Brad DeLong

Yes, There Are Some Economists Who Are Strongly Ideologically Divided from Reality

A rather obvious statement that 84% of polled economists agree with:

Because all federal spending and taxes must be approved by both houses of Congress and the executive branch, a separate debt ceiling that has to be increased periodically creates unneeded uncertainty and can potentially lead to worse fiscal outcomes.

Luigi Zingales says that he disagrees--presumably he thinks that the separate debt-ceiling vote adds to certainty about future policy and leads to better fiscal outcomes.

Is It Wrong to Contemplate Beginning the Workday with a Quadruple Espresso?

Herbert Hoover: "The White Race Cannot Survive without Dairy Products!"

The White Race Cannot Survive Without Dairy Products

Which Technological Advances Are Bad?: Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram Comes Out Against Literacy **UPDATE** and Musical Instruments too!

No. I'm not going to give him a link. UPDATE: Chris Bertram asks for a link http://crookedtimber.org/2012/12/27/noah-smith-had-me-going-for-a-minute-there/ and promises "this post was a dig at generalized uncritical tech-enthusiasm, a more nuanced post is in preparation." /UPDATE

Chris Bertram: Noah Smith had me going for a minute there:

I just love econobloggers, with their capacity for Swiftian satire. Dry as dust, yet clearly having a laugh, they aim to reel in the poor saps who are take them seriously, but they are big enough to continue to play along, making as if they really mean it. Until now, I’d thought of Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan and, perhaps, even Arnold Kling as being the true masters of the genre. But I’m pretty sure that Noah Smith surpasses them all with a new blog on eyeglasses and literacy.

George Lucas's War on Christmas

Now I Understand Why There Are 12 Million People in Dallas-Houston and Only 2 Million People in Kansas City...

At first glance, when you consider that Kansas City is located on a major natural transportation route and in the middle of four states of the best farmland in the world, the fact that Dallas and Houston--located in the middle of scrub, in transportation nowheresville--has six times Kansas City's population is distinctly odd.

It puzzled me.

Not any more...

Right-Wing Grifters at Play: Joe Hagan's Dispatch From the National Review's Post-Election Cruise

The thought of some poor right-wing D.o.a.B.--"Tall, Extremely-Tanned Blonde Kay from Greenwich"--paying good money so she can get investment advice from Kevin "Dow 36000" Hassett is truly dismaying…

Joe Hagan:

A Dispatch From the 'National Review's Post-Election Cruise: It was day five of the National Review magazine’s Post Election Cruise 2012…. Kevin Hassett, a former economic adviser to Mitt Romney…. “Minorities came out like crazy,” said Hassett, sighing. “White people didn’t get to the polls. There are far more African-­Americans voting than they expected.”… Hassett… predicted economic doom under Obama, the most likely scenario being another Great Depression…. That prompted a tall, extremely tanned blonde named Kay, from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to ask Hassett, the co-­author of the 1999 book Dow 36,000, “So what do we do with our money?” [Hassett] recommended investing in real estate in another country, maybe in Central America somewhere…. How about a Western country? “Okay, if Europe is what you want, go to Poland,” he said optimistically. “Go to Krakow, buy a house for $50,000, and it’s going to be like Paris in a few years.”…

George Will: Do You Know Who Else Had High Voter Participation? Hitler!

No, I am not kidding. Were to God I were: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-federal-voting-drive-makes-a-mountain-out-of-a-molehill/2012/12/19/461e17c4-494c-11e2-ad54-580638ede391_story.html

What other than the Washington Post would be silly enough to print this?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

May I Just Say That...

...traveling with:

• an old slow 17" MacBookPro,
• a new fast 11" MacBookAir,
• a 10" iPad, and
• an iPhone

is insane?

The Question Is Whether Our Minds Are too Powerful to Be the Result of Purely Darwinian Processes: Complete Self-Pwnage Weblogging

Someone who claims to be a "friend" makes me aware that others are joining Alvin Plantzinga and Gene Callahan on the side of Thomas Nagel's creationists--those claiming that we reason and we know we reason like winged angelic reasoning beings with transcendent access to objective reality, rather than like jumped-up monkeys using error-prone Humean heuristics on brains evolved to improve our reproductive fitness, and hence we know that Darwin is wrong on the evolution of the human mind.

Steven Landsburg.

Steven Landsburg: Unreasonable: Brad DeLong appears to argue here that because pure reason once led him, Brad Delong, to an incorrect conclusion about which direction he was facing, it follows that pure reason can never be a source of knowledge. (If that’s not his point, then the only alternative reading I can find is that Thomas Nagel is guilty of choosing a poor example to illustrate a point that DeLong would rather ridicule than refute.) It would be too too easy to make a snarky comment about how we’ve known all along about Brad DeLong’s tenuous relationship with reason….

[H]ere, for the record… facts… none of them, as far as I can see, accessible to humans via anything but pure reason:

It Is Easy to Train a Parrot to Be a Republican Presidential Candidate: All You Have to Do Is Teach It to Say: "Bernanke Bad! Bernanke Bad!"

Witness Marco Rubio:

Sound monetary policy would also encourage middle class job creation. The arbitrary way in which interest rates and our currency are treated is yet another cause of unpredictability injected into our economy. The Federal Reserve Board should publish and follow a clear monetary rule – to provide greater stability about prices and what the value of a dollar will be over time.

Rubio is saying nothing coherent here--besides: "Bernanke bad! Bernanke bad! I'm not sure why, but Bernanke bad!"

Rubio, you see, wants the Federal Reserve to stabilize three things:

1. The path of the price level,
2. The value of the dollar, and
3. The level of interest rates.

But you cannot do this. cannot stabilize the path of the price level and the exchange rate and nominal interest rates. Were we to confirm The One Who Is to chair the Fed, she could not do it.

If you stabilize the exchange rate--i.e., set up a gold standard and join it--interest rates and the price level will do their thing.

If you stabilize the nominal interest rate, you will find yourself in either an inflationary or deflationary spiral.

And if you stabilize the path of the price level, you will have to do some serious leaning against the wind with interest rates, and that will set the currency bouncing around.

I would call for Republicans to step up their game. But what's the use? No Republican primary voter, no advisor, no donor, no fundraiser will care that Rubio is talking economic incoherence. No Republican economist of note will shy away from boosting Rubio because his speechwriters lack basic economic literacy.

This is who they are. We have to deal with it.

Why Do Dylan Byers and Politico Think That Drinking Coffee Is Elitist and UnAmerican?

Scott Lemieux:

I’ve Had Enough Of You Water-Drinking, Air-Breathing Urban Elitists: Ben Jacobs’s piece reminds me of my favorite part of the Politico’s war on Nate Silver.   As others have pointed out, this botched hack cliche is comedy gold:

For this reason and others — and this may shock the coffee-drinking NPR types of Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wis. — more than a few political pundits and reporters, including some of his own colleagues, believe Silver is highly overrated.

Look, I knew those snooty elitists in Seattle and San Francisco looked down on me and my kind, but now you tell me that they drink coffee? No real American would ever be caught dead consuming this obscure product.

I tell you, every election cycle it becomes harder to be a regular American. White wine, Lipton Green Tea, orange juice, Gray Poupon, coffee — every day you discover some product that my relatives in rural Saskatchewan would always have in their pantry that marks you as an out-of-touch urban elitist in the eyes of D.C.-based Ivy Leaguers.

Nobody ever told Dylan Byers that it was lattes that were elitist--French, you know--and not coffee.

And Dylan appears to have not had enough of a clue to have picked up the talking point cliché on his own.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Strangely, Nate Silver Does Not Make Dylan Byers's List of Ten Breakout Political Reporters of 2012

Curiously, Robert Costa does.

What would you have learned if you had trusted Robert Costa the week before the election? This:

Three blue states could turn red: Ohio is the presidential campaign’s fall blockbuster.... But it is not the only must-watch battleground. Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are looking decidedly purple.... WISCONSIN Status: Toss-up.... Mitt Romney was set to campaign Monday in Wisconsin. He has already rescheduled for later this week — with good reason. The Badger State has suddenly emerged as a potential pickup. In the final days, look for the Romney campaign to put significant time and resources into the state. Local congressman Paul Ryan’s inclusion on the Republican ticket has energized the Romney campaign’s Wisconsin team.... [I]n the latest Rasmussen poll, Romney ties Obama....

You get the picture.

Anybody who trusted Robert Costa wound up more ignorant. He did not have the critical perspective on his Romney campaign sources and their pet pollsters that a reporter needed--no bullshit filter.

And, in Dylan Byers's view, the absence of a bullshit filter makes you a "breakout political reporter"--never mind that what he reported just wasn't so, and that to people not entirely within the right-wing bubble there were no good-faith reasons for him to believe it was so.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Improbable Research: Radioactive Cod Fillets

http://www.improbable.com/2012/11/09/atomic-bomb-v-cod-fillets-1955-study/

John Podhoretz: My Columns Were Perfect, Perfect! If Not for That Meddling Electorate!

John Podhoretz:

Jonathan Chait… had a good deal of sport at my expense…. [My] article[s]… after Election Day sounded an entirely different note about the technical brilliance of the Obama campaign than columns I’d written before Nov. 6…. But does Obama’s victory suggest… that I and others were simply… unprincipled right-wing hacks and cheerleaders?… I genuinely believed over the spring and summer that the economic news would make the president’s re-election nearly impossible…. Chait also quotes me changing my tune on Romney’s vague general-election strategy…. The problem here is that there could have been no other strategy…. [P]olls feature wildly varying results that serve to support wildly opposing points of view. So all we’re left with are subjective observations…. This year I argued Barack Obama wouldn’t win… based on experience… knowledge — years of study of electoral and presidential politics… common sense… [and] conviction…. I was wrong this year not only about the technical superiority of the Obama campaign but also about the nature of the American electorate…. That was not hackery. It was, alas, misplaced idealism.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Jumped-Up Monkeys with Darwinian Heuristics vs. Angelic Reasoning Beings with Direct Unmediated Access to Objective Reality Sun-Sets-But-Sun-Also-Rises Cage Match Smackdown Weblogging

UPDATED: To keep commenters from going down blind bypaths due to my imprecision. Bear with me: I am just a jumped-up monkey, after all...

Thomas Nagel argued that his reason could not have been the result of blind Darwinian evolution. He said:

• My reason tells me that if the sun is rising on my right then I am going north then.
• I believe I am going south.
• I believe I see the sun rising on my right
• My reason tells me that I must reject one of these two beliefs because they are inconsistent--either I must conclude that I am hallucinating, or I must conclude that I am not going south.
• Et cetera…
• This kind of transcendent access to truths of objective reality is not something that a jumped-up monkey with Darwinian heuristics can have.
• Therefore I am more than a jumped-up monkey with Darwinian heuristics: I am angelic reasoning being with direct unmediated access to objective reality.

I responded that he knew nothing of the kind:

His Darwinian heuristics had made a Humean guess that because the sun had risen on his right if he was facing north every single previous day, that the same held true today. I pointed out that this might be wrong--that he did not know that because the sun was rising on his right he was facing north, and did not know that he knew that he was facing north, and did not know that he knew that he knew he was facing north, but that he was just guessing.

And, to underscore this, I pointed out that I had once seen the sun rise due south, in which case if I had put the sun on my right I would have been facing not north but east. (I did not point out--but could have--that the claim that if you are facing north east is on your right fails at the South Pole: at the South Pole east is not on your right, north is on your right.)

This seemed to me to be conclusive: what Thomas Nagel took as a canonical example of an angelic reasoning being with direct unmediated access to objective reality was, when examined, nothing of the kind--but rather merely another example of the sad delusions to which jumped-up monkeys operating on error-prone Darwinian heuristics are liable.

Now Gene Callahan enters the ring on the side of the angelic reasoning beings with direct unmediated access to objective reality. I don't think he does any better than Nagel.

N.N. Taleb vs. Runciman

http://fooledbyrandomness.com/totheeditor.html

My Favorite Orange…

My favorite orange weighs nine-tenths of its own weight plus nine-tenths of a pound. How much does my favorite orange weigh?

I think we need to deal with some more important questions first:

• Who has a “favorite” orange?
• Why do you have a favorite orange?
• How long have you had this orange that you’ve bonded with it so much?
• Who has an equation to calculate the weight of an orange?
• Are you sure that it is an orange and not a pumpkin?
• Is it your favorite because it happens to weigh nine pounds!?

"Another Fun Fact Is Ben Franklin Originally Suggested That We Eat the Bald Eagle for Thanksgiving Instead of the Turkey!"

http://horseysurprise.tumblr.com/image/36244681243>

Horsey Surprise

http://horseysurprise.tumblr.com/

Marco Rubio: "I'm Not a Scientist, Man. I'm Just an Ambitious Politician Terrified of the Republican Primary Electorate!"

So, Republican Senator Marco Rubio, how old IS the earth?:

Marco Rubio: I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

David Weigel:

Marco Rubio Drops Some Science About the Age of the Earth: How can you read that and not think "Iowa"? We don't have a ton of polling on this topic, but back in January 2011, Strategic National Consulting asked potential GOP caucus-goers about the origins of the earth. Sixty-eight percent of them believed the planet was created in six days. Forty-five percent believed that the earth was less than 10,000 years old -- something Rubio does not say here, but something that implies all human history can be known from counting the eras in the Bible. So this answer, as confounding as it is, turns out to be pretty clever. Rubio is mushy on the "age of the earth" itself, which would cast him forever as a scientific know-nothing. But he posits that the Earth was created in "seven days or seven actual eras" -- and that these are the only possible options. That's a popular position!

War on Nate Silver: South of Silvergrad We Come Across the Shivering, Unarmed Remnants of Colonel Mustard's Forces Wandering the Kalmyk Steppe Begging to Be Fed:

Colonel Mustard--Professor William Jacobsen of Cornell--and his "troops":

» Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong says Romney ahead in Gallup because people don’t know where to vote - Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion: October 28:

Noted University of California – Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong has figured out why Mitt Romney is so far ahead in the Gallup tracking poll of likely voters. His theory  is that Obama supporters like him are only now figuring out where to vote, so they do not pass Gallup’s likely voter screen.  Apparently, when contacted by Gallup and asked whether he is likely to vote, DeLong responds “where?” Seriously.

MicahStone | October 28, 2012 at 7:23 pm What will be delong’s lame excuse AFTER Romney’s landslide win on Nov 6 ? (Yeah, we all know, it’s RACISM.)

sybilll | October 28, 2012 at 7:25 pm Excuse my language Professor, but Brad DeLong is a giant douchenozzle. I see his work at DU and on his blog, and bottom line, he is a pathetic fabricator that appears to be auditioning for a job at Media Matters.

SueAnne | October 28, 2012 at 7:27 pm Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “low information voter”. And, does his polling place change that much from one election to another, or has it been that long since he last voted?

katalyst42 | October 28, 2012 at 7:30 pm What this guy really couldn’t pass is the Gallup OUGHT-to-be-a-voter screen.

raven | October 28, 2012 at 8:36 pm I have family there and visit often enough. It’s another world. Ironically it boasts of dynamism and ferment but rather is like the bewitched province that never changes or accepts change. There is no drearier burg in America. My cheap fun while visiting is to wear patriotic hats and lapels and take in the scandalized and hostile glances. Believe me, these besotted souls have no idea what’s coming.

heimdall | October 28, 2012 at 7:34 pm This is the quintessential problem with many polls this election year. Polls are getting nearly 90-95% pass through the likely voter screens where only 60-70% registered voters actually vote in presidential election years. They are now even further skewed with the early voting crap, which favors democrats by a very large margin. Gallup is doing it right with their questioning for their likely voter poll because the net is much tighter, just look at some likely voter polls from MSM outfits that show their sampling get MORE Democrat after their questioning. The MSM questions to determine likely voters are usually enthusiasm based, which is WAAAY too loose. That is why you are seeing many polls the way they are now. They are too loose with likely voter screens, DRI sample is completely off with scales tipped in favor of the Democrats, and/ or adjusting samples to have more women/ minorities/ young voters than there will ever be. And STILL, Romney leads or ties Obama in many of these polls. The most egregious examples are coming out of Ohio right now. Bottom line is though, Mitt Romney is going to win if he wins the popular vote by 4-5% like current polling is showing. The left is going to go into serious shock on election night.

NeoConScum | October 28, 2012 at 7:36 pm Michael Barone, nobody’s dummy, is now saying that this may very well be a 1980 type, late in the cycle, ‘landslide’ of the Reagan-Carter kind. My-O-My, how nice it would be to take it so BIG that the expected whiners & shriekers have NO traction for their post-election lies….

Mary Sue | October 28, 2012 at 7:37 pm Watching on Twitter, libs are working overtime to build narrative Romney is not leading national polls and Ohio firewall is insurmountable. Sure they’ve been working this narrative for a while now but today it is just astounding how dedicated they are to resurrect the magical air of inevitability. I am fully convinced some pollsters will go down with the ship. PPP just dumped a load of manure to feed the narrative, good Soros soldiers to the end. This is going to be painful to watch….

delong | October 30, 2012 at 10:16 am Indeed we do get a sample ballot telling us where our polling place is this time in early October. I typically put it in one of the desk cubbyholes and pull it out and look at it the weekend before election day in early November. Do you have a point?Brad DeLong

JerryB | October 28, 2012 at 7:46 pm Rush has it right. The polls are converging on reality so that on Nov. 7 they can claim competence. This election has been Romney’s for more than 6 months. Now for the MSM. Will some start covering Libya now that the writing is on the wall?…

DINORightMarie | October 28, 2012 at 8:16 pm Is this man supposed to be a brilliant genius or something? Kinda reminds me of the deer crossing lady caller…. And these lefties think they are oh! so brilliant!

JD61 | October 28, 2012 at 8:18 pm I love that the Obots are so unaware of what’s about to happen to their criminal leader.

JD61 | October 28, 2012 at 8:21 pm Monday’s Politico/Battleground poll has R +5….

ConserveLiberty | October 28, 2012 at 8:46 pm At this point they’re looking ahead to 11/7. If their constituents are so shocked that Romney actually won they can claim fraud or stupidity among the flyovers and deny there was a ‘MANDATE” accorded to Romney to govern. They’re always setting up the next day’s talking points….

TheFineReport.com | October 28, 2012 at 9:09 pm I guess DeLong probably has trouble putting his underwear on so it’s facing front. But probably not. He’s just spitting out lies for consumption by the zombies and by people whose egos are too tender to admit they are fools for supporting a moron as a president, and aiding in the destruction of their country. The bad news for liberals in denial: YOU WERE AND STILL ARE FOOL. YOU TERRIBLY DAMAGED OUR COUNTRY AND YOU DAMAGED YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE AND CHANGED THEIR AND OUR WAY OF LIFE FOR THE WORSE. LASTLY, DON’T BE LIKE DeLONG: MAKE SURE YOUR UNDERWEAR IS NOT ON BACKWARDS….

delong | October 29, 2012 at 6:36 am Sigh Usually the polling place is the elementary school. Sometimes it’s the fire barn. Occasionally it is somebody’s garage. Right now I don’t know which it is–and, as I said, won’t until the weekend before election day. But I am a very likely voter indeed. That’s a problem with Gallup’s likely voter screen. This election, there are five interesting things about the polls that call for explanation:

• RAND has a huge pro-Obama house effect, and nobody knows why–but perhaps it is because RAND does reinterviews, and this is a treatment that transforms uninformed voters into informed voters over time.
• Ramussen has a smaller pro-Romney house effect relative to the average poll, and people think it may be because it doesn’t call cell phones.
• State-level polls have a small pro-Obama effect, and nobody knows why.
• Polls that are willing to interview in Spanish have a pro-Obama house effect.
• Gallup’s polls of registered voters are squarely in the middle of the distribution of national polls, but its gap between registered and likely voters is roughly twice that of any other national pollster.

Some places on the internet and elsewhere are places where people bring information about these (and other questions) and try to figure out what is going on. Other places on the internet are like this.

Yours,

J. Bradford DeLong….

Henry Hawkins | October 29, 2012 at 10:29 am In defense of DeLong, I would point out that not only do Democrats vote, many of them vote several times in any given election, often post-mortem. It doesn’t do well to vote multiple times at the same polling place, so they have to move around to various precincts. There are logistics!

delong | November 5, 2012 at 11:50 am And Gallup is now 48-48… Strikes me as a substantial win for the proposition that their likely voter screen is not very good until the week before the election, no? Mark your beliefs to market, people! Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life!

delong | November 7, 2012 at 5:35 pm And now we know. A week out from the election, Colonel Mustard’s second favorite pollster misses a presidential election by 8%–and 3/4 of the error is in the likely voter screen… Come back to reality, people! You can mark your beliefs to market if you try!

[crickets]

Rebecca Schoenkopf: Obama Tried To Call Mitch McConnell And John Boehner On Election Night, But They Lied That They Were Sleeping

http://wonkette.com/489466/obama-tried-to-call-mitch-mcconnell-and-john-boehner-on-election-night-but-they-lied-that-they-were-sleeping

Drew Linzer Observes Gallup's Frank Newport

Drew Linzer observes Frank Newport of Gallup:

Final Result: Obama 332, Romney 206 | VOTAMATIC: Recently there have been some complaints among pollsters – most notably Gallup’s Frank Newport – that survey aggregators (like me) “don’t exist without people who are out there actually doing polls,” and that our work threatens to dissuade survey organizations from gathering these data in the first place.

And Drew gives what seems to me the wrong answer:

My view is slightly different. I’d say that working together, we’ve proven once again that public opinion research is a valuable source of information for understanding campaign dynamics and predicting election outcomes. There’s no reason why the relationship shouldn’t be one of mutual benefit, rather than competition or rivalry. In a similar manner, our analyses supplement – not replace – more traditional forms of campaign reporting. We should all be seen as moving political expertise forward, in an empirical and evidence-based way.

The right answer would have been:

Obama took the race by 3.1%. Ten days beforehand Gallup had Romney up by 7%. Please stop polluting my aggregative averages with your extraordinarily error-ridden polls.

War on Nate Silver: The Noonan Forces Collapse, and Other Bulletins

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga's experimental mechanized corps overruns the Noonan forces:

Daily Kos: Peggy Noonan mocked data nerds who won the presidency: Peggy Noonan, as wrong as the rest of her ilk, on how President Barack Obama didn't seem "genuine" back in July:

Maybe Mr. Obama is living proof of the political maxim that they don't care what you know unless they know that you care. But the idea that he is aloof and so inspires aloofness may be too pat…. Mr. Obama... isn't really very good at politics, and he isn't good at politics because he doesn't really get people. The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The "Analytics Department" is looking for "predictive Modeling/Data Mining" specialists to join the campaign's "multi-disciplinary team of statisticians," which will use "predictive modeling" to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. "We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions."

This wasn't the passionate, take-no-prisoners Clinton War Room of '92, it was high-tech and bloodless. Is that what politics is now? Or does the Obama re-election effort reflect the candidate and his flaws?

Of course, this was a calculated effort to combat the notion that Mitt Romney was cold and aloof and didn't give a shit about people who weren't members of his country club (and maybe not even them). You think Romney is aloof, well what about Obama? He hired statisticians to employ gay math!

What?! Morton Kondracke Opened Up a Front in the War on Nate Silver!: War on Nate Silver Update Weblogging

And nobody I know even noticed! Nobody told me!

Morton Kondracke: Election Oddsmakers Suffering From Fuzzy Math: Nate Silver, the New York Times’ election modeler, gives Obama a 65.7 percent chance of winning. Granted, this is down from 85 percent before Obama’s disastrous first presidential debate, but it still strikes me as out there. Intrade, the share-buying website, had Obama as a 64.2 percent favorite as of today…. My read is that, in the first debate, Romney came off as a plausible president, knowledgeable on the issues and a decent guy — while Obama didn’t engage — and that the election’s been moving in Romney’s direction ever since….

Mock VIktor Davis Hanson: The Ancient Greeks like Akhilleus and Agamemnon would never have been distracted from the business of war by sex!

Today's War on Nate Silver Update: Rich Lowry in Headquarters Edition

From his headquarters far behind the lines, Rich Lowry wrestles with reality:

The GOP’s Cold Comfort: Obama had coattails. Democrats picked up two Senate seats… about seven House seats despite redistricting that tilted the playing field in the GOP’s direction…. Romney was flawed…. But Romney was clearly the strongest of the candidates in the primary field in the run-up to a winnable general election. What does that say about the party? The Washington Post points out that in almost every important Senate race, the Republican candidate actually underperformed Romney…

That's not "coattails". "Coattails" are when a popular presidential candidate running ahead of down-ticket candidates pulls them across 50%. "Coattails" aren't when a presidential candidate runs behind down-ticket candidates.

Paul Ryan: No. I Had No Idea What the Probable Election Outcome Looked Like. Why Do You Ask?

Paul Ryan:

Ryan: It 'Looked Like We Stood A Pretty Good Chance Of Winning' On Election Day: In an interview with WISN 12 News in Milwaukee on Monday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted that he and Mitt Romney were indeed caught off guard by the results of last week's election, claiming that the campaign's internal polling all pointed to a triumph for the Republican ticket.

The polling we had. The numbers we were looking at looked like we stood a pretty good chance of winning…. So, when the numbers came in, going the other direction. When we saw the turnout that was occurring in urban areas which were really fairly unprecedented, it did come as a bit of a shock. So, those are the toughest losses to have -- the ones that catch you by surprise.

The War on Nate Silver: Radio Silence since Tuesday 3 PM from Heeresgruppe B Commander Josh Jordan Edition

War on Nate Silver Heeresgruppe B commander Josh Jordan has been under radio silence since Tuesday afternoon 3:23 PM EST. Pehaps Sam Wang's T-34s have conducted a deep-battle penetration raid and smashed the transmitters?...

But we will repost the greatest notes from his immortal "Nate Silver's Flawed Model" http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/331192/nate-silver-s-flawed-model-josh-jordan:

The debate came... overnight Romney seemingly rid himself of the weaknesses that had been tacked on to him by over $100 million dollars in negative advertising... a dead heat... nationwide... worry built up among Democrats.... They began attaching their hopes to what BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith called “the bulwark against all-out Dem panic” — Nate Silver. Silver gained fame by correctly predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 election.... 2008 was a wave election... easy to foresee.... Silver’s access to the Obama administration’s internal polling gave him information that most other analysts never saw... increase[d] his accuracy.... Nate Silver is openly rooting for Obama... it shows in the way he forecasts....

On September 30, leading into the debates, Silver gave Obama an 85 percent chance.... Silver still gives Obama a 67 percent chance... has [not] observed the same movement to Romney... as everyone else.... Given the fact that an incumbent president is stuck at 47 percent nationwide, the odds might not be in Obama’s favor, and they certainly aren’t in his favor by a 67–33 margin.

Clive Crook: Oh Noes!! Obama Did Not Beat the Point Spread!!

Barack Obama broadly follows Ronald Reagan's (second term) security policy, George H.W. Bush's spending policy, Bill Clinton's tax policy, the bipartisan Squam Lake Group's financial-regulatory policy, Rick Perry's immigration policyJohn McCain's climate-change policy, and Mitt Romney's health-care policy. Although the economy remains deeply troubled and depressed in the aftermath of a financial crisis that the Republicans did everything they could to set the stage for, his policies have been by far the best and most successful of those in any major North Atlantic power. He wins reelection by a convincing 332-206 electoral vote margin while running against the most mendacious and lie-filled opposition campaign since William McKinley denounced William Jennings Bryan as dough in the hands of that communist-anarchist puppet master John Peter Altgeld.

Ramesh Ponnuru: Don't Believe Anything I Say! I Certainly Don't!

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/332891/what-i-got-wrong-ramesh-ponnuru:

I broke my no-predictions rule. I... threw out a tight-Romney-win call in which I had no confidence.... For most of the last two years, though, I’ve been a pessimist.... I never took sides in the Nate Silver wars (I just noted that Paul Krugman’s defense of Silver never rose above bluster)...

Going to the Corner: National Review's Corner, That Is...

Jay "Id" Nordlinger:

Encore: I’m going to sneak in one more letter… one of our regular readers from Georgia…. "The Right can’t field a better candidate. We put up an impressive, mainstream guy with super credentials, who made few gaffes, did well in the debates, and was amply funded. The result? A repeat of 2008, basically. If I’d known it would turn out like this, I would have backed a Gingrich-Palin ticket. More fun, less expensive — same result."

Mark "Fear the Hispanic Pizza Menace!" Krikorian:

Immigration & Delusion: Hispanic political activists are “the vanguard of a different culture that they passionately believe is superior to the culture of individual liberty” who won’t be attracted to conservatism by a few changes in immigration law…

And Daniel Foster along with Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru launches The War Against Those Who Fought Against the War on Nate Silver;

On the Beatification of Nate Silver: I… found Nate Silver skepticism a respectable position… [on]the occasion of his elevation to sainthood by liberals… [and] their usual, empty, ritualistic signification of “math!” and “science!”… [I have] one more thing to say….

[B]y the end Silver’s famed model was… a different way of presenting a variety of polling averages. It was not sorcery… all the decimal places were too cute by half… [the] “Science Bless You! Haha Lolz” crowd are… cult members… journalists writing dire warnings about global warming or activists campaigning against intelligent design could learn about long-term climate modeling or the mechanisms of natural selection if they wanted to doesn’t change the fact most of them don’t….

[T]he question of “why didn’t conservative believe the polls?” and what that means for the future… are askable and answerable without ever making reference to Silver…. [C]onservatives… failed to internalize the fact that there are simply more Democrats than there were ten years ago…

Jonah Goldberg:

The Critique of Nate Silver’s Pure Reason: [P]eople talk about math as if it were divinely prophetic… subscribe to a religion that simply apes the terminology of science…. [Q]uestioning [Silver's] methodology is akin to rejecting evolution or the laws of thermodynamics, as if only his model is sanctified by the god Reason…. [P]eople are different, more open to reason, and that the soul — particularly when multiplied into the complexity of a society — is not so easily number-crunched. Obviously this is a romantic view out of step with the times… the “age of chivalry is gone,” replaced by “that of sophisters, economists and calculators.” Still, isn’t it possible that the passionate defense Silver arouses from some people on the left has just a bit more to do with the comfort he dispenses than with the sophistication of his analysis?

Fly, You Fools!

Hoisted from Comments: Romney's Victory Speech Wanted

Kuas writes:

Please, please let that undelivered victory speech somehow make it onto the internet. Or at least a convincing fake.

We know it was 1150 words. Anybody want to provide it?

Generaloberst Josh Jordan's Elite "Wiking" Division's Final Offensive in the War on Nate Silver

Josh Jordan: November 6, 2012 3:23 P.M.

Three Takeaways from the Final Polls: Of all current national polls Obama has a microscopic six-tenths of a point lead…. Rasmussen showed Romney moving back into a one-point lead, and the Battleground poll remained a tie while Romney surged with independents…. The Gallup party-identification survey of October showed an electorate that was a one-point Republican advantage, which would seal a Romney victory and possibly a very emphatic victory…. Rasmussen released their October survey for party identification and it was even better news for the GOP…. While I think that a 5.8-point advantage is a bit too rosy for the GOP this election, if it’s anywhere close to right, Romney will have a resounding victory tonight.

These three points are why I am still optimistic that Romney is going to be elected president….... Team Obama knows their early-vote leads are tenuous at best. Just as the NCAA tournament has its fair share of bracket-busters, the GOP electorate this year may just be remembered as the ultimate “model-buster” for poll analysts.

After the Election of November 6...

The writers of the Republican Party
Published articles in various places
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the Republican Party
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier
In that case for the Republican Party
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Samuel Goldman watches Jay Nordlinger and Marc Thiessen, sore losers.

Romney Campaign Devoured by Killer Whale!

Joel Pollak: Exclusive - Inside Orca: How the Romney Campaign Suppressed Its Own Vote

John E.: The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA

Wonkette: "FEMA will be herding meth-addled real ‘Mericans from all across the heartland into railcars…"

Indeed. Wonkette:

Dispatches From The FEMA Camps: Obama’s Second Term Will Destroy American Values, Be Amazing: FEMA will be herding meth-addled real 'Mericans from all across the heartland into railcars and shipping them to camps.

Why trains? Because it’s more socialist that way.

Wonkette sends us to Mitt Romney's transition website

http://touch.wonkette.com/wonkette/#!/entry/mitt-romneys-transition-website-was-live-an-entire-day-after,509bbcc9d7fc7b56704f2181 Rumored to require five years of tax returns if you want to apply for a job.

 

Karl Rove and Company Got $80 Million and Republican Donors Got?

Memo to Republican billionaires: Rupert Murdoch is not your friend. John Roberts is not your friend. Karl Rove is not your friend.

Rupert Murdoch is not in the business of providing news, or advancing right-wing causes. Rupert Murdoch is in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers. As he said lo more than a decade ago: "There is no news channel catering to the very large right-wing segment of the American market. And that is a definite market opportunity". That's what determines the content on Fox News. But do not confuse the fact that Rupert Murdoch wants to keep your eyes glued to the screen with the idea that Rupert Murdoch is your friend. He is not. You are his mark.

Karl Rove is not your friend. Karl Rove took $400 million of your money this cycle and, if I know anything about the fee structure of Republican political consulting, kept $80 million for himself and his faction and wasted the rest. That Karl Rove promises he will deploy the $400 million to make sure high-bracket income taxes and estate taxes remain low does not mean that he knows how to do so. And his first and highest priority is to skim off the $80 million for himself and his faction.

And John Roberts is not your friend. Citizens United gave you the power to spend unlimited amounts of money on politics. One thing that that brings--as vomit brings flies--is grifters telling you that because you are spending the money you have the right to control Republican Party tactics, message, and candidates. But you are not very good at that--when the voters of America see what you really think, they run away. John Roberts is not your friend.

Duncan Black sends us to John Ward: http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/11/angry-vengeful-billionaires.html :

Many of the lightning bolts were aimed at none other than Karl Rove, the former Bush administration political genius who oversaw the deployment of nearly $400 million in campaign spending through outside groups American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS toward the presidential race and toward numerous Senate and House races.

"The billionaire donors I hear are livid," one Republican operative told The Huffington Post. "There is some holy hell to pay. Karl Rove has a lot of explaining to do … I don't know how you tell your donors that we spent $390 million and got nothing."

 

Adam Kotsko: "@adamkotsko: #DoesAnyoneKnowWhereICanFind liberals concern-trolling Republicans on strategies they should use to be competitive again?"

 

Byron York Watches Republican Epistemic Closure at Work

In 1992 we Democrats on the eve of the election did not know what the frack was going on and knew we did not know. In 1996 we knew we were ahead in the week before the election. In 2000 and 2004 we knew we were behind and needed to get lucky. In 2008 we knew we were way ahead, and in 2012 we knew we were ahead.

But apparently all the Republicans had bought and drunk their own snake oil. The defining moment, perhaps, was Karl Rove's end-of-Trading-Places "turn the machines back on" moment as he lectured Fox News on how they could not call Ohio for Obama. It was followed by Megyn Kelly, Pat Caddell, Michael Barone, and company speculating about how Romney might well win the popular vote because he was still ahead by 100K before the Left Coast had come in.

Byron York:

A few hours earlier, across the street at the Convention Center, the campaign’s supporters and volunteers fully expected Romney to be the nation’s next president. Indeed, what was striking after Fox News called the race for Obama, at about 11:15 p.m., was how stunned so many of Romney’s supporters were. Many said they were influenced by the prominent conservatives who predicted a big Romney win, and they fully expected Tuesday night to be a victory celebration.

“I am shocked, I am blown away,” said Joe Sweeney, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “I thought I had a pretty good pulse on this stuff. I thought there was a trend that was going on underground.” “We were so convinced that the people of this country had more common sense than that,” said Nan Strauch, of Hilton Head, South Carolina. “It was just a very big surprise. We felt so confident.” “It makes me wonder who my fellow citizens are,” said Marianne Doherty of Boston. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel like I’ve lost touch with what the identity of America is right now. I really do.”

Some Romney aides were surprised too, especially since they had put an enormous amount of effort into tracking the hour-by-hour whims of the electorate. In recent weeks the campaign came up with a super-secret, super-duper vote monitoring system that was dubbed Project Orca. The name “Orca,” after the whale, was apparently chosen to suggest that the project was bigger than anything any other campaign, including Barack Obama’s in 2008, had ever imagined. For the project, Romney aides gathered about 34,000 volunteers spread across the swing states to send in information about what was happening at the polls. “The project operates via a web-based app volunteers use to relay the most up-to-date poll information to a ‘national dashboard’ at the Boston headquarters,” said a campaign email on election eve. “From there, data will be interpreted and utilized to plan voter turnout tactics on Election Day.”

Orca, which was headquartered in a giant war room spread across the floor of the Boston Garden, turned out to be problematic at best. Early in the evening, one aide said that, as of 4 p.m., Orca still projected a Romney victory of somewhere between 290 and 300 electoral votes. Obviously that didn’t happen. Later, another aide said Orca had pretty much crashed in the heat of the action. “Somebody said Orca is lying on the beach with a harpoon in it,” said the aide.

 

John Quiggin: "Given the position [Mulligan] is trying to defend, these are the best arguments available" Why Not Mark His Beliefs to Market Instead?

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/11/08/mulligan-talks-his-book/

 

Erick Erickson: "As long as the GOP keeps relying on the usual hucksters, charlatans, and con artists it’ll keep getting the same results"

http://times247.com/articles/erickson-senate-needs-to-clean-up-its-act

 

Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport, Trapped in Silvergrad, Promoted to Feldmarschall

Never before in history has somebody capable of taking a random sample missed a presidential election by 7% one week out. Never.

Frank Newport says:

These polls are designed only to measure what is happening at the time of that poll in terms of the national popular vote [and are]... not designed to be predictive

Generaloberst Barone Discovers That His Brain Does Not Work in the Winter Cold of Silvergrad

The idea is supposed to be that people take and look at polls to see whether their ideas about fundamentals are correct, and to see if they understand the demographics and mechanics. Barone doesn't seem to have looked at any polls--save for Rasmussen.

Buce observes from Palookaville: Barone Admits He Was Wrong in his Prediction But Doesn't Have Any Idea Why:

Say this for Michael Barone: he is the only one (that I have noticed) of the "Obama will nail it" forces who has actually issued anything like a mea culpa. Here is is in the Washington Examiner:

I was wrong because the outcome of the election was not determined, as I thought it would be, by fundamentals. Some fundamentals, I thought, favored Obama. Americans like to think well of their presidents (and Obama’s approval ratings rose, slightly, over the fall) and many, perhaps most, Americans believe it would be a bad thing for Americans to be seen as rejecting the first black president.

On the other hand, most voters opposed Obama’s major policies and found unsatisfactory the sluggish economic recovery that seems to them to be the result—negative factors that seem to have been confirmed by responses to exit poll questions as they were by responses to poll questions for many months now. .... This is not, I think, a grand triumph for his ideas or ideology. It is a triumph for his campaign strategists.

What happened? I think fundamentals were trumped by mechanics and, to a lesser extent, by demographics.

This is syntactically coherent, but once you give it a moment's thought, it's incoherent. Absent any empirical justification, one could just as well say, "I was right about the mechanics, but wrong about the fundamentals." Or more baldly: "gee, it looks like the voters' 'fundamentals' are not the same as my 'fundamentals,' and I didn't know that before."

Amidst these competing possibilities, how could we choose? To answer that question, we'd need some evidence, and I don't see Barone providing any. I suppose we could fall back on the fact that Barone is Mr. Ear-to-the-Ground, having spent his entire professional career as the accumulator and expositor of voting behavior data: Barone knows fundamentals,don't ask. But if this is true (i.e., so he must be "right on the fundamentals")--if this is true, why didn't he also know what was going on with the mechanics? Is there some kind of jurisdictional no-raiding pact that keeps a "fundamentals" guy from learning about "mechanics."

And you could go a step further. If Barone knew nothing about mechanics on Monday, how does he know so much about mechanics on Wednesday? Was there some great whoosh of empirical input that overwhelmed him on election day, like an untimely tropical storm?

Or further still. When Barone talks about "mechanics" he seems to mean stuff that most people describe as ""ground game"--discipline, organization, getting out the vote. Faithful observers (although apparently not Barone) have been reading/seeing/hearing for weeks that Democrats appeared to be pretty good at their ground game. But they have also been hearing that Republicans were working hard to gin up an onslaught of voter suppression. If logical consistency is the goal here, couldn't Barone just as well have said "gee, I guess Republicans were just not at good as I expected at voter suppression"? Actually, he might have been right on that one, but again--it would have required an inference that he just isn't as good a data man as would have us believe.

That throwaway about "demographics" I do not get at all. Best way I can read it, he's saying "I didn't know there were so many (young voters) (old voters) (Latino voters) (one-armed nuns with sailing-vessel tattoos)." But this "demographics stuff" is precisely what is supposed to be his stock in trade.

Henry Blodget Tries to Understand the "If Not for That Meddling Nate Silver!" Scooby-Doo Villains

http://www.businessinsider.com/questions-for-those-who-scoffed-at-the-polls-2012-11

 

If Not For That Meddling Nate!: Uh-Oh Scooby-Doo Weblogging Edition

Lawyers, Guns and Money reminds me of the existence of Mickey Kaus (they recommend *not* clicking on the link: I concur). But the lure of comedy proves irresistible. And I find:

A claim that Superstorm Sandy lowered Obama's chances in the late election.... A new claim that the polls are biased in favor of Barack Obama.... The War against the Central Limit Theorem, the Current Population Survey, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.... A proposal that Romney win the election by going all-in on the attack on Black welfare queens and their cadillacs.... More labor statistics trutherism.... Doubling-down on the War on Nate Silver... The attack on Steve Rattner... The attack on the internet: "Why has Obama's public campaign been so ineffective for the past month? Couldn't someone digitally sophisticated and untanked--e.g. Buzzfeed's Ben Smith--make a good argument that the President was led astray by the overhyped reality and promise of Internet Politics"... The claim Fannie Mae caused the financial crisis... The claim Romney won the third debate...

But I want to highlight something genuinely interesting--an argument I have heard at least ten times from Republicans over the past week. I call it the Scooby-Doo villain "If not for that meddling Nate!" argument. It goes like this:

1. We don't assess and react to reality--we create our own reality, to which you must then respond.
2. The first debate gave Romney momentum up through October 12, and the perception of momentum thereafter.
3. The non-quantitative press corps perceived what we wanted them to perceive after October 12: that Romney had momentum.
4. Because everybody wants to join a bandwagon, had the perception of momentum bounced through the journalistic echo chamber for a couple of weeks, it would have turned into real momentum.
5. And then Romney would have won.
6. But by highlighting his dubious and largely-untested model and claiming that state polls showed that Obama still had a lock on Ohio, Nate Silver intervened in the election and turned the perception around--and in fact gave Obama the perception of momentum.
7. That's not a New York Times's journalists role, to interfere in the electoral process in such a blatantly partisan way.

Kaus provides a neatly-compressed example of casting yourself as both a Scooby-Doo villain and as the bad behind-the-times scout in "Moneyball":

Alerted by Brad (“The Scoutmaster”) DeLong–protector of vulnerable young journalists!–the NYT‘s Paul Krugman defends Nate Silver’s election projections against a fairly calm critique in National Review. I leave it to you, the reader, to decide if arguing that Silver includes too many old polls is the sort of thing that, allowed to proliferate, “means … science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible.” But what surprised me was this Krugman graf:

It’s almost besides the point to notice that the whole notion that Nate Silver is somehow serving Obama’s interests by skewing the results is bizarre. This race is going to be decided by actual votes, not perceptions of “momentum”. But then posturing and bragging seems to be central to the right’s theory, for reasons I don’t get.

I thought the whole reason for the “momentum” wars–is Mitt surging or not?–is that the perception of momentum can easily become self-fulfilling, because undecided voters tend to break toward the candidate they think is the likely “winner.” It’s not just “posturing and bragging”–though there’s plenty of that. It might affect “actual votes.” If Krugman doesn’t understand that, what else…

Rush Limbaugh: Everything--Except the Polls--Points to a Romney Landslide

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/11/05/everything_except_the_polls_points_to_a_romney_landslide