The White House Is Not a Metronome

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In a series of articles last week, the writer Megan McArdle asserted that Republicans have about a 75 percent chance of winning the White House in 2016. “Mostly, the White House flips back and forth like a metronome,” she wrote. “Voters just get tired after eight years.”

As other commentators, like Henry Farrell, have pointed out, one can find almost any pattern in presidential results if one looks hard enough. By manipulating the definition of incumbency, the time frame that one examines or the measure of success (e.g., the popular vote or the Electoral College), or by selectively excluding “outliers” or exceptional cases, the potential for cherry-picking and overfitting is high. (In layman’s terms, an overfit statistical model is one that is engineered to match idiosyncratic circumstances in past data, but which is not an accurate picture and makes poor predictions as a result.)

But let’s evaluate a relatively simple version of Ms. McArdle’s claim. What has happened, historically, after the same party has controlled the White House for exactly eight consecutive years? Read more…

In Public Opinion on Abortion, Few Absolutes

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For decades, both sides in the abortion debate have tried to say that public opinion was already on their side and only becoming more so.

Advocates for abortion rights have pointed to polls showing that a majority of Americans support Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. Abortion opponents have cited polls showing that a majority considers life to begin at conception – and opposes abortion access in many cases.

As with so many other areas this blog covers, abortion is one in which selective readings of the polls can seem to prove opposite conclusions. After writing about abortion and public opinion in Sunday’s Times – arguing that the issue does not benefit Democrats as much as other high-profile subjects, like immigration, guns, taxes and same-sex marriage – I wanted to dig more deeply into the polls and their trend lines. For all the assertions that advocates make about public opinion, I think that a few consistent messages emerge. Read more…

Beautiful Minds  | 

In The Times’s Sunday Book Review, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver reviewed “The Boy Who Loved Math” by Deborah Heiligman and “On a Beam of Light” by Jennifer Berne, two children’s books about youth and mathematics. “Together,” he wrote, “the books constitute something of an It Gets Better Project for mathematically precocious children, offering the same sort of affirmation that is now being given to gay and lesbian adolescents.”
Read more.

Senate Control in 2014 Increasingly Looks Like a Tossup

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This weekend’s announcement by the former governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, that he would not seek that state’s Democratic nomination for Senate represents the latest in a series of favorable developments for Republicans as they seek control of the chamber.

The G.O.P.’s task will not be easy: the party holds 46 seats in the Senate, and the number will very probably be cut to 45 after a special election in New Jersey later this year. That means that they would need to win a net of six contests from Democrats in order to control 51 seats and overcome Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s tiebreaking vote. Two years ago at this time, Republicans faced what seemed to be a promising environment and could have won the Senate by gaining a net of three seats from Democrats and winning the presidency. Instead, Mitt Romney lost to President Obama, and the G.O.P. lost a net of two Senate seats.

But Montana along with West Virginia and South Dakota — two other red states where an incumbent Democrat has retired and where the Democrats have not identified a strong candidate to replace them – gives Republicans a running start. Republicans could then win three more seats from among red states like Louisiana and Arkansas, where vulnerable Democratic incumbents are on the ballot, or they could take aim at two purple states, Iowa and Michigan, where Democrats have retired. More opportunities could also come into play if the national environment becomes more favorable to Republicans (such as because of a further slide in Mr. Obama’s approval ratings). Meanwhile, while Kentucky and Georgia are possibly vulnerable, Republicans have few seats of their own to defend; unlike in 2012, they can focus almost entirely on playing offense.

A race-by-race analysis of the Senate, in fact, suggests that Republicans might now be close to even-money to win control of the chamber after next year’s elections. Read more…

Public Opinion Shifts on Security-Liberty Balance

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A new Quinnipiac poll has found a significant shift in public opinion on the trade-off between civil liberties and national security. In the new survey, released on Wednesday, 45 percent of the public said they thought the government’s antiterrorism policies have “gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties” — as compared with 40 percent who said they have “not gone far enough to adequately protect the country.”

By comparison, in a January 2010 Quinnipiac poll that posed the same question, only 25 percent of the public said the government had gone too far in restricting civil liberties, while 63 percent said it hadn’t gone far enough to protect the country.

Although the shift in opinion is apparent among virtually all demographic groups, it has been somewhat more pronounced among Republicans, who may be growing more skeptical about President Obama’s national security policies. Whereas, in the 2010 survey, 17 percent of Republicans said the government had gone too far to restrict civil liberties while 72 percent said it had not gone far enough to protect the country, the numbers among G.O.P. voters were nearly even in the new poll, with 41 percent saying that antiterrorism programs had gone too far and 46 percent saying they haven’t gone far enough.

We generally caution against reading too much into a single poll result. But there are several reasons to think that the shift detected by the Quinnipiac poll is meaningful. Read more…

Rubio Is Losing Support Among Republican Voters

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Until recently, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida had occupied something of a sweet spot in Republican politics: a favorite of the Tea Party but also trusted by the establishment wing of the G.O.P.

Mr. Rubio’s embrace of comprehensive immigration reform, however, appears to have upset that delicate balance, and his support has slipped among the Republican base. The mention of his name drew boos at an anti-immigration reform Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill in mid-June, and recent public opinion surveys, taken amid the debate on immigration legislation, found his favorability rating falling and his standing in 2016 Republican primary matchups eroding.

Only two surveys, one by ABC News and The Washington Post and one by Rasmussen Reports, have tested Mr. Rubio’s popularity since the Senate reached the final stages of passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Both measured double-digit drops in his net favorability rating among Republicans.

Mr. Rubio is still very popular among Republicans, just not as popular as he once was, particularly in the days after the 2012 presidential election when he became a leading Republican voice and began being discussed as a top contender in the 2016 presidential race. Read more…

As Texas G.O.P. Revives Abortion Ban, a Look at Public Opinion

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The Texas Legislature began a second special session on Monday to again take up a bill that would, among other provisions, ban abortions in Texas after 20 weeks of gestation. The bill failed in a previous special session after State Senator Wendy Davis stood for roughly 11 hours in a filibuster that brought national attention to the fight.

The Texas bill is still expected to become law, however. And Ms. Davis’s filibuster came several days after Republicans in the United States House of Representatives succeeded in passing a similar ban (though that bill has virtually no chance of being taken up in the Senate). And since 2010, 12 other states with Republican-led Legislatures have passed bills that ban abortions after 20 weeks (many of those laws are being challenged in court as unconstitutional).

Discussions of women’s reproductive health have proved politically problematic for Republicans in recent years, but public opinion shows that Republican legislators pushing 20-week bans may be on safer political footing.

While polls have consistently found that a majority of Americans support a right to an abortion in all or most circumstances, surveys also show that support for abortion narrows further into a pregnancy. Read more…

Re-Election Is Likely for McConnell, but Not Guaranteed

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Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky secretary of state and a Democrat, announced on Monday that she will challenge Senator Mitch McConnell, a Republican, in 2014.

Mr. McConnell, the Senate minority leader, is likely to win re-election. Kentucky is a solidly Republican state, and President Obama received less than 40 percent of the vote there in 2012. Mr. McConnell has also amassed a huge war chest and hired Jesse Benton, who led Senator Rand Paul’s upset win in Kentucky in 2010, to run his campaign.

However, he is unlikely to sail to victory. Ms. Grimes was elected to statewide office in 2011 with 60 percent of the vote. She has deep ties to Democratic politics, both in Kentucky and nationwide, as the daughter of the state’s former Democratic Party chairman, Jerry Lundergan. Those connections and the high-profile nature of the race should make it relatively easy for her to raise money.

While there have not yet been any nonpartisan surveys testing a potential contest between Mr. McConnell and Ms. Grimes, the four partisan polls that have been conducted so far (three by the Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling and one by the Republican-leaning Wenzel Strategies) have shown a relatively tight race, with Mr. McConnell leading by an average of 4.5 percentage points.

A SurveyUSA poll conducted in June for The Courier-Journal found that 34 percent of registered voters would vote against Mr. McConnell no matter who his opponent was, double the 17 percent who said they would vote for him regardless of his opponent.

Those numbers reflect the fact that Mr. McConnell is fairly unpopular in Kentucky. Read more…

Same-Sex Marriage Availability Set to Double in One-Year Span

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The Supreme Court’s rulings on a pair of landmark cases on Wednesday, which overturned the federal Defense of Marriage Act and effectively legalized same-sex marriage in California, are the latest in a recent series of legal and legislative victories for same-sex marriage advocates worldwide.

By Aug. 1, same-sex marriage will be legal in California, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Washington — all states where it was not legal one year earlier.

There are about 59 million people living in these seven states, which means that the availability of same-sex marriage in the United States as a percentage of population will have more than doubled within the year. As of early last year, same-sex marriage was legal only in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont and the District of Columbia, which have 35 million people among them.

The availability of same-sex marriage is increasing almost as rapidly on a global scale. Read more…