US Politics: March Madness

[Tywin et al.]

12 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Some days I think he would, however, cheerfully invade Canada.

We invaded Iraq for its oil.

Your syrup isn’t safe!

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

Though Democrats should aim to win as much as they can, whatever seats they can switch to their favor will put more pressure on Republicans and Trump. The less seats that Republican whips have to rally to their votes and push through their agendas, the better.

[Fez]

24 minutes ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

Though Democrats should aim to win as much as they can, whatever seats they can switch to their favor will put more pressure on Republicans and Trump. The less seats that Republican whips have to rally to their votes and push through their agendas, the better.

It's true that if Republicans have something like a 220-215 majority after the election that they'll basically be totally paralyzed legislatively; but they almost already are totally paralyzed, and they'd still have control of the floor and the committees. Which means no oversight of Trump. For the House, it really is majority or bust for Democrats.

It's the Senate where the margin is important. If Democrats have the majority, that'd be amazing. But if they keep Republicans to 50, 51, or 52 seats, they still have a lot of strength to block the worst nominations/bills that can't be filibustered. The map is really bad though, and if things go poorly and Republicans wind up with 54+ seats, there's no telling what will happen. Certainly there aren't enough idiosyncratic Republican senators to stop anything at that point.

[Tywin et al.]

1 hour ago, DanteGabriel said:

Here's a nice note about Trump's legal toxicity from a Talking Points Memo reader:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-the-president-has-no-personal-attorney

Just like administration jobs, respectable, competent people don't want anything to do with this shithole President. 

I feel like it was around this time last year that  MZ , who works at a large law firm in NYC, said no high end firm would ever touch Trump simply because it would make it impossible for them to recruit new graduates. I’m sure it’s gotten significantly worse over the course of the year.

[The Marquis de Leech]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

In the past 12 elections, Democrats have won the House vote only three times: 2006, 2008, and 2012.

[Nitpick]

Four times. 1996, 2006, 2008, and 2012.

[/Nitpick].

[The Marquis de Leech]

14 minutes ago, Fez said:

It's the Senate where the margin is important. If Democrats have the majority, that'd be amazing. But if they keep Republicans to 50, 51, or 52 seats, they still have a lot of strength to block the worst nominations/bills that can't be filibustered. The map is really bad though, and if things go poorly and Republicans wind up with 54+ seats, there's no telling what will happen. Certainly there aren't enough idiosyncratic Republican senators to stop anything at that point.

The fact that we're even talking about Democratic gains with this Senate map is nothing short of insane. It'd be the first time since the direct election of Senators that a party gained seats in four consecutive cycles within the same Senate class.

(I've occasionally wondered how the map would look if Hillary had won the Presidency. The stuff of nightmares indeed).

[DMC]

10 hours ago, Triskele said:

There's some depressing analysis here on just how hard it's going to be for the Dems to re-take the House due to gerrymandering.  

The Brennan Center report provides very interesting data - a great state-by-state analysis on the responsiveness (or lack thereof) of state maps and variation between states' seats-to-votes curve.  However, it needs to be emphasized that while it is presented as such (somewhat by the authors themselves but much more so by the Mother Jones article), it cannot really be described as any type of forecast model for 2018 and has very little to do with analyzing the generic ballot.  Indeed, the term "generic ballot" is only mentioned twice throughout the entire report, and the "+11" number is not derived until the very end of the report ("Appendix 2"), using strangely arbitrary assumptions and a couple methodological red flags or worst practices (will detail later).  As the authors themselves state:

Quote

There are a few final caveats. This study uses a state-level view to specifically examine the role of gerrymandering in widening the gap between mathematically expected seat-share and actual seatshare. But at this relatively early stage in the 2018 general election cycle, it does not attempt to factor qualitative, district-specific factors, such as incumbency, the presence of third-party or independent candidates, shifting demographics, differing levels of movement toward (or against) the parties in subgroups of voters (e.g., white college educated women versus non-college educated women), turnout, or scandalous behavior by one or more candidates. All of these could have an impact on the actual number of seats each party wins. This year, a large and growing number of retirements, in particular, could make it somewhat easier for Democrats to win a majority than the model predicts. An especially strong wave, likewise, could produce "winner's bonus" by depressing turnout, volunteering, and fundraising among Republicans while increasing it among Democrats, enabling Democrats to pick up seats normally out of reach. For that reason, this model can and should be supplemented with additional information from other sources and models as they become available.

For the reasons above, the model also should not be used to predict which exact districts Democrats will win. While the data points in each curve represent individual districts, this study aims to assess the impact of map-drawing on responsiveness broadly in states. It is possible that Democrats win districts that the model projects they are unlikely to win and, conversely, they could lose races in districts that the model suggests that they should easily win. [11-12]

[...]

However, we caution against using the model to predict any individual race, as it does not take into account incumbency, candidate quality, local issues, electoral population shifts, scandals, or any other district-level factors. As a result, some districts — particularly those on the edge of predicted vote shares — are likely to be toss ups, and Democrats are likely to have an easier time winning some than others due to these aforementioned factors. The high number of retirements, in particular, makes it likely that Democrats could win slightly more districts than we predict, as more Democratic challengers will be facing fresh Republican candidates as well. A lack of Republican enthusiasm in a given district could, likewise, impact fundraising, volunteering, and turnout, possibly putting unexpected districts in play. These uncertainties are not reflected in our model, as we approach this issue from the perspective of map-drawers concerned about broad outcomes rather than that of election forecasters. [27]

This difference becomes apparent when comparing their analysis to actual election forecasters like the Cook Report.  The focus of the Brennan report is examining how difficult it is for Democrats to pick up seats in 13 states that they categorize as a Republican gerrymander or "court modified" map (Florida, Texas, and Virginia).  When you cross-reference these states with the seats the Dems have the best chance to pickup - names the 40 GOP seats Cook rates as Tossup or Republican Lean - only 12 of those 40 seats come from these 13 states (the Dems would need to win 16 of these 40 seats, a assuming they hold all those rated on their side).  

Why is this the case?  Because election forecasters are already aware of the incredible difficulties in these states caused by their unresponsive maps!  In other words, they have been baked in.  This is why the Brennan report is not particularly useful information in handicapping the 2018 House elections.  Further, while it's hard to tell because they do not provide any corresponding dataset (meaning it'd require much more time for me to discern the Figures), in Appendix 1 there are seats within their "Election Range 2006-2016."  This indicates even based on their own analysis there are a decent amount of pickup opportunities in these 13 states.

(Also, it should be noted they only analyze the 26 states that hold six or more seats.  I don't have much of a problem with this - these states account for about 85% of the seats in the House, which is certainly a good sample - but it's curious why they chose to cut off around an eighth of the available data).

To get back to that +11 number, this is arrived at in Appendix 2.  At first, I was going to write this off as ecological fallacy, but it's actually far worse:

Quote

An 11-point win for Democrats in the national popular vote is consistent with:

• a wave election in Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin,

• a strong to wave election in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington,

• a strong election in Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, and

• a modest to strong election in California and Illinois.

Now, while it does make sense to assume "redder" states will have more of a wave because there is more room for them to increase their share of the Democratic vote, there is no explanation provided for why, say, California and Illinois would have considerably gains compared to Maryland and Massachusetts (that both had equal to or larger Dem vote shares in 2016).  What's particularly concerning about this from an empirical perspective is California and Illinois are obviously the largest Democratic states.  

You could pick apart any of these categories - not to mention wonder who they know what the national popular vote win will be for Dems without analyzing an eighth of the seats as previously mentioned - but just because California was strong in 2016 doesn't mean it can't become stronger still in 2018.  In fact, one of the Dems' main systemic disadvantages in redistricting is the inefficient geographical sorting that has led to very blue states like California and Illinois to become bluer - which would precisely suggest a further rise, especially if there's a "Dem wave" in states like Alabama and Kentucky.  

Further, in this Appendix 2 analysis, they only use the 2016 results, as in the increases are assumed to be solely from the Dem vote share in 2016.  Not only is this just bad practice - any election analyst tries to use a combination of multiple prior elections - the rest of the Brennan report is based on the results from all three past cycles!  In other words, it's not even consistent with the 2012-2016 Map that serves as the "X-axis," or key explanatory variable!!!  In academic terms, that's really shitty work.  Based on all above, it becomes very hard not to assume this Appendix 2 "analysis" represents some of the worst-case scenarios when running their model to highlight the gerrymandering issue.

One final note on ecological fallacy:  Their report relies on one huge assumption - a uniform vote swing - meaning the vote share of all individual districts will move in tandem with the vote share in the statewide vote.  Again, this is perfectly fine when comparing the responsiveness of different state maps (it's probably the best way to do it), but very problematic when extrapolating such analysis to the impact of the generic ballot (or national popular vote) on individual districts.  The authors repeatedly justify this by claiming political scientists have found national factors strongly influence district-level results.  

As a political scientist, I'm unsure of this claim, but I could totally be wrong - the onus is on the authors to provide such evidence.  Instead, their only citation for this is one article (Jackman 2014), which doesn't mention district-level results at all but rather the impact of national factors on state-level vote swings (something that is indeed well-founded in the literature).  This is intellectually disingenuous, and serves as another red flag suggesting this is an exaggerated report by an interest group.  In comparison, there is Abramowitz's model that the report mentions and is used as a comparison in the Mother Jones article.  

His model uses three predictors to estimate midterm seat swing:  the generic ballot, which party controls the White House, and the number of seats held by each party prior to election.  Those are all aggregate level variables used to predict the aggregate House swing.  That's how you're supposed to do analysis, rather than applying national-level (aggregate) variables to state and district-level ("individual") estimates (now, there are certain multilevel models that can help get around this, but there's zero indication the Brennan report utilized such methods and I highly doubt it).  BTW, Abramowitz's model explains 88 percent of the variation is seat swings with an "n" of only 18 midterm elections.

[DanteGabriel]

15 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I feel like it was around this time last year that  MZ , who works at a large law firm in NYC, said no high end firm would ever touch Trump simply because it would make it impossible for them to recruit new graduates. I’m sure it’s gotten significantly worse over the course of the year.

Ah I probably missed that because I was too shellshocked to read the US Politics threads after the election, and didn't come back until the nationwide anti-Nazi rallies after Charlottesville. MZ was right on the money.

[Fragile Bird]

Gee, has Trump asked lawyers in the big Atlanta or Miami firms? How about ones in Alabama or Utah or Texas or some other red state? Surely NYC and Washington don’t have an exclusive lock on good lawyers?

 

 

[Mlle. Zabzie]

14 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Some days I think he would, however, cheerfully invade Canada.

54/40 or FIGHT!

2 hours ago, DanteGabriel said:

Here's a nice note about Trump's legal toxicity from a Talking Points Memo reader:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-the-president-has-no-personal-attorney

Just like administration jobs, respectable, competent people don't want anything to do with this shithole President. 

 

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

I feel like it was around this time last year that  MZ , who works at a large law firm in NYC, said no high end firm would ever touch Trump simply because it would make it impossible for them to recruit new graduates. I’m sure it’s gotten significantly worse over the course of the year.

We won't touch him - recruiting is a small but very significant sliver of a reason why (he is an ethical nightmare, for starters).  And honestly, if we won't touch him (my firm has several extremely prominent conservatives, particularly on the litigation side, though to be fair it is balanced by a bunch of less prominent (but still eminent) liberals on the regulatory and corporate side), and Jones Day won't touch him, then no one will.  And I work at a firm that has defended most of the companies you love to hate, so there's that.

@Fragile Bird there are of course wonderful lawyers outside of NYC and DC (we have an excellent practice in Chicago, Houston, San Fran, Boston and LA, and that's just us).  High end white collar work, however, and as you know, much like high end M&A in NY has tended to coalesce in DC and NYC. If you look at Chambers & Partners' rankings, the best practices for election related stuff are at Perkins Coie DC (they represent Democrats - aren't touching this), Skadden DC (less likely to touch this than us), Wiley Rein DC (represents Republicans but is almost certainly conflicted), Caplin Drysdale DC (they are more lobbyists than anything else), Covington & Burling DC (bipartisan, but whitest of white shoes, so won't touch it), Jones Day  DC (not touching it - doesn't help that several White House lawyers came out of JD) and Venable (probably conflicted).  There are some other boutiques, but I'm guessing they have already been tapped.

[Ormond]

I'd just like to say that we are very lucky to have experts in their fields like dmc515 and Mlle.Zabzie contributing to this thread.  

[Fragile Bird]

18 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

 

@Fragile Bird there are of course wonderful lawyers outside of NYC and DC (we have an excellent practice in Chicago, Houston, San Fran, Boston and LA, and that's just us).  High end white collar work, however, and as you know, much like high end M&A in NY has tended to coalesce in DC and NYC. If you look at Chambers & Partners' rankings, the best practices for election related stuff are at Perkins Coie DC (they represent Democrats - aren't touching this), Skadden DC (less likely to touch this than us), Wiley Rein DC (represents Republicans but is almost certainly conflicted), Caplin Drysdale DC (they are more lobbyists than anything else), Covington & Burling DC (bipartisan, but whitest of white shoes, so won't touch it), Jones Day  DC (not touching it - doesn't help that several White House lawyers came out of JD) and Venable (probably conflicted).  There are some other boutiques, but I'm guessing they have already been tapped.

I know you know I was being flip there. It’s interesting to see your list of law firms. I don’t know if a blue chip Canadian firm would act for the equivalent of someone as toxic as Trump, it would have to be a boutique firm. There’s just too much at risk!

[lokisnow]

12 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

I am sceptical. All the previous commentary I have seen suggests the Democrats need about a 6-7% win to have an even chance of flipping the house (itself an outrageous situation, but nowhere near 11%).

All of the experts selling the 6-7 % are fiscally dependent on the idea that the election is competitive (competitive meaning they sell the lie that democrats can win with 53-47, instead of that being an obvious loss). Of course they’re going to come up with rationalizations to sell subscriptions to their analysis and be hired as consultants. 

Brennan Center for Justice doesn’t have those financial conflicts of interests shared by the other experts.

Republicans and all of the reportage since 2010 on the “project red state” mapping software that drew all the gerrymanders have repeatedly stated they were drawn to withstand ten point waves, and were simulated thousands of times to test that, and simulated and modeled population drift and tested to make sure they’d hold up.

brennans analysis is absolutely consistent with everything reported about project red state six years ago, so the false hope that democrats can win a majority even though all these experts will never identify one additional winnable seat in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Michigan (for example) is nothing more than a sad pipe dream.

[Fez]

2 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

All of the experts selling the 6-7 % are fiscally dependent on the idea that the election is competitive (competitive meaning they sell the lie that democrats can win with 53-47, instead of that being an obvious loss). Of course they’re going to come up with rationalizations to sell subscriptions to their analysis and be hired as consultants. 

Brennan Center for Justice doesn’t have those financial conflicts of interests shared by the other experts.

Republicans and all of the reportage since 2010 on the “project red state” mapping software that drew all the gerrymanders have repeatedly stated they were drawn to withstand ten point waves, and were simulated thousands of times to test that, and simulated and modeled population drift and tested to make sure they’d hold up.

brennans analysis is absolutely consistent with everything reported about project red state six years ago, so the false hope that democrats can win a majority even though all these experts will never identify one additional winnable seat in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Michigan (for example) is nothing more than a sad pipe dream.

Brennan Center for Justice is involved with Eric Holder's initiative to end gerrymandering; and therefore have the incentive to overstate how bad gerrymandering is to the furthest extent they can.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

27 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I know you know I was being flip there. It’s interesting to see your list of law firms. I don’t know if a blue chip Canadian firm would act for the equivalent of someone as toxic as Trump, it would have to be a boutique firm. There’s just too much at risk!

Oh totally- for the audience at home. By yes this is a no win situation. He doesn’t pay. He doesn’t listen to his lawyers and he is brand toxic. 

[Fez]

Just now, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Oh totally- for the audience at home. By yes this is a no win situation. He doesn’t pay. He doesn’t listen to his lawyers and he is brand toxic. 

Well, if you want to get into the less prestigious, but likely highly lucrative business of selling cheap, probably scam-y, legal services to the kind of people that listen to Alex Jones or go to CPAC, it's probably a good business move.

There's a lot of money to fleece from gullible right-wingers if you have the stomach for it.

[lokisnow]

Dammit just got to Dmcs post. Sigh. Retracted I suppose. But I do love some good doom and gloom bad news about democrats inability to win. Nothing quite confirms my biases and suspicions as well!

[Shryke]

56 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

We won't touch him - recruiting is a small but very significant sliver of a reason why (he is an ethical nightmare, for starters).  And honestly, if we won't touch him (my firm has several extremely prominent conservatives, particularly on the litigation side, though to be fair it is balanced by a bunch of less prominent (but still eminent) liberals on the regulatory and corporate side), and Jones Day won't touch him, then no one will.  And I work at a firm that has defended most of the companies you love to hate, so there's that.

Something I was reading was saying that the ethical rules surrounding you knowing your client is committing purgury are a lot less friendly to the lawyers then you'd think and there are serious ethical obligations to do something about the situation. Not sure how accurate that is, especially in practice, but I can't imagine representing a client who you know will lie under oath is something anyone wants to get involved in.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

20 minutes ago, Shryke said:

Something I was reading was saying that the ethical rules surrounding you knowing your client is committing purgury are a lot less friendly to the lawyers then you'd think and there are serious ethical obligations to do something about the situation. Not sure how accurate that is, especially in practice, but I can't imagine representing a client who you know will lie under oath is something anyone wants to get involved in.

Each state has its own code, but the NYRPC is found here.  As an admitted NY attorney, I am an officer of the court (see preamble, at 1).   Under the NYRPC, I have an ethical duty to ensure that the information that I present to the Court is true.  See Rule 3.3.  Note that this obligation trumps (excuse the pun) my obligation to keep my client's confidences.  See also Rule 1.16 regarding "unworthy" clients.

25 minutes ago, Fez said:

Well, if you want to get into the less prestigious, but likely highly lucrative business of selling cheap, probably scam-y, legal services to the kind of people that listen to Alex Jones or go to CPAC, it's probably a good business move.

There's a lot of money to fleece from gullible right-wingers if you have the stomach for it.

There are plenty of unethical lawyers.  Even at big firms.  But most of us try to be better.

[Maithanet]

I would also say that any estimate of how big a "wave" (blech) the democrats need to take control of the House simply must take PA into account.  If they aren't changing their estimate based on the new map, then any estimate they make just isn't credible.  Democrats could very realistically go from a 13-5 deficit in the state in 2016 to a 10-8 advantage without any crazy swings or huge upsets.  Democrats could pick up 12 seats in CA and PA alone.