What Do Congressional Democrats Want to Do with Power, Anyway?

Apologies for no post yesterday, I usually write these posts the night before they come out, and you can see how that schedule could’ve come into trouble given the events of January 6th. Either way, I mentioned I wanted to write about Democratic policy proposals, and I will do that here. More specifically, I want to quickly go through the package first released in 2019 to encapsulate Congressional Democratic leadership’s primary goals. H.R. 1.

For the People

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Over the last seven Presidential election cycles, the Democratic Party has had the support of the plurality of the American people for six of the Presidential elections, despite this, by the end of the 117th Congress, both parties will have had total control of the federal government for about six years each. Some of this, to be sure, is Democrats’ own fault, with the exception of 2006 and 2018, they’ve been pretty bad at getting their base to show up in midterm elections, and due to the staggered nature of Senate elections that’s just part of the game you need to play if you want to really get power in a more lasting way. A lot of it, though, is structural. The electoral college doesn’t explicitly hurt Democrats, it helped Obama in both of his elections and it came very close to letting John Kerry unseat George W. Bush without winning the popular vote, but the two times it has actually decided elections, in 2000 and 2016, it has given the country Republican Presidents despite it wanting Democratic ones. The House is another thing that doesn’t clearly discriminate, but the disastrous 2010 midterm performance for Democrats allowed the GOP to gerrymander in many states, allowing them to take home a House majority in 2012 without winning the most votes (a cycle that is likely to continue into the 2020s because of how blue states tend to just not gerrymander at the federal level while red states are more than happy to). Finally, there is the Senate. The increasing density polarization of America means that a system like the Senate that gives rural voices just so much more power than urban ones means that the median state to take Senate control looks more like Georgia than it does Michigan, the a state much closer to the national will. The deck is stacked against federal Democrats, and that means that the few times that they win, they need to act on small-d democratic reforms and fast.

Enter H.R. 1: The For the People Act. It creates instant online voter registration, creates some level of campaign finance regulation that tries to stay within the bounds of the Citizens United ruling, creates universal vote by mail nationwide, and requires Presidential candidates to disclose their last 10 years of tax returns. All that aside though, most notably for what I’m trying to talk about here, it creates independent commissions to redraw Congressional districts in a non-partisan way in all 50 states, and it makes the last bit of the previous statement incorrect by committing Congress to adding a 51st state, Washington DC. Both of these things would be a boon to Democrats, and I urge them to prioritize them over anything else, because while it’s nice to have total power now, in two years that will almost certainly be gone, and these two things make it much easier to win power back. Non-partisan redistricting means that, with some exceptions that will be because of geographic quirks instead of deliberate partisan hijacking, the party that receives more votes in a state will have more representatives from that state. And while DC statehood does not make the Senate suddenly an even playing field for Democrats, it becomes something they can reasonably do with a pretty good election cycle instead of needing one landslide and one pretty good election cycle to even get to 50, two free Democratic Senators in perpetuity would be great for them, and if the GOP doesn’t like that, they can feel free to to test out what kind of Republican can genuinely make a dent in winning over black voters and maybe apply some of those lessons learned to more competitive races in the south, the playing field is still tilted in their favor. These things could also clearly never pass through budget reconciliation though, so there would either need to be 10 Republican votes on it in the Senate (plausible for gerrymandering reform, DC statehood would be doomed). Or, Democrats can get rid of the filibuster, a topic that will definitely come up over the coming two years and that I will write more about in future, but suffice it to say that I am in favor of this, and if we need to bribe Joe Manchin with a free yacht for every resident of the state of West Virginia, Democrats should try to make it work, with the understanding that Congressional Democrats being able to win power in any other point in this coming decade (they of course just went through 10 years without total control of Congress, so this isn’t out of the question) until major realignments come might be dependent on this. For more on this general topic, there was a great interview with Democratic strategist David Shor back in the summer about how much the deck is stacked against Democrats if they don’t act on this sort of thing, and I’m sure I will be writing more about it in the future, this was just to try to give a small taster.

Tomorrow: We meet a new Senator, one that I have a particular soft spot for.

Loeffler and Perdue Lost, but Warnock and Ossoff Also Won

Last night, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff defeated Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in runoff elections to the US Senate from Georgia. Media coverage about this will focus about what the Republicans did wrong, after all, Trump is still the President, but what the Democrats did right is as big a part of the story here. I especially want to look at Jon Ossoff here, because not every Democratic Senate candidate gets to have “reverend at MLK’s church” as a part of their resume, Ossoff had never held elected office before, but he held his own against the better of the two Republican candidates. He owes a lot of his playbook to one Barack Obama. Obviously Jon Ossoff is not black or in possession of a Harvard Law degree, but he uses a lot of the rhetorical flourishes that Obama used. The combination of high minded messaging about belief in American ideals, but also an ability to be pragmatic and laser-focused on basic economic issues when need be. The moment the Democrats had the opportunity to frame themselves as the $2000 check party and the GOP as the people who opposed that, it was Ossoff who got right on that. He made sure to focus all of his negative advertising against Perdue painting him as an out of touch rich guy, not on accusations of Perdue not being moral enough in the style of the Hillary Clinton campaign against Trump. These three tweets in a row do a nice job of illustrating my point.

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Anyway, Ossoff is an up and comer who gets to be a Senator at age 33 for six years from a newly minted swing state, he clearly has great things ahead of him, and I for one welcome our new Jewish twink overlords.

I should also mention that the polls in this election were spot on, so hopefully that should assuage some “the same polls that thought Hillary would win” type responses from people come 2022.

Tomorrow: A look at the sorts of policy Democrats have in mind for their new trifecta.

Senate Election Preview: David Perdue vs Jon Ossoff

This is the second in a series of two articles about the Georgia runoff elections to the US Senate today, the first is located here.

Today, January 5th, two runoff elections in the state of Georgia will take place to determine control of the United States Senate. The Democrats must win both races to win control of the chamber when Kamala Harris takes office as President of the Senate on the 20th, the Republicans need only win one. These are very important elections, and they both deserve articles of their own. This second article will be about the regular election, the race between David Perdue and Jon Ossoff to win control of this Senate seat through the 2026 midterms. Both of these articles will talk about the candidates one by one, with the state of the campaign from a qualitative perspective included within those candidate summaries, and then conclude with a mathematical breakdown of what we can expect. This second article will also contain some unified remarks about campaign strategy on the whole from both parties, who have largely chosen to unify their messages across candidates.

Senator David Perdue

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Amazingly, David Perdue is the only one of all four candidates in these races to have actually won an election for any office at some point in his life. The former executive for Reebok and Dollar General entered the fray in an incredibly Republican 2014 midterms to replace retiring GOP Senator , and did, well, not actually all that great considering the circumstances. He won his race by 7.7 points in an election cycle where the generic Congressional ballot was R + 5.7. That gives Georgia a more Democratic leaning PVI (R + 2) in this race than it was in the Presidential election this year (R + 4). For comparison, House Republicans in Georgia that year won by 16 points. It wasn’t a great showing, but his cushion was so large he could perform that far under expectation and still easily win. Perdue having actually been a Senator for six years means that he has a real record to go over and critique. You can largely split Senate Republicans into three camps. The few remaining still willing to compromise people with more socially moderate views: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, John McCain before he died, Lamar Alexander before he retired, Lindsey Graham before he went off the deep end. Then you have the bulk of the GOP, people who are often quite ideologically conservative, though how much varies quite a lot. Very willing to be loud about that, but not necessarily absolute firebrands: Mitch McConnell, John Thune, Mitt Romney, Chuck Grassley. Then you have the ideologues who won’t take no for an answer: Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Rand Paul. David Perdue is right on the border of those latter two groups. Which happens to be where Republican Senate leadership tends to introduce its agenda and for what Trump tends to argue. As a result, of all of the Senators who have been in that chamber for all four years of the Trump Show, he has the single highest Trump Score on 538, with 94.1% of his votes on things Trump has a stated opinion on being in line with said opinion. All but two of the seven deviations he has made have been on things that Trump was so out of line on he alienated the vast majority of the Republican caucus, those remaining two are things he was more right-wing on than Trump. This guy is a deep conservative in the true Reagan fusionist way of melding Christian social conservatism with pro business libertarianism.

In terms of his messaging on the campaign trail, it’s been a lot more normal than Loeffler’s bizarre Attila the Hun ads. His messaging is just the Republican standard of “I’m a businessman, not a career politician, I’ll bring you tax cuts and cut big government, my opponents are too left wing to be trusted.” Which to be fair has historically been a winning strategy for Republicans in Georgia, and based on polling (more on that later) he’s been outperforming Loeffler by the slimmest of margins. The potential insider trading scandal that I mentioned in the previous article also tags Perdue, with a lot of specific attention being paid to his case in this. He’s a very standard Republican, but it’s possible he’s so standard that a Georgia that just voted for Joe Biden will continue to snub Trump and those close to him.

Jon Ossoff

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The day is April 18th, 2017. Less than six months ago, Donald Trump shocked Democrats and the media by prevailing in a Presidential election. The Republican Party held control over all parts of the federal government and a lot of liberals who had previously merely cheered from the sidelines suddenly cared very deeply about every big news event going on in American federal politics. And a special election was happening in the Atlanta suburbs with a crowded field featuring only one standout who might be able to get the majority needed to avoid a runoff as a result, Jon Ossoff. GA-06 had been a very conservative district in its voting for a Republican Rep by more than 20 points in the 2016 election. Jon Ossoff was young, photogenic, sounded really good on TV, raised $30M for a House seat, and actually had a shot at flipping this seat deep in Republican suburbia to show Trump what was up. And then he came up just short, a reminder of how hard politics is for all the people new to this sort of thing (the district flipped Democratic in 2018 and is remained that way in 2020, by the way). Then, in late 2019, he announced a second act, with John Lewis endorsing him to launch his campaign, he was going to run to unseat David Perdue. Ossoff was the Democratic Congressional candidate who started the Trump era, and he might just be the one to end it with an exclamation point tomorrow.

Ossoff has shifted a bit in his pitches between 2017 and 2021. He sold himself as a bit more of a moderate in 2017, though still an unabashed Obama-style liberal, which is what got him his national attention. He’s being advertised as a bit more progressive this time around, but crucially, it’s on issues that are popular to be left wing on. “Workers, Wages, Weed” is the name of the game here, and Ossoff has done a good job of centering his campaign on all three, even if Ossoff loses by a slim margin, Democrats should use his campaign as a template in less conservative states than Georgia.

The Numbers Right Now

I’m writing this at about 1am Tuesday morning, and the 538 polling average looks like this:

Ossof has an ever so slightly smaller lead than Warnock, this could be noise, but this race being more Republican than Loeffler-Warnock in polls has been consistent for the whole time, and I would expect that has to do mostly with Loeffler’s lack of having won an election before and general weirdness in campaigning. All the caveats about polls I stated in the previous article still apply here, but I’d still ultimately handicap Ossoff with a 55% chance or so. Both of these are going to be close, and also likely very tightly correlated.

General Editorial Thoughts

It’s probably clear from these articles that I think the Democratic candidates have done a better job campaigning than the Republican ones. They’ve been campaigning together as a package deal for longer than the Republicans have, they’ve been willing to moderate their political message to the tides of the state more than the Republicans, Warnock is a better candidate on paper than any of the other three candidates in these races, and Jon Ossoff comes across as very intelligent when he speaks. Admittedly, some of this perception is bias, I like Warnock and Ossoff a hell of a lot more than Loeffler and Perdue, and I would be very happy to see the Trump era end with a federal Democratic trifecta. But I do think they’re genuinely good candidates, they’ve managed to lead in polling averages that include a lot of pollsters with (correct, as it turned out) Republican house effects in November, and even if they lose it’s going to be very close. Compare that to what everybody’s priors about Senate runoff elections in Georgia were going into this, I think even a slim loss an impressive showing compared to expectations. Ossoff in particular really does a really good job of hitting the popular notes in a way Obama was able to at his best, as an example:

This isn’t a tweet trying to sell it as an important social justice thing for marginalized groups who already vote Democrat and possibly alienating racist white swing voters, this is “hey, free money if we win!” It’s simple, but it works, and that’s really what I think Democrats should focus on over polarizing urban-rural culture war issues like gun control. Anyway, I really do hope the Democrats do win tonight, and I hope this has been a useful overview.

Tomorrow: Who knows? If the elections are called then obviously that, if the electoral college Congressional session is at all interesting instead of just tedious then maybe that, or I might talk about the things the House did today in normal business to avoid talking about either of those things. Follow me on Twitter if you wish to see my descent into insanity over the course of tonight. Hope to see you there when polls close in a few hours.

Senate Election Preview: Kelly Loeffler vs Raphael Warnock

Today, January 5th, two runoff elections in the state of Georgia will take place to determine control of the United States Senate. The Democrats must win both races to win control of the chamber when Kamala Harris takes office as President of the Senate on the 20th, the Republicans need only win one. These are very important elections, and they both deserve articles of their own. This first article will be about the special election, the race between Kelly Loeffler and Raphael Warnock to win control of this Senate seat only until the 2022 midterms. Both of these articles will talk about the candidates one by one, with the state of the campaign from a qualitative perspective included within those candidate summaries, and then conclude with a mathematical breakdown of what we can expect. The second article will also contain some unified remarks about campaign strategy on the whole from both parties, who have largely chosen to unify their messages across candidates.

Senator Kelly Loeffler

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At the very end of 2019, longtime Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson resigned from his post due to health issues. This provided an avenue for still fairly new governor Brian Kemp to make a big decision about what sort of Republican he wants in federal office. Kemp had more or less two choices, close Trump ally and man determined to show how loyal he was willing to be, Rep. Doug Collins, or Kelly Loeffler, a more unknown commodity whose biggest claim to fame was being very very rich thanks to her and her husband’s ownership of Intercontinental Exchange, a company that happens to own a little thing called the NYSE. Loeffler was picked, angering Trump but giving the GOP a super rich person to campaign for their Georgia Senators in 2020. And as it turned out, Trump shouldn’t have complained too soon.

Georgia has a somewhat unique Senate election system, if no candidate gets an absolute majority of the vote, another election is held the following January as a runoff between the top two candidates. Normally this would have to do with a Libertarian candidate or something splitting just enough votes to sink the GOP candidate under 50%, but in this case, Doug Collins wanted revenge and ran for this seat in 2020. Doug Collins and Kelly Loeffler faced off more against each other in the first round of the election than against a Democratic candidate, and that created some really weird incentives. Normally in a campaign one would try to appeal to as much of the electorate as possible and therefore try to act like a reasonable human being. But when the race is really about which Republican can cannibalize enough GOP votes off the other to make it to the runoff, the campaign becomes a contest of who can prove they are most loyal to the Republican Cause, which in 2020 meant being as much of a Trump ally as possible. From where this apparently non-ideological billionaire was coming, the face that emerged was of someone who was as much of a Trump cheerleader as anybody could possibly be. She touted her 538 Trump score of voting with the President 100% of the time (this has since changed after she voted for the Trump disapproved NDAA this December, though she notably didn’t show up to vote for the veto override on the 1st), she was going to stop socialism, she was more conservative than Attila the Hun. Combine this with the fact she still has some allegations of insider trading during the early stages of COVID when she got classified briefs about it she could make financial decisions on, and Loeffler has not exactly set the stage well for herself. Now, let’s meet her challenger.

Reverend Raphael Warnock

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Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta was where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, and being reverend there has been Raphael Warnock’s job since 2005. The man has never held elected office before, but before running for this seat was still quite involved in politics. He delivered the benediction for Obama’s second inaugural public prayer service, held a sit-in at the Georgia State Capitol in support of Medicaid expansion in the state, and chaired an organization helping people in Georgia register to vote. Without any actual incumbent elected officials running for the Senate seat under the Democratic label, Warnock was one part of a wide open field going into the race. Matt Lieberman, Joe Lieberman’s son, was the leading candidate, likely just from name-ID, until party elites started sending signals to pick Warnock over Lieberman and, to editorialize for a moment here, because Warnock is just a far stronger Georgia Senator candidate than a man whose claim to fame is being a New England politician’s kid. Due to the aforementioned weirdness of the structure of this election, there was intense pressure from Democrats to consolidate the vote around Warnock once he got steam as to avoid a Loeffler-Collins runoff.

It worked, and Warnock was the leading vote-getter in the first round of this election on November 3rd, beating both Loeffler and Collins and advancing to the runoff. Since then, Warnock has made some smart decisions about how to run in a conservative state like Georgia. A quick stop over at Google’s political ad database reveals that the highest spend ads attack Loeffler not for being racist or not displaying American values, but being an out of touch rich person who wants to take away healthcare. The second article of this series will go into more detail about the unified dynamics of the campaigns. But I think the general way Warnock has handled this has been good.

The Numbers Right Now

Normally I would try to do up my own polling average on this, but we’re short on time here, I launched this new push for politics blogging on the 1st and the election is on the 5th. I’m going to crib from FiveThirtyEight here. As of the day I’m pre-writing this, January 3rd, Warnock has a 2.2 point lead in polls.

Based on 538’s Lite forecasts in Senate races from 2018 and 2020, a 2 point lead in the polls corresponds to about a 60% chance at victory. There are of course reasons to be skeptical about the way polls are currently set up in American politics after the performance of Senate polling this November, but the polling was more or less spot on in Georgia, but that might just be luck, but the polling seems to be better with more educated electorates and you’d expect an electorate in a non-standard election to be more educated, but maybe that’s overthinking it and the polls really do just have a secular Democratic bias. In any case, I think 60% for either candidate isn’t nearly a big enough commitment to have egg on your face if it goes the other way, unless the margin is by something like 4 points or more in the other direction. The main thing we know about this election is it will be close, how close and who comes out on top remains to be seen.

Later today: A preview article on the other Senate race in Georgia.

Speaker Pelosi or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Median Voter Theorem

Nancy Pelosi is a member of Congress who is considerably to the left of the median voter. By DW-NOMINATE, she is in fact a notch or two to the left of the median Democratic Rep. These are two uncontroversial statements, but the way the internet distorts political factions would make these facts confusing to you. There is no better demonstration of this contrast than the discussion of yesterday’s vote for Pelosi’s election as Speaker of the House for the 117th Congress.

Nancy Pelosi was elected in a floor vote entirely on party lines with only five exceptions. Those exceptions were all from moderates. The leftmost coalition of House Democrats, the newly six-headed Squad, all voted for Pelosi. If you think about politics like a normal human being, this seems perfectly normal. Regardless of how just you think America’s political spectrum is, Nancy Pelosi is unambiguously on the left wing of it, for moderate Democrats in somewhat conservative districts (two of which voted for Donald Trump at the Presidential level) where Pelosi is too left wing for the electorate there and they need to fight their hard elections every two years, they have a pretty big incentive to distance themselves from Pelosi. Genuinely leftist members of the House in very safe urban districts, on the other hand, can support Pelosi without batting an eyelash because their electorates are very sympathetic to people as left wing as Pelosi. This is what you would expect from a very simple reading of the median voter theorem, and yet Twitter, everybody’s favorite website, was shocked.

Why do they think this, given what I’ve just talked about? Well, much of Twitter (which assuredly has many right-wing nutters, they’ve just done a good job of sectioning themselves off from the rest of the website) is very far to the left of the median voter. From this, they have convinced themselves that they are actually representative of the median voter (or some mythical army of leftist non-voters who would all turn out in droves if only Bernie was nominated). From this perspective, Pelosi is right of the echo chamber’s median, and therefore would only be supported by moderate Democrats who wouldn’t be hurt by supporting someone to the right of the median, and it’s the left-wing Democrats who need to step up and vote for, well, I don’t actually know, I haven’t seen any of these people actually name an alternative left-wing Speaker candidate. This is of course wildly out of step with how elections actually work, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is at zero risk of losing an election barring a primary challenger, who would assuredly have to stake out a lane to the right of her to not just fall flat, she therefore can feel free to support left-wing things as much as she wants, sure it costs her to run significantly behind Biden in her Congressional District, but she’s still winning by 40 points as opposed to Biden’s 43. Jared Golden, by contrast, has to fight like hell for his seat every two years and must distance himself from Biden in the rightward direction, Trump won his district in both 2016 and 2020. But if you imagine Twitter leftists as just thinking the median voter is as left-wing as the most left-wing member of the House, as it is in their echo chamber, their political reasoning suddenly makes sense.

Media feeds this as well, over the past two years, Golden and Ocasio-Cortez were elected freshmen Reps for the same party in the same election, but here is a comparison graph of both of their mentions on cable news over the past two years, see if you can spot any blips from Golden.

These two people hold the same amount of actual legislative power, but because one is far more ideologically loud, it creates this self-perpetuating cycle of media mentions and additional ideological response from her and suddenly a lot of people think AOC is somehow representative of House Democrats and their voters, despite that not being the case. There are broad implications to this, but I just wanted to do this article today to point out that it is a phenomenon that exists, and it’s why I’m going to try to explicitly not bring Twitter into these articles too often, certainly not in the longer articles like yesterday and what is coming tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Two articles, each previewing one of the Senate elections in Georgia.

From November 3rd to January 3rd

Two months ago today, on November 3rd, 2020, the polls finally closed on the United States Presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. In the coming days, it became increasingly clear that Biden would win, until November 7th when the networks finally called it. A lot has happened since then, and as the new Congress opens up today, we should go through those things.

The Senate battle lines are set

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While a lot of the media takes immediately after the 2020 election concluded seemed to take as a foregone conclusion that the Democrats would not win a trifecta, they still very well could through the Senate run-off elections in Georgia on Tuesday. The Democrats must win both elections to win control of the United States Senate. The elections put incumbent Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue against Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, respectively. I would obviously prefer it if the Democrats won these races, Biden being able to get some real action done, even if it requires budget reconciliation, would be very good. I wouldn’t hold my breath though, these are clearly going to be quite close elections and I wouldn’t try to prognosticate too much on either, but the simple fact that the Dems have to win both of the races to gain control whereas the Republicans only have to hold onto one tilts things a bit in the favor of the Republicans. Still, anything could happen.

Another round of COVID relief

Coronavirus government response updates: Trump signs $2T relief bill after House passage - ABC News

After a very weird back and forth between Trump and Congress where Trump wasn’t involved in stimulus negotiations for most of the process, then Trump suddenly decided he wanted to veto the legislation if it didn’t include $2000 direct payments to Americans instead of the $600 ones in the bill, Democrats introducing a bill to do just that, Trump suddenly pulling a 180 and signing the bill while still signaling that he wasn’t happy about having to do it and sending a red pen underlined version of the bill back to Congress highlighting the parts he didn’t like, as if that somehow matters in a country where the President does not have a line item veto, and finally Mitch McConnell killing the $2000 payments by attaching it to other provisions Democrats find toxic, we have $900B of stimulus through a process that felt as comfortable as this run-on sentence. The stimulus renews the Paycheck Protection Program, provides the aforementioned $600 direct to Americans, provides additional funding for vaccines and testing, puts the increased UI benefits back in place, money towards schools, an extension of the eviction moratorium put in place earlier in the year, and other, smaller things. This is obviously very good, and the people on Twitter whining about how the bill contains “just $600” should be more mindful of what they are actually talking about. We will see if this gets followed up upon by the 117th Congress going forward.

Biden begins filling out his roster

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Biden has begun to name his nominations for positions in his administration in cabinet offices, with some exceptions, most notably the Attorney General.
Going through the cabinet offices in the order of the line of succession:

  • Secretary of State: Antony Blinken
  • Secretary of the Treasury: Janet Yellen
  • Secretary of Defense: Lloyd Austin
  • Attorney General: Nobody yet named
  • Secretary of the Interior: Deb Haaland
  • Secretary of Agriculture: Tom Vilsack
  • Secretary of Commerce: Nobody yet named
  • Secretary of Labor: Nobody yet named
  • Secretary of Health and Human Services: Xavier Becerra
  • Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: Marcia Fudge
  • Secretary of Transportation: Pete Buttigieg
  • Secretary of Energy: Jennifer Granholm
  • Secretary of Education: Miguel Cardona
  • Secretary of Veterans Affairs: Denis McDonough
  • Secretary of Homeland Security: Alejandro Mayorkas

In addition, Ron Klain is in as Chief of Staff, Katherine Tai is in as the USTR, the Director of National Intelligence nominee is Avril Haines, Michael S. Regan is to be heading the EPA, Neera Tanden will be in charge of the Office of Management and Budget, which is in charge of signing off on a lot of the things the agencies propose, Linda Thomas-Greenfield is the nominee for UN ambassador, Cecilia Rouse will be chairing the Council of Economic Advisors, and John Kerry will be getting a special role as the climate czar.

I do not have developed opinions on many of these people, but I am an economics guy, and so I will go over the four nominees with jobs that most directly interact with economic policy. Janet Yellen is more or less the ideal pick for Treasury Secretary, she was good as Fed Chair, is perhaps more qualified to navigate the economic policy space in DC than anyone alive with the possible exception of Ben Bernanke, and she should be a fairly uncontroversial confirmation through the Senate. Katherine Tai seems to command respect of the Washington consensus on the topic of international trade, but unfortunately said consensus has become markedly more protectionist over the last five years as Obama’s TPP plans went up in flames thanks to Trump, I hope she will pull for pulling back the tariffs on China sooner rather than later, but I’m not optimistic. Neera Tanden is a very loudly ideological person and has been for many years, the ways in which she is an ideologue are the same ways in which I am an ideologue, so she gets a thumbs up from me. Finally, Cecilia Rouse is an academic economist, and one who happens to have a profile as an IGM Forum panelist, and her responses seem good. Fiscal and monetary stimulus in recessions good, free trade good, rent control bad, carbon tax good but might be a hard sell politically. Just a series of answers that show not just agreement with the consensus of economists, but her comments often add additional insight to answers that suggest she’s thinking about the political end of things too. She seems like a great improvement from the Trump administration and I hope she gets some real influence in the White House. I might talk about the other nominations in time as their Senate hearings come up, but we’ll leave it at that for now.

The look of things from now until Joe Biden takes office

Pelosi and McConnell hurtling toward coronavirus relief showdown - POLITICO

It’s worthwhile to look ahead for what is to come over the course of the next 17 days. On Tuesday, we will see the control of the Senate decided through the aforementioned Georgia run-offs. On Wednesday, the House and Senate will convene to count the Electoral College votes, which many Republicans have vowed to fruitlessly contest. The House will be having sessions from Jan 3rd through Jan 8th, before taking a break until the 21st. The Senate will be doing a pro forma session on the 3rd to ring the new Congress in, doing the EC vote counting on the 6th, and then not reconvening until the 20th. The big thing to keep an eye on here is Pelosi’s speakership, the Democrats have a majority, and they claim they have the votes for it, but the majority is narrow and getting everybody necessary to actually physically be in the Capitol for the vote in the time of COVID could make it tight. She will almost certainly pull it off, but it won’t be the usual effortless day. In addition, a lot of Reps will introduce a bunch of bills they have on day 1. Few will ever get their day on the floor, but we will still get a look at some ideological commitments of different party segments. It’s also worth seeing if any extreme freshman Reps try to pull any stunts, especially Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon believer who was elected from GA-14. Beyond that though, it will largely be a wait and see game with Georgia. From there, if the Democrats take the Senate we could see Trump getting out his veto pen during the last days of his Presidency, but that’s something to tackle when it happens. Depending on how I feel I’d be able to fit it in, I might try to get something out on Monday about the first day of Congress, but if that isn’t the case, get ready for two articles previewing the Georgia runoff on Tuesday, I hope to see you there.

Some Shooting-from-the-hip Probabilistic Forecasts for 2021

A few days ago Matthew Yglesias published an article entitled “How to be less full of shit” that went over the idea that someone who writes about politics should attempt to make loose probabilistic forecasts about events in the near future as to incentivize one to actually think about what they say about how things will pan out, and allows one to go back and judge precisely how wrong they were and in what direction (over or underconfidence, maybe just missing the most likely option consistently) or what issues one is wrong about. I think this is a good idea, and what follows is a vague attempt to stick probabilities on things that could happen in 2021, with the goal not being to be super precise so much as actually quantify my thinking on certain topics. I won’t have spent more than a few minutes on each one of these, so don’t think these are some expert opinion. The forecasts are also split up between how soon they will resolve, so I can write an article after those periods of time examining just those predictions. Finally, know that while some of the things listed here have probabilities of less than 50%, the thing in question is what I consider the most likely thing to come out of that scenario.

To be resolved in Q1 of 2021

  1. At least one of Kelly Loeffler or David Perdue successfully win re-election to the United States Senate on January 5th: 60%
  2. One party wins both elections in Georgia: 90%
  3. Joe Biden’s approval rating (as measured by the inevitable FiveThirtyEight polling average to come out at some point in the quarter, if by some form of laziness on the part of Nate Silver it is not released until like May or something, I will create my own average for the purposes of checking this, actually now that I think about that I might do that regardless, could be a neat project) is above 50% at the end of Q1: 75%
  4. The Kansas City Chiefs win the American Football Conference finals: 55%
  5. The Green Bay Packers win the National Football Conference finals: 30%
  6. The Kansas City Chiefs win Super Bowl LV: 25%
  7. American unemployment by the end of the quarter is under 6%: 60%
  8. At least two of Joe Biden’s nominees for Secretary of State, Defense, Treasury, and Attorney General are confirmed by the end of the quarter: 80%
  9. At least one bill with a silly acronym (defined here as a Politico or Wikipedia article about it using an acronym for it) is signed into law by President Donald Trump or President Joe Biden by the end of the quarter: 70%
  10. At least 25 million Americans will have received at least one COVID-19 shot by the end of the quarter: 65%

To be resolved in Q2 of 2021

  1. The Milwaukee Bucks win the Eastern Conference Finals: 25%
  2. The Los Angeles Lakers win the Western Conference Finals: 35%
  3. The Los Angeles Lakers win the National Basketball Association Finals: 20%
  4. Joe Biden’s approval rating is above 50% by the end of the first half of 2020: 60%
  5. American unemployment at the end of the half is under 6%: 75%
  6. At least one bill authorizing what the CBO estimates as a direct 10 year spend of at least $10B is signed into law by President Joe Biden by the end of the half: 65%
  7. President Joe Biden will be unable to deliver on his “100M vaccines in 100 days” promise: 70%
  8. France wins the “2020” UEFA Football Championship: 20%
  9. The winner of Best Picture in the Academy Awards will have actually been released in 2020: 80%
  10. Mentions of “Biden” on American cable news, as measured by the GDELT television explorer are greater in number than mentions of “Trump” throughout the first half of 2021: 90%

To be resolved at or shortly after the end of 2021

  1. The target federal funds rate as administrated by the Fed is never increased throughout all of 2021: 90%
  2. YoY CPI inflation in the United States never exceeds 2.5% in any month of 2021: 80%
  3. YoY nominal GDP growth in the United States in 2021 will be at least 4%: 80%
  4. American unemployment at the end of the year is under 6%: 90%
  5. Joe Biden ends the year with an approval rating below 50%: 55%
  6. The American League MVP is Mike Trout: 30%
  7. The National League MVP is Fernando Tatis Jr.: 15%
  8. The New York Yankees are American League Champions: 35%
  9. The San Diego Padres are National League Champions: 20%
  10. The San Diego Padres are World Series Champions: 10%

I hope to revisit this article at the end of each quarter, going back and looking at how I was wrong, and after the first half of the year is over adding an additional ten predictions for the third quarter.

Welcome to 2021!

Happy new year fellas, we can put 2020 behind us, and importantly for this blog, a new American Presidency starts, as well as a new Congress, the 117th, to go with it.

Over the course of the next two years I want to turn this place into much more of an old school 2000s blog, with frequent updating prioritized over long posts. I want to focus on tracking the actual political work being done on Capitol Hill and in the White House, looking at bills passed, nominations confirmed, and executive orders signed, and evaluating how they will actually impact America and the world, not just the partisan fights getting highlighted on Twitter.

I want to continue to work on psephological models ahead of 2022, my goal is to be able to do a real probabilistic Senate forecast for that year’s midterms.

I also want to put in some video work, maybe a weekly update that’s mostly just me talking into a camera, I don’t know, we’ll see.

I will see people back here on January 3rd, where I will try to kick things off with a reflection of what has happened since the election and what to expect in the weeks ahead in the new Congress and new Biden administration. And as a bonus on January 2nd, you can expect a weirder article to attempt a project in interested in.

Immediate Post-Election Reflections

You might not have heard about this, but there were some federal elections held in the United States a week and a half ago. 572 of them in fact, 51 of them for President, 51 for Vice President, 35 for the Senate, and 435 for the House of Representatives. Now, all of those races except a few in the House have been resolved, regardless of what President Trump has to say. While I don’t think it’s that worthwhile to make too many super confident takes this early on, I did make a prediction of the Presidential map, and I think it’s worth interrogating how reality differed from that map, because I think it tells a fairly noticeable story.

The Trends That Do Persist

One thing that I try to keep in mind when it comes to political analysis is that pundits tend to overestimate the amount to which new things that happen are the products of long-term trends over things that will just revert to the mean. The support of Donald Trump among Midwestern non-college-educated whites is one of those things. I figured it wouldn’t go back to Obama 2012 levels or anything, but I was seeing poll results that told me that it would get far closer to that than what actually seems to have ended up happening based on county-level results (if you try to make these inferences based purely on exit polls the 538 Politics newsroom will come to your house and shoot you). Here was my ultimate predicted electoral map:

I got Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina wrong, plus ME-02’s isolated electoral vote. You will note how similar my predicted map was to 2012, I really believed that Biden was largely recreating the Obama coalition. Instead it appears that he just leaned in really hard to the college-educated whites niche. That is enough to make up a majority of the nation, but it’s incredibly electorally inefficient. The median state for Senate purposes here is probably Georgia or North Carolina, which are maybe R + 5 or + 6 compared to the median American voter, and the staggered nature of American elections means that Democrats need to average that over a six year group of three election cycles to take the Senate, it’s rough.

All that being said, Joe Biden will become the President on January 20th, and that is a tremendous relief after the last four years, pessimism about Congressional Democrats aside. I will likely be writing about actual things that, like, the United States government will actually do instead of just having the President whining on Twitter all day, and that will be fun.

Also, stay tuned for 2022 projection stuff, I think it’s a reasonable goal of mine to be able to publish a probabilistic forecast for the Senate by the time that election rolls around, and some of the work I’ve done on slowly going over Senate results and polling error will build to that.

Some Research on New York Senate Elections

This is just a short little post to say that I’ve decided to start working on some research for how close polls tend to track to results in Senate races, something that probably won’t be totally finished before the election and is more of a backburner thing that could be deployed for a 2021 special election or something. That being said, the first state I looked at with this was New York, using 538’s collection of polls dating back to 1998, I put together very basic polling averages (adjusted for date, sample size, and partisan sponsorship, but not actual proven quality) for each state and measured how the Democratic Senate candidates (Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and Kirsten Gillibrand) in New York did compared to their poll lead on election night. Here’s a quick graph I did up in R of the results of that:

The correlation coefficient here is 0.96, though that doesn’t quite explain the fact that Democrats do seem to reasonably consistently overperform polls in New York, I’d need to look at other very blue states to say if this is just noise or not though. And there was one Democrat to underperform polls, but that was Chuck Schumer’s 2004 campaign which had only one poll measuring it.

I will do more research into these numbers and probably tweet about it, but unsurprisingly polls are undefeated at predicting Democratic victories in very Democratic states (though Schumer was only up by about 3 points in my polling average in 1998 when he in fact won by about 10, that was notably the last competitive Senate race in the state of New York). I also might update this post itself with additional findings as time goes on.

Update: Twitter thread that goes a bit more in detail is here: