Looking for Accurate Polls

One of the common complaints we see about politics and especially political coverage nowadays is the charge that people or ideas are being unfairly ignored - particularly that we don't have a good idea which opinions are actually widespread and which aren't.

Both sides have an irritating tendency to argue that the more extreme opinions associated with their side are actually rare (and being overemphasized by their opponents) and that the extreme opinions associated with the other side are actually common (and being downplayed by their opponents). Theoretically, one of the ways we're supposed to get a more precise idea about the level of support for certain ideas (and people) is by asking about those ideas in a systematic fashion - or polling. Realistically, the polls themselves become a point of contention, with both sides arguing about how accurate or relevant they are, and so having polls to talk about tends to change the shape of the argument rather than actually allowing one side or the other to win.

The data we get from polls is still a very useful thing to have, though. Since one of my favorite news organizations put out an article a week or so ago about proper use of polls, I figure now is as good a time as any to talk about it.

That article has a lot of good advice in it about what useful conclusions we can and can't make based on polling data, but it is strongly focused on presidential primary polls, and there's one mistake with polling in general that I'd like to talk about in more detail. Specifically, that would be jumping to conclusions based on data which in reality is a bit more nuanced. This is another (rare) moment where I legitimately can argue that both sides tend to fall short. 

A lot of the left-leaning people I know don't always look past the top-line numbers to ask about how the questions were asked or other factors that affect the survey. There's a lot of polling data out there which legitimately indicates that some liberal policies are popular, but if those policies are misunderstood or voters don't count those issues as their top priority, then that doesn't necessarily translate into popularity for liberal politicians themselves. 

The right-leaning people I know, on the other hand, tend to discard a lot of polls entirely because they don't see how the data could possibly be accurate given what they see from their other sources of information. They give too much weight to the various sources of error and fail to realize that it is possible to compensate for them or compare these polls to their past performance to check them. Alternately, they don't apply the same suspicion to their other sources of information, many of which are less reliable than a properly conducted poll.

In both cases, there's a legitimate argument being made, focusing either on what makes the results reliable or on the sources of potential error. However, there's also a failure to look at possible counterarguments or alternate explanations, and accurately figuring out what's going on in the world requires avoiding that as best as possible.

Moderation and Enthusiasm

It's become quite normal to watch the Democrats agonizing over what the right path to victory in the next presidential election is - and then agonizing about whether the level of agony on the topic is appropriate, because of course we have to keep going deeper. The latest example of this was a New York Times editorial written by Thomas Friedman about why what he saw in the first presidential debate makes him think President Trump will be re-elected. Both it and some of the responses to it were interesting reads, even if I find the whole debate kind of tiresome.

So, which side of the debate do I think is right? The answer to that question is that it's complicated - there were some things Friedman said which made a lot of sense to me, and several things he said which seemed obviously wrong.

The biggest entry in the latter category is the notion that nominating a moderate candidate who spends all of their time talking about moderate ideas will actually help give the Democrats less of a reputation for extreme ideas among their opponents. I don't think that's likely; I think even if the "squad" completely vanished from public life tomorrow along with half of the presidential candidates, the Republican media will simply find something else (whether or not it's actually relevant or significant) to use as an example of extremism.

The ideas Friedman talks about in the latter half of his editorial are quite instructive. Democrats that focus on building up small businesses and the economy may be moderate by his definition, but I'm willing to bet that the sort of regulations and investment he describes will still be dismissed as socialism by most Republicans. If nothing else, such Democrats will simply be accused of laying the groundwork to pursue their true intentions later. So I don't really hold the more progressive Democrats responsible for making the party appear more extreme. It may be slightly easier for the other side to make that argument with them around, but telling them to take a hike isn't going to protect us enough to be worth it. I'd rather have the energy and new ideas they bring, even if many of those ideas are things I disagree with.

What makes it complicated is the balancing act between kicking people out for being too extreme and letting those people dominate the entire conversation. The above explains why I don't want to do the former, but it also means we can't use that particular tool to prevent the latter from happening, and most other means for doing so are not particularly effective. I would like to suggest that the moderate wing should be more vocal and enthusiastic about their ideas, but it turns out they're not quite as good at that as the progressive wing is.

Then again, the fact that articles like Friedman's are so common is its own argument that the moderate wing is having their say, even if we are spending plenty of time discussing the progressive wing's ideas (and defending them from unjustifiable attacks). Which is why I opened this by saying I find this debate tiresome... I actually don't think there's much to be worried about in either direction, even if I know that we're going to continue to go back and forth about some of the exact details.

Density and Housing

I ran across an interesting New York Times article last week about housing and affordability in California. I doubt many people would disagree that California has a couple of interesting problems with their cost of living, but that's not going to stop us from disagreeing about what's causing the problem, and this particular article highlights what I believe is the primary cause.

Specifically, it talks about the various ways in which zoning and usage restrictions are driving costs up and pushing people out. The proponents of such rules probably aren't trying to make a point of the latter, nor do I think the environmental concerns that are routinely mocked by the right wing are necessarily the point (or the major cause of these problems) either. Frankly, I think it's just NIMBYism - many people just don't want to live in high-density areas, and so will take steps to prevent their areas from becoming high-density. I don't understand it myself, since I've always liked living in higher density areas (better mass transit, more services close by

If it were just a matter of people choosing to live in areas they preferred (and moving if the area no longer suited them), I would have much less of a problem with that. Unfortunately, as the NYT article points out, what's actually happening looks a lot more like people blocking everyone else from living in a particular area unless their preferences exactly match the existing groups'. There's a line there between properly advocating for oneself and unjustly interfering with others, and a lot of the strongest opposition is on the wrong side of it.

This article also led me to some interesting questions about how zoning is different in various areas, and why some of the places I've lived in other countries don't seem to have this problem. Luckily, I was able to find some interesting (albeit perhaps overly detailed) articles about zoning in North America versus Japan. It's a fascinating look into how government decisions that most of us neither know nor care about have massive effects on multiple parts of our society and economy. I still need to find someone who actually likes North America's zoning and have a chance to see a defense of the idea before I can say I'm completely convinced, but articles like these still reinforce my belief that there's some things about our society that we need to fix.

Learning from Immigration History

This article from the New York Times stuck with me mostly because of one particular line near the end:

During World War II, the United States blocked a ship with hundreds of Jewish refugees from docking at our shores, sending many back to their deaths. After the war, the United States declared “never again” and became a leader in the modern-day refugee movement.

Given that the whole article is about problems in Central America and Honduras specifically, one can probably guess why the author brings that point up.

And the reason why it's so compelling to me is that this isn't the first time this point has been raised - the immigration debate often features comparisons to the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Jews, and more, depending on whether we're talking about people who we feared weren't useful, people who we feared might be a threat, or people who we regretted not helping more when we had the chance. It's remarkable how often we've regretted our past mistakes in this regard, and kind of depressing how often we turn around and do the same thing to different groups of people anyway.

That doesn't mean we can't decide we don't wish to or don't believe we can help, and there are plenty of ways we can make the problem worse with poorly thought out interventions. However, using that as an excuse to do nothing at all to help is little more than a prelude to yet more useless avoidable regret.

End of a Irrelevant Narrative

So I'm going to go ahead and join the debate about the special counsel's investigation and whether or not President Trump's campaign colluded with Russia. I've specifically avoided saying anything one way or the other up to this point, but now that the investigation's ended, I'm more willing to participate briefly.

To put it simply, I really don't care that the special counsel's investigation has ended with no evidence of collusion. It's not going to have all that much of an impact on who I support or vote for in the future.

I made a post on one of my social media accounts shortly after the election that pointed out the various policy disagreements I have with President Trump and the Republican party generally. None of that has changed; to the extent that I've discovered I was wrong about some of those concerns, it's largely a matter of overestimating the risks involved, not underestimating the benefits.

To put it another way, it's similar to the remarks former Senator Flake made when he was asked why he didn't do more to oppose President Trump. He pointed out that he was still a Republican, he still liked lower taxes and fewer regulations, and he wasn't going to oppose such things just because someone he disliked was supporting them. By the same token, I'm not going to stop supporting social justice, strong environmental regulations, and a government that's actually involved in public life to a useful degree simply because some of my compatriots were overly aggressive in assuming criminal behavior on the part of someone they disliked.

And I also feel compelled to point out that President Trump was the most unpopular presidential candidate in history well before the special counsel investigation was even being considered. Those of you who are assuming that this result means President Trump can now cruise to an easy re-election may want to reconsider that assumption. I don't know whether or not he will be re-elected, but I'm fairly confident it will be a rather close race.

Political Backgrounds and Aptitude

One of the major benefits to online news is that it's very easy to create interesting interactive visual presentations; today's example is the New York Times with a little graph about what sort of experience and qualifications each of our current members of Congress have.

The write-up they've attached to their graph notes a number of interesting ways in which the makeup of Congress doesn't at all match the makeup of the country as a whole, and offers some speculation on the potential consequences of that. Most of it has to do with problems they might not understand very well (because very few of the people with experience with them go on to become politicians) or ways in which Congress might be more willing to aggressively deal with issues because they disproportionately affect the areas of society that most representatives come from.

While some of it is plausible, though, I don't think I agree with all of it. And I think it's worth considering exactly what we want the job of one of our representatives to be - because depending on how we define those responsibilities, it's entirely natural that not everyone will want to deal with them.

For example, while I do think more people with scientific or technical backgrounds in Congress would be good for the country, it doesn't surprise me that the sort of person that likes a job in those fields might not like being a politician. And part of the ideal of picking people to represent us is that we pick some of our best for leadership roles, so one would expect at least some deviations from the mean in that group.

To be entirely clear, I think we do still have a problem as far as our pipeline for political jobs is concerned, and I think we should be more willing to look for talent in a wider pool than we currently do. But I think we need to be careful when we're defining what success in that endeavor looks like.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Turnout

There are few things that frustrate me more than tribal politics and gridlock getting in the way of legitimate, important priorities for our nation. Given that improving our system of voting and ensuring that everyone who wants to vote can vote is high on my list of those priorities, it shouldn't be any surprise that editorials like this one from the Wall Street Journal irritate me quite a bit.

As far as I can tell, their primary complaint is that trying to mimic parts of California's voting system for the entire country is going to increase Democratic power across the entire country. They point out a few things about California's system (such as automatic registration, automatic distribution of mail-in ballots, and people being allowed to collect ballots for others) and complain that states should be allowed to decide for themselves how much or how little of that to mimic.

About the only bit of it that I agree with is the concerns about voter harvesting; I agree that it creates too many opportunities for voter fraud and intimidation. Of course, that's also the part that's not in the nationwide bill the House Democrats have put up, so its relevance to those changes is rather low.

Everything else, frankly, comes off as a cheap attempt to poison the well regarding a number of very useful ways to improve voter turnout for everyone by associating them with the biggest Democratic stronghold in the country. The actual arguments against it mostly amount to "it makes voter fraud easier" (which we know because California is still catching those bad automatic registrations) and "states should be able to decide" (which ignores the legitimate interest the federal government has in promoting the health of the entire country's election system). As reasons why we shouldn't take steps to improve turnout, they fall quite badly short; the benefits for the health of our democracy outweighs arguments like those.

Legislative Gridlock

The ongoing train wreck in British politics that is their effort to decide how they're going to split from the European Union doesn't affect me personally much, but I've still been following it with some interest. A parliamentary system such as theirs doesn't usually develop the sort of gridlock which is paralyzing it now.

For anyone that's not familiar with it, normally a prime minister whose proposals lost by a wide margin (i.e. what just happened to the Brexit deal) would expect to lose a vote of no confidence shortly afterward. The entire point is that the prime minister is supposed to command majority support in the parliament, after all. In this case, though, Mrs. May's Conservative Party doesn't particularly like the deal in question, but is still willing to support her as prime minister over other alternatives, and so the normal consequences aren't happening.

Which leaves the British government unable to function in the normal way, and without any other obvious means to either get back to that normal or find a new standard. Not reaching any deal at all by the deadline is a real possibility, as is a deal passing with mostly the opposition parties' support instead of the majority parties. It depends on exactly how much those opposition parties want to avoid the no deal scenario, how much they're willing to help out Mrs. May's government, and what they can get in exchange for their support.

I'm calling those answers "probably a lot", "not much at all", and "who knows; making deals with the opposition isn't that common", which isn't as helpful in actually predicting the future as we might wish. Hopefully they'll still manage to avoid the worst case scenario.

Democratic Coalitions

FiveThirtyEight continues to do an awesome job with their coverage of US elections; they just recently posted several articles analyzing the candidates for the Democratic presidential primary.

... It's all still quite speculative, of course, and as the article warns, there's a lot of stuff in it that will probably look a bit questionable in retrospect. But for an analysis conducted a full year and a half away from the nomination, I think it's decent. It's a pretty good way to think about what the primary candidates have to do and how they could go about doing it, if nothing else - and it's a chance for the Democrats to start thinking about which groups they belong to and what coalitions they'd accept.

I find myself mostly in agreement with the idea that the "mainstream" or "most likely" candidates (e.g. Biden and Sanders) are probably weaker than they look, although I don't know if I really think that means one of the others will take it instead, given how low the name recognition is for everyone else. Then again, there's plenty of time for that to change.

Political Shifts

I do feel a bit weird commenting on internal debates among conservatives, since it feels like that shouldn't really be any of my business (given that I'm not particularly conservative). However, the various ways that some conservatives are responding to Tucker Carlson's recent comments (plus, of course, the monologue itself) offers not just some interesting thoughts on how conservatism might develop from here, but also some food for thought on what's going to happen to liberals in response.

Part of that is because there are parts of Carlson's piece (in between ridiculous misrepresentations of Democrats' priorities, some faulty logic about how we ended up here, and a frankly horrifying vision of how we should fix it) that I am generally able to agree with regarding the degree to which government should be trying to affect our society. If this is the sort of thing we can expect more of from prominent conservatives, there's a world in which they end up drifting to the left as far as government intervention in the economy is concerned. Possibly to the point of actually teaming up with the sort of liberal that cares more about reforming the economy than they do about social justice, although that's a bit of a stretch.

That would, though, leave a lot of mainstream left and right wing people out of that group, and if they wanted to exert any useful opposing force, they might find themselves teaming up as well. That would most likely involve the liberals abandoning some of their efforts to exert control over the economy (perhaps by reasoning that social pressure on companies to do the right thing could make up for the lack of government involvement), and involve the conservatives giving up on some of their opposition to socially liberal ideas.

Basically, we'd shift from a horizontal split on the Nolan Chart to a vertical split. Still a two-party system, but different coalitions and splits between them.

Now, do I think that sort of shift is actually likely anytime soon? Nope.

In the end, I think a lot of conservatives, even if they agree that government policies need to be designed to address various social problems, will still mostly argue that government involvement is what screwed things up in the first place, and simply removing government from as much of our lives as possible will fix the problem eventually. Carlson's piece might convince them to think more carefully about the limited ways in which they are willing to use the government, but I don't think it's going to get them to start turning to government policy so much that they can find common ground with socialists. Similar things can be said about the liberals here; even if they continue to use free market arguments regarding the economic dominance of big cities and pressure on corporate decisions, I don't think we're going to see them abandoning the idea that the government has a major role to play and drifting towards libertarianism.

But I think it's possible enough to speculate on, even if it is quite unlikely to happen soon.

Changing Capitalism

One of the random posts that went through my news feed with the new year was a nice little thing about what we'd remove from the world if we could change one thing. A fairly innocuous and unsurprising post for this time of year, all things considered... except for some of the answers, of course.

A number of people used it as a nice way to talk about things that were holding them back and things they'd like to do differently in the future. However, a number of people also used it to make statements about some significant things they'd like to remove from the world - greed, capitalism, money, or oil were all named as things by some of them.

Which immediately attracted my attention, because I actually don't agree with the notion at all, particularly as it applies to the specific resources which are often sources of conflict.

Here's the thing: Many of these things, particularly the actual resources, have provided great benefits. There are entire regions of the world that would not be easily habitable without gas-fired heating and electrical systems, for example. Capitalism itself turns out to be an okay way to allocate resources and a better way to self-correct that allocation when something isn't useful or desired than most other economic systems.

The caveat, of course, is that the above doesn't mean these things are an unalloyed good. Over-committing to one specific solution or helpful resource can put us in a bad situation when it comes time to change to a better one or try to address problems with what we have, for example. And while there are a lot of ways in which capitalism is self-correcting, there are a lot of circumstances in which it isn't (monopolies and limited definitions of value being the most prominent examples to me); those situations can't be fixed by purely capitalist solutions. That would be why the vast majority of successful societies have some form of mixed economy instead of pure capitalism, and believing our economic and societal structures are flawless and shouldn't be (or even can't be) improved further seems like unjustified confidence verging on stupidity to me.

But we should be aware of what we've already got and do the best we can to ensure our changes are actually improvements. That's not easy to do (or to agree on), but it's worth the effort.

Townspeople and Politicians

The Wall Street Journal ran an article earlier this week about how Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) managed to win reelection in one of the closest victories the Republicans managed in 2018. There's a lot of interesting stuff in that article; a lot of it makes me question whether very many other Republicans will actually be willing to lean towards the center in the same way. I think the answer is "not many"... but that's not actually the point I want to focus on.

The one detail I am going to focus on is from this quote:

One lesson of such tours is that Capitol Hill is a bubble. At a taco joint in conservative Castroville, Mr. Hurd asks a breakfast group for their thoughts on the Saudi killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and the table gets pretty quiet. That subject is remote compared with a future bypass on U.S. Route 90. “What people talk about in D.C. is different from what people talk about here,” Mr. Hurd says in the car afterward. “Man, Khashoggi has dominated Washington, D.C., for a month. None of them brought it up.”

While I can see the point the author's going for, that reads a whole lot to me like "these people are too deep into their own bubble to realize or care about what's going on in the wider world". It's kind of ironic that they have exactly the same problem, in that sense, that we're complaining about everyone in Washington DC having.

To be fair, that doesn't rule out the idea that both groups are stuck in their own bubbles - and politicians not capable of understanding what their constituents are going through is definitely a worse problem to have than the reverse. But it's important to remember that the voters can have that problem too, particularly if we want to have politicians that can help lead the country rather than just blindly following the currents of public opinion.

Government by Donation

Last week, someone apparently decided to set up a GoFundMe page for people to donate money towards paying for President Trump's proposed border wall. As of this writing, it's at about $16.5 million out of a $1 billion goal.

I do want to start by pointing out that there are several complaints about this donation project that I don't agree with. As nice as it is to play games with math showing how long it will take to reach their goal or predict that the rate of donations will drop, it's probably not that easy to make guesses about the rate of donations. And while it's tempting to point out how much else we could get other than political stunts with this money, the average donation is right around $50, and all of us are probably guilty at one point or another of using sums like that in a less than ideal fashion.

What I do want to ask is: do we really want our government to work this way? 

The one detail I will use from the math problem I discounted above is that even if the donation rate doubles, it would take months to reach the goal - and years to get the actual amount we'd need for the wall. Even if we decide that's okay for this project, there are a number of things our government needs a bit more urgently than that. We did, after all, learn all the way back before we even had a Constitution that a federal government that can only ask for money can't even pay its debts, much less do anything else.

And making a habit of this also means tying our government's ability to pay for things to the wealth level of the portion of society that favors a particular project or the strength of the viral marketing campaign they can come up with. Both of those possibilities seem like they could make our country very undemocratic if they end badly.

Even if we decide we'll only do it for some limited projects, that still offers an option for people to do end runs around the democratic process by offering conditional donations. There are ways to avoid that, but we'd need to be careful about how we set it up. Otherwise, we'd see the government forced to choose between accepting money for projects that the people don't want or turning down money that it generally needs more of. 

Meritocracy's Weakness

Earlier this month, right after the former President Bush's death, two editorials showed up in the New York Times which drew a fair bit of criticism for their views of what makes the ruling class in the US (such as it is) worthy of their positions in society.

I happen to agree with a lot of the criticism of the first one - I think it ignores a lot of the flaws of the old guard and doesn't acknowledge that sometimes people appear more trustworthy because they look more like us - but it still brings up a useful point, and the second one develops that point further. Specifically, they point out that an elite class ostensibly based on merit alone can still share many of the flaws of an aristocracy based on inheritance and privilege.

It's a useful reminder that designing a system with a specific goal in mind (in this case, to ensure that those at the top of our society are there because they deserve it) is often more difficult than it looks and vulnerable to any number of shortfalls and unintended consequences. In our case, we've hidden or willfully ignored many of the ways in which unearned advantages affect people's results even as we tried to focus on merit alone. And we're not willing to fix it, because the steps we'd need to take to even find the problem look like steps backward to any number of people.

I think the conclusion the second article ends on - that our elites should be aware of how they got there, rather than suffering from any illusions about their place in society - is a good one, even if I think it still paints an overly bright picture of the past. It certainly is a useful detail to remember as we keep trying to find a new way forward.

Strawman Arguments

There have been a lot of interesting stories lately about little things like how the left hates "Baby It's Cold Outside".

To me, one of the interesting things is that I first heard about these things from the conservative people I know calling people stupid for complaining about them, rather than from the liberal people I know actually complaining about them. Particularly given that I have far more liberal friends than conservative ones, it's hard to believe that anything which is a common complaint on the left wouldn't come from the former group first. It almost makes me question how much the average liberal actually believes such things.

Sarcasm aside, it's worth taking a closer look at how and why we complain about small numbers of people complaining about random things. Sometimes it is appropriate to call attention to such things and make a point about poor arguments and extreme views. (If you're hoping I'm about to clarify whether or not I think the liberal complaints in question actually are that sort of extreme view, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you, though.) However, there's a dangerously fine line between doing it in a way that limits the scope to just the extremists in question and doing it in a way that tries to make everyone on the other side look like the extremists in question. I get quite tired of people complaining about how nasty the other side's discourse is and then doing things like the latter that simply add more fuel to the fire.

It's also worth looking at what we want done about the problems we complain about. Personally, I don't care if someone decides not to listen to a song or the like, whether their reasons are good or bad. That goes double if it's only a small number of people. Even if they start encouraging other people to do the same, it doesn't affect me much unless I care about their opinions of me. If they asked me point blank for my opinion, I suppose I might tell them, depending on how much I wanted to deal with an argument. But I wouldn't bother a whole lot more than that; their views simply aren't going to affect me much. It irritates me that many of the people I know that claim to be about personal freedom aren't willing to extend the same courtesy to their opponents.

Democrats and Populism

Usually it's the conservative columnists at the NYT that have me shaking my head inside the first paragraph or two... but there are rare occasions where it happens with the liberal ones as well. And this piece about what the Democrats should focus on to win in 2020 is one of them.

The short version is that I don't like populists, and I don't want the Democrats to focus as much on populism as this editorial calls for.

To be fair, there's a version of populism that I can support, and the graphs in that article about who earns more support as the defender of the working class illustrate why. A lot of these policies are popular because they legitimately do support the working class and are things we should be doing. To that extent, I definitely do want the Democrats to focus on their support for such things and make them a central part of the message.

However, I also think there's a version of populism that focuses too much on economic anxiety and ignores social issues - this was the major problem I had with Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries. I can understand that not everyone cares about the latter, but given that the Democrats are going to get blasted by the other side for their social views regardless of how extreme they are, I don't think it's worth compromising on those views in order to avoid distractions.

That isn't the worst of it, though, because there's also the sort of populism that amounts to telling people what they want to hear regardless of its practicality. In particular, there probably are some moderate swing voters out there that want both lower taxes and more government benefits; we've seen that phenomenon before in the Republican, rural sections of the country voting for candidates that promise to cut taxes even as they're voting for Medicare expansions and other liberal policies. The problem is that any sort of promise we make telling them they can have both is almost certainly false - in the Democrats' case, it'd be because we'd feel that we had to raise taxes to support programs (as opposed to the Republicans cutting programs to support their tax cuts whether or not they said they were going to keep the programs), but that would still be the sort of lie that is all too common in politics.

Election Forecasting Accuracy

FiveThirtyEight isn't the only news source I know of that tries to check themselves for errors and talk about why they got things wrong (or why they got them right), but they do tend to be more comprehensive about it than most places are. The specific example which I'm writing about is this very detailed article from last week about their midterm forecasts.

One of the most counter-intuitive things I got from that article is that their probabilistic forecasts mean that they actually don't want to be right all of the time. For example, out of all the races they say are fifty-fifty splits, they'd want to get half of them right - if they were capable of picking the winner more often than that, it would imply that the odds weren't actually even to begin with. So they're actually worried if they're calling too many of the winners accurately, which is a rather amusing problem to have.

They also offered a number of concerns they might want to take a harder look at as they go on to forecast the 2020 election. One of them was underestimating the effects that stronger partisanship was going to have, which is rather depressing but certainly not surprising. The other big one was them discounting polls conducted by partisan groups a bit too much in some cases. It will be interesting to see how they change their forecasts going forward... although we might not figure out how useful any changes are until it's time for the 2020 postmortem.

And then I probably have to admit that one of my favorite parts was the closing portion, which I will just quote rather than trying to paraphrase:

We actually do think there’s enough of a track record now to show that our method basically “works.”... We probably won’t be as accurate-slash-lucky in 2020 as we were in 2018, especially in the primaries, which are always kind of a mess. But our way of covering elections is a good way to cover them, and it’s here to stay.

I'm looking forward to plenty more great reporting from them.

Tallying Votes

Okay, I lied, we will see more political posts this month.

Specifically, it's interesting to note that the midterm election results aren't final yet. To a certain extent, this always happens; there are always some races that are decided by rather thin margins or races where late-arriving absentee or provisional ballots might make a difference. Of course, since Florida is the site for this particular dispute, and because the races in question are some of the statewide races, this instance is drawing a bit more attention than usual. Florida's close elections and history with election recounts almost certainly aren't helping; problems that might go unnoticed in an election that's not close or in a district with no history of problems aren't going to escape notice there.

These debates do tend to irritate me a bit more than most, because they highlight the ways in which most sides here don't care about anything except victory. You'd think we would all easily agree on the notions that we want every legitimate vote to be counted, and that we want to check in detail for any errors in the process that might be preventing the result from reflecting the will of the people. For that matter, there's also the point that some elections will simply be close, and while additional checks are wise in that scenario, we can't allow them to leave the result in doubt for months or more. Balancing those two can be tricky, but shouldn't be impossible.

In practice, though, whoever is ahead when the recounts start almost inevitably seems to complain that there should be no need for the extra trouble, regardless of how close the results are, what the laws say about mandatory recounts, or what the possible sources of error in the initial count were. Whoever is behind when they end almost inevitably seems to complain that there's an obvious need to triple-check (or quadruple-check, or more) in order to remove every possible error, regardless of how long that will take or how wide the final margin ends up being. I'm sure most of the people involved in these disputes legitimately think that delaying the results of an election or not checking as much as necessary for errors are both problems we shouldn't tolerate. However, how they balance those two concerns always seems to benefit their side, regardless of the facts of the situation.

And if a recount or late-arriving votes actually ends up changing the winner, well, then we all get to deal with conspiracy theory bullshit about those votes being manufactured out of thin air, regardless of the evidence for or against that claim. I suppose I shouldn't be too pessimistic (there aren't claims like that being made in Arizona, for example, despite the post Election Day swing back towards Sinema), but the sort of claims that are coming out of some people about Florida don't exactly build faith in humanity here.

In the end, I don't think it will matter all that much; the recounts are unlikely to change the election result. I'm looking forward to not having to worry about this particular debate any more, but I also think there's a lesson here about tribalism that we should try not to lose sight of.

Midterm Election Results

Okay, there is going to be one political post this month, instead of entirely game and creative writing posts.

The one major thing that strikes me about the midterm elections is that I'm not sure there is any kind of coherent narrative here. The losses suffered by some of the Democrats further out to the left and some of the Republicans that tied themselves enthusiastically to President Trump suggests that both parties should be looking to the center - but then there's a number of moderate Democrats that did unexpectedly poorly, some farther left Democrats that did well, and a number of extreme Republicans that managed to survive. I'm sure eventually someone will come up with data trying to show which narrative is stronger overall, but I think the message from this one is never going to be anything other than a mixed verdict overall. Which probably means it's going to be even easier for people to read whatever they want into this one, of course.

I think this election does also suggest that we can expect close elections to continue. There are a lot of Democrats who are hoping that finding a candidate less disliked than Clinton will cure all of their ills, but the defeat of some fairly high quality Democrats this time around suggests that partisanship is just going to keep getting stronger. I worry that this also means each party will stop worrying about margins and just take any victory as a mandate to do everything they want, rather than trying to find the compromises that our system makes necessary. If that does happen, we're going to see even more gridlock than we already have.

Try as I might, I don't think I see any of this getting better soon. Demographic change might help the Democrats a decade or two from now, and the Republicans might hope that the demographic groups they're currently ignoring will be won over by economic gains, but I don't think either is going to make much of a change in the near future. I guess we'll get to see whether tribalism and partisanship rip us apart before some kind of change helps us reunify - and while I certainly am interested in the results of that experiment, the drastic nature of the consequences for failure worries me quite a bit.

Migration Patterns

The title of this article on the caravan of migrants heading towards the southern border of the US rather neatly sums up one of the things I was thinking about the issue: "This Isn’t the First Migrant Caravan to Approach the U.S. What Happened to the Last One?"

After all, if this caravan really is supposed to be a threat to our sovereignty, or anything similarly hyperbolic, then how did we survive the last one?

As tempting as it is to just let that rhetorical question stand on its own, it's probably best if we look at the details a bit more closely. What happened to previous caravans suggests that only a fraction of this one will actually end up at the US border (although a fraction of a caravan this size will still be somewhere around two thousand people). Most of those people will request asylum, and a majority of the people that start that process will get past the first step. At that point, most of them will end up living and working in the US while they wait for their cases to work their way through immigration courts. Most of those asylum seekers will eventually be denied; I don't have particularly good data about how many of those will try to stay in the US anyway, but even if all of them did, it wouldn't increase the number of illegal immigrants entering in a given year by very much.

It's possible that this iteration will be slightly different - maybe the larger size of this group just means there are more people that won't qualify for asylum, so there'll be a smaller percentage that gets past that first step, for one example - but I doubt it'll be significantly different.

I can see how someone looking at that chain of events might be a little bit annoyed, given that it clearly offers chances for people to stay here longer than our laws permit, but I also don't think the opposition I've seen to the caravan has really thought through what our options are to stop that from happening. For better or for worse, our law does have provisions for people to request asylum, and most of the people in previous examples have followed those provisions. Finding technicalities and excuses to deny them entry, or forcing them to go through additional hardships while they're in the US, or any other method that preserves that option to request assistance on paper while removing that option in practice, just makes us look like we're not willing to keep our promises. Or makes us look like we're not brave enough to admit that we actually want less immigration, period.

Of course, we could just change the law so that people like this can't request asylum, or make the standards for granting asylum stricter (as Attorney General Sessions did). It's not quite that simple, though... that does basically say that we want to allow fewer immigrants (legal or not) and provide aid to fewer people. There are plenty of people in the US who don't want that to be the message we send to the rest of the world, and who are quite willing to both advocate for and vote based on that opinion.