By Kent R. Kroeger (May 2, 2018)

A delusive debate has erupted in Washington, D.C., driven mostly by narrow partisan agendas, with little attention to the real issues involved. In the process, the Trump administration has put congressional Democrats in the position of defending government secrecy and privilege at the expense of the public’s right to know how its government operates.

This newest partisan conflict concerns a proposed policy at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that will change how the agency assesses and uses scientific research during the regulatory and rule-making process.

Though this new policy has not been formally written, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced in an April interview with the Daily Caller a potential policy that would prohibit the EPA from using scientific research unless its resultant data are released publicly for independent scientists and industry experts to review.

Pruitt’s policy proposal would change a long-standing EPA policy allowing regulators to depend on non-public scientific data in developing environmental rules and regulations.

“We need to make sure their data and methodology are published as part of the record,” Pruitt said to The Daily Caller. “Otherwise, it’s not transparent. It’s not objectively measured, and that’s important.” According to Pruitt, ‘scientific secrecy’ increases the likelihood of bad science— and even fraud — influencing public policy.

Pruitt will reverse long-standing EPA policy allowing regulators to rely on non-public scientific data in crafting rules.

The response from Democrats and environmental advocates was swift. In their view, this policy is designed to restrict the scientific research available to the agency when it writes environmental regulations and, in cases where a study’s data are made available to the public, risks violating confidentiality agreements signed by the study’s participants.

Moreover, such transparency will give critics of EPA regulations, particularly those pertaining to the fossil fuels industry, an increased opportunity to undermine the credibility of the science underwriting those regulations.

Recalling industry resistance to the Six Cities Study (published in 1993) on the health impact of air pollution, Sean Gallagher, a government relations officer with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said Pruitt’s new transparency policy would have prevented research like the Six Cities Study to influence environmental policy.

“They (the fossil fuels industry) didn’t like the regulation, so they tried to attack the science underlying the regulation,” Mr. Gallagher told the New York Times. “It has become very clear to us that this is not about science. This is a means to an end.”

According to Pruitt’s critics, this transparency policy would have a significant impact on environmental regulations premised on research linking pollution and other toxic hazards to individual health outcomes. Without human exposure data, many EPA regulations would never exist.

Hence, the strong belief among congressional Democrats that this is exactly the outcome Pruitt and the Trump administration want.

The New York Times editorial board summarized Pruitt’s motives as such:

“Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, took yet another step to muzzle the scientific inquiry that for years has informed sound policy at an agency he seems determined to destroy. He told his subordinates that they could no longer make policy on the basis of studies that included data from participants who were guaranteed confidentiality.”

So who is right? Is the Pruitt transparency proposal an attempt to increase the government’s accountability to the people? Or a cynical use of privacy rights to prevent significant public health research influencing environmental policy?

In essence, this current dispute is a battle between two equally democratic virtues: government transparency versus individual privacy rights.

With respect to EPA regulations, Pruitt’s critics assume privacy is sacrificed by increased transparency. Pruitt and the Trump administration, in contrast, believe one doesn’t compromise the other.

In this debate, Pruitt and the Trump administration are more right than their critics. Increased scientific transparency through the public release of scientific data does not have to jeopardize study participants’ privacy and, therefore, should not impact the availability of scientific data in the development of environmental policy.

I worked for five years (2002–2007) in the Defense Manpower Data Center, the U.S. Department of Defense unit responsible for implementing the release of public use datasets derived from opinion surveys of U.S. military personnel.

Our research office conducted surveys of military personnel on topics ranging from a person’s financial situation, health status, mental health issues, sexual assault and attitudes about their military service. These were highly sensitive topics and privacy was paramount in the successful collection and analysis of this type of information.

Internally, data from our surveys informed personnel policy decisions ranging from sexual assault to the DoD’s Tricare health care system. But we also had researchers external to the government using our data for evaluating the status of our nation’s civilian and military defense personnel.

In that effort, our office implemented de-identification methods on the survey data that protected the privacy of survey respondents but also allowed academic and defense policy ‘think tanks’ to access DoD survey data.

It is unlikely that the datasets informing environmental policy are more sensitive than those informing defense personnel policy.

Transparency was not compromised by privacy considerations within DoD survey research because it was never considered a zero-sum game. Both democratic virtues of transparency and privacy existed together without ever one diminishing the other.

How is that possible?

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a measurement standards laboratory, and a non-regulatory agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote innovation and industrial competitiveness.

The Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) of 2014 establishes NIST as responsible for developing information security standards and guidelines for federal information systems, including establishing rules and procedures for protecting Privacy Act of 1974 information.

In Dec. 2016, NIST released draft guidelines on how government agencies can prepare datasets for public release once those agencies de-identify individuals within the datasets without compromising their scientific value while also protecting individuals’ private information.

According to NIST, “De-identification is not a single technique, but a collection of approaches, algorithms, and tools that can be applied to different kinds of data with differing levels of effectiveness. In general, the potential risk to privacy posed by a dataset’s release decreases as more aggressive de-identification techniques are employed, but data quality decreases as well.”

Data scientists have established procedures by which identifying information in a dataset can be protected using indirect identifiers, such as the commonly used k-anonymity model. Furthermore, a wide range of software tools are already developed to implement various de-identification procedures, including AnonTool, ARX, the Cornell Anonymization Toolkit, Open Anonymizer, Privacy Analytics Eclipse, µ-ARGUS, sdcMicro, SECRETA, and the UTD Anonymization Toolbox.

Once identifying information is removed from a government dataset, the government has a number of methods by which it can release the dataset to the public. These include:

● The Release and Forget model: The de-identified data is released to the public directly without any access restrictions.

● The Data Use Agreement (DUA) model: The de-identified data is made available only to qualified users under a legally binding data use agreement that details how the data can be used.

● The Synthetic Data with Verification Model: A synthetic dataset is created that maintains the statistical properties of the original dataset, but which does not contain private information.

● The Enclave model: The de-identified data is maintained in a segregated enclave that restricts access to the original data, and only accepts queries from pre-qualified researchers.

There is no privacy-based excuse for federal agencies to restrict the use of individual-based scientific data in the development of public policy.

Under the Obama administration, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) directed Federal agencies in 2013 to develop plans to provide for increased public access to digital scientific data. Under its guidelines, Federal agencies were charged with releasing data in a form that permits future analysis but does not threaten individual privacy.

Pruitt’s proposal for new transparency rules within EPA are entirely consistent with the OSTP directives. Does that mean Pruitt and the Trump administration won’t use this new requirement to de-legitimize research data that may contradict their political agenda? Of course that is a possibility. Pruitt’s transparency proposal may be no more than a Trojan horse designed to undermine existing and future environmental regulations.

But the challenge facing environmental scientists under Pruitt’s transparency proposal is not how to avoid public disclosure of their research data, but how to defend their findings in the political arena.

Pruitt’s transparency proposal is entirely consistent with this nation’s democratic ideals.

So, why the resistance from Democrats and environmental activists to Pruitt’s proposal?

The answer is politics. Period.

K.R.K.

Insults and ad hominems can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, April 22, 2018)

Cartoonist Charles Schultz was a subversive. Lucy Van Pelt pulling the football away from Charlie Brown at the last second was his metaphor for the insincerity and duplicity of the power elites.

Lucy was the power establishment. Charlie Brown was the rest of us.

Progressives today may not want to be associated with Charlie Brown (he seemed to lose a lot), but there is no shame in that comparison. Charlie Brown was honest, trusting, and pure of heart. There is no dishonor there.

As our mainstream media teed-up another superfluous non-issue to relentlessly grind on (this time it was Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen), a progressive leader had the gall to suggest her party’s pursuit of the current president should not blind them to a real issue: Americans’ civil rights.

Nina Turner, president of ‘Our Revolution’, a progressive advocacy organization started by Bernie Sanders’ former presidential campaign staff, was on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper when she weighed in on the FBI’s raids on the offices of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen:

“Throughout the history of this country, especially when it comes to African-American folks — Black Panthers, Dr. King, Malcolm X and other civil rights freedom fighters— you can see that sometimes the government can go too far in its efforts. Now that is not to say the Cohen incident is parallel to that, but as American citizens we should have some concern for how this goes, even if it is against someone we don’t like. This is about how we act as a government.”

Turner understands that the ‘means’ do not necessarily justify the ‘ends.’ Furthermore, she made clear that the FBI’s Cohen raids were not necessarily an abuse of power, but simply that Americans should be vigilant in ensuring the government doesn’t violate the rights of its citizens, even those citizens we don’t otherwise ‘like.’

Predictably, on cue, establishment Democrats lashed out at Turner:

What will it take for Democratic Party progressives to realize they are no longer welcome in their own party?

Since 1992, there have been two political parties in this country: the traditional Republican Party, led (for now) by Trump, and the Pro-Choice Republican Party, otherwise known as establishment Democrats, led by Obama administration holdovers, such as Tom Perez, and the smoldering embers of what is left from the Clinton political machine.

Since Bill Clinton took control of the Democratic Party in 1992, our nation has effectively lived under one-party rule, where the two nominal parties wage electoral battles on social and culture war issues, distracting voters from the real economic issues that most impact people’s lives.

And Donald Trump is the Frankenstein monster this one-party-system has created. It’s a system that ignores the economic realities of working-class and middle-class Americans. It’s a system that allows income disparities on a scale not seen since the robber baron era in the late 19th-century. It’s a system that pretends the covert drone wars perpetuated and refined by the Obama administration are antiseptic enough to keep our political leaders’ hands clean while they proceed to destabilize Muslim-majority countries not sufficiently suppliant to American interests.

And now the establishment Democrats demand discipline from the progressive wing of their party in order to slay a creation of their own making — Donald J. Trump.

Progressives, don’t fall for the con. Donald Trump came to power on their watch, not yours.

In their heart, progressives know Democratic Party leaders no longer welcome them and every day progressives try to bring their concerns and ideas to the attention of the party elites, is a day they’ve lost turning those concerns and ideas into actual public policy.

It’s a political system where bank executives and fund managers are allowed to sponge billions of dollars from average Americans through fraudulent underwriting practices and deceptive risk pricing (among other causes of the 2007–2008 financial crisis) and not ONE goes to jail. Eight years of the Obama administration and no banker goes to jail for their naked theft of billions of dollars?!

Establishment Democrats are in no position to lecture progressives about the dangers of the Trump administration.

Not when Democrats controlled both congressional chambers for first two years of the Obama administration and fulfilled his campaign promise of affordable, universal health care by passing a Republican-designed health care plan, the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Did progressives ever ask Obama, if you are going to pass a health care law without the support of Republicans, why not bite the whole enchilada and pass a true universal health care plan?

Bernie Sanders and Michael Moore did. Who else?

Many progressives still don’t want to hear this fact: Obama and the establishment Democrats’ health care, Big Pharma and insurance industry donors were never going to allow substantive health care reform. It was all a con, sold to progressives by an intelligent and charming community organizer from Chicago.

This is not cynicism. This is how government works in a one-party-system. False choices. Pre-determined outcomes.

And, now, those same establishment Democrats are demanding progressives get in line and take down Trump and the Republicans. When progressives suggest the media’s obsession with the Trump presidency, particularly the Trump-Russia collusion story, is a distraction from genuine issues, the establishment Democrats quickly stomp the thought out through shaming and rich-splaining.

Never mind that the policy constants of the past thirty years supported by these same Democrats, globalist economics (deregulation and open markets) and neocon regime change wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria), have left this country with dangerous amounts of public debt, increased income inequality, and seemingly irreconcilable social divisions.

These policies laid the groundwork for the populist uprising in the Republican Party and is directly responsible for the rise of Donald Trump.

It takes real balls for the establishment Democrats to then turn around and blame progressives for the election of Trump.

One Step Back to Take two Steps Forward

There comes a time when it takes one step backwards before you can take two steps forward.

This is that time for the progressives.

Two intersecting forces make NOW the time for the progressives to show their strength.

The first force is the impending implosion of the Republican Party under Trump’s incompetent leadership. Not even Nikki Haley will save the party by the time the 2020 election comes around. The Republicans are a dead-party-walking.

The second force is the overwhelming expectation that the Democrats will regain control of the U.S House in 2018. Perhaps even the U.S. Senate is in play.

Progressives must understand this simple reality: Establishment Democrats are Republicans. They have seduced progressives with their socially liberal inclinations, though progressives should have had a clue at their insincerity when it took Hillary Clinton until 2015 to publicly declare her support for marriage equality. You may have been with her, but she was never really with you.

The humble truth is, when establishment Democrats win, the Republicans win.

The progressives must therefore focus on taking back their own party from establishment Democrats before taking on the Republicans. The progressives have no chance of rolling back Republican policies until the establishment Democrats are shown the door and gifted back to the Republican Party where they belong.

Let the Republicans have Bill and Hillary Clinton. Trust me, the Democratic Party won’t miss them.

For now, run as independents

So, for those progressives that recognize the establishment Democrats’ big con, what next?

Where progressive Democrats have already won the party nomination. the task is straight forward: Get them elected.

In many states, it is already too late to put up progressives Democrats in the primaries. The only option now is to run progressives as independent party candidates in the general election.

Bernie Sanders’ supporters have built the grassroots fundraising and electioneering infrastructure necessary to organize a nationwide candidate filing program for the general election.

However, independent and minor party filing deadlines for the general election are rapidly approaching. Here are just a few coming up in the next few weeks:

A more complete list of filing deadlines is here.

In those states where deadlines are missed, progressives can partner with other minor parties (such as the Green Party) with candidates on the general election ballot.

Yes, if successful, this strategy will keep the Republicans in power another two years.

That is the price progressives must pay for allowing Republicans to usurp control of the Democratic Party in 1992 and letting them carry the party’s banner for the next 26 years.

Progressives will never beat the Republicans in Congress until they beat them in their own party.

How the establishment Democrats continuously mistreat and marginalize people like Nina Turner tells us all we need to know about their true intentions.

Progressives, now is the time to take back your party.

K.R.K.

Cards and letters can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com or kkroeger@nuqum.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, April 20, 2018)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

The chances are still good that the Democrats will win control of at least the U.S. House this November.

The prediction market PredictIt.com gives the Democrats a 69 percent chance of gaining control of the U.S. House. And while the same market gives the Democrats only a 38 percent chance of controlling the U.S. Senate, those are odds the Democrats only a year ago would have made them giddy with optimism.

My own midterm election models (which you can access here) indicate, under current conditions, the Republicans will lose 37 House seats and 4 Senate seats, putting both chambers under the control of the Democrats.

The smart money remains solidly in the Democratic Party’s corner for the 2018 midterms.

Yet, with the 2016 presidential election as a vivid reminder, Democrats know there is no such thing as a ‘sure thing’ in American politics. Despite a year and a half media obsession over the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, on November 7th, the Democrats could still find themselves in the minority in both congressional chambers.

Here is why that is still a real possibility…

The Mueller investigation may not end with a definitive conclusion

For 18 months the Trump-Russia collusion story has dominated the national news media. According to the Tyndall Report, among the Top 20 news stories of 2017, Russia-related stories accounted for 31 percent of the coverage by the three broadcast news networks. The ratio for the cable news networks undoubtedly would be even higher.

Yet, after all this hostile coverage of the Trump presidency, Democrats need to prepare themselves for this real possibility: The Robert Mueller-led investigation probably will not indict Donald Trump.

“Mueller will not indict Trump for obstruction of justice or for any other crime. Period. Full stop. End of story. Speculations to the contrary are just fantasy,” wrote Paul Rosenzweig in The Atlantic last January. “Mueller will not indict the president, even for money laundering. The resolution of the current American crisis is going to be political, not criminal. The future lies with Congress and, ultimately, the electorate, not with prosecutors and the courts.”

Rosenzweig isn’t coming out of nowhere with that conclusion. Twenty years ago he served as a Senior Counsel in the investigation of President Clinton. What is his rationale? “The Department of Justice has a long-standing legal opinion that sitting presidents may not be indicted,” writes Rosenzweig. “First issued in 1973 during the Nixon era, the policy was reaffirmed in 2000, during the Clinton era.”

And what can we expect from the Mueller probe with respect to President Trump? According to Rosenzweig, he will file a report on his findings with the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein (since the Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself).

We are going to get a report. And based on what has been revealed so far, the chances of the Mueller probe proving Trump (or anyone in his orbit) colluded with the Russians to impact the 2016 election is less than certain.

Such an ambiguous outcome might further energize #TheResistance’s resolve to put the Democrats in charge of Congress. But it also has the potential to torpedo the movement’s organizing assumption that Trump is not just a misogynistic buffoon, but a traitor. The reality that Trump is not a Russian tool will be deflating for many of his critics.

Americans may come to the defense of an embattled president

Democrats should be concerned about another potential outcome of the Mueller probe. The American public may not just grow weary of the Trump-Russia collusion story, a significant percentage may rally around the president, particularly if the economy remains strong and real progress towards peace is achieved on the Korean peninsula.

There is an historical precedent for this phenomenon. Kenneth Starr’s probe into an array of controversies surrounding President Bill Clinton, including his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, resulted in the House impeaching the president on Dec. 19, 1998. Interestingly, as evidenced in the graph below, Clinton’s Gallup job approval ratings rose consistently until the House impeachment. And though his ratings did dip during the Senate trial (in which Clinton was not convicted), they never dropped below 50 percent.

Of course, how Americans react to Trump’s impending impeachment (assuming the Democrats take the House back) may be very different from the Clinton experience.

According to the April 2018 Quinnipiac poll, 52 percent of Americans believe Robert Mueller is conducting a “fair” investigation. While still a majority, this is the lowest level of support the Mueller probe has received from the American public.

Is this evidence of “Mueller probe fatigue”? Perhaps. At a minimum, the Democrats would be well advised to track the public’s mood with respect to the Mueller probe, particularly among independents and Democratic-leaning voters. Should either segment show growing signs of ‘Mueller fatigue,’ the Democrats will have a problem in November.

The economy shows no signs of slowing down

The economy is not working in the Democrats’ favor either. It shows no signs of slowing down, even with trade wars lurking about. Whether the credit belongs chiefly with Barack Obama or with Trump is anyone’s guess. What does matter is to whom the American people give the credit and the most recent evidence, from an April 2018 Quinnipiac University poll, is that a plurality of Democrats (!) now believe Trump — not Barack Obama — is responsible for the current strength of the country’s economy. As of April 9, 46 percent of Democrats agreed that Trump is more responsible for the United States economy’s current strength is due to Trump.

According to the New York Fed’s yield curve model, there is an 11 percent probability of a recession in the United States in the next twelve months (please check out this model’s accuracy here).

The Democrats are not likely to get any help from a souring economy when election day rolls around and they will face an opposition party that will try to make the election all about the economy.

If I were a betting man (and I am), I would say the economy is not going to help the Democrats in November, not that they need it to since midterm election results are not a simple function of the economy. Nonetheless, the Democrats’ chances of taking back Congress would be better if the economy wasn’t humming along as it is.

A formal peace on the Korean peninsula will prove deadly to the Democrats

The impending meeting of Trump and Kim Jong Un is the ultimate wild card before the midterm elections. It is easy to make glorious predictions (positive or negative) about any tangible outcomes coming from this meeting, but there is simply no way to know.

History suggests the chances are near zero that concrete steps towards a real peace agreement will arise from this first meeting. Nonetheless, just the novelty of it and the positive coverage likely to surround it works in the Republicans’ favor. Short of a physical brawl breaking out between Trump and Kim Jong Un, it very probable that Trump’s image will benefit substantially. And, frankly, a fist-fight might lift his image as well with a lot of Americans.

The Blue Wave may crest too soon

It is also possible that the “Blue Wave” may crest too soon. There is only so much energy that can be sustained by a political movement. Even true believers can get to a point where they just want to say “screw this, lets go see a movie.”

There are already “tentative” signs that Trump’s worst days in terms of job approval ratings may be over. Trump’s job approval ratings have been slowly but steadily rising for the past four months. This is the longest sustained increase (+3%) in his numbers for his young presidency. Of course, it would take just one ill-considered tweet for him to lose all of this improvement.

In addition, the generic ballot polling questions regarding the midterm elections are starting to show a small rebound for the Republicans. While the party gap in the poll averages are still over 5 percentage points (in the Democrats favor), it is a big improvement over just five months ago when the gap was near 12 percentage points.

These recent trends are small and far from conclusive. But, if I am a Democrat, I’m obsessing about those ‘small turns in the numbers.’ They may be an ‘early clue to the new direction.’

One of my favorite movie scenes comes from The Beatle’s first film, A Hard Day’s Night, wonderfully summarizes the political punditry class’s unending quest to predict future trends.

In the scene, George Harrison accidentally stumbles into an advertising executive’s office and finds himself recruited to be in an ad campaign featuring a young model named Susan.

Near the end of the scene, after Harrison is run out of the office for mocking ‘this Susan,’ the ad executive turns to his secretary and asks: “You don’t think he’s the new phenomenon, do you?”

“You mean an early clue to the new direction?” she replies.

“Where’s the calendar?” he says as he points to the calendar. “Its’s alright. He’s just a troublemaker. The change isn’t due for three weeks yet. All the same. Make a note not to extend Susan’s contract. Lets not take any unnecessary chances.”

That’s a pretty fair depiction of political polling and marketing as well. Seek the early clues. The new directions. Nate Silver, Kellyanne Conway and Frank Luntz are millionaires for a reason.

The smart money still remains solidly in the Democrats’ corner for the midterms. A lot must change in the environment for the Republicans to have any chance of keeping the House. Even as some national poll numbers improve, on a race-by-race analysis, the sudden rash of retirements and the district-level polling data do not bode well for them.

Nonetheless, we’ve seen this movie before. Heading into election day, the Democrats are in control. What could possibly go wrong?

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (April 9, 2018)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

Donald Trump’s digital strategy in the 2016 presidential campaign, led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and with a likely assist from the Russians, had a demonstrable impact on the election outcome.

If it was not a decisive factor in the final outcome, it was pretty damn close.

Its apparent targeting focused on those potential “conservative” voters most vulnerable to defecting to the Hillary Clinton: Less-than-strong conservatives over 40 years of age who used social media to share political information during the campaign.

“Slightly conservative” and “conservative” Americans accounted for 25 percent of the U.S. vote eligible population in 2016 according to the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES). And within that 25 percent, just under half of them said they used Facebook or Twitter (hereafter referred to as social media) to share political information during the campaign. That is almost 29 million people.

That is a large number of potential voters considering the 2016 electoral college result would have changed if only 70,000 Trump voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin had voted for Clinton instead.

Our findings, summarized below, are derived from an analysis of the ANES, a pre-post election survey fielded by Stanford University and the University of Michigan (see Appendix A for details on the survey methodology).

Older, less-than-strong conservative voters in 2016 that used social media for sharing political information had noticeably different attitudes

Trump’s digital strategy appears to have been focused on shoring up support among his base by driving up negative feelings towards Hillary Clinton. And, based on the ANES data, the strategy was effective.

In rating Hillary Clinton on a 0 to 100 favorability scale, on average, “slightly conservative” adults aged 40 or older who used social media to share political information gave her a rating of 20.7, compared to 32.1 among otherwise similar adults who had not used social media for sharing political information (see Figure 1 below). A similar relationship emerged among “conservative” adults (aged 40 or older).

Within the other voter segments defined by age and ideology, there were no significant differences in Clinton ratings between social media users and non-social media users.

While not be definitive evidence of the impact of Cambridge Analytica or Russian meddling, it is strong evidence of the effectiveness of Trump’s digital strategy.

When we looked at the relative difference in favorability towards Clinton and Trump (see Figure 2 below), older conservatives again stood out.

Older conservatives that used social media to share political information were significantly more positive towards Trump relative to Clinton (Favorability Gap = 74.1 points), when compared to those in the same demographic category but who did not use social media for political information sharing (Favorability Gap = 53.7 points).

Relative perceptions of the candidates’ honesty was also an important factor in voters’ decision calculus (see Appendix B for a logistic regression model of the 2016 vote choice).

When assessing the honesty of the two presidential candidates, “slightly conservative” and “conservative” adults (aged 40 or older) who used social media also indicated a greater honesty gap in Trump’s favor (Honesty Gap = 1.8 and 2.5, respectively), compared to otherwise similar adults (Honesty Gap = 0.9 and 1.9 points, respectively; see Figure 3 below).

We believe these findings are strong, if not conclusive evidence, that Trump’s digital campaign had a demonstrable impact on the 2016 election.

Quantifying the impact of Trump’s digital strategy

Based on the 2016 ANES survey data, we estimate 28.7 million vote eligible Americans (or about 12 percent of the voter eligible population) were prime targets for the Trump campaign’s social media strategy, and 15.9 million of them voted (see Table 1 below).

If we remove the “social media effect” (SME) in the 2016 presidential election, we estimate that 849,000 Trump voters would have voted for Clinton instead (Note: We refer to the “social media effect” as the “Facebook-Twitter effect” (FTE) in Table 2 below.)

Without the SME, Trump would have lost the popular vote by 3.7 million votes and would have lost Michigan by 19,000 votes (see Table 2 above), yet he still would have won the electoral college in our estimation. But not by much.

Keep in mind, we are not considering other subgroups, particularly “middle of the road” voters, that also may have been impacted by Trump’s social media efforts. The 849,000 votes switched estimate is probably conservative.

Trump’s Facebook ads (particularly those created by the Russians) probably broke through the clutter

The 2016 ANES data cannot tell us what social media ads respondents saw during the campaign. But our analysis reveals the targeted impact of Trump’s digital strategy.

All you have to do is look at some of the Facebook ads from the 2016 campaign to see why Trump’s, particularly those created by the Russians (Internet Research Agency), may have worked better than Clinton’s.

Across the small sample of Facebook ads below, the mainstream Clinton and Trump ads all look professional but are unspectacular and mostly forgettable. The Trump ads created by the Russians (IRA) are crude, unprofessional, and hard to ignore.

Clinton Facebook ads

Trump Facebook Ads

Trump Facebook ads (Russian-created)

For better or worse, Trump’s campaign was about breaking the rules and conventions of presidential campaigning. He was an unconventional candidate and his digital strategy reflected that fact.

And we now have evidence that the Trump campaign’s digital strategy had a measurable and possibly decisive role in determining the 2016 election outcome.

K.R.K

Appendix A — Methodology

The 2016 American National Elections (Time-Series) Study is sponsored and managed by the University of Michigan and Stanford University.

The national survey is designed to assess electoral participation, voting behavior, and public opinion as it relates to eligible U.S. voters. In addition to the political content of the survey, it also measures media exposure, cognitive style, and personal values.

Data collection for the ANES 2016 Time Series Study began in early September and was completed in January, 2017. Pre-election interviews were conducted with study respondents during the two months prior to the 2016 elections and were followed by post-election re-interviewing beginning November 9, 2016. Both face-to-face interviewing and Internet-based data collection was conducted independently, using separate samples but substantially identical questionnaires. Web-administered cases constituted a representative sample separate from the face-to-face.

The SPSS dataset we used for our analysis combined the face-to-face and Internet samples which can be summarized as follows:

Analytic survey weights, provided by the ANES researchers, were used in all of the quantitative analyses presented in this article.

A complete description of the ANES 2016, including datasets, questionnaires, and supporting documentation, can be found here.

Appendix B: Logistic Model of the 2016 Presidential Vote (American National Election Study)

By Kent R. Kroeger (April 9, 2018)

 

News of another chemical weapons attack in Syria, this time in Douma, reminds us of how deep and unresolved that conflict remains.

The Western media have generally been quick to blame the Assad regime for this latest attack, while Assad and the Russians have been equally quick to deny their culpability in this horrendous act that killed at least 70 civilians, mostly women and children.

That the blame has been so quickly assigned to Assad’s regime is predictable and with some merit; however, it is the breadth and ferocity of America’s media and governing elite to also blame Donald Trump for this cruel act that is most troublesome.

In a Washington Post editorial just days before this latest chemical attack, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough writes: “ That the U.S. president announced his plan to cede Syria to Vladimir Putin had to be deeply unsettling for those three countries, which are under continuous threat from Russia. But they are certainly not alone. America’s friends and foes alike must be asking themselves what kind of country cedes Iraq to Iran in a catastrophic, ill-planned war; abandons that country in 2011 after returning a semblance of order; sits idly by while 500,000 Syrians are slaughtered; allows, through inaction and neglect, for the rise of the Islamic State; and belatedly crushes the Islamic State’s dream of a thousand-year caliphate — only to once again move to abandon the region, thereby empowering the Islamic State, Iran, Russia and the murderous Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.”

But the most troubling conclusion Scarborough draws is the following: “After years of endless bloodshed, the U.S. military has finally learned to fight an enemy such as the Islamic State in a way that is successful and sustainable.”

Scarborough’s builds his thesis from the dubious assertion that the defeat of ISIS (at least as a territory-controlling entity) was solely the work of U.S. military strategy and ignoring the fact that, by following Russia’s lead, we stopped fighting a two-pronged war (one against Assad and one against ISIS) and decided to concentrate on the beatable foe, ISIS.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius takes the war-mongering to an even more cynical level by suggesting it is the ‘feel-good’ thing to do.

“One face of the war in Syria that Americans don’t often see is the U.S. Army trauma surgeon, standing in the midday sun on the outskirts of Raqqa, taking a brief break from her near-constant duty in the operating room treating Syrians whose limbs have been shattered by bombs and booby traps. The doctor is a lieutenant colonel serving with U.S. Special Operations forces,” writes Ignatius about one of his experiences during a four-day trip to Syria in February. “The lieutenant colonel is part of the Syria mission that President Trump seems determined to end. Reflecting on the surgeon and the scores of other U.S. soldiers I’ve met during three trips to Syria since 2016, I can’t help thinking that there’s something about this mission — which has been low cost and high success, according to commanders — that Trump doesn’t understand.”

The U.S. doesn’t fight wars so our troops can feel good about themselves. We fight wars to protect our national interests when they are threatened.

As an extra measure, for any remaining skeptics towards a new U.S. occupation in the Middle East, Ignatius ends with this doughy anecdote: “I’m flying out of Syria on a C-130 cargo plane. Sitting next to me is a young officer who’s upset to be on that flight, for two reasons. He is going home to see his mother, who’s very ill. And he is leaving his comrades on the battlefield before the fight is over. He hates that last idea. So should we all.”

Ignatius should have told the young officer, no need to worry, the war in Syria will never be over. The officer will have plenty of time to rejoin the fight.

A fight that Scarborough and Ignatius both suggest the U.S. has learned how to win.

After almost 17 years of U.S. troops fighting jihadists and anti-Western combatants, have we really discovered the secret sauce necessary to bring peace and stability to Syria and the Middle East in general?

Of course not.

Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis, USA, Ret., who retired in 2015 after serving in four combat deployments (including Syria) offers boots-on-the-ground experience in the Middle East and concludes that now is not the time for the U.S. to make a bigger troop commitment in Syria.

“Aside from the fact it is militarily impossible to accomplish the laundry-list of goals in Syria — ‘countering’ Iran (which can’t even be defined), opposing Assad (which isn’t necessary for U.S. security), and stopping Turkey from attacking Syrian Kurds (risking confrontation with our NATO ally),” Davis writes in an op-ed essay for CNBC.com. “It is not in America’s interests to stay in Syria for objectives so disconnected from our security and prosperity. Contrary to conventional wisdom in Washington, the strategic benefit doesn’t come anywhere close to justifying the cost.”

Davis also counters the suggestion the U.S. leaving Syria will embolden Russia.

“ Many fear that a U.S. withdrawal from Syria would hand a victory to Russia. That concern is also misplaced. Russia has an enduring interest in Syria in holding on to their sole Middle East warm water port at Tartus,” Davis writes. “ So long as Assad stays in power, they (Russia) will continue to hold it (Tartus), quite irrespective of whether the U.S. remains or withdraws. What Russia wins by the departure of U.S. troops, however, is becoming the primary owner of the Syrian disaster and all the strategic costs that come with it. American power throughout the Middle East remains robust and undiminished, and will continue to dwarf that of Russia even after the small contingent of U.S. troops has returned home.”

Davis finally concludes: “ Syria remains embroiled in a civil war with scores of groups and militias trying to attain various and competing objectives. The remaining fight there belongs to them, not the United States.”

The chemical attack in Douma is tragic and must be addressed by the international community. And should the UN confirm Assad’s role in the attack, there must be an international response that includes holding Russia accountable as well.

A new and larger U.S. occupation force in Syria, however, should not be considered one of the viable options.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, March 28, 2018)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

“It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward

In the 2016 election, many people thought President Donald Trump was honest, or was, at least, selectively honest.

“He says it like it is — he doesn’t speak out of both sides of his mouth like other politicians,” a Trump supporter told me as he waited for Trump to arrive at a Des Moines, Iowa campaign rally early in the 2016 presidential campaign.

What he was describing was more Trump’s off-the-cuff, rambling speaking style, not his honesty. Nonetheless, relative to other politicians, Trump was a refreshing change of pace to many voters.

Voters know politicians lie. They even understand why on some level. We all lie over the course of a lifetime for various reasons: to protect someone’s feelings, to motivate people, to avoid a conflict the truth would otherwise ignite, or to hide our own mistakes, misdeeds, or inadequacies.

It is human to lie.

“To keep society running smoothly, we need to tell white lies,” says Dr. Paul Seager, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire (UK). “We all lie and those who say they don’t are probably the biggest liars of all.”

But not everyone that studies deception and lying agrees with Seager’s conclusion that it benefits society or that all people are predestined to be liars.

“We are not born liars,” says Dr. Roland Losif Moraru, a psychologist from the University of Petrosani (Romania). “There are lots of reasons that could motivate people to tell lies, and even though each reason might be different than the other, all of them stem from one root cause which is being unable to bear the consequences of telling the truth.”

“Lack of courage, lack of problem-solving skills and lack of the ability to properly handle unexpected events may make escaping from a situation a much better option than facing it,” says M. Farouk Radwan, author of How to Make Someone Fall in Love with You. “Consequently, lying is the combination of being unable to face the results of honesty and the lack of proper values.”

That last sentence may be a perfect summary of America’s political class.

Donald Trump was elected, in part, due to his blunt, unfiltered, and generally unstructured way of speaking. In the view of his supporters, his frankness is one of his defining qualities. To his detractors, at best, he is an “intellectual sloth” prone to falsehoods, if for no other reason than, he doesn’t know the truth in many cases. At worst, he is a scheming charlatan dedicated to abusing the power of the presidency for his own private gain (perhaps to also serve the interests of his Russian handlers).

Conservative columnist George Will pointedly said of Trump’s chronic estrangement from knowledge, “The problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.”

“This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence,” Will wrote.

But speaking in ignorance, as Trump often does, is a different form of lying. To assert a point of fact while not knowing if it is true seems particularly noxious. It may not fit into a narrow definition of lying, but its consequences can be every bit as consequential.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell asserting at a 2003 UN Security Council meeting that Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime had an active weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program an example of a political lie? Or was it just wishful thinking given the decision to go to war with Iraq had all but been made?

Former members of the George W. Bush administration continue to argue their mistake on Iraqi WMDs was either an honest one or not a mistake at all.

Secretary Powell, representing the most common defense of the Bush administration’s using Iraqi WMDs as a pretext for war, now calls his UN speech the product of a “great intelligence failure.”

But was it something, in fact, more dishonest than simply a breakdown in the intelligence collection and analysis process?

If Secretary Powell knew it might not be true, was the WMD assertion just another potent type of political lie?

The more conventional definition of lie — when someone with a knowledge of the facts consciously misrepresents those facts to further an agenda — may generally be considered the clearest form of lying, but politicians have mastered other methods of manipulating facts to achieve the same goals.

Not all lies are equal

The political dysfunction we experience today is complemented by the inability (or disinterest) of the news media to distinguish between the various types of lies emanating from politicians.

Donald Trump saying he is the “smartest person in a room” is not the same as Barack Obama saying, “If you like the health care plan you have, you can keep it.” Both were lies, but one far more substantive than the other.

The news media tend to deposit all political lies into a collective bucket, regardless of degree or impact, which doesn’t serve the public interest well.

Furthermore, fact-checking websites like Politifact.com tend to focus exclusively on politicians’ statements easily verified through widely-available information sources. But what about situations where the critical knowledge can only be obtained through sources far outside the typical access channels of journalists or the public? Or even members of Congress?

When U.S. Special Operations soldiers died in Niger last year, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham admitted to NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, “I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger.”

The U.S. Special Forces Niger operation was not a secret. U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) had been openly posting on Twitter about U.S. involvement in Niger since it started in 2013, reports SpecialOperations.com.

If Congress can be in the dark on routine U.S. military operations, it should surprise few people that journalists might also be in the dark. Moreover, the potential for public officials to lie to the news media increases considerably when the government’s activities are off everyone’s radar.

The news media is also ill-equipped to separate truth from fiction when they must assess a politician’s intent.

We may never know Hillary Clinton’s true intent for why she preferred a private server for her work e-mails over the more legally-appropriate (and probably more secure) e-mail system already in place at the U.S State Department.

But her intent is the essence of whether or not she lied when she told reporters she chose the home-brew system for its “convenience.” Her explanation reminded me of George Washington’s famous line: “It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”

By shielding her emails from public scrutiny, including the deletion of over 30,000 emails after the emails had been subpoenaed by a congressional committee, it became reasonable to ask, “What is she hiding?”

There is a substantive difference between Donald Trump sending out his press secretary Sean Spicer to lie about the size of the crowd at the presidential inaugural and Hillary Clinton’s mendacity regarding why she needed a private email server.

There was a national security interest in knowing the content of Clinton’s e-mails which resided on a unsecured private network. There was nothing at stake with Spicer’s inaccurate boast about crowd size, except his credibility as a press secretary.

Yet, Politifact.com gave Sean Spicer’s untruth a ‘Pants on Fire‘ rating, while the truthfulness of Clinton’s claim she authorized a private e-mail server for the ‘convenience’ could not be assessed.

Not all lies are equal and treating them as such serves the interests of those telling the most dangerous lies.

If, on the other hand, journalists and the political class were to share a common schema for categorizing the various types of lies one hears in the nation’s capitol, it might aid the public in distinguishing between a  ‘run-of-the-mill’ Washington, D.C. lie and one of real consequence.

A Taxonomy of Political Lies

During the 2016 presidential, WNYC’s On the Media radio broadcast, hosted by Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, created their own taxonomy of the classic political lies, which included: lies of omission, lies of distortion, lies of exaggeration, the bald-faced lie, and lies that feel like they must be true.

All excellent types of lies, but for the purpose outlined in this essay, they fail to distinguish the most toxic lies from innocuous ones.  Some bald-face political lies are relatively harmless (Donald Trump: “No administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days.”), while others can lead a country into war (George W. Bush: “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”).

Instead, a useful taxonomy of political lies needs to go beyond simply the content of the lie (exaggeration, distortion, factual omissions) and attempt to discern its scope and purpose.

In that effort, here is a simple taxonomy of political lies that distinguishes them along two dimensions:

• Self-awareness — is there good reason to believe the (alleged) liar knows if they are telling a lie?
• Impact — does the (alleged) lie relate to a subject matter of great importance or impact (e.g., national security, a major federal policy, etc.)?

In many cases, where a lie fits on both dimensions will be a subjective judgment and won’t be known with any certainty, if ever, until many years have passed. In other cases, it may be easier to determine the substance of a lie than the self-awareness of the liar. A liar’s intent is particularly difficult to discern as it often requires knowing what was in their heart at the time they spoke an untruth.

Clinton saying “the private e-mail server was for convenience” is impossible to prove as lie unless she left a documented record of saying otherwise. And she didn’t, as far as we know.

Still, the taxonomy of political lies can help journalists and the public decide what politician-sourced untruths are more important than others, even when it is unclear if an untruth has been spoken.

Figure 1 below shows the basic dimensions of the political lie taxonomy. The horizontal axis assesses the potential impact of the lie based on its subject matter. For example, a lie about the outcome of a military engagement is less consequential than a lie about campaign donations. The vertical axis is based on the degree to which the (alleged) liar is aware they are telling a lie. As mentioned, it is usually difficult to know the extent to which the liar is aware they are telling a lie. A better way to utilize the ‘self-awareness’ dimension therefore is to estimate the probability that the (alleged) liar is consciously lying. For example, we can say with high probability now that Richard Nixon knew about his White House’s effort to cover up the Watergate break-in. It always helps, of course, when there is a documented admission as there was in Nixon’s case. In contrast, there is decent probability that Donald Trump believes he had the largest inauguration audience in history.

The two-dimension taxonomy creates four categories of lies. There are lies of ignorance, lies of indifference, lies of narrative, and lies of purpose. Generally, the most serious lies will be those with a potentially high impact (Lies of Purpose and Lies of Narrative).

Figure 2 provides a short description of the four lie types and Figure 3 offers examples from history of each lie type.

We will start in the lower left-hand quadrant: Lies of Ignorance. This is probably the easiest category to explain and some will rightfully argue this is not really a lie. This is the type of lie where we often speak using gross simplifications, or go “outside the data,” or talk in areas far outside our areas of competency. Such a lie can be driven by a desire just to be social or out of our need to be respected for our intelligence. Insecure people often tell these types of lies and might account for the vast of majority of Trump’s spoken untruths.

There is one caveat with this category, however. Being wrong about a point of fact is not the same as lying. For a politician’s untruthfulness to earn a spot in this quadrant, they must recklessly disregard any attempt to learn the facts before they speak their untruth.  I stand guilty of this lie more times than I’d like to admit but it is Trump that has taken this category to weapons-grade levels.

The second quadrant — Lies of Indifference — is populated by political lies where the speaker of the lie knows they are lying but it concerns a matter of relative lesser importance. A recent example would be former press secretary Sean Spicer telling the press corps that Trump’s inauguration was the most watched ever. It wasn’t, even if you include online and replay viewers.

Some could this is the worst kind of lie, since you knowingly do it even though it concerns something of relative insignificance. Only a congenital liar would potentially compromise their integrity and trustworthiness for a lie whose benefits would be minimal at best. Trump telling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the U.S. has a trade deficit with Canada (which is not true and Trudeau immediately challenged Trump on the claim) was a pointless effort and served no tangible purpose.

The third quadrant — Lies of Narrative — includes lies that are often controversial in that the liar contends they ‘honestly believed’ the untruth they told. Short of a deathbed confession stating otherwise, these lies are taken on faith that the liar is telling their truth about their ignorance. What makes this problematic is that lies of narrative concern issues of high importance (national security, federal legislation, etc.). I am convinced that when Trump said of illegal Mexican immigrants — “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people” — he was certain of his statement’s truth. That shouldn’t exonerate him for the depth of the lie.

Lies of narrative, as the label implies, typically propel a larger narrative in the political blood stream. A better example may be Powell’s WND speech before the UN. On his word, I accept that he believed the intelligence given to him. But Powell is a bright man. He knew the score when he was provided the intelligence on the non-existent Iraqi WND program. The U.S. was going to war with Iraq. The narrative was set. Powell just needed to advance the ball one more step. These lies may be the most dangerous as politicians have mastered them as tools to avoid the consequences of their infidelity to the truth. If caught speaking untruths, they just need claim they acted in good faith. As long as they don’t document their deliberate misapplication of the facts, who can prove otherwise? Forthright ignorance is a viable defense in Washington, D.C.

The fourth quadrant — Lies of Purpose — includes lies that we probably think of when we think of political lies. Watergate. Tammany Hall. Gulf of Tonkin. Iran-Contra Affair. This category also includes less criminal but still significant lies such as President Obama’s claim about the Affordable Healthcare Act (ACA) that “if you like the health care plan you have, you can keep it.”

Their defining characteristic is that the (alleged) liar knew they were speaking an untruth but did so in the pursuit of a specific political outcome or personal gain. It was pre-meditated. They didn’t just turn a blind-eye to contradictory evidence. They actively strangled and buried it.

When is a lie better than the truth?

Leo Tolstoy has an answer for this last question: “Anything is better than lies and deceit.”

Yet, today, the observation that lying is an art from in Washington, D.C. is hopelessly banal. Career politicians and senior civil servants cannot survive long without mastering this dark art.

Lying is a survival tool and the successful politicians know how to wield its powers. In contrast, Jimmy Carter’s failures as president were exacerbated by his unwillingness to employ it on the political battlefield.

“Jimmy Carter may have been wrong — often — but one thing he was not was a liar,” says conservative blogger David Pettit. “He was and is a great human being who was wholly unsuited for the deceptive and underhanded rigors of the Office of President.”

In contrast, there is Bill Clinton. A man that many regard as a successful, though under-achieving, president. Perhaps more than any president in history, lies for him were purely utilitarian devices. He used lies the way you use shortcut keys on your laptop keyboard. His lies helped him to survive to fight another day. The ends justified the means, and if it required lies to achieve a larger goal, so be it.

The lesson to be learned from the 2016 election is that simple definitions of lying don’t convey their power or their impact on voters. Millions of Americans did not care that Trump didn’t tell the truth a lot of the time. When it mattered to them, they thought he was a truth-teller. Even if the facts proved otherwise.

At the end of the 2016 presidential campaign the Washington Post determined that 64 percent of all Trump statements were totally false. Compare that to the average politician who makes completely false statements 10 to 20 percent of the time.

The wrong conclusion from 2016 and the Trump presidency is not that we are in a post-truth era. Speaking the truth has been and will always be important, particularly from our elected leaders. What has happened, however, is that the use of lies has become so ingrained in our political culture, we don’t see it anymore. Its like that ugly, textured wallpaper your mom put up in the kitchen in the mid-70s. After awhile, you don’t see it anymore, but it is no less ugly.

We don’t need the ‘deep state’ concept to recognize that it is too acceptable for the political establishment to say one thing among themselves, but something totally different when they speak to the public. In fact, the media and political elites lionized President Bill Clinton for his ability to prevaricate for political purposes, even as they feigned in public how disgusted they were at how effortless it was for him to do so.

His wife, Hillary Clinton, probably said it best in her April 2013 speech to Wall Street banking executives: “If everybody’s watching all of the backroom discussions and the deals, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So you need both a public and a private position. You just have to sort of figure out how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today.”

In Topeka, Kansas, that is called lying. In the social circles of our political and media elites, that’s called being smart.

Perhaps these words from author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who, not coincidentally, was raised in the Midwest, can help bring a culture of honesty back to our political system:

“The real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.”

― Laura Ingalls Wilder

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, March 26, 2018)

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

Parkland student David Hogg’s impassioned plea at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C. over the weekend to hold lawmakers accountable at the ballot box if they don’t pass gun control legislation soon was an exercise in earnest cluelessness.

Hogg’s sincerity is not the issue. That the Democratic Party and its network of government-empowering interest groups would use children to advance their political agendas, though troubling, is not the issue.

The problem with the March for Our Lives movement and pro-gun control Americans in general is that they are fighting a battle that is rigged against them. Earnestness, persistence and hard work will not overcome that problem. Voting Republicans out of office won’t even help.

First things first, I must disclose my own biases on this issue. I fully support banning “assault weapons” and their deadly enhancements, such as high capacity magazines and bump stocks. Unlike the 1994 assault weapons ban, which left many loopholes in its definition of an “assault weapon,” I would aggressively broaden the definition (For an excellent summary of the deep flaws in the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, I recommend Brad Blumer’s article in the Washington Post from December 17, 2012).

“Experts who have studied the (1994) law tend to agree that it was rife with loopholes and generally ineffective at curbing gun violence,” reported Blumer in his 2012 Washington Post article.

And why was the law ineffective?

“For starters, only 18 firearm models were explicitly banned. But it was easy for gun manufacturers to modify weapons slightly so that they didn’t fall under the ban. One example: the Colt AR-15 that James Holmes used to shoot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., last summer would have been outlawed. Yet it would have been perfectly legal for Holmes to have purchased a very similar Colt Match Target rifle, which didn’t fall under the ban,” wrote Blumer.

I want to see substantive gun control legislation passed in this country as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the marches I watched on Saturday didn’t address the barriers to gun control and may have, in fact, setback any chance of such legislation passing anytime soon.

Three factors work against seeing any meaningful gun control legislation passed by this Congress, or a Democrat-controlled Congress after the 2018 midterms.

The Constitution stands in the way of gun control legislation

The first factor is the constitution itself. Often we hear a pro-control argument that goes something like this: “There are more legal and administrative restrictions in place to restrict our ability to get a driver’s license than there are to buy a gun.”

The problem with that argument is that we don’t have a constitutional right to drive a car. If we did, the barriers to getting a driver’s license would be very different. An absurd comparison only because there were no cars when the Founding Fathers wrote the constitution.

But what about the right to vote? That is also a constitutional right that is continuously threatened by Republican efforts to erect more and more barriers to the voting booth.

While true in the short-term, the historical arc with respect to voting rights in this country actually supports the notion that gun rights are going to be protected by future courts as well. With few exceptions, the voting franchise has been consistently expanded and barriers to voting significantly reduced since this country’s founding.

When Republicans tried to pass a voter ID law in North Carolina in 2013, the Supreme Court quickly knocked it down by allowing lower court rulings against it to stand.

The Fourth Circuit court found in 2016 that the 2013 package of voting reforms in North Carolina, including the establishment of a strict voter-ID requirement and restrictions on early voting and same-day registration, “were enacted with racially discriminatory intent.”

When something is a constitutional right, the courts take a circumspect view of attempts to restrict that something.

If the Constitution included a positive right to basic health care, which has been erroneously suggested as FDR’s intent in his “Second Bill of Rights” speech in 1941, we would have had universal health care in this country already.

But we don’t.

Gun control advocates face a similar problem.

James Madison, our fourth president and Father of the U.S. Constitution, laid out in Federalist Paper No. 46 the importance of the people possessing the right to form well regulated state militias:

“Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger.”

Our Founding Fathers had good reason not to trust a federal government. History was rich with evidence showing strong central governments monopolizing the tools of violence to control the people.

If state militias are essential to repelling a federal army, in Madison’s view, and in sharp contrast to the views of many European legal scholars at the time, the American republic cannot be afraid to “trust the people with arms.”

Subsequent to Madison’s writings, early U.S. court rulings adopted a restricted (well regulated militia) view of the Second Amendment. In United States v. Miller (1939) the majority opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court wrote: “The Court cannot take judicial notice that a shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches long has today any reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, and therefore cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to keep and bear such a weapon.”

Hardly a stance the National Rifle Association (NRA) would endorse today. And, since 1939, U.S. courts have taken increasingly more negative views of attempts to restrict gun rights, in part, due to the NRA’s expansive and sophisticated lobbying efforts.

There is no question the NRA has been a powerful force for gun rights, though its power is exaggerated through its association with the inherent potency of a constitutional amendment.

Take away the Second Amendment, we wouldn’t be talking about banning assault weapons in the U.S. right now. From their first inception they would have been banned.

Partisanship hurts the prospects of gun control legislation

The second factor is the role of partisanship in national policymaking.

Once partisanship has infected an issue, it is all but impossible to pass substantive and enduring legislation.

Partisanship has given us a graveyard of stunted and unfulfilled legislative dreams. National health care? Partisanship gave us the weak alternative called Obamacare. It may well die before another Democratic president and Congress can get elected.

A sustained national commitment to a complete conversion to renewable energy to combat global warming? Partisanship has limited government action to a series of executive orders and bureaucratic rulemaking, all potentially reversed under an opposing party’s administration.

Is there an example of a current national policy driven by a bipartisan consensus?

Yes — the vast majority of federal spending: Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, debt servicing and national defense.

Attempts to cut Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid spending is token at best, typically led by a small faction of libertarian deficit-hawks in the Republican Party (e.g., Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee).

As for defense spending, the overwhelming majority of congressional Democrats and Republicans can’t fall over themselves fast enough to put money behind their shared prosaicism that they want to “support our troops.” The flat defense spending under Obama was the result of his administration overseeing the reduction in combat operations initiated under George W. Bush. And the increases just passed by the current Congress and signed by Trump significantly reverse those lean Obama budgets.

When bipartisanship prevails, substantive legislation happens. When partisanship takes over, substance is replaced by platitudes and posturing.

That is a fair summary of the rhetoric at the March for Our Lives. 

Parkland students, like Hogg, lecturing their “old ass parents” for not knowing how to “use a f-king democracy” is not only laughably stupid and ahistorical, but does more to help ignite the backlash against passing gun control legislation.

Had the Democratic Party and associated interest groups not co-opted the Parkland students, there may have been a real chance to see a broad assault weapons ban in this country. Once CNN, Ted Lieu and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz got their paws on the Parkland students, however, the odds of such legislation dropped dramatically.

Enabling the Parkland students to publicly humiliate Florida Senator Marco Rubio during the CNN town hall on gun control or during the March for Our Lives rally didn’t help either.

Rubio is the exact type of Republican the gun control lobby needs to be working with, not against.

At this point, assuming the Democrats control both the White House and Congress after 2020 presidential election, the best-case scenario is passing an assault weapons ban as riddled with loopholes as the 1994 law.

Only a bipartisan effort can hope to counterbalance the NRA’s influence on the relevant congressional committees.

The importance of gun control to the American public is volatile

The third factor stopping gun control legislation is its long-term volatility in importance relative to other problems facing our nation.

In its most recent poll on the most important problems facing the U.S., the Gallup Organization reports a surge in their importance of gun control.

“The U.S. Gallup’s March update finds 13 percent of Americans mentioning guns, up from less than 1 percent in early February, before the (Parkland) shooting occurred,” according to Gallup analyst Jeffrey Jones. “The percentage mentioning guns in response to this open-ended question is the highest Gallup has recorded since it first began compiling mentions of gun-related issues in 1994. The previous high was 10 percent after the Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado.”

Not surprisingly, this current rise in the importance of gun control is driven by the Parkland shooting incident. Opinion surveys, particularly when asked about national issues most Americans only experience through the media, are mostly reflections of what people directly or indirectly read, hear and see in the media. Opinion surveys are prone to the ephemeral effects of event-driven phenomena.

But policymaking is typically a long-term project. The volatility in the importance of gun control to average Americans will not work in gun control advocates’ favor. As the table below shows, the importance of gun control spiked with the Las Vegas shooting in October 2017 but quickly eroded by December. The importance of gun control will fall after Parkland too. Perhaps not as fast or as far as previous shootings because of the news media’s higher level of attention to the issue, but it will fall.

Assigning too much weight to poll results at this point only sets up gun control advocates for the inevitable disappointment when the media spotlight turns to the next cable-news-driven event (Stormy Daniels Round 2? The next series of Mueller indictments? The next stock market collapse? A strategic strike on North Korea or Iran?). It is just a matter of time and if there is no action in Congress soon on gun control, the chances of passing an assault weapons ban diminish rapidly.

The Democrats must strike while the iron is hot.

“If [McConnell and Ryan] were to simply let the (gun control) bills comes to the floor, they would pass,” New York Senator Chuck Schumer said at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C. “The NRA represents a small minority, but it has a stranglehold on Leader McConnell and Speaker Ryan.”

But McConnell has already tabled gun control on the Senate’s 2018 schedule in favor of banking reform. Anything gun control legislation that does make it to the floor before the midterms will be limited to enhancing background checks, raising age minimums for gun purchases, and limiting the sale of bump stocks and high capacity magazines. Those are not insignificant policy changes, but they are not likely to change the levels of gun violence in this country.

With the deck stacked against them, what are gun control advocates supposed to do?

Of course, giving up on passing gun control legislation is not an option.

But anyone advocating changing the Second Amendment is spitting into the wind.

Instead, gun control advocates must focus on what they can control: the media and themselves.

Hopefully, it is not controversial anymore to say that the major news media outlets (Fox News and The Wall Street Journal notwithstanding) are in the tank for the establishment Democrats’ political agenda.

That fact is a double-edged sword for gun control advocates. On the one hand, anything that can keep gun violence high on the public agenda works to their advantage. But by associating gun control with a partisan agenda works to their disadvantage.

At a minimum, adults need to assert control of the message coming out of the gun control movement. The maudlin, over-heated theatrics coming from the Parkland students will backfire over time if left unfiltered.

If there is one iron-law in political communication it is that Americans don’t like to see their political leaders excessively emotional. It is tolerated in brief, well-defined moments: Reagan hugging the family members of the space shuttle Challenger victims. Obama shedding a tear for the Sandy Hook students.

Gun violence victims and their families should express their profound emotions. But for political leaders, crying, swearing and yelling are generally not effective political communication styles.

Effective political leaders are not victims. They are compassionate but even-tempered, and when they do show strong emotions, they must appear in control of those emotions.

But the sonics and optics at these mega-marches, including the Women’s march in January 2017, are not designed to attract fence-sitters and independents to a cause. These marches are meant to rally troops (hence, why they are called ‘rallies’!), but they are piss-poor at expanding a political base.

The Vietnam War marches ushered in two Richard Nixon election victories. The Nuclear Disarmament Marches in the 1980s preceded Ronald Reagan’s 1984 electoral victory, the largest election landslide since FDR.

The point is, marches don’t necessarily presage significant political victories in the marchers’ favor.

Two-thirds of Americans now support stronger gun control measures. The rise in support is almost exclusively among Republicans and Independents, not Democrats (see charts below):

It is support among independents and Republicans that will determine the final outcome of the current momentum to pass gun control legislation. Calling anyone over 18-years-old part of the problem, which is what more than one Parkland teen expressed at Saturday’s march, is a recipe for choking off the momentum gained since the Parkland shooting tragedy.

Chuck Schumer telling marchers that the students like those at Parkland “are our leaders” says more about the Democratic Party’s leadership vacuum than anything else.

Gun control advocates therefore should take that as a sign that letting their movement align with the Democratic Party is a grave mistake.

There are Republicans ready to work with the Democrats on meaningful gun control legislation. Don’t alienate them with immature spokespeople like David Hogg.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.