Friday, April 21, 2017

The first 92 days

I posted this on Facebook this morning, but wanted to expand on it a bit.

As we approach the modern-day checkpoint of the first 100 days, Trumpflake would like to remind us that he's actually done so much and anyone who says he hasn't is fake news. What has Trump actually accomplished?

He has gotten a Supreme Court Justice appointed. That is certainly a thing. I would, however, argue that it was really Mitch McConnell who did that. If not for that bag of misery, we'd have filled the available seat with Garland a year ago. This is akin to Little Donnie being proud that he baked a cake when all he actually did was turn the oven on. It's so cute when they don't know what all else has to go into it!

He has managed to simultaneously achieve the lowest approval and highest disapproval numbers since that's been a thing. If only he could have done the exact opposite of what he's doing, he'd have very nice approval numbers in the low 60s.

He keeps telling us his wall is ahead of schedule, but there was never a schedule announced. He also proudly talks about how illegal immigration is way down already. But we still need the wall because Mexicans are bad.

He has signed a huge number of executive orders whose contents he's been barely aware of, none of which (to my knowledge) has demonstrable positive effects on society. The most egregious have been held up in court. He then lashed out at the courts because so-called judges are bad.

He lied about basic, verifiable, facts like his inauguration crowd size, whether Korea was part of China, barely knowing Paul Manafort, 3+ million illegal voters (who all voted for Hillary), Obama screaming at protesters, Obama's nationality, the state of black neighborhoods, who donates money to, General Pershing subverting the Philippines by dipping bullets in pigs' blood, the relative size of his electoral college win, and probably the size of his penis. There's more, check out the false and pants on fires here (which together make up right about half of his evaluated statements):
http://www.politifact.com/…/dona…/statements/byruling/false/
http://www.politifact.com/…/donald-trump/statements/byrulin…


He made a total debacle of health care reform, then tried to pawn it all off on Paul Ryan (somewhat fairly). But, it was his promise too and he needed to be more involved.

He continues to focus on the Islamic Terrorist boogieman when there are so many far more dangerous things we can do a lot more about going on. (gun deaths, alcohol deaths, drug overdose deaths, distracted driver deaths, deaths due to preventable health conditions, homeless deaths, ... )

He also focuses on the regulations boogieman and how they should be significantly reduced. (Regulations are vetted and serve to protect the population as a whole)

He shot $90-100M of missiles at an airfield in Syria and failed to actually take it out of commission.

He has reduced the role of science in decision making, for example insisting that global warming is fake news and that it should not be a considered factor in regulations.

Numerous people on his senior/appointed staff have had to resign or recuse themselves due to lying about potentially inappropriate contact with Russians.

He, and many in his administration, continue to investigated by the FBI, Senate and House for suspicious ties to Russia.

He has spent at an actually unprecedented (the real term, not how he uses it) rate on vacations to Mar-a-Lago. He has also played golf at an unprecedented rate. Also, Trump the private citizen profits directly from these trips.

His wife lives in a different city, costing the city of New York $40-50M per year, as well as federal taxpayers money for lodging Secret Service. Trump the private citizen profits directly from this.
He rolled back protections for women and LQBQT.

He has reduced the quality of discourse to a 3rd-grade level.

While writing this up, I literally had to start looking back at older news because there's so much. I'm sure I didn't even get everything that could be considered major on here.

So ... what has he done right? Why should anyone write a positive report card about his work?

I had to think, and think, and think to come up with all the things on this list. And I still missed some (like the wiretapping lies, handing Merkel a bill for Germany's "debt" to NATO, ... ). I realize constantly that practically every day this administration does something that would be a once-a-year (or maybe once-a-quarter) shock. 

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

An admittedly imperfect take on gerrymandering

We all know gerrymandering is a thing, but what can we do about it? Can we even quantify how much there is? How can we say what representatives "should have" won? If you put people in different districts and had them vote on different representative options, there's no guarantee of who they would vote for.

I would propose, however, that there should be reasonable alignment between the popular presidential vote and the number of House seats for each party. While looking at each state is fraught with error (some representatives have broad appeal, for example), I would expect the effect to average out. Alternatively: the effect should average out if there's no systemic bias in how districts are drawn.

In the last election, Clinton took 48% of the popular vote, Trump 46%, and other 6%. If we simply scale this out over the 435 house seats, the alignment suggest we should see 209 Democrats, 200 Republicans, and 26 question marks. I would then generally expect that the question marks should also subdivide similarly and would leave us around 222 Democrats vs 213 Republicans.

The actual number is 193 Democrats, 237 Republicans, and 5 empty seats (for example because cabinet appointments who had been representatives have not been replaced yet). That's less Democrats than we'd expect in even the worst case (where the question marks all go Republican). It's certainly far fewer than the slight advantage this model says Democrats should have.

Where does this discrepancy come from? I charted the vote tallies in each state and compared the expected (proportional) representative count to the actual. I rolled the 3rd party votes proportionately into the two main parties. What do I see?

Republicans have an advantage in a lot more states than Democrats
While only 16 Democratic states have more representatives than the model would predict, 31 states have more Republicans than we'd expect. Screening out all the states where the net effect is less than 1 representative (rounding error, essentially), leaves only 7 states with a Democratic advantage compared to 21 going the other way.

Republicans own the majority of the biggest swings
The top 10 swings (positive denotes pro-Republican) are Texas (+5.3), Pennsylvania (+3.9), California (-3.6), Ohio (+3.3), North Carolina (+3.3), Massachusetts (-3.2), Florida (+2.3), Georgia (+2.2), Connecticut (-2.1), Michigan (2.0).

Republicans gain big in close states
It's not surprising that a state leaning heavily one way would have a more extreme representative makeup. However, Republicans make some huge gains in tightly contested states. Filtering those with popular votes between 47% and 53% shows significant wins in Pennsylvania (+3.9), North Carolina (+3.3), Florida (+2.3), Georgia (+2.2), Michigan (+2.0), Virginia (+1.8), Wisconsin (+1.0). In all, Republicans made more than half their gains (14.6 of 26.4) in states with fairly close presidential popular votes. Half again (+7.3) of that gain is made in states where the popular vote was within 51-49.

So what's going on here? There's a common narrative that Republicans got a boost from promising to repeal Obamacare. Even if not for that, perhaps there's just random volatility? Republicans have in fact controlled the House since 2010 (when Obamacare became their rallying cry), but didn't in 2008 or 2006. But, we have to go all the way back to 1992 to see the previous time Democrats had numbers ... though the Democrat win streak then stretches all the way back to 1960 when the party wasn't even the same thing it is today.

What happened in 1994 to turn the tide?
That was when the more heavily partisan rhetoric started to come into play, but I'm not sure how that influenced the outcomes. Perhaps it was more fear-based, playing on people's concerns? Whether through gerrymander, message, or something else, Republicans figured out a new way to play and win.

Republican presidents were winning elections in the 60s, 70s and 80s, proving that the model I've proposed has no predictive power. I still wonder if it should work, if there's some kind of rigging or gamesmanship afoot, or if there are just tides in politics I don't understand.