Today's Non-Useful Non-Data: Third Way and the Case of the Bogus Focus Groups

Our strenuously moderate friends at Third Way made the mistake of inviting the very astute political reporter Molly Ball to accompany them on one leg of their listening tour of the Real America--basically a bunch of meet-ups and focus groups convened in swingish areas around the country. Third Way released a report on that leg of the trip--to Wisconsin's 3rd Congressional District--and Ball has written a devastating piece comparing her experience on that trip to what the Third Way folks wrote up in their report. Short version: "What they wrote up sure ain't what I saw and heard!"

The report is short, covering only three big takeaways from the seven listening sessions Third Way conducted. The first is the importance of hard work; the second is the need for a strong workforce. The third, described in a section entitled “Just Get the Hell Out of My Way,” is locals’ purported antagonism to big government. “Whether the question is about immigration or banks, taxes or welfare, the people we spoke to generally felt that government policies were irrelevant to their daily lives,” it states. This view is made to sound like one that was broadly expressed, but in fact, we mostly heard it in just one session—the group of curmudgeonly farmers. Almost all of the quotations in this section are drawn from that group. There are no quotations from the people we met who were pro-government, such as the teachers and laborers and activists, who voiced concern that local, state, and federal government ought to be doing more to take care of people.

According to the report, the community’s “biggest frustrations” are “laggard government and partisan squabbling.” “The idea that such bickering can be tolerated in D.C. is appalling to most,” it states. The good people of western Wisconsin, Third Way found, wanted nothing so much as a society where people could put aside their differences. The report quotes a man who said, “We come together on projects and solve problems together.” It doesn’t quote any of the Wisconsinites we met who expressed partisan sentiments or questioned the prospect of consensus.

The researchers had somehow found their premise perfectly illustrated. Their journey to Trump’s America had done nothing to unsettle their preconceptions.

I'm not generally a big fan of focus groups precisely because they are so susceptible to observer bias, leading the witness and cherry-picking. But even by the modest standards of focus group practitioners, this is pretty egregious. And there's more. As David Atkins reports over at Washington Monthly's excellent Political Animal blog, their whole methodological approach was suspect from the get-go and violated basic, simple standards people typically use to conduct this kind of research. 

1) Never reveal the sponsor of the research. Third Way’s recruiters apparently told respondents not just during the groups but apparently in the screening process, which means that respondents were at liberty to research the group, its motives and its funding in advance. The potential for problems is enormous: respondents will game their answers to fit the organization’s interests, or conversely come in hostile to the organization. 

2) Don’t have someone internal to the organization actually collect and analyze the data. Increasingly, organizations are ignoring this for cost-saving reasons, but best practice is to have an independent firm handle data collection and reporting so that it’s clear that the organization’s own internal pressures aren’t biasing the data or the conclusions. From Ms. Ball’s reporting, it seems that Third Way staff designed, executed, collected and analyzed the findings internally. That might be marginally acceptable if you’re quickly trying to figure out which car ad or refrigerator features to go with, but not for a $20 million study to set the direction of one of the world’s two most powerful political parties after a devastating defeat.

3) Do not bias respondents toward your objectives at the beginning of the groups. This is by far the worst of the sins apparently committed by Third Way. It’s so egregious that one is left to wonder whether the malpractice was intentional or simply incompetent. Let’s review how the groups began:

Hale or her colleague Luke Watson, Third Way’s deputy director of strategy, began each Wisconsin focus group with a variation on the same refrain.

“We are a think tank that deals with what the plurality of Americans are thinking about—in other words, we don’t spend a lot of time on the ideological edges,” one of the two would explain. “It has started seeming like the far left and the far right were the only voice in America, but we know that’s not true. We focus on the 70 percent in the middle, because we think most of us, as Americans, are there.”

Even for a non-research professional, the red flags here should be obvious. Moderators have enormous power of persuasion in a focus group room, and the psychological tendency of respondents in a group setting is to adapt their answers to the moderator’s suggestions. Moderators need to be extremely careful in how they phrase even the innocuous questions to avoid pushing respondents toward one direction or another. They certainly should not be telling respondents what the organization’s own beliefs are right out of the gate.

Yikes! Well, as they say, garbage in, garbage out.

Obscure Music Friday: Roky Erickson

With Halloween coming up, there is certainly no better way to mark the occasion than with Roky Erickson performing his fabulously demented song, It's a Cold Night for Alligators! Erickson was the frontman of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, who went a bit 'round the bend after the Elevators broke up. Albums like "The Evil One", from which this song was taken, were the result. Also great in that album were "Creature with the Atom Brain", "Stand for the Fire Demon", "Two-Headed Dog" and "Night of the Vampire". Completely unique in the proper sense of the term.

Here's the first verse from "It's a Cold Night for Alligators":

It's a cold night for alligators
It's a cold night for dogs
The dogs choke on their barking
When they see alligator persons in the bog and fog

Tell it like it is, Roky!

Today's Useful Data: Democratic Wave Watch

Challengers, challengers, challengers, we got 'em. You can't have a wave election without lots of viable opposition candidates to wipe out vulnerable incumbents. This cycle, it looks like the Democrats have them in spades. Michael Malbin at Brookings:

Record numbers of Democrats continue to emerge who are willing to defy the normal odds by mounting early challenges to sitting House incumbents. As of June 30, we counted 209 Democratic challengers who had raised $5,000 or more. Three months later, the 209 had grown to 391 Democratic challengers with at least $5,000. Of these 391, 210 raised at least $50,000 and 145 raised at least $100,000…. [T]here were many more Democratic challengers at the end of September 2017 (at each financial level) than for any other party cohort since 2003. The Republican class of 2009 was in second place, with all others well behind. At each level, the GOP class of 2009 had fewer than half as many challengers as the Democrats of 2017….

[M]any more Republican incumbents are facing Democratic challengers at this time of the year (at each funding level) than any other set of incumbents since 2003. Because multiple candidates are in fact running in some districts, the advantage is not quite as large as it was for the raw number of challengers. There were more than twice as many Democratic challengers in 2017 as Republicans in 2009. When we flip the question around, there are just short of one-and-a-half times as many Republican incumbents facing Democratic challengers in 2017 (at the various funding levels) as the other way around in 2009. While not as large an advantage as the raw number of challengers suggests, this is still considerable. The 2009 GOP cohort was larger than any other before this year. It was large enough to feed a major partisan shift in 2010—and larger than the Democrats need to become a majority in 2018.

A necessary, if not sufficient, condition! 

Signs of the Times (and for the Democrats, They're Pretty Good)

As the GOP civil war heats up, the Democrats' fortunes look increasingly bright.

Item: The Democrats have opened up a huge lead in the generic Congressional ballot--15 or 16 points in the most recent polls--as Aaron Blake explains in The Washington Post (538's statistically adjusted rolling average has the lead at "only" 13 points).

Item: Congressional Democrats are doing the hurt dance on the Republicans in 2018 midterm fundraising. Cameron Joseph of Talking Points Memo has the story and all the data. 

Item: There is a very significant enthusiasm gap this cycle in the Democrats' favor. Amy Walter at the Cook Political Report covers the data and their implications.

Yep, pretty good. But it ain't over 'til it's over.

Today's Useful Data: The Uneven Distribution of Opportunity

Do people in small town, exurban and rural America really have anything to complain about or are they just lashing out because of the rise of diversity? A fascinating column by Ron Brownstein covers the diverging fate of these places and the faster growing cores of metropolitan areas. It would appear that folks in these areas really do have something to complain about and that they really are, in fact, being left behind.

In metro areas from Seattle to Chicago to Washington, DC, new data show that per capita incomes, education levels and the young adult share of the population are rising rapidly in downtown urban centers that were left for dead 30 and 40 years ago. Simultaneously…incomes, education levels and the age structure is failing to keep pace, or even deteriorating, in the small town and exurban communities at the metropolitan area's periphery.

This widening geographic separation between town and country — reinforced by a strong urban tilt in such key measures as venture capital investment and new business formation — helps explain President Donald Trump's overwhelming support in the smaller, mostly white communities that largely feel excluded from the economic recovery since 2009….. per capita incomes since 1990 have increased just three percent in communities 30 miles out, while rising fully 45% at the city center.

Like a river cutting through rock, these shifting economic currents are helping to carve the nation's stark new political alignment. Along with unease about demographic and cultural changes, the sense of falling behind economically helps explain Trump's dominance of mid-sized and small town America: he carried more than 2,600 counties last fall, more than any candidate in either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Conversely, the thriving economies, and increasingly youthful and well-educated profiles of the largest urban centers, help explain how Hillary Clinton carried 87 of the 100 largest counties by a combined margin of nearly 14.7 million votes, according to calculations by Pew Research Center senior writer Drew DeSilver (including Washington, DC, pushes the margin to nearly 15 million votes). Although few Democrats recognize it in their rhetoric or agenda, they are increasingly the party of the places in America that are succeeding the most in the globalized, post-industrial economy.

The moral of the story: if Democrats want to succeed with the voters they've been losing, they will have to make a very serious effort to spread economic opportunity more widely. 

Mensheviks Forever!

Let's face it, the Mensheviks were the good guys. Mitchell Cohen has a really excellent article over at Dissent on what the Mensheviks stood for and their conflicts with, and criticisms of, Lenin. Here's one graf from the Cohen article:

No regime identifying with Bolshevism has led, at any time or place, to anything that can be called “liberation.” The contemporary left can gain a useful perspective by revisiting some of the major arguments once made by leftists on behalf of left-wing principles against Leninism. Some on the left and many on the right will find it disconcerting to recall that the first anti-Bolshevik was a Marxist, Julius Martov. Although he was finally defeated by Bolshevism, and while, much as he tried, he could not save Marxism, his politics represented a plausible, intelligent, and humane left alternative to Leninism in Russia—on almost every issue.

 Yep, correct on all counts. Read the whole article; great stuff.

The Only Way to Stop Populism

The recent election results in Austria and the Czech Republic show that populism is not about to go away anytime soon in Europe. Nor do recent events in the United States, despite the Trump administration's legislative incompetence and Trump's historically low approval ratings, indicate that populism is about to disappear from the American political landscape.

The basic reason for this is simple. Capitalism is in a long transition from an industrial to a postindustrial, services-based model of society and so far the transition has not gone well. As this transition unfolded in the last two or three decades of the 20^th century, Western capitalist societies saw a distinct slowdown in economic growth, twinned with a startling rise in inequality. The early 21^st century continued these trends with the global financial crisis of 2007-08 dealing a grievous blow to advanced economies, the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Many countries have recovered from this damage only recently and some have not yet done so.

So we are now talking about many decades of poor economic performance, particularly as it has affected those with low or modest skills whose livelihoods were connected to the old industrial economy. Elites on both the right and the left have appeared powerless to either accelerate this transition so it arrives at someplace good for most people or push it back to a better place. Thus mainstream parties and leaders are suffering and populist ones are rising.

For the broad left, this dynamic has been particularly problematic. Across advanced countries, the left has faced, and is facing, the same general problem. On the one hand, the transition to postindustrial society has thrown up a raft of newly left-leaning constituencies. Minorities and women appreciate the fall of barriers to their full participation in society and the economy and see progressive government as a guarantor of further upward mobility. Professionals and the highly-educated have fared relatively well from the transition, support the emerging cosmopolitan values of postindustrial society and see government as a provider of essential services and investments such a society needs. Younger generations too support these new values, know that their future lies in postindustrial society and want government to help them find their place within it.

On the other, the left, particularly the mainstream left, has seen its support crater among formerly left-leaning traditional working class voters who fared well in the old industrial society and cannot find a satisfactory place in the new one. It is these voters who have powered the emergence of right populist figures like Trump and his ilk. The rate of desertion from the left has been fast enough that it has effectively undermined the left’s ability to assemble effective political coalitions that include both their new constituencies and a sufficiently large portion of their old working class voters.

That is the left’s challenge and it is not an easy one to meet. In fact, many on the left fear that right populism will just continue to grow, riding a tide of economic anxiety and cultural resentment to a commanding political position and providing a permanent barrier to left advance. This is highly unlikely. Those on the left would be well-advised to keep in mind the prescient words of economist Herbert Stein, usually known as Stein’s Law: “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop”.

The real question is what comes next. What political force could undercut the populist dynamic and stabilize support for postindustrial society? The obvious answer is one that can reduce the collateral damage from the postindustrial transition and make it work for a much larger segment of the population.

Unless one believes the postindustrial transition can somehow be reversed, the only answer is to accelerate the transition and build a  new and healthier growth model for contemporary capitalism. That is what the left should aim for. While other issues are important, they are all secondary to this overriding issue. And until the new growth model can be perceived by voters and deliver concrete benefits, expect populism to continue to bedevil Western capitalist societies.

Thus, it is not enough for the left to simply win more elections. They must govern, when they have a chance, to push this central objective forward. Nothing else will defuse populism and put the left's most cherished goals within reach.