Talkin' 'Bout Their Generation(s)

The generally progressive political leanings of the Millennial generation are well-documented. But we're just starting to get to the point where the Post-Millennials (for want of a better term), those born in the 21st century, are reaching voting age. Will this next generation also be as progressive? If so, we should  be able to detect early signs of this in the views of those at the tail end of the Millennial generation and the very beginning of the Post-Millennial generation--say those currently aged 15-24. 

And well, how about that--the good folks the Public Religion Research Institute have an informative new survey out covering just that age group. There's a lot to digest there and I urge you to check out the entire report. But here are some findings from the survey that I thought were particularly interesting:

• 15-24 year olds give Donald Trump an incredibly bad 25 percent favorable/72 percent unfavorable rating.
• Democratic party: 57 percent favorable; Republican party: 31 percent favorable. Obama: 70 percent favorable!
• Oppose building the wall on the Mexican border: 72 percent, oppose temporary ban on some Muslims entering country: 63 percent, favor legal gay marriage: 75 percent, oppose birth gender bathroom requirements for transgender individuals: 62 percent, oppose making abortion more difficult: 72 percent.
• Is there a lot of discrimination against: Muslims (84 percent yes); Transgender people (79 percent); blacks (72 percent); gays (72 percent); Hispanics (63 percent)....compare to: whites (23 percent yes); white men (16 percent).
• Almost two-thirds of 15-24 year olds say that colleges should allow controversial speakers on campuses even if they espouse views deemed offensive to some students.
• Discrimination against men is now as big a problem as discrimination against women: 76 percent disagree.
• Women's gains in recent years have come at the expense of men: 72 percent disagree.
• Discrimination against whites is now as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities: 69 percent disagree.
• Efforts to increase diversity almost always come at the expense of whites: 66 percent disagree.
• Contact with immigrants who speak little English bothers me: 70 percent disagree.

These are pretty liberal responses and do not suggest that the youngest Millennials and the entering cohort of Post-Millennials are likely to change the solidly progressive politics we've seen from Millennials so far. Generational replacement should continue to undermine the Trumpified GOP for many years to come.

Note: Some may read this and be disappointed there wasn't 100 percent disagreement (or agreement) with some of these questions. Be reasonable! The central tendency here is very, very liberal and they are replacing, in effect, people in the electorate who are much, much more conservative. And yes, whites in this 15-24 year old age group are indeed more conservative than their black, Latino and Asian counterparts. But they are far more liberal than older whites across the board, which is the really important thing.

Democratic Wave Watch: Three Reasons It's Very Likely to Happen

Many Democrats want to believe....but they just can't bring themselves to do so. I mean (gulp) what about 2016? Don't wanna get fooled again, etc, etc.

In that regard, there are a number of fears that are typically expressed about why things are not really as good as they look. Here are some of the most common, with recent evidence to the contrary.

1. So the Democrats have over-performed in special elections. Bah, humbug, that doesn't predict anything. Ah but it does, it does. The latest evidence is a nice analysis by the good folks over at Daily Kos Elections (not following them?--you should!). In brief, they created an index of special election results in each interim period between federal elections and compared them to the House popular vote in the next federal election. They find a very strong predictive relationship.

And that's not all. They also looked at their index for just the year immediately following a federal election to get a sense of how predictive recent special election results, which just cover one year (2017), might be. They also find a strong relationship (though not quite as strong as with the two-year index). How strong? The one-year index does about as well in predicting the House popular vote as the generic Congressional ballot just one month before the actual election. That's pretty good and tells us that the 2017 special election results really are sending us a strong (and very positive) signal about Democratic prospects in the 2018 House election.

2. But won't the Republicans' traditional midterm turnout advantage neutralize all the Democrats' advantages? Nope, not likely. In fact, it's not clear that Republicans are likely to have much of a turnout advantage in this election anyway. As Harry Enten notes on 538, in elections where they occupy the Presidency, so their candidates are not running as the opposition, the Republican turnout advantage has been minuscule; they turn out a a level barely higher than Democrats and do not succeed in significantly improving their margin over that among registered voters as a whole. That means there's not really much of GOP thumb on the scales in terms of turnout in 2018 since the President is a Republican (and a very unpopular one at that).

3. Ah, but what about the economy? It's doing well and that will make Trump and therefore the GOP more popular, undercutting the Democrats. Well sure, if Trump does become a lot more popular because of the economy, that would really help the GOP, given the well-established relationship between a President's approval rating and the midterm electoral performance of the President's party. But that just doesn't seem to be happening. As Nate Cohn shows in a recent analysis, the extraordinary thing about Trump is how massively he's under-performing the state of the economy in terms of job approval. Going by economic performance alone, his job approval by this point in his term should be somewhere in the 50's not in the  high 30's where it continues to languish. Cohn notes:

Since 1950, no party has held the House through a midterm election when the president’s approval rating is less than 40 percent. The Republican Party’s considerable structural advantages in the House would at least give them a shot to survive this time, but the growing Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot and the G.O.P.’s weak showings in this year’s special congressional elections suggest that the president’s approval rating is weighing on the party in exactly the way one would expect.

It remains possible that Democrats could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Or that perhaps a really huge economic boom could finally manage to elevate Trump's approval ratings and therefore his party's prospects in 2018. But right now a Democratic wave still looks like a pretty good bet.

It's the Governors' and Legislative Elections, Stupid!

Sure,  control of the House is very important and the Democrats have an excellent chance to get that back in 2018. More difficult, but not out of the question, would be the Senate. 

But let's face it, 2018, even with very favorable results in the House and the Senate, is not going to be the start of a new progressive era. No, that is really a 2020's thing when President Trump is defeated and Democrats have enough strength in the states to dominate the next round of redistricting, thereby allowing them to translate their underlying political support into actual political victories. 

That's why the most significant results of the 2018 election may well be those for state, not federal, offices. Here's what's at stake:

• 36 governors' races, 26 of which are currently in Republican hands. And of the 26 Republican-held seats, 13 are in states that Obama won in at least one of his Presidential victories (pictured above). 
• At least half of state Senate seats in 42 states (in 15 of these states, the entire Senate is up).
• Every state House seat in the overwhelming majority of states.

These results will set the playing field for state elections in 2020 and the redistricting thereafter. Procedures in states vary but the typical setup is for the state legislature to be in charge of the actual redistricting with the governor having veto power. In 34 states, the governor who will be in office for the upcoming redistricting will be elected this year (two were elected last year, which the Democrats bagged) and in 30 states half or more of state senators who will preside over the process will be elected this year. 

Of course, 2020 will be important too, but the revolution, so to speak, starts this year. So if you're wondering where to put your energy and/or money, you could do worse than throwing it at competitive legislative and govenors' elections in key states. And in case you want some hard data on state legislative districts, the Presidential results in a given Republican-held district always provide useful information about the potential competitiveness of the district.

Historical and model-based results suggest this could be a very good year indeed for the Democrats at the state level. Let's make it happen.

Science Fiction Saturday: Larry Niven's Ringworld

Larry Niven's Ringworld is one of the great hard SF novels. Here's the setup:

On planet Earth in 2850 AD, Louis Gridley Wu is celebrating his 200th birthday. Despite his age, Louis is in perfect physical condition (due to the longevity drug boosterspice). He has once again become bored with human society and is thinking about taking one of his periodic sabbaticals, alone in a spaceship far away from other people. He meets Nessus, a Pierson's puppeteer, who offers him a mysterious job with almost no details. Intrigued, Louis eventually accepts. Speaker-to-Animals (Speaker), who is a Kzin, and Teela Brown, a young human woman who becomes Louis' lover, also join the crew.

They first go to the puppeteer home world, where they learn that the expedition's goal is to investigate the Ringworld to see if it poses any threat. The Ringworld is a gigantic artificial ring about one million miles (1,600,000 km) wide and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit (which makes it about 600,000,000 miles or 950,000,000 km in circumference), encircling a sunlike star. It rotates to provide artificial gravity 99.2% as strong as Earth's from centrifugal force. The Ringworld has a habitable, flat inner surface (equivalent in area to approximately three million Earths), a breathable atmosphere and a temperature optimum for humans. Night is provided by an inner ring of shadow squares which are connected to each other by thin, ultra-strong wire. When the crew completes their mission, they will be given the starship in which they will travel to the Ringworld; it is far faster than any possessed by humans or Kzinti.

When they reach the vicinity of the Ringworld, they are unable to contact anyone, and their ship, the Lying Bastard, is disabled by the Ringworld's automated meteoroid-defense system. The severely damaged vessel collides with a strand of shadow-square wire and crash-lands near a huge mountain. Many of the ship's systems survive intact, including the faster-than-light hyperdrive, but the normal drive is destroyed, leaving them unable to launch back into space to use the hyperdrive. They set out to find a way to get home.

And have many adventures along the way! The Ringworld really is a mind-blowing concept and very well-developed in the book. As for what or who the Kzin and Puppeteers are....well, you'll just have to read the book. These are creatures first introduced in Niven's extensive Known Space future history, pretty much all of which is worth reading. As for Niven's later stuff I find it hit or miss, particularly that written with other authors. But Ringworld is the pure quill. Highly recommended.

Obscure Music Friday: Unhinged Rockabilly!

Earthling, what means this "B-I-Bickey-Bi, Bo-Go-Go"? We'll let Gene Vincent explain! 

Bonus: Hal Willis and "My Pink Cadillac". I mean really, what could be cooler?

Optimistic Leftist Book Club: Straight Talk on Trade by Dani Rodrik

The Optimistic Leftist Book Club isn't much of club (I'm the only member!) but I thought I'd start sharing some particularly fine recent reads. Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik is a must-read if you want to get your head on straight about where our economic world is headed--and how we might be able to make it better.

Rodrik is a good, clear writer who never lets economic jargon substitute for explanation when he's analyzing economic problems and trends. His general stance is heterodox though in the sense of eschewing dogmatic interpretations of neoclassical economics and prizing methodological flexibility, rather than, say, being a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory. He first came to attention back in 1997 with his refusal to sign up to the "Washington Consensus" that completely open economies and the free movement of capital was the key to prosperity for all developing countries. Rodrik pointed out that this approach was not supported by the data and reflected more a commitment to a selective set or economic principles--really dogmas--than to finding what works for individual countries (these views are nicely-summarized in his 2007 book, One Economics, Many Recipes). 

Rodrik continues to research and write widely on the problems of the global economy, including the connection between these problems and recent rise of populism. The Straight Talk book contains much useful material along these lines since it is based partly on a long-running series of columns for Project Syndicate where he has repeatedly grappled with populism and other hot contemporary issues. For example, here's Rodrik on why working class voters might vote against what appears to be their economic self-interest :

Many elites are puzzled about why poor or working-class people would vote for someone like Trump. After all, the professed economic policies of Hillary Clinton would in all likelihood have proved more favorable to them. To explain the apparent paradox, they cite these voters’ ignorance, irrationality, or racism.

But there is another explanation, one that is fully consistent with rationality and self-interest. When mainstream politicians lose their credibility, it is natural for voters to discount the promises they make. Voters are more likely to be attracted to candidates who have anti-establishment credentials and can safely be expected to depart from prevailing policies.2

In the language of economists, centrist politicians face a problem of asymmetric information. They claim to be reformers, but why should voters believe leaders who appear no different from the previous crop of politicians who oversold them the gains from globalization and pooh-poohed their grievances?

In Clinton’s case, her close association with the globalist mainstream of the Democratic Party and close ties with the financial sector clearly compounded the problem. Her campaign promised fair trade deals and disavowed support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but was her heart really in it? After all, when she was US Secretary of State, she had strongly backed the TPP.

This is what economists call a pooling equilibrium. Conventional and reformist politicians look alike and hence elicit the same response from much of the electorate. They lose votes to the populists and demagogues whose promises to shake up the system are more credible.

Framing the challenge as a problem of asymmetric information also hints at a solution. A pooling equilibrium can be disrupted if reformist politicians can “signal” to voters his or her “true type.”

Signaling has a specific meaning in this context. It means engaging in costly behavior that is sufficiently extreme that a conventional politician would never want to emulate it, yet not so extreme that it would turn the reformer into a populist and defeat the purpose. For someone like Hillary Clinton, assuming her conversion was real, it could have meant announcing she would no longer take a dime from Wall Street or would not sign another trade agreement if elected.

In other words, centrist politicians who want to steal the demagogues’ thunder have to tread a very narrow path. If fashioning such a path sounds difficult, it is indicative of the magnitude of the challenge these politicians face. Meeting it will likely require new faces and younger politicians, not tainted with the globalist, market fundamentalist views of their predecessors.

It will also require forthright acknowledgement that pursuing the national interest is what politicians are elected to do. And this implies a willingness to attack many of the establishment’s sacred cows – particularly the free rein given to financial institutions, the bias toward austerity policies, the jaundiced view of government’s role in the economy, the unhindered movement of capital around the world, and the fetishization of international trade.

I always find Rodrik's views refreshing....and highly educational! Pick up the book if you can. Bonus: John Judis recently conducted a very nice, lengthy interview with Rodrik that showcases many of his most interesting perspectives.  

Et Tu, Iowa? The Wheels Come Off the Trump Bus

Did you know that Trump carried Iowa in 2016 by more than he carried Texas? That might be hard for Trump to pull off in the future, since Iowa voters seem to have been hit with a serious case of buyers' remorse. The year-end Iowa poll, conducted by Ann Selzer's firm, has Trump at an extremely anemic 35 percent approval in the state versus 60 percent disapproval. That's very bad. And keep in mind that Selzer's polls have a sterling reputation for accuracy; 538 has actually dubbed her "the best pollster in politics". So if Selzer say Trump has a 35 percent approval rating in Iowa, he probably does have that or very close to it. 

While Selzer's poll does not provide extensive crosstabs, we can make a pretty good guess as to what's going on from other data. No doubt a lot of Trump's dreadful approval rating (can we call him "the failing Donald Trump"?) is driven by white college graduates bailing out on him in the state, as they have in others. But Trump's support was already relatively low among these voters in 2016, so it's doubtful disaffection among this group can account for all of a precipitous drop to 35 percent approval in the state. Instead, it is likely that he is seeing significant attrition among white noncollege voters, who are a strong majority of the state's voters (62 percent, twice as large as the white college share of 31 percent) and who were overwhelming responsible for Trump's 9 point victory in 2016.

Of course, there is no doubt you could wander around any of the counties in Iowa that swung to Trump in 2016 and--as journalists are wont to do--still find "die-hard' Trump supporters who love what he's doing, think he's sticking it to the Establishment and believe there's a massive conspiracy against him. There's a whole cottage industry of these "Trump's base still loves him!" stories. 

But that's not the point; some voters will indeed support him no matter what. But, equally, his somewhat less die-hard supporters may indeed head for the exits because he's an insane blowhard, hasn't done what he said he would do, only cares about the rich--whatever. Politics is fought at the margins and that is where he is losing.

But, some may argue, that's Trump. He's not on the ballot in 2018. Therefore, perhaps his free falling approval rating even in states which embraced him with gusto are not that important. Well, that's probably never been true; approval ratings of the incumbent President have always been a significant factor in midterm elections. Good approval ratings help the incumbent party's candidates; bad ratings hurt them; terrible ratings hurt them even more.

And here's the thing. Not only is this generally true, it's probably more true now than ever. Ron Brownstein points out in his latest CNN piece:

As the 2018 election year begins, one question above all is likely to shape its outcome: Will Americans vote to constrain President Donald Trump by electing a Democrat-led Congress that will challenge and resist him, or to empower the Republicans who are increasingly working in harness with him?

Voters have increasingly viewed House and Senate elections less as a choice between individual candidates than a referendum on which party they want to control Congress -- a choice grounded in their assessments of the President. All evidence from the special elections in 2017 suggests that pattern will continue to drive voters' decisions this year.

As more voters have treated congressional elections in effect as parliamentary choices, it's grown difficult for either side to maintain the unified control of the House, the Senate and the White House that Republicans enjoy now. The last three times one party went into a midterm election holding unified control, in fact, voters have revoked it -- providing the opposition party control of one or both congressional chambers. That was the fate of Democrats under Barack Obama in 2010, Republicans under George W. Bush in 2006 and Democrats under Bill Clinton in 1994.

The ominous precedent for Republicans is that Trump's standing with the public now is weaker than each of those predecessors' was when their party lost unified control during midterm elections.

That about sums it up. The GOP can run, but they can't hide. Not even in the cornfields of Iowa.