. Psychologists James Hilton and William von Hippel define stereotypes as “mental representations of real differences between groups. . . allowing easier and more efficient processing of information.”

But stereotyping has a risk. It can mischaracterize the true nature of a group and its relationship to other groups. Trump’s almost monolithic white, less-educated voter base is not a myth, but its not the whole story either. And its certainly not the interesting story.

As we will see below, there is significant attitudinal diversity within the media-maligned conservative base, who could represent the tipping point in a Democrat landslide in 2020, or the foundation of a new, durable GOP electoral majority.

Yes, racism and sexism punctuated the 2016 election, but…

As the U.S. has become more educated and ethnically diverse, Republican voters have become more reflective of an earlier era in America, as they are now predominately white, Christian, and less likely — from even a decade ago — to be college graduates, according to a 2018 Pew Research study. Add in a growing partisan gender gap and it doesn’t take a PhD in demography or political science to realize this is voter base is problematic for the Republicans going forward.

Still, the formula worked for the Republicans in 2016.

Education levels among whites strongly correlated with their 2016 vote choice. The divide in vote preferences between highly-educated and lesser-educated whites grew dramatically during the 2016 campaign, according to a team of researchers led by University of Massachusetts–Amherst political scientist Brian Schaffner, and this gap is not explained by economics.

But this divide was not a reflection of greater economic stress among lesser-educated whites. According to Schaffner’s team, Trump’s vote was driven by sexism and racial denialism, not economics. “Explicit racist and sexist appeals appeared to cost Trump some votes from more educated whites, but it may have won him even more support among whites with less education.”

The UM-Amherst study, however, leaves a dark impression about the average Trump voter; even though, the analytic focus of the study had little to do with describing the average Trump voter. Its concern was in describing relationships between populations through marginal and conditional probabilities — which is not the same as describing a population such as Trump’s conservative base. Those are two different analytic tasks.

There is little doubt that Trump’s explicit appeals to nativism along with his own misogynistic behavior sharpened the sorting process among many voters still available to either Clinton or Trump in the last months of the 2016 election. But those ‘persuadable’ voters are not the same as the conservative base.

At a rally in Minnesota last summer, Donald Trump invited his audience to offer its opinion on the “fake news” media. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Compassion and Acceptance Defines the Largest Conservative Bloc

Don’t let the sounds and images from Trump campaign rallies (or the rambling, ignominious rants of Trump himself) define the entire conservative base. The bloc of voters that most helped elect Trump cannot be summarized with stereotyping labels such as ‘racist,’ ‘sexist,’ ‘homophobic,’ or ‘anti-immigrant.’ I understand the temptation, but resist.

Employing a two-stage attitudinal segmentation of 2018 ANES respondents, in the first stage, using attitudes related to current policy issues (immigration, trade, health care, economic inequality, gun control and climate change) and, in the second stage, using attitudes on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other social organizations, three sub-segments are identified within the GOP’s conservative base (see Figure 2):

Old Guard Conservatives (33% of Conservatives; 9% of all eligible voters).

Lost Hope Conservatives (27% of Conservatives; 7% of all eligible voters).

Compassionate Conservatives (40% of Conservatives; 11% of all eligible voters).

Figure 2: The Sub-Segments within the Conservative and Progressive Political Segments

Data Source: 2018 American National Election Study (Pilot); Analytics & Segmentation by Kent R. Kroeger

Compassionate Conservatives are the largest sub-segment of conservatives (40%) and distinguish themselves from both the Lost Hope and Old Guard sub-segments with respect to their favorability towards other races, ethnicities, and social groups (i.e., group affinities). On average, Compassionate Conservatives rate whites roughly the same as they do Blacks and Hispanics (in contrast to the other conservative sub-segments who rate whites significantly higher than those groups). Second, Compassionate Conservatives demonstrate greater affinities towards Gay and Lesbian, Transgender, Muslim and immigrant Americans relative to Lost Hope and Old Guard sub-segments. They are, for lack of a better description, more open-minded than other conservatives and represent the largest number of conservatives.

Given the relatively small sample size of conservatives (effective n = 331) and progressives (effective n = 358), most of the demographic differences between the sub-segments are statistically insignificant. However, there are some notable exceptions:

• Compassionate Conservatives are the wealthiest sub-segment
• Lost Hope Conservatives are the least wealthy sub-segment
• Old Guard Conservatives are the oldest and least Female sub-segment

While more detail on the attitudinal and demographic differences between the conservative (and progressive) sub-segments can be found in the Appendix below, the following graphs highlight some of the more prominent attitudinal differences.

Figure 3 maps the conservative and progressive sub-segments based on their average ratings of whites and Blacks. The diagonal line shows where both racial groups are rated the same (equity). Four of the six groups are relatively close to this line (and statistically indistinguishable from it), while Justice Progressives, on average, rate Blacks higher than whites and Lost Hope Conservatives do the opposite.

Figure 3: Ratings of Blacks and Whites (Conservative and Progressive Sub-Segments)

Data Source: 2018 American National Election Study (Pilot); Analytics & Segmentation by Kent R. Kroeger

On these racial attitudes, Compassionate Conservatives (the orange circle) have more in common with Establishment Progressives (the dark blue circle)than they do with the two other conservative sub-segments.

On attitudes regarding immigration, Compassionate Conservatives also distinguish themselves among the conservatives. While they generally agree that immigration numbers into the U.S. should decrease (horizontal axis in Figure 4), they depart from their political brethren on whether immigration and diversity hurts American society (vertical axis in Figure 4). Only 20 percent of Compassionate Conservatives believe immigration and diversity hurts society, while 46 percent of Old Guard Conservatives and 57 percent of Lost Hope Conservatives believe it does. That is a significant and dramatic difference within the conservative base.

Figure 4: Attitudes on Immigration and Diversity (Conservative and Progressive Sub-Segments)

Data Source: 2018 American National Election Study (Pilot); Analytics & Segmentation by Kent R. Kroeger

Figures 5 through 7 summarize the sub-segments (conservative and progressive) on their ratings of Gays and Lesbians, Transgender, and Muslims. As seen in this series of bar charts, the distributions of the identity group ratings by the Compassionate Conservatives resemble the progressive sub-segments far more than the two other conservative segments. In particular, the distributions for the Compassionate Conservatives closely match those for the Paycheck Progressives, a sub-segment of progressives that skews male and less wealthy.

Figure 5: Ratings of Gays and Lesbians (Conservative and Progressive Sub-Segments)

Data Source: 2018 National Election Study (Pilot); Analytics and Segmentation by Kent R. Kroeger

Figure 6: Ratings of Transgender (Conservative and Progressive Sub-Segments)

Data Source: 2018 National Election Study (Pilot); Analytics and Segmentation by Kent R. Kroeger

Figure 7: Ratings of Muslims (Conservative and Progressive Sub-Segments)

Data Source: 2018 National Election Study (Pilot); Analytics and Segmentation by Kent R. Kroeger

If LGBTQ rights and other identity-based issues were major vote drivers for conservatives, 40 percent of the GOP/Trump base might listen to Democratic messages on such topics during the current election cycle. Then again, the GOP might just as logically target Paycheck Progressives with uniquely tailored messages.

If there is one constant in American politics, every national election is potentially competitive. The popular vote difference between the two parties in U.S. House elections has exceeded 10 percentage points just six times since 1946 (out of 37 elections).

Neither the Republicans or Democrats enter an election without hope or possibilities. Whether a party leverages their strategic and tactical strengths enough to fulfill those hopes is another matter.

Are Compassionate Conservatives the GOP’s “Breakaway Province” or their beacon to the future?

A Democratic-aligned pollster once described Reagan Democrats, a working-class, once reliable voting segment of the Democratic Party coalition, as the Democratic Party’s ‘breakaway province.’ The defection of this ‘province’ to the Republicans in 1980 ushered in Ronald Reagan’s charismatic leadership and a conservative ideology that would dominate the American political landscape until the 2008 financial crisis.

Though some political scientists are skeptical that realignments actually happen — David Mayhew once writing, “Electoral politics is to an important degree just one thing after another… and their underlying causes are not usefully sortable into generation-long spans” — some political observers believe the 2016 Trump election may be the commencement of the next great realignment.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius recently opined: “Political systems can be like scientific theories. Sometimes there emerge so many anomalous elements that don’t fit the existing structure that the theory collapses, and a new one arises… We may be entering such a period. The definition of a winning Democrat may be that, in response to Trump’s rambling circus of self-aggrandizement, he or she could create a genuinely coherent new political order.”

One possible target of Ignatius’ new political order could be Compassionate Conservatives whose attitudes resemble many in the Democrats’ progressive base, the presumption being that the three factions in the progressive left will hold together as long as Trump is in office.

The other common assumption rising from observations like Ignatius’ is that a centrist candidate could be very attractive to Republicans and Democrats disillusioned by the ideological extremism of their parties — and that an ideologue from the left (like Bernie Sanders) or right could not build such a coalition as easily as a centrist candidate.

But the political world doesn’t operate under this naive voting model where voters line up their opinions relative to those of political candidates and make their vote choices accordingly. Centrists and non-ideological voters, in particular, are generally unable or disinclined to make decisions this way.

Political scientists realized long ago that using spatial models of voter attitudes to predict vote choice aren’t terribly informative. To the contrary, two realities describe American voting behavior: (1) Vote choice often drives voters’ opinions (not the other way around), and (2) there is little electoral penalty for political extremism.

The result is that idealistic and folksy conceptions of our pluralistic democracy as one where voters ‘throw the bums out’ when their policies fail is dangerously wrong.

Political scientists Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, in their book, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, conclude that “abandoning the folk theory of democracy is a prerequisite to both greater intellectual clarity and real political change. Too many democratic reformers have squandered their energy on misguided or quixotic ideas.”

In explaining why Bernie Sanders can attract voters that don’t necessarily agree with his policies, Achen and Bartels write:

“Decades of social-scientific evidence show that voting behavior is primarily a product of inherited partisan loyalties, social identities and symbolic attachments. Over time, engaged citizens may construct policy preferences and ideologies that rationalize their choices, but those issues are seldom fundamental. That is one key reason contemporary American politics is so polarized: The electoral penalty for candidates taking extreme positions is quite modest because voters in the political center do not reliably support the candidates closest to them on the issues.”

The point is simply that we cannot assume a candidate’s views are a direct reflection of his/her supporters’ views. And we see that phenomenon in the 2018 ANES data where Centrists are often low-information voters who support candidates not always close to their own personal opinions.

One reason I don’t show the Centrist political segments when mapping opinions and attitudes (such as in this essay) is that their political behavior is either too unpredictable or non-existent (i.e., non-voters). The more ideologically cohesive political segments are far more interesting.

Which is why Compassionate Conservatives (on the right) and Paycheck Progressives (on the left) are so intriguing and potentially more impactful in the 2020 election and for the futures of their respective parties.

Contrary to media narratives, the potent political division within the Democratic Party is not between Centrists and Progressives but between Establishment Progressives (think Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke) and Justice Progressives (think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren). But even those two political segments agree far more than they disagree. On health care reform, for example, the distance between Sanders’ Medicare-for-Allplan (a single public option for all) and the Democratic establishment’s Medicare-for-America (offering a public option to go with the current private health care system) is small when compared to what the Republicans offer on health care reform — which is mostly nothing.

As for the GOP’s conservative base, the media narrative on its composition is not much more than stereotyping and it is generally wrong. Representing two-fifths of conservatives, Compassionate Conservatives mirror the Democrats more than other conservatives on racial, gender, and cultural attitudes. And not only are they the largest conservative segment, they are wealthier and younger than the party’s Old Guard, promising that the power of Compassionate Conservatives within the GOP is more likely to grow than shrink proceeding into the future.

The battle for the soul of the Republican Party will be fought between the three sub-segments of conservatives described in this essay. The older, more politically active Old Guard against two relatively young sub-segments, themselves divided by education, economic status, and levels of open-mindedness.

The conservative base is not a white, uneducated monolith of racists, sexists, and homophobes (…don’t get me wrong, these conservatives do exist). But, attitudinally, the conservative base is remarkably diverse. If it weren’t, the GOP would be dead in the water heading into 2020.

• K.R.K.

For datasets and statistical codes, send requests to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

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APPENDIX: A METHODOLOGICAL SIDEBAR

A Two-Stage Segmentation Based on Policy Attitudes and Identity Politics

This essay uses an two-stage attitudinal segmentation of U.S. eligible voters as its data source to identify the GOP’s conservative base (measured in Dec. 2018).

In the segmentation’s first step, all 2,500 ANES respondents were clustered based on a series of attitudinal questions related specific social and political policies (e.g., trade, immigration, gun control, climate change, etc.) in order to create relatively homogeneous political segments. In other words, the people within each segment possess relatively similar attitudes on policy issues [More detail on these segments can be found in the previous essays, starting here.]

A five-cluster solution was selected based on fit characteristics and interpretability (Figure A.1). Progressives are the largest political segment today, accounting for 30 percent of the eligible voter population, followed by Conservatives (27%) and Independents (19%).

Figure A.1: The Political Segments in the U.S. eligible voter population

Data Source: 2018 National Election Study (Pilot); Analytics and Segmentation by Kent R. Kroeger

This essay is focused on the Conservatives, who were additionally segmented based on their racial attitudes and group affinities (i.e., orientation towards identity politics).

The second-stage segmentation identified three sub-segments within the Conservative political segment: Old Guard, Lost Hope, and Compassionate Conservatives. [My fourth essay discusses in detail the three Progressive sub-segments within the Democratic Party’s base.]

Compassionate Conservatives are the largest of the three Conservative sub-segments (40 percent of the Conservative segment and 11 percent of the total population) and, as we will see below, counter many of the stereotypes presented in the national media about the Trump base (Figure A.2).

Figure A.2: The Sub-Segments within the Conservative and Progressive Political Segments

Data Source: 2018 National Election Study (Pilot); Analytics and Segmentation by Kent R. Kroeger

Figure A.3 shows the average affinity scores (rating on a 0 to 100 scale) for each Conservative sub-segment. Where all three sub-segments agree is no surprise: They like Donald Trump, whites, rural Americans, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; and they dislike Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the #MeToo movement, socialists, journalists, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller (though on the latter, opinions have probably changed in the last few days).

Figure A.3: Racial Attitudes and Group Affinity Questions Used for 2nd-Stage Segmentation

Data source: 2018 American National Election Study (Pilot); Segmentation by Kent Kroeger (NuQum.com); Color shading is determined within the column (i.e., political sub-segment)

However, significant differences in racial attitudes and group affinities also delineate the three sub-segments. Most axiomatic are the highly negative views Lost Hope Conservatives hold towards Blacks, Hispanics and immigrants. Lost Hope Conservatives, representing only 27 percent of the Conservative political segment, are consistent with mainstream stereotypes of the Trump base: They are anti-immigrant and racially-biased (and probably sexist too).

In counterpose, Compassionate Conservatives distinguish themselves in two ways from both the Lost Hope and Old Guard sub-segments. First, on average, they rate whites roughly the same as they do Blacks and Hispanics (in contrast to the other sub-segments who rate whites significantly higher than the other races and ethnicities). Second, Compassionate Conservativesdemonstrate greater affinities towards gays and lesbians, transgender people, Muslims and immigrants relative to Lost Hope and Old Guard sub-segments. They are, for lack of a better description, more compassionate and open to the world and its inherent differences.

Though not quite a majority of the Conservative base, Compassionate Conservatives probably represent a better conspectus of the “typical” Trump-voting conservative than either the Old Guard or Lost Hope sub-segments.

Demographics and Behaviors

Figure A.4 details the demographic and behavioral characteristics of the sub-segments. In this table, the color shading is determined by each row. For example, in the first row, Establishment Progressives have the highest incidence of females (60%) and the Old Guard Conservatives have the lowest (37%).

Figure A.4: Demographic and Behavioral Characteristics (Conservative and Progressive Sub-Segments)

The starkest differences between conservatives and progressives are in the incidence of Blacks, Hispanics, a college education, Trump voters (no surprise), and non-religiousness.

Within the conservative segment, Compassionate Conservatives stand out asbeing very white and having high incomes, while the Old Guard are very male, religious, and old. The Old Guard were also the most supportive of Trump in 2016 and had the highest vote turnout percentage of the six sub-segments. Lost Hope Conservatives stand out from other conservatives with the highest percentage of females (47%) and the lowest average incomes.

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Additional Graphics

Figure A.5: Demographic and Behavioral Characteristics (Conservative and Progressive Sub-Segments)

Data Source: 2018 National Election Study (Pilot); Analytics and Segmentation by Kent R. Kroeger

Figure A.6: Ratings of the #MeToo Movement and the Transgender (Conservative and Progressive Sub-Segments)

Data Source: 2018 National Election Study (Pilot); Analytics and Segmentation by Kent R. Kroeger