The biggest news from yesterday’s elections in the United Kingdom was the achievement of a parliamentary majority by the Conservative Party. The second biggest news was that the entire polling industry predicted a different result.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight had a succinct summary of why this seems to be happening lately, not just in the UK but in the Scottish Independence Referendum, the Israeli elections, the 2014 U.S. midterms and even the 2012 U.S. presidential election:

Voters are becoming harder to contact, especially on landline telephones. Online polls have become commonplace, but some eschew probability sampling, historically the bedrock of polling methodology. And in the U.S., some pollsters have been caught withholding results when they differ from other surveys, “herding” toward a false consensus about a race instead of behaving independently.

But I added this comment at Washington Monthly:

All these are big and legitimate concerns. But probably the bigger problem is that such issues will be seized upon by anti-data zealots and “game-change” journalists–think of them as like the old-fart baseball scouts in Moneyball who knew a good player when they saw one–to seek to discredit any objective measurements of public opinion or any analysis based upon them. After all, polls are “wrong,” right? So let’s just wing it with our instincts, prejudices, snail’s-eye observations from the campaign trail (or bar), insider opinions, and of course, first-person anecdotal takes on the mood of the electorate.

The solution to flawed data is better data, not less data and certainly not data-free reporting and analysis. Keep that in mind next time someone tells you to “ignore the polls.”

I don’t have to remind TDS readers that Democrats have been agonizing about what to do to appeal to non-college educated white voters–a.k.a. the “white working class”–ever since their current tilt towards the GOP became evident. But with Democratic “populism” on the rise, it’s now Republicans who are finally having to worry about this demographic, with some even attempting their own “populist” appeals at each other’s expense. I wrote about this at TPMCafe in the context of Mike Huckabee’s campaign launch:

What’s been missing for a good long while in the GOP is any serious effort to do what Nixon did: make Republican economic policies working-class-friendly. But now, as Democrats have more or less in concert decided to struggle towards a “populist” economic message that can win back some of these voters, Republicans are waking up to the same necessity.
The disconnect between the economic policies of the GOP and the interests of their most reliable voters has been a recurring theme for the self-styled “Reform Conservatives,” who often borrowed Tim Pawlenty’s line that the GOP needed to become the party of “Sam’s Club,” not just the country club. But as the Reformicons’ influence has grown, their demands have been watered down: the budget plan recently unveiled by Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, supposedly a new acme of Reformicon thinking, buys off traditional Republicans with the elimination of taxes on investment and inherited income before timorously cutting in the “Sam’s Club” voters with an enhanced child tax credit (plus an enhanced EITC for the working poor).
Some libertarian-oriented Republicans also claim to be promoting a new right-wing economic populism via attacks on corporate subsidies or “crony capitalism.” But again, this is at best a syncretic approach, since these self-same “populists” are avid to reduce or eliminate taxes on or even regulation of the corporations they are savaging as fascistic leeches.
But at least two prospective GOP candidates for president in 2016 seem inclined to take an edgier approach to the task of appealing to the economic views of working-class conservatives — both of them candidates who have experienced considerable success in the past appealing to their cultural resentments.
Rick Santorum’s distinctive pitch so far in the 2016 invisible primary has been to match rhetorical appeals to white working class voters with a very specific hostility to legal as well as illegal immigration as the alleged reason for underemployment and wage stagnation. It’s sort of like an AFL-CIO argument circa 1990 with everything other than one subject blotted out.
But Mike Huckabee shows signs of going significantly further. He got a lot of credit in 2008 for being a “populist” initially because he refused to go along with GOP cheerleading over the George W. Bush economy, and subsequently because he feuded with fiscal hardliners — especially the Club for Growth (which Huckabee called the “Club for Greed”) — over his record in Arkansas. This time around he’s earning the “populist” label by criticizing two shibboleths of contemporary conservatism: free trade and “entitlement reform.”
In both cases, he’s mining grass-roots conservative disgruntlement with Republican orthodoxy. Moreover, he’s linking these economic complaints about the agenda of conservative business elites to his longstanding and more-pointed-than-ever attacks on the cultural agenda of liberal elites.
It will be interesting to see if he seeks and gains attention for being (most likely) the only candidate in a huge presidential field to take issue with the Republican congressional leadership’s push to win approval for Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. More importantly, the heavy, heavy investment of Republican politicians in budget schemes that depend on reductions in Social Security and Medicare spending will give Huckabee constant opportunities to tout his newly stated opposition to such cuts as a betrayal of promises made to middle-class workers who’ve been contributing payroll taxes their entire lives. Beyond that, two candidates — Chris Christie and Jeb Bush — are already on record favoring reductions in retirement benefits that go beyond the highly indirect voucher schemes associated with Paul Ryan.
Now it’s not entirely clear Huckabee can be an effective spokesman for a working-class-oriented “populist” faction in the GOP. He’s vulnerable to counter-attacks based on his record of supporting tax hikes as governor of Arkansas. Speaking of taxes, he’s very identified with the “Fair Tax” scheme of replacing the income tax with a national consumption tax, which has a superficial appeal to “populists” as a way to kill the IRS, but would massively shift the federal tax burden from the wealthy to the middle and lower classes. Huckabee’s commitment to culture war issues may be too much for many non-conservative-evangelical white working class voters, much as the non-economic views of the politician who introduced the whole concept of culture war, Pat Buchanan, made him unattractive to people who shared his disdain for free trade and liberalized immigration and foreign aid. Huckabee’s questionable organizational and fundraising skills are also handicaps.
But it is possible Huckabee (and perhaps Santorum, and maybe other opportunistic candidates down the road) could succeed in scaring away others from those economic positions of the Wall Street Journal editorial board that actual Republican voters do not like. And short of that, if something a bit closer to real “populism” than the token gestures of Reformicons and libertarians is crushed by party elites, the GOP could be exposed to some dangerous inroads from Democrats, who look to be far less reluctant to offend wealthy donors this cycle.

So Democrats should watch these conservative lurches in the direction of “populism”–and the quite possibly savage reaction they could produce–with great interest.

It sometimes seems that political observers are divided between those who treat polling data, no matter how early or ephemeral, as Gospel Truth, and those who want to dismiss polling data, or even all data, out of hand, either for some period prior to real votes or forever.
At Washington Monthly this week, I discussed the issue in response to a sound but in my opinion misleading post from an observer whose work I admire:

At the Upshot today, Nate Cohn has a good primer on what you should ignore in all the early GOP nomination contest horse-race polls, but goes over the brink into one of those general injunctions to ignore early polls, presumably because he thinks readers are sure to misinterpret them. But then he makes a questionable assertion about how we should view the field:

Some might say that Mr. Rubio and Mr. Cruz’s support is enough to put them alongside Mr. Bush or Mr. Walker, the two candidates who have led the polls and have often been described as front-runners for the nomination. But Mr. Bush and Mr. Walker are front-runners in spite of their standing in the polls, not because of it.
They’re front-runners because the other candidates do not appear to have enough support from party elites to sustain a national campaign. Those other candidates do not have natural factional bases — like moderates for Mr. Bush, and conservatives for Mr. Walker — that give them clear opportunities to win early contests, or do not have the potential to build broad enough coalitions to win the nomination.

But how do we know Bush and Walker have these “natural factional bases.” You could say we know this about Jebbie because of rumors of fabulous fundraising numbers and all the blind quotes from Establishment types expressing their adoration for him. But until all this turns into reported contributions or public endorsements, it remains speculative, doesn’t it? I’d say a big reason for the Jeb the Frontrunner assumption is that his putative rival for that “factional base,” Chris Christie, is drawing terrible numbers in the early polls. And by that I don’t necessarily mean his horse-race standing, but his favorable/unfavorable ratios and the distribution of what little support he has. Similarly, we know Scott Walker is formidable not because of money or endorsements (he has little of either so far) but because early polls consistently show him with decisively strong support among conservative ideologues, and clear potential for growth in the rest of the primary electorate. And we know Marco Rubio has the potential to become a top-tier candidate because of his consistently strong approval ratios–again, in the early polls.
So I would amend Nate’s advice by saying it’s wise to ignore the order of candidates in early horse-race polling, which, as he points out, changes constantly (as it did in 2012 when even Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain led such polls at one point in the cycle), but do pay attention to the internals. And to stress a point where I may be just about alone in the punditocracy: even early general election trial-heat numbers may matter for candidates whose appeal in their own party is attributable to their claims of electability.
This is already a real problem for Jeb Bush, since the Establishment’s reported belief that he’s the strongest candidate to send up against Hillary Clinton isn’t born about in polling of these two extremely well-known polls; and it’s a potential asset for Rand Paul, whose otherwise unlikely candidacy has been strengthened by consistently stronger showings than anyone else in trial heats against HRC.
There’s a couple of other things about Nate Cohn’s take that give me pause. He concludes:

At some point, Mr. Walker, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio will need to take the lead in the polls, particularly in Iowa and New Hampshire. But now, it’s better to focus on the fundamentals — whether the candidates appear to hold the support from party elites necessary to win the nomination, whether they are broadly appealing throughout the party, and whether they seem capable of building support in the early states.

First of all, I just have to groan when I see yet another meaning assigned to the term “fundamentals,” by which some people mean GDP numbers alone, while others would add other economic statistics, presidential approval ratings, characteristics of the cycle, and landscape. And second of all, where do we find these fundamentals this early in the contest, particularly such criteria as “whether they are broadly appealing throughout the party, and whether they seem capable of building support in the early states”? That’s right: early polls, properly interpreted.
So: turns out there is gold to glean from early polls, so long as you know where to spot the fool’s gold.

Up until now, it was generally assumed the 2016 elections would revolve around some of the same issues discussed in 2012 and 2014: economic stagnation and inequality, immigration, national security challenges, and maybe executive powers and culture-war issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
But there’s been one too many incident of racially-tinged collisions between police and the communities they are supposed to protect to assume that any more. I wrote about that this week for TPMCafe.

[T]he riots in Baltimore this week brought back a lot of memories for Baby Boomers who remember Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964, Watts in 1965, Cleveland in 1966, Detroit and Newark and Cambridge in 1967, and cities across the country in 1968, including Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Some may or may not remember the extent to which police brutality charges and/or habitual racial profiling in arrests were major issues in many of these cities back then. But in any event, what seems like a growing drumbeat of incidents of black men being killed by police (or by would-be police like George Zimmerman), illuminating long-suppressed complaints about brutality and racial profiling, is interrupting this election cycle, supposedly focused on economic inequality and national security threats, like one of those special bulletins of yore….
For some pols this old/new challenge may appear to be the very last thing they need. That’s likely the case for former Baltimore mayor and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who cut short his pre-presidential campaign overseas trip to rush back to address a crisis he no longer has any power to control. He will immediately face claims that “zero-tolerance” policies he put into place as mayor contributed to the deterioration of police-community relations, thanks to a rising tide of arrests for minor offenses that ruined the employment prospects of many young black men (also a major factor in some of the 1960s “race riots”). This is not the kind of allegation someone seeking to cast himself as the Fighting Progressive candidate for president can easily overcome.
If the Baltimore saga is an existential challenge for O’Malley, it may serve as a devilish temptation for his successor as governor, Republican Larry Hogan. Being from an old political family, Hogan is surely aware that one of his Republican predecessors began an unlikely ascent to the vice presidency after Richard Nixon noticed with pleasure his tough talk towards protesters on the Eastern Shore (in 1967) and in Baltimore itself (in 1968). Indeed, had Mr. Law-and-Order Spiro T. Agnew not shown his contempt for the law by taking bribes as part of an arrangement that went back to his tenure as Baltimore county executive, he would have almost certainly become the 38th president of the United States. Did Larry Hogan think about that when he talked tough towards protesters in Baltimore this week?
More generally, Republicans everywhere may be tempted to exploit the reflexive support for police officers among white citizens that is beginning to exhibit itself everywhere black protests arise. As John Judis observed at National Journal this week, the likely election of Dan Donovan–the prosecutor who appeared to work hard to avoid any grand jury indictment of the cops who killed Eric Garner–to Congress in Staten Island next Tuesday may signal a new era of racial backlash, battening on conservative anxieties already aroused by the years of attacks on Obama and manufactured fears of his supposed mania for “redistribution.”
If there is a supply of backlash voters, there will certainly be a demand, if only among the crowded GOP presidential field where the candidates will soon run out of ways to demonstrate their True Conservatism. The more historically minded of them may realize that St. Ronald Reagan himself built his California political career on a foundation of backlash to rioters, albeit student radicals more than African-Americans per se.
Worse yet, if Republicans begin to return to backlash politics, some Democrats may get happy feet and return to their old habit of reflexively supporting aggressive police tactics and tougher sentencing in order to preserve their appeal to the shrinking minority of white voters willing to support them. All in all, it’s rational to fear that the rarest of phenomena, the bipartisan trend towards criminal justice reform, could be interrupted by polarization over police behavior, before it’s reached fruition. And in the long run, nothing would be more certain to perpetuate the oppressive fears of African-Americans for whom regular politics is sometimes little more than an interruption of lives spent under the gun.

We’re far enough into the 2016 election cycle to hear the sound of a few myths exploding. A notable one is the idea that governors are inherently better presidential candidates. I took a jaundiced look at that one at TPMCafe this week:

This ancient trope is based partly on statistics, notes Five Thirty Eight‘s Nate Silver:

Throughout American history, about twice as many governors as senators have been chosen to be standard bearers by the major parties, even though at any given moment there are only half as many sitting governors as sitting senators.

Statistics aside, it’s plausible that executives are a more natural fit for Chief Executive than career legislators. And in an era of raging anti-Washington sentiment, it makes sense that a record free of complicity with the federal government’s deeds and misdeeds could be an advantage.
All these factors were supposed to make the rich bumper crop of GOP governors and former governors in the field this year the collective frontrunners. But in case after case, their records back home are undermining their credibility or even threatening their freedom.
Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal are both suffering from calamitously bad approval ratings in the states they govern. Christie’s is at 38/56 according to a new Quinnipiac poll. Jindal was at 27/63 in a March poll, and with a frightful state budget situation, it looks as though he hasn’t hit bottom. And the otherwise high-flying Scott Walker’s popularity in Wisconsin has recently hit a very bad patch, with the famously objective Marquette Law School poll just last week showing him at 41/56, and worse yet, trailing Hillary Clinton by double digits. Walker’s most recent budget is also getting panned by big majorities of Wisconsin voters. This is a particularly unfortunate development for a candidate whose entire “electability” argument is based on his popularity in Wisconsin, a state that Obama has carried twice but Walker has won three times (in lower-turnout nonpresidential elections, to be sure).
Rick Perry has left office, but is under indictment for alleged abuses of power as governor. Christie and Walker also have to worry about prosecutorial footsteps, though experts differ on the risk of the hoosegow either faces.
Jeb Bush, for whom the statute of limitations has probably tolled on any violations of law he might have committed, is suffering from some gubernatorial blowback. His Florida rival Marco Rubio is reportedly setting up a superPAC to be lavishly funded by a billionaire who is still angry about a 2004 Bush veto of an appropriation to benefit a cancer research project set up in his sister-in-law’s name.
We already know from what they did to him in 2008 that Mike Huckabee’s nemesis, the Club for Growth (or as he has called it, the “Club for Greed”) is undoubtedly waiting in the weeds with another recitation of his tax-raising behavior as Arkansas governor.
And then there’s Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a might-have-been presidential candidate whose national viability was atomized almost overnight by his clumsy handling of a “religious liberty” bill, which wound up offending just about everybody while making him look like a deer in the culture-war headlights.
The exception to the rule that gubernatorial service has been at least a mixed blessing in the GOP field is the barely-visible John Kasich of Ohio, but even in his case gubernatorial duties have caused him to mosey up to the starting gate of a potential presidential candidacy with an unimpressive lack of dispatch or focus.
(Perhaps the gubernatorial sins of Jim Gilmore and George Pataki will come back to haunt them if anyone notices their presence on the campaign trail. For now they are operating safely under the radar screen.)
Even on the Democratic side, Martin O’Malley’s two terms as governor of Maryland have become an unexpected millstone in a possible presidential run, as his tax policies have drawn some blame for the shocking November 2014 loss by his intended successor, Anthony Brown.

All in all, it’s not that bad to be one of those despised Washingtonians in 2016. I’m reasonably sure Bobby Jindal wishes he had never returned to Louisiana to run for governor.