September 23: About That House Republican Agenda
I’m certainly old enough to remember lots of these pre-election “agenda” documents, and couldn’t help but mock the latest one at New York:
In Thomas Pynchon’s 1965 cult novel The Crying of Lot 49, a character who has taken too much LSD decides that if everyone on earth repeats the marketing phrase “rich, chocolatey goodness,” it will represent the voice of God. With or without drugs, a lot of people in politics have a similar delusion that getting candidates to make the same noises like chirping cicadas will produce electoral victories. It’s a particularly strong belief among congressional Republicans, who share the dubious conviction that Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” is what flipped control of Congress in 1994.
With the assistance of Gingrich and former Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, the House Republican Conference has released a new “agenda” document, entitled “Commitment to America.” The document, clearly designed for online consumption, has lots of bells and whistles and factoids about the hellish reign of Joe Biden and his “Democrat” Party. What it doesn’t have is a whole lot of specificity, unlike the unfortunate “agenda” that Republican Senate Campaign Committee chairman Rick Scott released earlier this year to the near-universal horror of his colleagues, who don’t want to be identified with the proposed sunsetting of Social Security and Medicare.
The relatively anodyne character of Kevin McCarthy’s pet project doesn’t mean it is entirely useless. Candidates mouthing the approved pieties will presumably not be expressing their pithy views on Jewish space lasers or repeating QAnon slogans.
Still, it’s hard to take seriously an agenda for the nation that does not mention climate change, Russia, or extremist threats to democracy — or one that suggests the sole cure for inflation is to cut “wasteful government spending” without explaining what that means (in the indictment of Democrats that accompanies the agenda, there is much criticism of direct stimulus payments, which Donald Trump preferred to virtually every other form of government spending).
Most interesting was how House Republicans handled a red-hot issue they dare not ignore completely, given the obsession it commands among a very big chunk of the GOP party base: abortion. You have to look pretty hard to find it, nestled as it is under the unlikely heading of “A Government That’s Accountable,” and the downright misleading subheading of “a plan to defend America’s rights under the Constitution.” And it simply says Republicans will “protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers.” So they checked off a box for anti-abortion activists in the manner least likely to draw curious or unfriendly attention to the extreme abortion views so many of them have expressed, which don’t poll well. Perhaps voters will be too mesmerized by the overall party message to notice. Repeat after me: rich, chocolatey goodness.
Most of the political science research on voting indicates that the likelihood of voting rises with education. Voters with a high school diploma or less tend to break Republican; voters with a college degree or some college education tend to break Democratic; voters with post-graduate education break evenly (those in social sciences breaking heavily Democratic, those in physical sciences breaking heavily Republican).
That has been the general trend since “The American Voter” came out decades ago, although the trend does appear to be weakening some among voters with post-graduate education and college education.
Jason – EMD posts RV’s when they are available, LV’s when RV’s are not available. RV’s are better because they are more accurate for predicting outcomes. LV’s do gain some value for predicting outcomes as the election gets very close, which will be soon.
i read in salon (i beleive) that bush has not visitied ohio at all or very much in last three weeks.
can anyone confirm that?
A small complaint/request for clarification.
You seem to oscillate between citing LV results and RV results. You have a lot of excellent analysis, but the practice gives the impression of only citing the most favorable side of a poll for Kerry.
Is it merely a matter of polling firms just looking at LVs, or RVs, but not both? If not, perhaps you could cite both results, or, if it’s not too simplistic, say why you favor one over the other?
The trends reported in this poll for education and income are quite extraordinary:
“Kerry’s support gradually grows from those who do not have a high school diploma (60-40 Bush) to those with a graduate or professional degree (67-32 Kerry). Kerry leads in income categories under $35,000 a year and in the $51,000-$75,000 a year range; Bush leads narrowly in the $36,000-$50,000 category and has wider leads in the higher categories.”
I have seen few polls that gave breakdowns by both income and education, but the trends are generally in the same direction although usually weaker. Since education and income are highly correlated, it is very striking to have such opposite trends and when you look at subgroups with the same level of education, the change in Bush/Kerry vote as a function of income must be staggering. And similarly for change in vote as a function of education among people with the same income.
In this circumstance, weighting your sample to give an accurate demographic breakdown by education, but not by income (the latter is nearly impossible for a myriad of practical reasons) will actually INCREASE the Republican bias of the sample created by the oversampling of high-income voters.This bias affects RV samples just as much as LV samples.
I have not studied past poll data on this subject, but my impression was that in past years the overall trend was that Republican vote went up with education level, so that weighting for education allowed you to partly correct for undersampling of low-income voters. But if my recollection is right, this year is different — meaning that the polls are underpredicting Kerry’s vote. (Don’t get too excited — my guess is that the effect is probably not more than one point or so — but in this election one point is a big deal.)
One conclusion is clear. Polls absolutely should not weight their samples for education this year.