Tag Archives: US politics

Some Thoughts on the Midterm Elections in the US

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The Democrats clearly did terribly in the midterm elections on November 4.  Here are some thoughts on some (not all) of the factors behind this:

1)  Turnout is the “name of the game” in US elections, and the Democrats did badly at getting their normal supporters to go to the polls and vote.  Only an estimated 36% of those eligible to vote in the US actually voted this time, 11% below the 41% rate estimated for the 2010 midterms.  One traditionally thinks of elections as if voters go to the polls regardless, with the issue then being whether their choice will be candidate A or candidate B.  Under such circumstances, a successful campaign strategy is to focus on how best to convince those voters to vote for you rather than your opponent.  An appeal to the voters who are politically in the middle would then be, under such conditions, a good strategy.

But most Americans do not vote.  The winner is then the candidate most successful at convincing those who would vote for him or her, to actually take the trouble to vote.  The need is to get those who would vote for you to overcome the hurdles they must go through to cast their ballot.  They are more likely do this the more committed they are to the candidate and what he or she represents.

2)  Obama, and Democrats generally, did a poor job at making such an appeal.  Possibly the clearest example of this was Obama’s decision (under pressure from several Democratic candidates for the Senate, most of whom then lost) to postpone any announcement of executive actions he would take on immigration reform – actions which would not require new legislation.  Obama publicly promised to make such an announcement this past summer, but then decided to postpone any such announcement until after the election.  This then led to strong criticism by many Hispanics, including heckling at some of his speeches, and a reduction in support from Hispanics.  This was manifested in part by a reduced share of the Hispanic vote going to Democrats, but even more in a reduction in Hispanics going to the polls at all.  The result will now be a Senate more averse to immigration reform than before.  But the reaction by Hispanics is understandable.

The strategy did not pick up many, if any, moderate votes.  But it did lead to a key constituency to be less interested in overcoming the hurdles that exist in the US (and increasingly exist:  see below) to go out and vote.

One can point to issues that have disappointed other key constituencies as well. Significant groups of Obama supporters were disappointed by his (so far) non-decision on the Keystone pipeline (he has not approved it, but nor has he decided against it); his extension of the Bush tax cuts for all but the extremely rich (which has weakened the fiscal accounts, with this then strengthening those opposed to the government spending that would have accelerated the recovery and reduced unemployment); his failure to prosecute aggressively those on Wall Street who through fraud sold mortgage-backed securities that misrepresented the financial capacity of many of those receiving such mortgages, which led directly to the 2008 financial crisis; the support provided to those Wall Street banks and other financial institutions then to rescue them from this crisis, while home-owners who were sold such mortgages received only limited, and in the end ineffectual, help; and more.

I would not argue that these positions did not reflect Obama’s genuine beliefs.  While conservative pundits have labeled him a far-left socialist, or worse, Obama has in fact governed from the middle.  But such positions then had the effect of leading many with more liberal views not to see a reason to go to the polls.

Obamacare provides a further example.  It has successfully reduced the number of uninsured in America by over ten million so far, and has been the most important health care reform in the US since Medicare was passed in 1965.  But it has been criticized by those on the left as an overly complex program.  As they note, it was a plan first conceived by the conservative Heritage Foundation in 1989.  Republicans in Congress in 1993 then championed this plan, with its individual mandate, as their counter-proposal to the health reform plan of the White House task force led by Hillary Clinton.  Many Obama supporters would have preferred the simpler approach of a health care plan built on extending Medicare to the full population (a single-payer system).  The problems with the launch of the Obamacare exchanges in October 2013 affirmed for many that such a simpler plan would have been better.

The Obamacare system that works through private insurance companies may have been necessary politically, to get any health care reform passed through congress.  It was politically in the middle, derived from a plan first pushed by Republicans.  But it disappointed many liberals as overly complex and more costly than an extension of Medicare to all would have been, while picking up few votes from voters in the middle.

3)  Voter suppression works, and can be decisive in close elections.  A wave of more restrictive voting measures were enacted following the 2010 elections, in those states where Republicans took (or kept) control of both the governorship and both houses of their legislatures.  Courts have ruled against some of the new voting restrictions, while others were merely postponed.  Such new measures, which vary by state, were in place in 21 states for the first time in a midterm election in 2014.

The measures all act to increase the hurdles to voting.  They can have a particularly discriminatory impact on the poor and many minorities.  Voter ID requirements may not matter much to someone with a car and driver’s license, but if you are poor and do not own a car, and hence have had no need for a driver’s license, the burden can be significant.  And the intent of such laws was made especially clear in Texas, where a license to carry a handgun is counted as a valid ID for voting, while a state-issued photo ID at the University of Texas for an in-state student is not.

It is difficult to impossible to estimate the impact that raising the hurdles to voting has had on voter participation.  A recent study by the GAO estimated that in two states examined (Kansas and Tennessee), the result may have been a reduction in voter participation of about 2 to 3%.  If all this impact is focussed on one side of potential voters (e.g. poor who would vote for Democrats) in an otherwise evenly divided state, the impact would be to reduce the votes on one side by 4 to 6%.  This is huge, and could be decisive in many contests.

Two prominent states that introduced significant new voting hurdles since 2010 were North Carolina and Florida.  Republican Thom Tillis, who as speaker of the state House of Representatives pushed through the new voting measures, beat Senate incumbent Kay Hagan by a narrow 49.0% to 47.3%.  He may well owe his win to the new hurdles.  And Republican Governor Rick Scott of Florida signed into law new voting restrictions as well as implemented executive actions that made voting more difficult.  He won over his challenger (former governor Charlie Crist) by a margin of just 48.2% to 47.1%.

While it is impossible to say with certainty that the new hurdles were the deciding factors in these races, they figures are so close that they very well could have been.

4)  Obamacare has succeeded in its primary objective of making it possible for more Americans to obtain health insurance.   But the politics of whether such progress will translate into net votes in favor of politicians who supported it are not straightforward.

In the US, before Obamacare, roughly 85% of the population (using round numbers, but sufficient for the illustrative purposes here) had health insurance, whether through government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, or through private insurance normally obtained via your employer.  About 15% of the population had no such health insurance cover, and the primary aim of Obamacare was to make it possible for this 15% to obtain health insurance coverage.

While making it possible for this 15% to obtain health insurance is an indisputable gain to the 15%, they of course only make up 15% of the total.  The other 85% already have health insurance, and health insurance coverage is of course important to all of us.  But with the complexities of the Obamacare reforms, the 85% who already with health insurance cover can understandably be worried whether Obamacare might have an adverse impact on them.  It won’t, and there will indeed be gains for most of them (health insurance policies must now meet certain minimum standards, including the provision of coverage for routine annual check-ups without a deductible, coverage for adult children up to the age of 26, an end to denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, and other measures).  Only a relative few of the very rich will now pay more in taxes to cover in part the cost of subsidies that will make it possible for those of lower income to afford coverage.

But with the complexities of the Obamacare reforms, plus the anti-Obamacare campaigns by certain political groups (such as a number supported by the Koch brothers), as well as by Fox television and a number of radio talk programs (such as Rush Limbaugh), it is not surprising that people within the 85% may worry.  Access to health care is important to all of us, and if Obamacare would, in some unclear fashion but based on what critics are asserting, lead to loss of coverage within the 85%, one can understand the concerns.  And with the 85% far outnumbering the 15%, it would not take a very high share of the 85% to oppose Obamacare, under the mistaken belief they will be harmed in some unknown way, to offset the positive reactions among the 15% now able to obtain affordable health care.

There can be a similar political arithmetic in other areas as well.  Falling unemployment will matter a good deal to those now able to get jobs, but they constitute a relatively small share of the labor force.  After all, an unemployment rate below 6% (as it is now) means that more than 94% have jobs.  And if those with jobs are told that the measures being taken to spur growth will have an adverse effect on them (such as the assertions, completed unsupported by any facts on what has happened to inflation thus far, that the Fed’s monetary policy will lead to hyperinflation), the political gains from bringing down the unemployment rate may be more than offset by the worries of the 94%.

 

There were many reasons for the poor showing of the Democrats in the November 4 midterms.  The factors discussed above are only a few, and perhaps not even the most important ones.  But they did contribute.

Red States vs. Blue States: Lower Incomes and Less Growth in Texas

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State-Level Real GDP per Capita as Ratio to US, 1997-2012

A.  Introduction

Texas Governor Rick Perry’s speech on March 7 to the annual CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) meetings was described by various news web sites as “a barn burner address” that wowed the conservatives, as “a rousing speech that was one of the best-received of the conference so far”, as a “fiery speech that ignites CPAC”, as a speech that brought “the audience to its feet and eliciting loud cheers”, and that “received huge applause throughout his rousing speech”.

Rick Perry has been Governor of Texas for more years than any other governor in Texas history.  He was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1998, and became governor in December 2000 when George W. Bush resigned to become President of the US.  Perry was then elected governor in his own right three times (in 2002, 2006, and 2010), the first Texas governor to be elected to three four-year terms.  He is not now running for a further term, and thus will step down following the election later this year.  It is widely assumed he will once again seek the Republican nomination for the Presidency in 2016, and many interpret his CPAC address as confirming this.  He is well known for the failure of his 2012 campaign seeking the Republican nomination, when he quickly went from front-runner to quitting following a series of goofs.  The best known was in one of the debates with the other Republican contenders, when he said he would close three cabinet level departments in the federal government but could only remember two, in his famous “oops” moment.

Perry’s speech at CPAC set forth what will likely be a major theme of his upcoming presidential campaign:  the contrast between the great performance (in his view) of red states (conservative states that generally vote Republican) and the terrible performance of blue states (liberal states that generally vote Democratic).  As the longest-serving governor of the premier red state of Texas, it is not surprising that Perry would say this.  But what has the performance actually been?

B.  Real GDP per Capita

The graph at the top of this post presents one key measure:  real GDP per capita, presented as a ratio to the US average.  Texas is shown (in red), along with two of the top blue states:  Massachusetts (in blue) and New York (in green).  The figures are calculated from data issued as part of the GDP accounts by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which provides such data at the state level GDP on an annual basis (with 2012 the most recent available).  The current series goes back only to 1997, before which the state-level figures were calculated on a different basis, and thus are not directly comparable to the later figures.  But 1997 is also the year before Perry was elected Lieutenant Governor, so it provides a suitable starting point.

As the graph shows, real per capita GDP was substantially higher in Massachusetts and New York than in Texas in all of these years.  Indeed, per capita GDP in Texas actually fell relative to that for the US as a whole from 1998 to 2005 (meaning growth in Texas was slower than in all of the US over this period), after which it started to recover.  The oil boom resulting from the sharp escalation in oil prices from the middle of the last decade was certainly a factor helping Texas in recent years.

And it is not only in terms of real income levels where Texas has lagged.  Texas has also lagged Massachusetts and New York in terms of overall growth since 1997.  Real per capita GDP rose by 30.4% in Massachusetts over 1997 to 2012 and by 28.9% in New York, but only by 21.7% in Texas:

State-Level Growth of GDP per Capita, 1997 - 2012

C.  Personal Income per Capita

GDP per capita is the broadest measure of income generating activities in a state, but not all of GDP goes to households.  Part will go to corporations (and not distributed to households via dividends).  It therefore is also of interest to look at per capita personal income by state, again relative to that for the US  as a whole:

State-Level Personal Income as Ratio to US, 1997-2012

Once again one finds this measure of income to be far higher in the blue states Massachusetts and New York than in the red state of Texas.  But what is different and interesting is that personal income per capita in Texas is seen to be also below personal income per capita for the US as a whole.  A higher share of GDP generated in Texas goes to corporations than is the case for the US as a whole.  GDP per capita in Texas is somewhat above the US average (although not as much above as in Massachusetts or New York), but personal income per capita, once one subtracts the share going to corporations, is lower in Texas than for the US as a whole.

D.  Conclusion, and Re-Nationalizing the Postal Service

Conservatives, including not surprisingly Governor Perry, hold up Texas as the ideal which they want the nation to emulate.  But GDP per capita is lower in Texas than in the blue states of Massachusetts and New York, and has grown by less in Texas than in Massachusetts or New York over at least the last fifteen years.  In addition, personal income per capita is not only lower in Texas than in Massachusetts or New York (and very much lower), it is even lower than the US average.  Corporations account for a disproportionate share of incomes earned in Texas.

Perry closed his speech to CPAC, to cheers and loud rounds of applause, by declaring that the federal government should “Get out of the health care business, get out of the education business”.  Presumably this means Perry wishes to end Medicare, and that federal government assistance to students and schools up to and including universities should also end.  It is not clear, however, he has thought this far ahead on the implications of what he is calling for.  Calling for the end of Medicare, as conservatives have in the past, is not currently a popular position.

But while Perry said the federal government should “get out” of health and education, one area where he appeared to call for expanded federal responsibility was in the running of the postal system.  The proper federal focus, as established in his reading of the constitution, should be on defense, foreign policy, and to “deliver the mail, preferably on time and on Saturdays”.

The constitution does indeed call on the federal government to ensure postal services are made available.  But while this was done through a cabinet level department under the US President for many years, since 1971 the postal service has been run as a government-owned but independent establishment, run like a private corporation with its own board.  It is not fully clear what Perry means by arguing the federal government should return to its original mission vis-a-vis postal services, but the implication appears to a be reversal of its 1971 conversion from a cabinet level department to an independent agency run along private lines.  That would be an odd position for a conservative.  But I suspect he has not really thought this through.

Armed Guards Cannot Stop Mass Shootings

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Following the horrific shootings at  Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut last December, many called for strengthened controls on access to guns in the US.  Most of us thought that even the NRA would now support sensible measures.  However, the NRA then surprised us when, in a flamboyant press conference, NRA head Wayne LaPierre instead called for armed guards to be posted at all schools in the country.  As I noted in a blog post at the time, there is no evidence that this would do any good, that placing more loaded weapons in the schools would indeed make more weapons available to shooters who made the guard one of their first victims, and that even if it were possible to place armed guards in all of the over 130,000 schools in the US, how would one also do this in all of the movie theaters, college campuses, shopping malls, fast food restaurants, churches, commuter trains, Christian prayer rallies, post offices, other work places, and all the other locations where mass shootings had been inflicted in the US in recent years.

The mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard on September 16 has now provided us a test of the NRA proposal.  The Navy Yard is a military facility, with armed guards and secure entrances.  The shooter, a former full-time Navy reservist, was now a private contractor working at the facility, and came in on morning of September 16 with a shotgun in a backpack.  He had purchased the shotgun, legally, two days before at a gun store in Virginia not far from DC.  He went to a bathroom on the fourth floor of the building, took out his gun, and started to shoot innocent people.  At one point he shot an armed guard, took the guard’s weapon, and then used that weapon to shoot more people.  Police arrived at the scene within two minutes of receiving notice of the shootings, and were inside the building within six minutes.  The police, not the armed guards posted at the facility, eventually shot the killer.  But 13 died, including the shooter.

If armed guards at a military facility cannot stop such mass shootings, how can anyone believe that the NRA’s plan of armed guards in our schools will protect our school children?