Glitch Gloating? Good

I'm not sure whether it was in response to my earlier item or not, but Andrew Sprung tweets:

So constructive to have all hands in a major political party poised to highlight & gloat over every glitch in major new gov service.

Presumably he's being sarcastic, but you know what? It is constructive! It's absolutely a good thing to have a major political party poised to highlight every glitch in what government is up to. Not so much the gloating, but that's not doing any harm. The highlighting is definitely a good thing. One of the strong points of the two-party system is that it leaves an out party with every incentive to identify everything that's going wrong. Not just in government, but in the nation as a whole.

The problem isn't highlighting the glitches, or even gloating about them. The problem is that the current radical GOP is actively opposed to fixing ACA problems, to the point of obstructing attempted fixes. That's a problem. But it's also not normal at all. A healthy party would either promote fixes in order to get more mileage out of their claim that the administration botched thing, or at the very least use glitches and needed fixes as an opportunity to get its own policies adopted. Flat-out rejectionism is definitely a problem, but it only comes up because the normal party incentives of winning elections and enacting public policy don't seem to be working as well as they should for the radical GOP.

But seeking out poor public policy and calling attention to it? That's extremely healthy for the system.

Gridlock/Polarization

National Journal is running a funny-looking chart of partisan polarization in the House with this explanation:

If you're looking for a quick fact to explain congressional gridlock, it's this: In the 113th Congress, only 59 members have voted with the majority of their party less than 90 percent of the time (20 Republicans and 39 Democrats).

So first of all, a minor point: "Congress" here apparently means the House.

Second: polarization -- partisan polarization -- just means that Members vote with their party and against theother party. Gridlock is about failure to pass legislation. Indeed, really more specific; to go back to the traffic analogy, it's about failure to pass legislation that everyone wants, but is being blocked by collective action failure of some type.

Which is to say that gridlock and polarization are not the same thing, and not necessarily related in any straightforward way.

Indeed, within the House, partisan polarization should ease gridlock. Since the House runs by majority party, if that party is unified, then they can basically do whatever they want.

Thus in the historic 111th Congress, in 2009-2010, the House was extremely productive. Very strong polarization, and no gridlock at all.

The Senate, with the filibuster forcing supermajorities, is another story; there, polarization might make gridlock more likely assuming that the majority party has fewer than 60 Senators. However, with 60 Senators, and given unified government, polarization should mean less, not more, gridock.

What about with divided government? Does polarization then mean gridlock?

Not necessarily. A non-polarized Congress can avoid gridlock by having different majorities express themselves on different issues. On the other hand, a non-polarized Congress also can create a lot more gridlock. After all, a polarized Congress means that one person can bargain for her whole party; a non-polarized Congress can devolve into an ungovernable mess (indeed, one theory of why parties exist at all is that legislatures don't really work well without them).

In other words, the relationship between polarization and gridlock is complicated.

What does cause gridlock, however, is a party driven by aversion to compromise -- both internally and with the other party. That's what's happening now, with the dysfunctional GOP. And that, not polarization, is most likely the primary source of current gridlock.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Frances Conroy, 60.

Ah, a little good stuff:

1. Sarah Binder on counting filibusters and "blocking."

2. Great post by Stan Collender on why no one paid attention to the new budget deficit numbers -- it's a great example of agenda setting, or in this case negative agenda setting. The one thing worth adding, from the White House point of view: a rapidly decreasing deficit is "objectively" lower; whether it's an improvement is more complicated, though. Best, as Collender says, to just duck the whole issue.

3. Ta-Nehisi Coates vs. Richard Cohen is hardly a fair fight: the best blogger out there against perhaps the worst columnist?

4. Seth Masket on the center.

5. And Mike Wagner wraps up the State of the Parties conference.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Alfre Woodard, 61.

Good stuff:

1. Ezra Klein reviews Double Down and The Gamble.

2. Sean Trende breaks out a new explanation for the polling vs. results difference in VA-Gov.

3. While Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy consider both that and other possibilities. I'm sticking with different switch-away from the Libertarian as my best guess, but I'll admit it's more speculative than solid.

4. And: State of the Parties! The papers are here. This is the quadrennial conference on US political parties in Akron that's always excellent. I'll continue retweeting stuff from there tomorrow; if I'm lucky, I'll get to some of the papers, too.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Natalia Tena, 29.

A new month, and more good stuff:

1. New evidence that how open a primary is doesn't have anything to do with polarization.

2. I'm pro-pork, but skeptical that more available pork within the system would have changed anything with regard to the shutdown. Still, John Hudak is right that pork is a good thing.

3. And the Monkey Cage's election reports continue to be one of the great resources out there -- here's a post-election report on Argentina from Julia Pomares.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Bernie Williams, 65. Yes, 65; no, not that Bernie Williams. This one was an OFer for the Phoenix Giants when I used to go see them all the time.

Plenty of good stuff:

1. Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy take a closer look at some of the shutdown polling.

2. Matt Yglesias is right about Medicare Part D and ACA.

3. I largely agree with Chris Cillizza's myths about the House GOP. I suspect he's right that the dozen or 20 or 30 or 60 or 80 radicals who have put us where we are are a lot less coordinated than one might think from some of the coverage. Good point.

4. Molly Ball reminds us that a substantial chunk of Republicans really don't approve of compromise.

5. C-SPAN ratings? Huh. I guess it's true that some people will watch anything. Brian Stelter reports. (And you all know my view: Brian Lamb is a true Hero of the Republic).

6. Seth Masket on parties and the shutdown.

7. And Ed Kilgore pushes back some against my TAP column. I should be clear about what I think. I absolutely believe that the press should cover the substance of political battles, whether they are legislative or electoral. As a matter of fact, I also absolutely believe that the press should cover the ephemera. What I don't think the press should do -- or that pundits should do -- is make claims that can't be sustained. The press shouldn't tell us that something will affect elections when it won't. They shouldn't tell us that something will affect pubic opinion when it won't. Or public policy, when it won't. That may sound terribly obvious, but in fact those principles are violated all the time.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Lena Heady, 40.

Good stuff:

1. What it sounds like when your colleagues in the Senate really, really, hate you. This is beyond brutal. From Manu Raju.

2. Elizabeth Rigby on how Republicans have made Medicaid more complex, even before the ACA expansion.

3. A couple I missed: Seth Masket on sore loser laws as party protection.

4. And Richard Skinner on parties and policy.

Party Strength and the Shutdown

Mark Schmidt has a very much worth reading piece over at TNR in which he makes the counterintuitive case that the problem leading to the shutdown is party weakness, not party strength. I recommend it, but I'd take the same facts and put it in a different way. To some extent, this is just terminology, but I think that there's more to it than that; properly understanding party strength is necessary to understanding what's gone wrong with the GOP.

Here's a taste of his argument:

In fact, “partisanship” isn’t the cause of the shutdown. And we’d probably be better off if politicians—that is, Republicans—were thinking more about the interests of their own party....

[T]he modern Republican Party is not strong. It’s something more like a loose association of independent forces, including Tea Party–backed members, those with their own sources of campaign money from ideological backers, many with seats so safe that they can happily ignore all their non-conservative constituents, and outside agents like Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, who Businessweek recently described as the de facto Speaker of the House. Many of its politicians have deliberately cut themselves off from all the incentives that traditionally moderate and stabilize politics—earmarks, constituent service (many offices say they won’t help constituents maneuver the ACA), and infrastructure spending. With safe seats, and hearing little dissent at home, they are able to do so. Cutting themselves off from the incentive to build and maintain a strong and viable party is part of the same story.

Yes and no.

What I'd say is that the current Republican Party is both strong and dysfunctional.

The parties - both of them -- are strong in the sense that almost everything in US politics runs through the parties. 

That hasn't always been the case. In the nadir of party strength, which was roughly in the postwar era,* much of what happened in US politics didn't run through the parties at all. To begin with, we had an era of "candidate-centered" politicians, who recruited their own supporters who were personally loyal to them; found their own sources of money that were personally loyal to them; and, generally, did what they wanted. It wasn't just about campaigning for office: once elected, politicians generally turned to either personal loyalists or to partisan-neutral governing professionals. Think, for example, of Nixon surrounded by Haldeman and Ehrlichman (both of whom had no GOP ties but were pure Nixon creatures) and Kissinger. The neutral press dominated information flows. Even many of the early campaign consultants of the time worked for politicians from both parties.

That's all changed. Now most campaign professionals and a large number of governing professionals are party people -- not (usually) from formal party organizations, but people who have made their careers working within one political party, usually for a series of candidates and party-aligned groups. The party-aligned press is strong, especially on the Republican side. Candidates raise most of their money from party donors, often through party-aligned groups of one kind or another.

Because (or at least probably because) most of this party growth has taken the form of informal networks of party loyalists rather than under the control of formal party organizations, it's meant that our contemporary strong parties are not inherently hierarchical. Put it this way: if you want to run for Congress, you may be able to find a party faction or party-aligned group who will support you, even against a same-party incumbent...but you usually won't have a chance as a pure outsider to the party. Primary elections, then, often serve as tests of strength between different party groups or factions. Not, however, between party and anti-party groups.

(It's further confused because the participants often don't use that kind of language. Tea Partiers, who are not only GOP-aligned but pretty close to being the core of the Republican Party, often talk as if the Republican Party is an enemy, rather than saying that they -- the Tea Party -- are the true Republicans. But that, in my view, is in fact just semantics).

Schmidt talks about campaign finance and outside spending, but quite a bit of that outside spending is party money, in one way or another. He says that such money can "destabilize and decenter the process," but for the most part it was never stable or centered in the first place -- one of the big things that's happened over the last forty years or so is the rise of national political parties, which hardly existed for most of the nation's history.

So the best way to think about, say, the Koch brothers is that they are influential national Republicans who have some limited ability to influence the party, but must compete with others for influence.

OK, that's all about party strength. But what's happened to the GOP is that it's become broken and dysfunctional. In particular, there's a strong chunk of it that seems to be dedicated not to normal politics, but to making money by fleecing the rubes and easy marks that appear to have an enormous appetite for purchasing cultural/partisan products. And that, indeed, produces all sorts of perverse incentives.

Again...to some extent it's just semantics to want to call this dysfunction within a strong party rather than just calling it a weak party. But it matters because it's the very strength of the parties that makes it such a big deal when one of them is broken. And because extremely strong parties tend to suck in everything around them, so that the Crazy Caucus becomes a fringe, and then an important group, within the GOP, rather than just existing out there in the nowhere by itself.

I wish I had a solution for the broken GOP, but I don't. One thing, however, that this analysis suggests is that making the parties "stronger" isn't going to do it. Increased partisanship (what Schmidt wants) might well lead, in these circumstances, to an even bigger conservative marketplace, and even more perverse incentives. Increased hierarchy might give a John Boehner more influence...or just wind up meaning that demagogues and snake oil sellers feel compelled to take over formal positions if possible, and they might well succeed.

I do think that the path for a solution has to found in recognizing that the people, institutions, and groups causing the trouble are found within the (expanded, in my terminology) Republican Party, not outside of it. But alas that's about as far as I can get. If there's an obvious solution to the broken, dysfunctional Republican Party and the damage it's doing to the US, I sure can't see it.





*The timeline is complicated, and much of it is undocumented. Some apartisan elements in the system seem to have been strongest in the immediate postwar period and were already fading by the 1960s and 1970s; others, however, didn't show up until the that later portion of the era. By the 1980s, all the indicators (as far as I can see) were all pointing in the same direction (towards stronger parties), but in roughly the eight decades before that there are plenty of things working in opposite directions from each other.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Ellis Burks, 49. Not quite a HOFer...but a lot closer than you might think, and better than quite a few guys who made it. Terrific late hitting second peak, ages 34-37, but only about 250 PAs after that.

Plenty of good stuff:

1. Excellent new TNR feature: Isaac Chotiner tries to interview Barney Frank, receives abuse (via a Chait tweet).

2. Three good ones from the folks at Mischiefs of Faction. First, Greg Koger's analysis of the Congressional vote on Syria is useful, whether or not there is a vote.

3. Then Jennifer Victor, also on the Congressional vote.

4. Also: Richard Skinner on why Republicans have flipped on foreign policy.

5. I like Kevin Drum's sentiment here about contemporary news cycles, but it's almost certainly hopeless; the best we can do is to remember that at worst things will seem messier in progress, but that doesn't mean that they'll now seem messier in retrospect.

6. And LGM asks the question: what photo should they put on their (hypothetical) annoying pop-up ad for themselves? Lots of excellent choices...but more to the point, who or what should Plain Blog have on our even more hypothetical annoying pop-up ad? I can think of a lot of good ideas, but even though it's not in good shape, I might well go with this one.

Yes, Of Course It's OK to Speculate About Syria and 2016.

This again? I'm hearing all sorts of complaints about people speculating about how the Syria matter will affect the 2016 elections.

If we're talking general election -- I'm with you. Pending an enormous policy disaster, and perhaps even if there is one, the outcome in Syria will likely have zero effect on the November 2016 election.

But if we're talking nominations? As long as you agree on two things:

1. The 2016 presidential nomination contests began some time ago and are underway right now; and,

2. The outcome of the 2016 nomination contests is important

...then of course it's reasonable to be talking about possible effects of the Syria thing on 2016.

Granted, some of that speculation will be foolish. Lots of punditry is foolish! But there's zero reason the topic should be off limits.

To the contrary: if you think the possibility of US intervention in Syria is an important one, then you absolutely should want to think about (and perhaps to attempt to affect) how the issue will play out within the two parties as a part of their presidential nomination processes.

I get that some people wish that there was a break from electoral politics. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Not just in the US -- once again, parliamentary countries pick their party leaders far, far, in advance of the next election, and those selections are always open to further challenge, which means that they too have continuous party leadership competition, even though it takes a very different from. Parties do this for the very good reason that nominations determine who and what a party is, and in democratic parties that question is basically always going to be an open one.

To put it another way: speculating about 2016 (presidential nominations) is just another way of asking about a party's position on an issue, and perhaps in a deeper way than tallying votes in Congress might do. So if it annoys you, get over it.

Oy, Politico

Alexander Burns and John F. Harris tell us that the Syria matter has exposed the "weakness" of several institutions...I'll only pay attention to the one I know best: the parties. Here's what Politico would have us believe:

The diminishment of the parties has been underway for years, fueled by the rise of outside groups and politicians who don’t depend on their parties for money and influence. 

This is...exactly backwards. The parties are very strong and have been getting stronger. The "outside" groups are mostly party-aligned groups, organized outside of formal party organizations but tightly connected to party networks; Members of Congress are far less independent of their parties than they were twenty or forty years ago. They are elected by mostly party-connected campaigns, with party-connected money and other resources.

This reality is the main reason Washington has been paralyzed in recent years — neither House Speaker John Boehner nor Obama has any confidence they could bring their own parties along on a deal over the budget, entitlements or other domestic issues.

The parties are so strong that individual politicians -- including presidents and chamber leadership -- are tightly constrained, and cannot do much freelancing.

But the very real possibility that these leaders can’t summon enough followers to produce a majority to authorize force in Syria - particularly in response to something as repugnant as the alleged use of chemical weapons - puts the reality of that weakness in a stark new light.

Syria is, at the very least, complicated...but there are at least two ways to look at it that show party strength. One: Syria shows the clear weakness of the apartisan foreign policy establishment when faced with the strength of the parties. Two: Syria shows the weakness of nominal leaders against their parties when they try to go against party priorities -- on the Democratic side the antiwar priority, and on the Republican side the antiObama priority.

When George W. Bush asked the Hill to authorize the war in Iraq, only six Republicans in all of Congress voted against his request. On Syria, Obama lost two Democrats – Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Tom Udall of New Mexico – in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee alone (in addition, Ed Markey of Massachusetts voted present.)

It's just not a comparison that means anything. Nor does "strong party" mean that the president's party will automatically do whatever the White House wants. A better analogy was when George W. Bush sought to put a personal choice, rather than a party choice, on the Supreme Court; when his selection was laughed off by Republicans, that was a party victory, even though it was a presidential defeat. We simply can't judge party strength by compliance with the president's wishes.

It’s a stark illustration of how far party discipline has decayed that a measure supported by Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid faces such uncertain prospects for passage. Indeed, party leaders have almost emphasized their lack of leverage in pressing for passage of the White House-backed resolution.

Party cohesion in Congress is at record levels! Syria is, to be sure, different. But focusing on the odd dynamics of the Syria (prospective, remember) vote while ignoring all the other votes is a pretty odd way of determining how strong the parties are.

Look: the obvious thing about parties, which Burns and Harris surely must know, is that it's absolutely impossible to discuss anything about the Syria vote in Congress without primarily thinking about the parties. We all know that. We all talk about it like that. If we're thinking, say, about what Mitch McConnell will do (he declared against the resolution today), we're talking almost completely about a party story. Every story you've read about the Congressional reaction is basically a party story -- look at the way that reporters (quite rightly) separate out Democrats and Republicans, and discuss how they're coming to decisions separately. Because most Democrats face one set of cross-pressures; most Republicans face a different set. Those are party stories, and they matter so much because our parties are so strong.

Or consider the big exception in those Congressional stories: John McCain. McCain really isn't (primarily) constrained by party; he seems to be constrained mainly by his own whims and prejudices. Here's the thing: when parties are weak, Congress is absolutely full of McCains. That's pretty much what Congress was like in much of the mid-20th century. Indeed, it's not just Congress; presidents such as Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter often placed either their own personal whims or the consensus of "neutral" policy experts ahead of party positions (neutral policy experts aren't actually neutral, but they aren't particularly tied to political parties -- just as the "neutral" press isn't a partisan press, but has it's own set of opinions and biases).

Syria has been an issue that confused the parties. It's an issue which causes internal cross-pressures within both parties. It is not an issue that demonstrates party weakness. For better or worse, parties thoroughly dominate US politics right now. Syria very much included.

The Smart But Mistaken Case Against A Healthy Party

This may be a little unfair, but I'm going to react in advance to a three-part series by Sean Trende about party makeovers. Despite that he's only published part one.

Trende proposes to answer seven questions about elections:

1) What if elections are simply random?
2) What if it really is just the economy, stupid?
3) What if Republicans actually aren’t that out of step ideologically?
4) What if party makeovers don’t work?
5) What if the American people just automatically self-correct?
6) What if this period of introspection is just what out-of-power parties do?
7) What if it makes no sense for a party to think more than 10 years out?

Part one, today, answers questions one and two. It's okay, I suppose, although there's a more straightforward way of making the point he's trying to make. Rather than asking his first two questions, what I think he really wants to say is that presidential elections from at least the 1970s on, and probably well before that, are best thought of contested between two basically evenly matched parties with results mostly dictated by "fundamentals" such as the economy, presidential popularity, and other pre-campaign objective factors. I mean, it's true (as Trende says answering his first question) that election results could easily just be random variation, but in fact we know very well (as he points out when turning to the second one) that election results are not random at all.

At any rate, Trende's main point as I understand it so far is that the underlying fundamentals of an election year, and not the current health of the parties, is the main driver of election results -- and in that, he's exactly right:

So maybe all of this talk about party rebranding and the success of the Democratic Leadership Council running to the center may be irrelevant, or at least mostly irrelevant. It’s pretty clear to me that if Bill Clinton had run in 1984, he would have lost in a landslide -- probably not as big of a landslide as Walter Mondale, but still a landslide. If he’d run in 1988, he probably would have lost, although the election might have been close. We’d probably then conclude that DLC centrism was a ticket to oblivion, and celebrated the revival of New Deal liberalism when Tom Harkin defeated Bush in 1992.

And yet...

The next question, and one that Trende's seven questions doesn't get at, is whether the "fundamentals" are fixed -- or if they can be powerfully affected by the health (or lack thereof) of a party.

The party in office, that is. I'm with him about the party out of office; they have to be in extremely bad shape to lose their opportunities to cash in on in-party difficulties. It can happen...that's Goldwater and McGovern (both of whom turned solid defeats into even worse landslides).

But in office...a dysfunctional party in office can strongly affect, if not actually determine, the fundamentals of subsequent elections. That is, we can think of the failures of both Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush as party failures, not personal failures of an incompetent president (or as random fluctuations of the economy and foreign policy which would have happened to any president of either party during those years).

My own view? The DLC and other 1980s efforts to reform the Democrats were largely irrelevant. The big problem for the Democrats had been earlier, with the crackup of the party over race and Vietnam after 1964 (with roots going back decades, to be sure). By the time Walter Mondale beat Gary Hart in 1984, all that was mostly ancient history, and the Democrats after 1982 were probably as ready to govern as they were in 1992. They just didn't have much chance, thanks to election-year fundamentals -- but to the extent they did, in the House after 1982 and the Senate after 1986, they were fine.

Nor is it clear what, if anything, could have prevented Democratic problems in the aftermath of Vietnam and the slow-motion realignment of Southern Anglo voters (with the latter surely something that virtually all of today's mainstream liberals believing was a worthwhile tradeoff for the gains in justice from civil rights). The particular disaster they got (an ill-formed nomination process and terrible nominees in 1972 and 1976, and especially the particular awful nominee that popped up in 1976) were probably somewhat random and perhaps avoidable, but the problem in the party was real.

The current Republican dysfunction has been building for years, but if you want a marker on it a good one is the House GOP revolt against George H.W. Bush's budget deal in 1990. Since then, Republican dysfunction hasn't affected elections when they were the out-party (especially in 1994 and 2010), but it's probably made them less capable of governing, which caused problems for them at the ballot box in 1996, 1998, 2006, and 2008. And, I'd say, 2004: a more successful George W. Bush first term might easily have produced a Nixon/Reagan type reelection.

Now, you have to make an argument here that Bush was an awful president (and that the Newt-era and Boehner-era Houses were dysfunctional) as a systematic consequence of Republican Party dysfunction. As regular readers know, I think that's a very big part of the truth (see, for example, my recent Salon column about the party of Newt and Nixon). Which then gets to the question of what can anyone do about it if the Republican Party is dysfunctional in ways that make it less likely to govern successfully...and I'm not sure what the answer to that one is.

Basically, however, the critique here of what Trende is (as far as I can tell) up to is that treating the fundamentals as external to the (governing) party's health is a real mistake. It's not a full causal connection, of course; recessions and recoveries, and war and peace, and natural disasters, and all the other things that can be part of those "fundamentals" are not pure functions of the health of the incumbent party. But healthy parties, and the good politicians they elect, are in a much better situation to capitalize on the good things and avoid the bad ones.

All of which means that the Republican Party would be smart to get its act together -- not so that they can win office, but so that they can get more out of it and have it last longer when they do win. 

Why Would In-District Donations Be Less Effective?

Fascinating findings by Kristen Coopie Allen today over at Mischiefs of Faction. She looked at money in state legislative contests (lots of cases!) and, among other things, found one thing that I find particularly interesting: money raised from outside the district is a bit more effective than money raised within the district.

Important caveats: I've read the blog post, not the dissertation, and so I can't speak to how impressive I think the relationship is; also, I don't really know how she explains it, or even what speculation she has, since it's not in the post. One more thing: the effect is small. "A candidate with 100% of her donors residing in her district boundaries is only expected to earn 3 fewer points in the General Election than a candidate with no in-district contributors." All that said...

Remember, since we're pretty sure that at the end point a dollar spent equals a dollar spent regardless of source, what we're really looking for is what fundraising tells us about the candidate, the candidacy, the campaign, or...well, if the relationship is real, it should be telling us something.

I can think of two, possibly related, explanations.

One is about the elusive notion of "quality" candidates. Perhaps the ability to raise money outside of a district is actually a marker of candidate quality, and goes with other good candidate skills.

Or: if it's true that district money is more likely to be from family and friends, while out-of-district money is more likely to be party (network) money, then it would be interesting if it's really just about the advantages of being plugged into the party network. We do know that self-funding dollars are less effective than donated dollars, which I've speculated could be about party.

I don't really know how much of this is true in state legislative elections; I could imagine, for example, that out-of-district money might be just an indication that someone attended college out-of-state, which might mean that out-of-district money is more likely to be from friends. That's less likely to be the case (I would think) in House or Senate elections, where personal connections are presumably just less important.

Anyway, there's more than just the in-district finding, so click through and check it out.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Cirroc Lofton, 35.

Good stuff:

1. "Don't Quit Your Day Job." Jay Ulfelder on making it as an independent research consultant.

2. Lots of parties links...I may write on some of this, but I'll link to them here in case I don't get to it. I'll start with Seth Masket on parties and ideology.

3. Andrew Sabl uses the Jim Messina news (the Obama campaigner is working for the Conservatives in the UK) to think a bit about party affiliation.

4. Mark Thompson on Rand Paul, Chris Christie, and the possibility that Republicans will get their act together.

5. And, yes, Ishtar is a good movie. David Haglund is correct. That it became the poster child for flops had something to do with sexism, and something to do with eagerness to go with standard Hollywood narratives...but whatever else Ishtar is, it's a good movie. Not a great one -- it's not an unrecognized classic or anything like that. But it's fun, and funny. On the other hand, I finally got around to seeing A New Leaf recently, and I was totally disappointed. I'm thinking that it's mainly because Walter Matthau isn't as funny as Hoffman or Beatty.

Catch of the Day

How about one for Seth Masket, for an excellent explanation of just what it was that prevented the pretenders from winning the GOP nomination in 2012. See also John Sides, but Seth is focused more on this part of it.

No, it wasn't the voters. It was -- you guessed it -- the Republican Party. Well, collectively, it was; individually, it was lots and lots of individual Republican party actors.

What's tricky about all of this is that there's no fixed formula to tell us how important activists are compared with, say, campaign professionals. Or how important particular party-aligned interest groups are, or how important the party-aligned press is, or how important party politicians are.

Or, within that: how important is Rush Limbaugh compared with, I don't know, Glenn Beck? How important is this governor compared with that Senator, or this Iowa-based activist motivated by home schooling compared with that South Carolina based activist primarily interested in immigration?

My sense of all this is that we're still early in the process of understanding all of this, especially since it's (at least potentially) shifting all the time. To the extent that a party is either strictly hierarchical or extremely monolithic, then it's fairly easy, but the more a party differs internally and is internally democratic, the more it's going to be very hard for anyone -- insider or outsider -- to figure out exactly who has how much of a say.

But even if it's hard to study, that's where the action is. And sometimes it's easy; the big whopping zilch in terms of endorsements that several of the candidates put together in 2012, even after they were able post impressive-looking wins in primaries, was an easy tip-off.

At any rate, the key to understanding all of this is knowing where to look. And most of the time, that means party actors, not voters.

Also: nice catch!

Today's Lesson in Why One Shouldn't Trust Self-Identified "Independents"

Sean Hannity: "I'm not a Republican, though people often mistake me for one."

(From Political Wire, quoted from a Playboy interview I'm not going to click through to read).

Or, to quote John Sides:

The three myths [about independents] are:

1) Independents are the largest partisan group.

2) Independents are actually independent.

3) Change in the opinions of independents is always consequential.

Sean Hannity is perfectly free to call himself whatever he wants. But he is obviously a functional Republican.

Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you about how independents are a huge group of voters. For whatever reason, our political culture values calling oneself "independent," and discourages people from identifying themselves as party regulars -- if you ask people whether they vote the candidate or the party, an overwhelming majority will go with "candidate."

Our political behavior, on the other hand, demonstrates considerably partisan behavior -- most of us, most of the time, do in fact for party, not candidate.

All of which is not only very familiar to anyone who has studied the evidence, but should be obvious to anyone who listens to political actors talk.

A reminder of my good-enough way of thinking about how the actual electorate breaks down: it's one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, one-third independent...but that final one third is itself really one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, and one-third (and thus one-ninth overall) true independent. And what's more, those true independents are overwhelmingly the least informed and least attentive to politics; the stereotyped careful independent who carefully reads up on the issues and the candidates in order to make up her mind does exist, but she's a tiny, tiny, party of the electorate (I've never seen numbers, but I'm guessing some fraction of one percent).

Read Stuff, You Should (Plus Housekeeping)

Happy Birthday to Ken Osmond, 70.

And some good stuff:


1. "The people have taken over American politics, and they hate it." Ezra Klein reads Fiorina.

2. Brad DeLong on "normalization."

3. Scott Bland on the DCCC taking sides and getting away with it. Very interesting.

And I'm on the road through Tuesday...I'll almost certainly put up the normal weekend posts, but don't expect much more than that over the next few days.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Dule Hill, 38.

And some good stuff:


1. Scott Monje on the NRA and the UN Arms Trade Treaty.

2. James Fearon on the question of how many wars the United States is currently fighting -- and what's at stake in answering that question.

3. Kevin Drum on what George Washington couldn't do.

4. Got behind on this, but David S. Bernstein on how the parties decide -- and enforce their decision -- in the Massachusetts Senate special.

5. And Sarah Posner on the National Day of Prayer (and the post-policy GOP).

Monday Cranky Blogging 3

It's been a while since the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle made me cranky, at least politically cranky...but, yup, yesterday's did the trick. It was 24 Across: "Tammany Hall corruption, e.g.?" The answer: "Evil from New York" (The question mark in the clue is pegged to the theme, which had to do with "flipped front" so that the answer was a riff on "Live from New York").

"Evil"? Really? I suppose that to some extent it's justified, since it asks about Tammany Hall corruption, as opposed to Tammany Hall or machine politics in general. But, really, the crossword writer and editor can't think of a better example of New York evil?

It's all Goo Goo nonsense, in my view. For the best understanding of "corruption," read Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. That's not to say there was no dishonest graft or other even worse behavior, but normal machine politics, including "honest" graft, is in my view probably a positive, but at any rate far from evil.

Evil? Try a progressive politician...say, Woodrow Wilson.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Terre Roche, 60.

Right to the good stuff, as I'm glad that I've made it through the first stretch of west coast night games:


1. Larry Bartels on math (don't know that I've ever mentioned it as such, but Bartels is one of the people who you should pretty much always read on every subject).

2. Seth Masket (with Thad Krouser and Eric McGhee): party endorsements in primaries appear to have direct effects on voters.

3. Dean Baker on Social Security disability.

4. One more on Thatcher: Carah Ong has comments from Reagan and Bush administration oral histories about her.

5. And flacks vs. reporters.