Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion

(by Matthew Knee)

As the mainstream media strained its resources and even brought on amateurs to power through Sarah Palin's old emails for the scandal that wasn't there, a slow-motion constitutional crisis has been unfolding.

The War Powers Resolution clearly states that president can authorize military action for 60 days without seeking congressional approval. In the absence of congressional approval, the war in question must be wrapped up by the 90 day mark. For the war in Libya, that deadline is Friday.

The Obama administration claims that the war in Libya is too small to count as a war, and that it is not an US action but a NATO action. Congress disagrees. Speaker Boehner informed Obama yesterday of the upcoming deadline, and today 10 congressmen announced their intention to file a lawsuit.

That there is so little coverage of the fact that the president quite likely ignoring both the law and Congress to fight a war of choice is a testament to how far professional journalism has fallen. That the so much of the left is suddenly not that interested in the legality of wars or checking out-of-control presidential power is a testament to the hollowness of their ideals.

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(by Matthew Knee)

I recently managed to get a few parking tickets dismissed. My parking permit fell off my mirror, resulting in about 4 tickets overnight. The parking office told me there was no rule against duplicate citations, and so did whomever processed my written appeal, which was rejected. When I went to me in-person appeal, however, I was told that there are in fact rules against repeated tickets within an 8 hour period for the same violation in the same place.

What relevance does this story have (Other than emphasizing that one should be persistent in appealing parking tickets)? It says a lot about bureaucracy and policy implementation. Bureaucrats are people doing jobs. They have a role to play and people to answer to, and like most office workers are generally concerned with clearing their in-boxes or to-do lists and avoiding the wrath of an angry boss, usually by complying with organizational goals or pressures and trying the succeed at whatever part of their job is being measured. In my case, the people who work in the parking office are there to collect payments and keep complainers from complicating things. The people who process written appeals are tasked with clearing huge numbers of mostly-frivolous parking appeals. The people who conduct in-person appeals are in the business of talking one-on-one with individuals who on average have better cases (because they haven't given up yet), and occasionally granting mercy. All behaved as expected.

Bureaucratic behavior has implications for a variety of policies. The two I will discuss today are affirmative action in state university admissions, and K-12 teaching.

Several states have passed bans on affirmative action, but many public universities theoretically banned from using racial preferences continue to do so by other means, particularly by considering variables known to correlate with race, systems that combine racial signals with subjectivity, or using other methods to facilitate a desired racial balance. This can be explained in part by the behavior of bureaucrats. There do not exist compliance officers whose role it is to ensure that these laws are followed, but there do exist federal affirmative action compliance officers who focus on non-preference federal policies beyond state control, and run offices of affirmative action with varying powers, scopes, and budgets. These are people that must be answered to.

Similarly, academic senates, admissions officers, and administrators have liberal pressure groups, each other, sometimes government officials, and their own often-liberal ideology telling them that they need to achieve some desired racial balance. Many don't want to comply with racial preference bans anyway, and even if they were not so inclined, doing so could complicate their jobs significantly.

There are rarely internal controls to counter these forces. At UCLA in 2008, a professor on the academic senate committee charged with admissions oversight asked to conduct a study to determine whether their new admissions policy was being used for racial discrimination. He was unceremoniously denied the right to do so and run off the committee, despite support from the committee's undergraduate representatives.

All opponents of racial preferences have is the slow and unwieldy legal system - and generally the laws aren't properly worded to rule out current tactics anyway.

K-12 education faces similar, more straightforward, problems. Teachers in a union-based seniority system are simply incentivized to stick around, not do anything utterly egregious, and demand their contractual rights. This has the dangerous side-effect of making teachers dependent on the union for their livelihood rather than their skill at their work. Solidarity and union rights are the way to success, not performance and internal competition. Some have varying incentives to raise very specific test scores (which can lead to its own problematic "teaching to the test" incentives), but in stronger union areas merit pay is far from the norm.

What are we to learn from this? When seeking the correct policies, conventional wisdom emphasizes the importance of examining at how the public will respond to changes in incentives. However, it is also important to examine how government officials will respond to a change in incentives. Good government policy requires building functioning systems that resist being undermined or swept aside by circumstance or bureaucratic resistance. Good laws and policies must go beyond mere declarations.


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(by Matthew Knee)

Yale recently announced the closing of the The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), America's first academic institute to study anti-Semitism, citing a lack of scholarly output and student interest. The overall Jewish community, and some newspaper columnists, are up in arms, claiming conspiracy.

However, YIISA could not have succeeded so long as the Yale student body, especially the Jewish community, remained unwilling to hear the ideologically-inconvenient truths about a hatred that disproportionally exists in communities that leftists love to love. YIISA events were sparsely attended by Yale students, and apparently, relevant classes were underenrolled as well. Those who point out that the PLO condemned a YIISA conference on global anti-Semitism fail to note that the Jewish community at Yale did not come to YIISA's defense in any significant way. While I found many references to the controversy searching the Yale Daily News web site, I found no examples of the organized Yale Jewish community standing up for YIISA.

I recall talking with other Jewish students about YIISA, including some who were directly involved. The complaints I heard were consistent. Yale students consider the study of anti-Semitism of the sort YIISA examined to be a "right wing" pursuit. They complained that YIISA was too focused on Europeans leftists, Israel-haters, and particularly, Muslims.

This was unsurprising considering the far left nature of the Yale Jewish Community. While I was on campus, Yale Friends of Israel (YFI), Yale's allegedly pro-Israel student organization, had so big a tent that one of their leaders told me, at the height of the controversy over "The Israel Lobby," that even Walt and Mearshimer's views should be welcomed as a form of pro-Israel viewpoint. This was met with approval by nearby YFI members.

YFI has not been all bad. It does engage in some pro-Israel programs in addition to anti-Israel ones, especially cosponsoring pro-Israel events that were happening anyway, such as YIISA events or the Yale stop on the Dershowitz book tour du jour, or letting various outside Jewish organizations come present their usual inreach and training programs. However, Yale's Jewish organizations have consistently failed to advocate for Israel or the Jewish community in a public and aggressive fashion when it was not politically correct to do so.

YFI takes pride in never having real conflict with the Muslim community on campus, despite the views prevalent in that demographic. Yale Friends of Israel wrote, regarding their relationship with Yale's Muslim community at the end of 2008-2009 school year "We go out of our way not to step on each other’s toes." They noted that all their events that year were met "without protests or demonstrations by student groups," before going on to note one exception - a pro-Israel speech during the Gaza war that Yale the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale (Slifka) forced off campus due to "security concerns." They emphasize though that they were not a sponsor of the event. The implication is clear - they avoid conflict with the Muslim community by minimizing pro-Israel activity, but the Muslim community and their allies apparently do not reciprocate when some trouble-maker decides to side with Israel when it really matters.

The organized Jewish community instead participated in the Interfaith Vigil for Palestine, although the then-president of YFI was quick to note that he considered it "a vigil in hopes of peace and in prayer for the victims in both Gaza and in Israel.” Right. I'm sure that's exactly how the organizers, who, after all, named the event "Interfaith Vigil for Palestine," saw it.

Last year, YFI held an event "in conjunction" with Israel Apartheid Week, featuring an anti-Israel documentary which "explores the subject of discrimination and land-use planning in Jerusalem, which is at the core of both the overall conflict and the apartheid debate," after which they could discuss among themselves how Apartheid is too strong a word.

When Rahmatullah Hashemi, a former Taliban spokesman, spent a year as a Yale student, the Jewish community defended his presence on campus. Amy Aaland, then-Exectutive Director of Slifka, told John Fund "It's a chance to learn about him and his culture. Dialogue starts at a table. You have to share a meal together." She also noted that "it's not like the Taliban attacked this country," and was untroubled by his view that Israel is America's Al-Qaeda (our agent of terrorism against the Muslim world) noting that this view is common at Yale. Aaland also said about Hashemi "why not come from a place of trust, break out of old molds and consider him innocent until proven guilty?," despite Hashemi's role as a Taliban propagandist being beyond dispute.

More recently, Slifka head Rabbi James Ponet (who officiated at Chelsea Clinton's wedding) and a group called Jews and Muslims at Yale (JAM) hosted Ground Zero Mosque Imam Rauf. YFI and JAM endorsed Rauf, claiming that "it is difficult to see why anyone has ever had a problem with the cleric or his organization. Nevertheless, they note that while "Rauf consistently shrugged off" questions "about militant Jihad and those strands of xenophobia present in Islam...we never felt that the imam was avoiding these questions for political reasons; rather, it quickly became clear that these were simply not important parts of his religious vision." Oooookay then.

I could find more examples, but this post is long as it is. Why must the left-wing Jewish community at Yale engage in such logical contortions to deny Muslim anti-Semitism and preserve their friendship with the organized Muslim community? I believe that it preserves their view of the world, their place in it, and their sense of right and wrong. Both the Jewish past and the leftist present militate towards supporting those viewed as oppressed minorities, and leftist philosophies, rooted in particular views of relative power and the desire to overturn traditional hierarchies, rate Muslims as more oppressed than Jews, especially Israelis. Palestinian propagandists and terror apologists have internalized this lesson, portraying their opponents as bigots, Islamophobes, imperialists, and oppressors.

The reality of anti-Semitism, however, is that it is more prevalent among those groups leftists identify with out of what they wrongly believe to be anti-bigotry sentiment. The left-leaning Anti-Defamation League and others find that despite problems in the past, anti-Semitism in American Evangelical Christian community is no higher than the general population, but anti-Semitism among American minorities is vastly higher than American whites. At least regarding certain money matters, Democrats are more Anti-Semitic than Republicans, and priming anti-Semitic beliefs is associated with increased opposition to corporate tax cuts. And of course, anti-Semitism in the Muslim Middle East is nearly universal.

I'm not saying that the Jewish community should develop new prejudices or seek out hostile relations with other groups, but that they need to reject these (ironically) racialist viewpoints entirely. Fighting anti-Semitism is not compatible with a compulsion to back "the right side" as the left sees it. It is compatible with recognizing threats and challenges, and dealing with them rationally.

Those who are concerned with anti-Semitism need to look past the closing of YIISA and to the fact that leftism is crippling the Jewish community's ability to combat anti-Semitism. All the information in the world will do no good if people refuse to take it to heart.


*Disclosure: Professor Donald Green, who operates YIISA's parent organization, The Institute for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), is my academic adviser. I have not discussed the matter with him in order to ensure and to emphasize that I am in NO WAY speaking for him or for ISPS. I have received money from ISPS in the past, although have not done so recently.
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(by Matthew Knee)

You might think so, from the "at least we aren't hypocrites" defense that comes up every time a Democrat is caught with his pants down where they shouldn't be.

When liberals and the MSM (…but I repeat myself) amplify Republican sex scandals and minimize Democratic ones by playing the hypocrisy card, they are implying that the specific behaviors involved are ones that Democrats tolerate and Republicans condemn.

Hypocrites are those who present themselves as holding a particular set of values, but who act contrary to them. For the Democrats' assertion that these scandals demonstrate Republican hypocrisy but not Democratic hypocrisy to be true, not only must Democrats not present themselves as the sort who oppose - independent of their political context - the scandalous sexcapades of their own members, but the scandalous sexcapades of Republicans as well. After all, Republicans could not be blamed for particular hypocrisy if the parties did not differ on these issues.

But do they? If a scandal concerns simple homosexuality, promiscuity, or some association with abortion, then there might be a difference between the parties. But how many scandals fit into those categories? Democrats might protest that Republicans talk about family values more, especially in the abstract, but Republicans have nothing resembling a monopoly on family values talk. Generic appeals to the virtues of family (including using family values talk to argue FOR gay marriage) have become universal in American political rhetoric, even if the parties use them to make very different points.

If the Democrats are to not be hypocrites, they must at minimum claim not to stand against the immoral actions of America's randy representatives. What must the Democrats not oppose to keep their hypocrisy card valid? Let's take a look at some major political sex scandals:

Bill Clinton: adultery, possible sexual harassment (…by some feminist definitions, due to the workplace power imbalance)
Anthony Weiner: adultery, predation of much younger, less powerful individuals, possibly sending unsolicited dick pics.
James McGreevey: adultery (with another man and employee)
Gary Condit: adultery, possible sexual harassment (…by some feminist definitions, due to the workplace power imbalance)
Mark Foley: sexually harassing teenagers (of the same sex)
Larry Craig :adultery, illegally trolling for gay sex in an airport bathroom
David Vitter: adultery, prostitution
Gavin Newsom: adultery, being a terrible friend (He had an affair with his chief of staff/campaign manager/very close friend's wife.)
Elliot Spitzer: adultery, prostitution
Ted Kennedy : adultery, drunk driving, manslaughter

What patterns do we see here? For one, none of the major sex scandals of this era were about abortion, promiscuous singles, or simple homosexuality. Scandals that did relate to homosexuality involved homosexual acts that would be objectionable to approximately as many people had they been heterosexual but otherwise identical. At most, in a few cases some on the right might find the homosexual nature of these acts to be an aggravating circumstance where others might not.

The incidents that become political sex scandals are not the sort that are disputed in public discourse. These are consensus issues. There is ordinarily little reason for politicians to speak on topics such as 'Don't cheat on your wife" or "Don't troll for anonymous sex in airport bathrooms."

When a politician is caught doing such things, however, other politicians get to stake their positions. In all nearly all of these cases, there was a consensus among the political class that the politician's actions were wrong, and most dissenters can be explained by factors such as partisanship or friendship. Thus, the history of political sex scandals proves that Democrats and Republicans similarly judge and condemn the sorts of sexual transgressions politicians commit. When these specific matters come up, Republicans and Democrats stake their claims and make their judgements, on average, quite similarly.

The Democrats need to either cut their hypocrisy talk or make it clear that they do not oppose general skeeziness and adultery with aggravating circumstances (low-ranking subordinate, underage or creepily young, prostitution, public lewdness, close friend's wife, kills girl while driving drunk, etc.). There is a word for those who present themselves as virtuous when it is useful to condemn others, but set aside those virtues when necessary to defend their own misdeeds: Hypocrites.

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(by Matthew Knee)

...that is, the fact that he or she is driving a Prius.

I took this picture in the parking lot of the California Republican Assembly convention in Orange County last spring. I saw the same car at the California Republican Convention the following fall in Sacramento, although I am unaware as to the identity of the activist.


EDIT: Added some close-ups for readability.

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by Matthew Knee

In a closed door meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz asked Netanyahu to demand a pledge from the Republican Jewish Coalition not to make Israel a campaign issue in 2012. He did not.

To the uninitiated, Wasserman Schultz's bizarre request seems almost too chutzpadik to be believed, as much blogospheric mocking shows. However, Wasserman Schultz was in a sense parroting AIPAC’s bipartisan party line, albeit in an ironically partisan way. AIPAC works to ensure that Israel-related bills in Congress pass with crushing bipartisan majorities, and that American presidents pursue pro-Israel policies. To do this, they must establish that Israel is not a partisan issue, allowing pro-Israel activists and donors of both parties to use their clout to ensure that elected officials – especially otherwise indifferent ones – remain influenced by pro-Israel supporters.

Ideally, Israel should not be a partisan matter, and AIPAC works hard to prevent it from becoming one - they need to win votes no matter who is in power, and they do, by enormous bipartisan margins. Obama's backpedaling at AIPAC shows that they still are quite good at this. He might have been dissembling, but the fact that he felt the need to do so says a lot about AIPAC's power and success.

However, the partisan divide on Israel stems directly from many Democrats becoming less pro-Israel. Wasserman Schultz manages to turn the principle that pro-Israel policies should be bipartisan upside down, using it to provide cover for some Democrats to defect to the anti-Israel side of the fence. If one is to "erase the aisle" on Israel issues, as Wasserman Schultz suggests, one must ensure that the parties are equally supportive of Israel - not simply stop talking about the fact that they are not.

Democrats are not becoming anti-Israel because Republicans are calling them anti-Israel. Republicans claiming to be more pro-Israel won't make pro-Israel Democrats defensive about anti-Israel positions they do not hold, and considering the high level of Democratic partisanship in the pro-Israel community, Republicans expressing invalid criticisms of Democrats' Israel views is unlikely to leave Democratic politicians without influential pro-Israel supporters any time soon.

The problem is that these criticisms have merit. Democrats are becoming less supportive of Israel because American liberalism, influenced by Postcolonialism, anti-anti-Islamist sentiment, cultural relativism, and the decline of nationalism (and the attendant affinity for nations like ours), is no longer as compatible with support for Israel as it once was. While 85% of Republicans sympathize more with the Israelis than the Palestinians, only 48% of Democrats do. Last year, when Gallup polled Americans about their views on 20 different countries, the partisan favorability gap on Israel - 27 points - was the highest of any country. I encourage everyone to read Jennifer Rubin's more detailed rundown of the numbers.

While Democrats may be becoming less pro-Israel in absolute terms, the spectrum itself has shifted to the right. As Palestinian rejectionism has moved Israel’s own positions rightward, far more Democrats than Republicans have suddenly found themselves on the not-pro-Israel side of the shifting divide. This also increases the gap between the very pro-Israel and the go-along-to-get-along types, potentially complicating bipartisan legislation.

If the Democratic Party had no Israel problem, they would respond to Republican challenges by matching or beating their bids. They would take offense at the implication that they are any less pro-Israel and fight to prove their critics wrong. Some are trying. Many Democrats have taken the side of Israel (not to mention American values and commitments) in the recent Obama-Netanyahu dust-up. But as party chair, Wasserman Schultz is stuck slathering lipstick on the Obama's not-so-kosher Israel policies, and faces the reality that on average, Democrats are simply not as pro-Israel as Republicans. She doesn't have the hand to match the GOP's on the issues, so all she can do is bluff them into folding.

Ironically, by rudely forcing a direct confrontation between the RJC and the National Jewish Democratic Council on this issue, Wasserman Schultz likely exacerbated problems of partisanship in the pro-Israel community. Republicans can hardly be expected to ignore their policy differences with the administration, nor abandon Israel as the facts on the ground push it rightward. They especially can't do these things because the Democrats demand it. I hope that the trend of Democrats turning against Israel is reversed, but in the mean time, pro-Israel Republicans need to continue fighting for what is right and holding the Obama administration responsible for their actions – with or without Democratic support.


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by Matthew Knee

Sunday was Al-Nakba ("The Catastrophe") Day, and it's not just Arabs who are upset. Al-Nakba Day commemorates the defeat of the Arab armies in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, when, rather than accept a two state solution, they decided to try their hand at genocide instead. The invading Arab armies vowed to push Israel into the sea, and expelled their own Jewish populations, destroying some communities so old that they predated the existence of Islam or even Christianity. While they killed thousands and created nearly a million Jewish refugees, they failed. Al-Nakba, and the day to commemorate it, is a narrative that inverts reality - one in which the Jews attacked and expelled the Arabs with genocidal zeal.

The existence of Al-Nakba Day is also a reminder that "The Occupation" is not the problem and 1967 borders are not the solution. Al-Nakba Day is about the existence of Israel – and thus the existence of nearly all the Jews who remain in the Middle East. To those who fully accept the Nakba narrative, there is unlikely to be a path to peace compatible with the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish State. Until Israel's neighbors accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish State, peace will not be possible.

Sunday, a coalition of anti-Israel Jews and other assorted Palestinian activists, led by Jewish Voice for Peace, LA Jews for Peace, CODE PINK, and Friends of Sabeel (A Presbyterian-affiliated Palestinian Christian organization), protested outside the The Simon Wiesenthal Center's Beit Hashoah – Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles. The Museum of Tolerance exists to raise awareness of prejudice and genocide, particularly the Holocaust, and of course, to promote tolerance. They are a popular destination for field trips, and provide race relations training to law enforcement and court-ordered classes to certain types of criminals.

The far left has been targeting the Wiesenthal Center with increasing tenacity in the past year or so. Palestinians and other activists, most of whom voiced no objection to the destruction of the Jewish cemeteries of Gaza, are up in arms over their building a museum on a Jerusalem municipal parking lot that was at one point an Arab cemetery (Of course, if it is not permitted to build where something of historical significance once stood, it would be pretty much impossible to build anything in Jerusalem at all). The far left was all the more enraged when the executive director of NYC Museum of Tolerance announced his opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque, calling it "insensitive."

Because the Museum of Tolerance is located in a very Jewish area, neighbors and passers-by stopped to engage the protesters, while the pro-Israel grassroots organization StandWithUs led a counter-protest across the street. Like many counter-protesters, I stumbled upon the protest as I drove by, and then returned shortly after to join the counter-protesters and document the scene with my cell phone camera. A picture tells a thousand words, so embedded below is a captioned slide show that tells the story of the protest.




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by Matthew Knee

I have generally believed that Obama did not release his birth certificate because he thought that the birther issue made some of his opponents look foolish. So long as the birther issue was politically beneficial, there was no reason to put it to rest.

But, true conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, now he has. Why? That is the question of the day. Does he fear Trump qua Trump? Doubtful. Trump's polling is pretty dismal at this juncture. It's Palin dismal (Don't get me wrong, I like Sarah Palin, but bad numbers are bad numbers). Did he think the public was starting to buy the birther line in a way that was particularly harmful to him? Perhaps.

If so, he may have been driven to a political blunder by a collection of basic errors in polling interpretation. As Nate Silver points out, while Gallup found that only 38% of Americans believe Obama was definitely born in the US, only 43% of Americans think Trump (about whom there is no active birther movement) was definitely born in the US.

A number of issues may be artificially inflating this high degree of uncertainty. First of all, when people are asked questions about political figures, the act of asking the question is itself a suggestion that a meaningful controversy exists about the subject. Second, people are hesitant to express absolute certainty, especially about matters they know little about or do not regularly concern themselves with. Finally, people also don't always answer the question the pollster thinks they are asking, especially when they know few actual facts about the issue in question. Polling non-obvious facts about controversial people will often result in respondents simply taking the opportunity to express positive or negative affect towards the person in question.

The number of Americans who think Obama was definitely born abroad (24%) is significantly greater than the number who think Trump was born abroad (7%), but it seems unlikely that once the sources of inflation are removed, there are all that many Americans left who are serious birthers and are the sort of people who would ever consider voting for Obama anyway.

Taken together, these theoretical flaws and Gallup's "Trump birther" pseudo-control question raise significant doubts as to the threat posed to Obama by birtherism. Had Obama waited until the election, he may have been able to strike a serious blow against his opponent and other Republicans by shooting down this conspiracy in a spectacular fashion, but instead, he did us a great favor by squandering this advantage.



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by Matthew Knee

Yesterday was a good day for the reformers. Prosser seems to have won, and Tuesday’s election holds promising signs for the recalls. However, the fight in Wisconsin is far from over, and is likely to repeat itself in other states. While all professional campaign messages should be properly polled or focus-grouped, this post will examine some existing evidence for how best to approach public sector union reform. Going forward, reformers must learn to counter the psychological advantages that large, sympathetic special interest groups such as professional public sector unions have in shaping public opinion. Like many reformers such as the National Right To Work Committee and Chris Christie, it is important to support the workers while opposing the unions. Additionally, it is important to properly gauge the local political climate and calibrate aggressiveness accordingly.

While Americans pay lip service to fiscal conservatism in theory, they are reluctant to be the “bad guy” when it comes to actual cuts. Liberal policies tend to benefit sympathetic constituencies, and the left knows how to take advantage of this good will, not only by highlighting the plight of their underdog beneficiaries, but by defining their opponents as members of unsympathetic groups such as "the rich" or "big business."

Identification, affinity, and disaffinity are important aspects of public opinion. One of the better theories of partisanship is that individuals identify with the party whose members they identify with. People are Democrats or Republicans because they look at who belongs to each party and see themselves as Democrat or Republican kinds of people. People also have strong emotional associations with groups, especially those that they associate with themselves. Mentioning a group as a victim or beneficiary of a policy can prime these emotional responses or associate them with certain viewpoints.

While Americans generally hold mixed to mildly supportive views of public employee unions in general, they tend to hold unionized government professions such as policemen and teachers in very high regard. In a recent poll, Americans supported unionization of government employees in well-regarded, high-status professions such as firefighters, police officers, and teachers by a 2-1 or greater margin, but were about evenly divided on office workers and janitors. Practically, this is illogical - lower-skilled, commoditized labor is more suitable for unionization, and public safety employees are especially poorly-suited for unionization. The same series of polls showed that labor union leaders are regarded as not demonstrating much honesty and ethics (even lawyers fair better!), and another found that organized labor is about as trusted as big business. This suggests that people do not always make the distinction between the public service professionals most commonly associated with government workers and the union bosses that represent them, and thus public opinion on public sector unions tends to represent a confused mix of the two. Reformers must hammer home these distinctions if they are to garner public sympathy.

In hindsight, attacking collective bargaining was among the riskiest ways of counteracting the budgetary effects of powerful public sector unions. It polls much worse than many other reformist ideas and affinities, in part because it difficult to portray collective bargaining limitations as in the interests of the workers. One can argue that union bosses use their collective bargaining power to enact unjust work rules or unsustainable policies that can lead to layoffs and unfunded pensions in the long run, but true as this may be, it is not intuitive and raises questions of budget priorities. Thus, major limitations on collective bargaining might be out of reach in some states in which significant reforms are nevertheless achievable.

Instead (or, additionally), reformers may want to focus on policies that can be shown to enhance workers rights and uphold American values. This is not just because they sound better, but because such policies really do protect workers from being exploited by political machines that both take and spend their money without proper consent.

The power of public sector unions is built on a network of coercive laws and policies beyond collusive collective bargaining, many of which were also implemented in Wisconsin, though discussed less in the media. Reformers could focus on passing Right To Work laws ensuring individual government workers the right to choose not only to decline to join a union, but the right not to pay fees to workplace unions they refuse to join. Failing that, reformers could pass laws creating the right not to have money taken automatically from government workers' hard-earned paychecks and given to politicians and causes not of their choosing without their consent. Reformers should promote more democracy in the workplace, forcing union re-certification elections more regularly and ensuring a secret ballot to prevent intimidation of workers. Public sector union reform should carry the banners of freedom of association, of freedom of speech, of democracy, of freedom of choice, and of good governance. Reformers can win by giving workers more rights, not by taking them away.

Reformers should also fight for just and fair workplace rules, not those based on the power of the established over younger workers. Seniority works for the unions because it promotes solidarity rather than competition among union members, but seniority is neither fair to quality employees nor an effective way to encourage good work. Merit should play a large role in pay, promotion, and retention. For instance, good, dynamic young teachers must not be fired to protect incompetent, clock-punching lifers. Reformers should make examples of government employees, especially teachers, who are good at their jobs but get pink slipped due to a lack of seniority. Reformers should also find more “rubber rooms” and other collections of incompetent but unfireable tenured public employees to demonstrate who gets to keep their jobs instead.

The left portrays unions as the opponents and counterparts of big, evil corporations, which while false, fits the commonly-held but simplistic narrative of business and labor as naturally opposing forces. Unlike public service professionals, the reputations of businessmen, the rich, and big corporations are very weak. The left will portray reformers’ efforts as scapegoating teachers and other sympathetic professions while cutting taxes on the rich.

One solution is to only target public sector unions. Leave corporations out of the equation. Our state and local budget deficits largely stem from public sector unions, not private sector unions. Targeting only public sector unions creates a powerful case that this is about balancing budgets and reining in out of control government, rather than destroying an opposing set of interest groups. It also allows reformers to argue that public sector unions are especially problematic due to their collusive, rather than adversarial, relationship with many of those they negotiate with, and could dampen enthusiasm for retaliation among the nearly half of union members who work in the private sector.

We know from Wisconsin, however, that public sector unions will make the case that big corporations and the rich are behind their opposition anyway. Reformers in the most precarious of political positions might consider bundling systemic changes that solve the public sector union problem with some amount of pain for corporations and/or "the rich," so as to show that they are making everyone share in the sacrifices budget balancing requires. There is plenty of anti-market, winner-picking crony capitalism worth targeting. This could neutralize the left's emotional attacks with a powerful appeal to intuitive perceptions of fairness.

This is not to say that reformers should not stand strong or that collective bargaining is a third rail. It looks like the reformers in Wisconsin may yet prove that it is not, and unwillingness to spend political capital on important issues misses the point of good representative government. Nor am I saying that reformers should not raise awareness of shady union bosses or overly-generous labor agreements. However, it is important to connect with voters' emotions and identities in such a way that they know the reformers are the good guys.

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As of this writing, Joanne Kloppenburg clings to a tiny lead over David Prosser, with the result not to be known for weeks or months until after a likely recount.  As we know from Minnesota, recounts are not to be taken lightly, and need to be fought tooth and nail.

But regardless of how the result turns out, there are some clear takeaways:

1. Every vote counts.  There were approximately 1.5 million votes cast, and the gap is about 200 votes.  Republicans need to push hard on voter integrity legislation and practices.  One can only imagine how many U. Wisconsin - Madison students who are registered to vote elsewhere, and whose parents probably claim them as residents of other states for tax purposes, voted in the election.  It probably made the difference.  Laws that ensure that only those entitled to vote can and do vote are hated by Democrats for this and similar reasons.
2. Don't believe the spin being put out by PPP Polling and others that Republicans are doomed, and that the world changed after the November elections.  Gov. Scott Walker received 52% of the vote in November, so Prosser -- who was slow out of the gate to respond to attack ads -- did only 2% worse.  And that in an emotional atmosphere in which Democrats staked everything, but Republicans only became motivated in the final couple of weeks.  As Matthew Knee pointed out this morning, big labor proved much less formidable than expected.
3. The courts matter, including trial courts.  This was an election for the Supreme Court, but trial court Judge Sumi's extraordinary interference in the legislative process provided solace and encouragement to anti-Prosser forces.  By making what was a legislative issue a judicial issue, Judge Sumi -- whether she intended to or not -- made the Supreme Court race the key event in the political war over collective bargaining.
4. Keep in mind the courts when thinking about the 2012 presidential election.  Six more years of Barack Obama likely will result in a change in the character of the U.S. Supreme Court.
5. We have to police the police.  Who could have imagined that police unions would join protesters and engage in acts of political intimidation?  Who could have imagined that a county Sheriff would declare that his officers would not act as "palace guards" when protecting the State Capitol?  Public sector unions are more than economic issues, they are central players in whether voters or unions control government.
6. Conservatives were complacent, but are motivated now. Consider the Wisconsin Supreme Court election the wake up call for the majority which grew complacent after November. Conservatives around the country need to understand that nothing can be taken for granted.

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by Matthew Knee

Last night, the movement to save America and the states from corruption and insolvency may have suffered a setback in Wisconsin. Prosser has a razor-thin lead, but almost all the outstanding votes are in Kloppenburg counties, and for whatever reason, Democrats seem to usually benefit from recounts. However, regardless of the final outcome, last night’s election holds important lessons for the future, namely that big labor’s organizational and motivational advantages may count for less than many fear.

In the television air war, reformers prevailed. Free market organizations managed to outspend big labor, and our money was free-range cash, donated willingly, as opposed to monies coerced by law from taxpayers and workers.

On paper, the reformers were severely disadvantaged. Both candidates agreed to run on only $300,000 in public financing, meaning they could not directly operate on the scale this election required. The unions’ well-established political organizations, compounded by likely-stronger recall petition teams that they were able to re-purpose, looked to be an enormous advantage. The Prosser campaign’s lack of infrastructure was so severe that Prosser suggested on The Mark Levin Show that people "simply...talk to their friends" because "there isn't really an adequate office, isn't adequate staff, to handle all the volunteers It will be interesting in the coming days to hear if and how the Tea Party movement managed to organize for this election so quickly.

Big labor should have been far more excited and mobilized than the reformers. Non-public-safety public employee unions’ ability to function in Wisconsin is at stake if the Budget Repair Bill sticks. Special interests with tangible benefits at stake are generally far more motivated to act than taxpayers as a whole, whose losses are less direct and less apparent. In national elections, when every political machine is firing on all cylinders, there are many competing sources of excitement, but in off-season elections, concentrated interests usually have an advantage. In retrospect, Wisconsin, with its recall provisions and upcoming key judicial election, was an especially tough venue for a battle between the interests of the many and the interests of the few.

Despite all these disadvantages, and regardless of who ultimately prevails in this election, the reformers fought big labor to a virtual draw. Perhaps the most powerful collection of special interests in the country gave their best, and all they managed to do was (maybe) eke out a photo finish win in a purple state with disproportionate union membership and under mostly favorable circumstances.

The money to ensure future solvency and prosperity must come from somewhere. Any solution will anger whichever constituencies lose out, and there will be many. The pain and sacrifices will be shared. Unlike many other special interest groups, however, success against public employees unions will severely limit their ability to do further damage, rather than merely angering them. Clearing a hornet’s nest can be challenging, but it is better in the long run than constantly dealing with hornets…and last night showed that big labor's sting is less painful than many feared.

[Correction: I referred to the judicial election as a special election, which it technically was not. It was a regularly-scheduled off-season election, but the exact same principles apply.]

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It is not surprising that there would be an enthusiasm gap in Wisconsin, with the national unions pouring substantial funds and efforts into recalling Republican Senators and eventually Gov. Scott Walker. 

The efforts are not only monetary, but also through physical and other intimidation, such as physically disrupting recall efforts against Democratic Senators and intimidation by police unions against businesses which do not denounce Republicans.

Is the situation dire for Republicans?  Or is the silent majority merely intimidated into public silence?

Sam Stein at HuffPo argues that Republicans are being seriously outorganized and outfunded:

Both national and Wisconsin-based Republican operatives tell the Huffington Post the party is being dramatically outworked and out-organized by Democrats in the recall campaigns being launched against state Senators.

The operatives, who raised their concerns out of hope it would jar the GOP into assertiveness, argue complacency has taken over after Governor Scott Walker successfully shepherded his anti-collective bargaining bill into law. While the Wisconsin Democratic Party, with major assists from progressive groups and unions, has harnessed resentment towards the governor into a full-throttled effort to recall eight GOP Senators, neither the enthusiasm nor organizational acumen exists on the Republican side of the aisle.

I have no doubt that much of what Stein says is true, but the numbers being reported by Dave Weigel show that each side has obtained so far roughtly half the number of signatures needed for recall petitions.  So is the enthusiasm gap really going to show up at the polls?

As both Stein and Weigel report, local Tea Party activists and groups are leading the way in recall petition drives against Democrats, while the Democrats have national union support.

I have no way of judging if the situation is as dire as predicted.  As Matthew Knee wrote yesterday, the polling numbers do not necessarily portent doom for Republicans.

But this should be a call to action for those who want to support the recall efforts against Democrats and to help defend the recall efforts against Republicans.

While most of the nation will have forgotten about Wisconsin by June, the national unions will try to turn Wisconsin in June 2011 into Massachusetts 2010, where Scott Brown's victory shocked the country.

The difference is that there is no underlying national support for bloated state budgets, unlike the genuine national revulsion at Obamacare which led to Brown's victory.

If left to its own devices, the recall efforts against Republicans in Wisconsin would fail miserably; but things are not left to their own devices, as a victory in Wisconsin may be the national unions' last chance to resurrect control over state budgets.

Post in the comments or send me links to the groups fighting for Republicans in Wisconsin. And consider donating.

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GUEST POST by Matthew Knee:

Professor Jacobson asked me to comment on the DKos/PPP poll regarding big labor's recall efforts in Wisconsin. The questions are mostly fine, but I have a few thoughts on the results that might be helpful.

Wisconsin recalls do not work like the famous California recall that replaced Gray Davis with Arnold Schwarzenegger. A recall in Wisconsin is just a new election, rather than a referendum on whether the officeholder should be recalled with a new election bolted on. David Nir, who presents these polls on behalf of DKos, seems to think the Wisconsin situation is worse for the Democrats, because a successful recall also might require good Democratic candidates.

Unfortunately, I'm not so sure. There are many ways to slice the data, but by almost any measure the DKos/PPP poll shows less support for recalling Republican incumbents than support for electing Democrats or general disapproval of the Republican incumbents.

Why? Recalls are NOT regular elections. There is a sense among some that they are an extreme measure in response to serious derelictions of duty or other crimes. While big labor considers it a heinous crime to take away their hard-bought privileges, there are people out there who, whether or not they agree, consider the legislature’s actions to be within the bounds of normal political activity. There is a small but potentially pivotal number of people who will oppose any given politician in an ordinary election, but also oppose a recall. Thus, if there was a separate recall question, which renders the election question moot if not passed, there would be a risk of the recall failing even if the Democrat could win a regular election question. It would also require big labor to win two campaigns per recall instead of just one.

Nir correctly implies that it is less challenging to garner support for generic candidates than actual people, but at best that could make the difference between the California and Wisconsin systems a wash. Either way, more likely than not, these polls slightly overstate Democratic support.

DKos find three Republicans trailing generic Democrats: Olsen (47-49, recall support at 40-39), Hopper (44-49, recall at 44-33), and Kapanke (41-55, recall support at 52-44). Two Republicans (Cowles and Harsdorf) also lead generic Democrats and lead against the recall, but have negative (32-40) and even (43-43) approval, respectively.

Here is a chart which accompanied the DKos blog post:

















Here is an alternative chart I prepared which provides additional context for the data:

















Can the Dems steal 3 seats they need to take the Senate? Yes. This is probably going to be quite a battle. There can be little doubt that big labor will get enough signatures for recall elections in the areas they have a chance of winning – not only are they strong on the ground, but they will be willing and able to hire as many petition-gatherers as it takes.

Kapanke's numbers are extremely worrying. He and Walker are down double digits, and Obama up just as much. This might be a hard seat to hold.

Hopper is behind 5 to a generic Dem and 11 on the recall, which is almost as scary, although oddly enough his approval rating is 5 points higher than opposition to the recall, so there is an outside chance there is something seriously wrong with that poll. On the bright side, Walker is only down 4 in the district, Obama is down 7, the fugitive senators down 7, and Walker and the state Senate Democrats are tied when respondents’ are asked whom they back in the current conflict (I worry about these numbers, as this was asked right after the fugitive senators question. Also, calling the other side the Senate Democrats rather than the unions might exaggerate Walker's support).

The other races will be tight, but the Democrats need only to win 1 if they unseat Kapanke and Hopper. I am less worried about Cowles than his mere 2-point lead against a generic Democrat indicates. While Cowles' approval is 8 points negative, Walker's approval in the district is 6 points positive, Obama's 8 points negative, the fugitive senators 11 points negative, and in the Walker vs. the Senate Democrats question, Walker leads by 8.

Similarly, Olsen is less popular than the major issues and figures at stake in the recall. While Olsen’s popularity is 10 points negative and he is two points down on a generic Democrat, in his district Walker is even, Obama is 6 points negative, and Walker leads the Senate Democrats by 3 points.

Harsdorf's district is fairly split on both her and Walker, though she is up 4 on a generic Democrat, Walker is up 4 on the Senate Democrats, the fugitive senators are down 12, and Obama is down 10.

How will it all turn out? No one can be sure how this ball will bounce. Will the anger big labor has whipped up calm down between now and the recalls? Will the sky not falling make the budget more popular? Will recall opponents be able to match the intensity of union members who have tangible interests at stake? Will Republicans be able to compete with the Wisconsin unions' money, manpower, and out-of-state backing?

Only time will tell. One seat will be extremely hard to keep, and another quite challenging. I am very worried about Republicans’ ability to bring their supporters out to not only vote but to volunteer in these often low-turnout special elections, especially when they are motivated by general principles and the unions are motivated by personal gain. Concentrated interests are far easier to mobilize than diffuse ones.

Fortunately, the simplest, most accurate narrative favors the GOP. While they should focus-group and poll on their own, and specific qualities of the incumbent, the challenger, and the district must be considered, this data suggests that Republicans should go on the offensive. In most districts, the idea of a recall is itself unsettling compared to the general political landscape, Obama and the fugitive senators are underwater, and more voters side with Walker than the Democrats in the Senate. With union anger probably at its peak, it is unlikely that this will change much for the worse, so long as the GOP is not swamped by big labor’s big money or massive mobilization campaigns. Incumbents can portray themselves as loyal public servants making difficult but necessary calls, but beset by White House-based D.C special interests with massive war chests filled with government money diverted without consent from workers’ pay.

These recalls will pose a challenge, but if Republicans are aggressive and able to mobilize the necessary resources, big labor can be stopped from taking back the majority.

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Related Post:
Polling 101 Recap

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Here is a recap of the Polling 101 series of Guest Posts by Matthew Knee, which ran last week:

1. How People Answer Polls
2. Samples & Margin of Error
3. Handling Bias
4. Evaluating The Public Employee Union Polls
5. You Can't Learn Much From Asking People Their Ideology

The series was a real eye-opener for me, and hopefully for our readers. I look forward to additional posts from Matt in the future.

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This is the fifth in a series of GUEST POSTS by Matthew Knee, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University specializing in campaigns and elections, ethnic voting patterns, public opinion, and quantitative and experimental approaches to political science.  While this is the last post in the Polling 101 series, Matt will continue to do guest posts on polling issues in the future.
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You Can’t Learn Much From Asking People Their Ideology

I get frustrated every time someone on the right declares that we are winning the ideological war or an extreme candidate can win, just because some poll showed that many more people in the country/state/congressional district call themselves conservative than liberal.

First of all, many people do not know enough about themselves or the political spectrum to have a consistent ideological system. As I explained elsewhere in the primer, individual views on specific issues are usually assembled on the spot from values and considerations activated by questions. People’s answers often vary across question wording or even multiple askings of the same question. If views on individual issues are so unstable, how can one expect individuals to be ideologically consistent? Those not on the higher end of the political knowledge spectrum are thought by many not to have consistent ideological systems, even if they may identify consistently with an ideological group.

Truly, purely, ideological Americans are firmly in the minority. Relatively few of those who report that they are conservative are True Conservatives in the sense that purists mean it. More methodologically rigorous surveys ask many questions and construct an ideological scale by combining that information. There is a good deal of ideology to be found beneath the surface, but it is found through data-mining the responses of those who are far from ideologically pure.

Those who believe that conservatives consistently outnumber liberals by a wide margin should ask themselves why the parties are so evenly matched in the average election.

It is not because there are all these conservatives who do not turn out because a candidate is not conservative enough. In 2008, Gallup had the national ideological breakdown at 37% conservative to 22% liberal. The exit polls showed a basically identical 34% - 22% in a race where the right was about as demoralized as possible.

Moderates often rival conservatives in number, and more conservatives still vote Democrat than liberals vote Republican. Twice as many did so in the 2008 presidential race, and a year later Gallup found that 4% of Republicans were liberal but 21% of Democrats were conservative (numbers that have remained very similar since at least 2000).

We must be realistic about our prospects. We live in a closely-divided country with a non-ideological, often low-knowledge center whose swings largely dictate the balance of power. Conservatives can rejoice that the label “conservative” is in a lot better shape that the label “liberal,” but we should not confuse that information with the prevalence of actual conservatives and liberals in the country. We certainly should not confuse that with the prevalence of “pure” conservatives and liberals, who are rarer still.

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This is the fourth in a series of GUEST POSTS by Matthew Knee, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University specializing in campaigns and elections, ethnic voting patterns, public opinion, and quantitative and experimental approaches to political science.
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Today I will provide an overview of the polling situation in the national battle against the public employee unions (PEU’s). This will not be a cheery post, as the battle is not going all that well on the public opinion front. (It seems the moratorium on martial language in politics has been lifted). Tomorrow I will discuss what reformers can do to turn things around.

As I explained on Monday, most persuadable voters lack set opinions on most issues, but do have various values and considerations floating around in their minds. Answering a polling question is an active task. The polling question and the answers provided activate considerations, which are then weighed and integrated into an answer.

Depending on which poll and what question you look at, the reformers are anywhere from about even to facing a two to one disadvantage. The wording and sampled population tend to determine how the landscape looks, but a number of patterns emerge.

As with many issues, from 40,000 feet fiscal conservatives are doing acceptably well, but the closer in we get, the more people shy away from specific forms of austerity and fall into the demogogues’ traps.

1. Which Public Employees Do We Mean?

It seems that mentioning specific kinds of public employees increases support for PEU’s. Previous Gallup polls show that school teachers, firefighters, and policemen – who are usually cited as examples of PEU members in polls, are among the most trusted professions in the country. In fact, a recent Bloomberg poll shows that people overwhelmingly support these groups unionizing, but are divided on the unionization of janitors and office workers.

Preferring unionization of public safety and high-status occupations over lower-status, commoditized occupations is highly illogical from almost any serious policy point of view, but makes sense if respondents simply hear these questions as “blah blah firemen blah” and the answers as “pro or con.” (This phenomenon happens more than you might think.)

2. Polls On Collective Bargaining

The worst results come from questions on eliminating collective bargaining for public employees. This is a tricky question to ask. First of all, I doubt that most people actually know what collective bargaining is, so they are going to rely on the pollsters’ description of it, or just the fact that the words sound good.

There are other issues as well. Proposing a revocation of a sympathetic group’s privileges is inherently unpopular, and describing collective bargaining as a right is not only false but highly prejudicial.

On the other hand, mentioning the budget, pay levels, strikes, or pensions, in the question or previous questions, might bias a poll against the PEU’s. As always, polls that sample adults will skew a bit more liberal than those composed of registered or likely voters.

Results from polls that display most of the pro-PEU features (Gallup, NYT/CBS) show support for collective bargaining in the 60%-30% range. Bloomberg’s just-released poll shows a 64%-32% pro-collective bargaining split on a mostly-neutrally-worded question (despite following questions about public employees making more money) but this could represent voters supporting “rights” when provided with no context whatsoever. Polls that prime negative feelings towards PEU’s with previous questions and/or mention the budget (Quinnipiac, Rasmussen), show the anti-PEU camp ahead by a few points.

This puts reformers in a tough situation. They ARE trying to take collective bargaining away from PEU’s, which does in fact make them fairly useless. Of course, such moves are intended to weaken PEU’s (as is necessary for budget balancing), but that is not the discussion we are having. As usual, conservatives can win – though only barely – when discussing austerity in the abstract, but once spending cuts are portrayed as harming those who would otherwise benefit from them, the American people get cold feet.

3. Polls On Walker vs. The PEU’s

Although this fight looks to be mostly over legislatively, we still can learn from how people respond to this formulation. Rasmussen, whose samples tend to have a rightward skew and whose previous questions, shows a small advantage for Walker, though it decreased from 10 percentage points to 5 between their two polls. Pew, with an overly-Democratic adults sample (D+10) and a mention of collective bargaining, has the PEU’s up by 11 percentage points. Bloomberg’s poll, asking respondents to choose between statements biased each way, went 49%-46% for the PEU’s, but I greatly disfavor this methodology since it is difficult to come up with equally-biased statements.

Still, again, PEU opponents do alright in the most generalized formulations. It is a good sign that the enormous PEU leads in some polls do not materialize usually in polls that provide little information of their own. That could indicate that people are only retaining moderately pro-PEU views of the conflict, even though more descriptive discussions can provoke highly pro-PEU views. This limits the long-term damage, PEU’s will still be able to bring out these very negative views, with some effort and lots of cash, when an election or recall comes around.

4. Balancing the Budget vs. Union Busting

Here the news is somewhat good. In both the Quinnipiac and NYT/CBS polls, which could not be more different on other results, as well as the Bloomberg poll, more Americans believe these attacks on PEU’s are motivated by balancing budgets than hurting PEU’s. This suggests that some of the opposition to taking privileges from public employees may be fairly shallow, since even when most disagree, more attribute the actions of PEU opponents to noble goals than political gain.

5. Generic Feelings Towards Unions

Since this too is a general question, so PEU opponents fare better here than in other areas. The D+10 NYT/CBS poll have union support at 33%-25% favorable-unfavorable, but the rest show better news. Gallup has Americans disapproving of PEU’s by 47%-46%. Rasmussen has Americans supporting PEU’s by a 50%-44% margin, although 54% of independents oppose them. This has become worse, however, over the course of the conflict, with an earlier poll showing a 45%-45% split.

6. Assorted Policies

Opinion is mixed on other policies. More people generally believe that government employees (without mentioning specific types) are overpaid than underpaid, but never constitute a majority. Rasmussen finds overwhelming support for public employees paying the same for their health care as private sector workers (though that is a very loaded question). Strong pluralities against teachers and public safety workers striking, and 50% support for cutting state payrolls by 10% over 10 years. The NYT/CBS poll shows only slight advantages for allowing public employees (with teachers, police, and firefighters mentioned specifically) to retire and earn pensions early, without even mentioning the size of these pensions, which are the main problem, and with a somewhat liberal sample. The same poll has Americans supporting cuts to pay and benefits of public employees to reduce budget deficits by a 47%-46% margin.

7. Partisan Breakdown

On union issues, polls show that Democrats are usually more united than Republicans, especially in the scenarios in which Dems have big leads. This means that big labor is probably closer to their support ceiling than its opponents. This also demonstrates the need for reformers to inoculate Republicans against pro-PEU framing. There is evidence that knowledge can inoculate people against framing, and that this effect is particularly strong when it is in accordance with one’s overall ideological system. This is to be expected, since groups are more likely to be enthusiastic about issues that affect them directly.

So what can reformers do about this? How can they limit the drop-offs in support from general budget-cutting to forcing PEU’s to make major concessions? I will provide some suggestions tomorrow.

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This is the third in a series of GUEST POSTS by Matthew Knee, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University specializing in campaigns and elections, ethnic voting patterns, public opinion, and quantitative and experimental approaches to political science.
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Handling Bias

Today I will discuss ways to handle bias when you find it, and then apply some of what has been discussed to the PPP Wisconsin poll that Professor Jacobson discussed last week

1. Pollsters Are, Generally Speaking, Competent Professionals, & Polls Are Relatively Accurate

Conspiracy theories about polling are usually wrong. Despite its shortcomings, polling is a relatively mature science, and its practitioners do their jobs reasonably well.

This does still mean that outlier polls put out by campaigns are often wrong - sometimes, the pollster’s job is to persuade the voters that their client has a shot at winning. Usually this is due to using overly-optimistic assumptions about who will turn out to vote and similar subjective matters, but sometimes they do something shadier such as not rotating candidate order (There is an advantage to being first), priming with previous questions, or taking multiple samples and releasing the one in which their candidate does the best.

Public polls, on the other hand are conducted and released by people who are trying to get things right. Issue polling is inherently tricky, as I’ve explained above, but pollsters generally get elections about right on average. Why are media polls sometimes liberally-biased in their wording? I can’t speculate. These mistakes can even occur subconsciously or accidentally. But as much as conservatives are naturally skeptical of the media, we should examine polls on their own terms using solid methods, rather than discarding useful information just because we don’t like the source.

2. A Bias Is Not Always A Problem At All – Let Alone A Fatal One

Say you find a flaw that could bias a poll result, but do not know how large an impact it would have. Sometimes you do not need to know. Such a bias is about as likely to improve your argument as weaken it, depending on which way it biases the results. For instance, if you are arguing that a poll on unionization indicates more support for the anti-union side, and you find a question is biased for the unions, then you can say that your theory is probably even more true than the numbers indicate.

3. Compare That Which Is Mostly Similar

Most real, full-data-based polling analysis is based in large part on some kind of multiple regression analysis. Multiple regression finds relationships between the variable you are interested in and the outcome you care about in a hypothetical world in which other factors you think might get in the way (“controls”) are equal. Without a data set, you can’t do that, but you might be able to use similar principles. If a pollster has conducted multiple surveys on the same question over time, you might be able to compare the results without worrying that different question wordings or methodologies will get in the way. For repeated polls, you pretty much just have sampling error and change over time. Similarly, even comparing the same wording by different pollsters over time can be instructive, as long as you keep an eye out for differences between pollsters.

Less ideally, polls that ask about previous views or votes can be interesting, as long as one considers in what direction and to what degree people might lie about previous views.

4. You Can Estimate The Impact of Some Biases

What if you have some information about the impact of a bias, but not enough for exact results? In that case, you can estimate the maximum impact by testing possible but extreme scenarios.

Yesterday I laid out the general template for something like this. If we know what the over-sampled group thinks, and we know approximately what a representative group might think, the number espousing any particular view can be adjusted by the difference between those percentages times the number of percentage points off the sample is.

Now let’s try something more complicated, which will also incorporate the previous two items. Some have argued that the PPP “do-over” poll sampled too many union members and Barrett voters.

Say someone wishes to know how many people abandoned Walker in hindsight for Barrett, and wants to adjust for this oversampling. This makes sense because the poll asks who previously voted for Walker, so we can compare changes within the same group. This means that the slight difference in voter composition is unlikely to matter, since we are comparing the same people. It is unlikely that a slightly different voter composition would have a significantly different amount of change. In the PPP poll, the group sampled went from claiming they voted 47-47 to giving Barrett a 45-52 advantage, creating a 7 point deficit for Walker..

We have a 6% surplus of union members. We know that 37% of union members voted for Walker. We can multiply those numbers to find how many potential Walker abandoners are in that union surplus (2.2% of the sample). Thus, if every single union member in that 6% abandoned Walker, it would only account for 2.2 percentage points worth of abandoners . Realistically, it is very unlikely that even half of all union members changed their minds. Assuming this half all went over to Barrett (which is a more negative scenario than supported by the data), we still have only accounted for 2.2% of the 7% deficit that was created.

We are assuming that the demographic voting breakdowns are equivalent to the exit polls. This is not ideal, but a pretty good approximation. All of these numbers are subject to sampling error anyway.

If we want to be more specific, as in yesterday’s example, we then need to adjust for plausible numbers of abandoners in an equally-sized non-union group. In other words, what would the people who would otherwise have been sampled have done? We do not know exactly what this number is, but since the overall sample changed only slightly, it is likely not large. It might slightly enhance the effect of oversampling union members if non-union members became more supportive of Walker (it would blunt the effect if non-union members also became less supportive of Walker). All in all, this will probably not make much of a difference, since it is unlikely that even if non-union folks became more supportive of Walker, they would be anywhere nearly as skewed as our already-unreasonably skewed union group. Even if a quarter of them left Barrett for Walker and none moved the other way, (which is, again, completely unreasonable), this would net only 1.3 more points.
To make matters worse, the poll relies on asking for whom people voted in November. Since it appears that more people oppose Walker now than then, it is likely that to the degree this number is off, it is because there are people who did vote for Walker but do not want to admit it, rather than the other way around. Thus, this bias, while unmeasurable, militates in favor of Walker losing more support, rather than less.

From what we know, despite the somewhat unrepresentative sample, it looks like Walker has probably lost a bit of support between November and the PPP poll, since even ridiculously optimistic assumptions only account for half of his losses. Is it possible that even after adjusting for union support and people lying about for whom they voted, there is some other factor that contributed to the retrospective tie that can explain away Walker’s losses? In theory, yes, but it is extremely unlikely. Is it possible that this is due to sampling error? Yes, but again, the difference is large enough that that is also unlikely. Hopefully I have shown how little an impact small differences tend to have on final numbers.

*   *   *

Tomorrow, I will examine more polls on the conflict with public employee unions.

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