totient | Entries tagged with politics

Over the last several years I've given a bunch of money to Senate candidates, because I want to turn the Senate blue, and elect more women, and also because often they're in swing states where I figure the candidate's GOTV operation will help the top line of the ticket too. I'd like to think I made a difference, and certainly some candidates I've given to have prevailed in close elections, but there's a lot of money in a Senate race and I'm not in a position to give the kind of money that's really noticeable there.

State legislature races on the other hand have budgets that look a lot more like my annual dining-out budget, even now that some PACs have noticed and started spending money. And this being a redistricting year, these races are going to make a lot of difference.

I'm still focusing on races in states that will swing the top line as well, and also on races where women are running. That isn't limiting me much this year, which is nice.

I'm working from this list but there are many others. Or there are PACs you could give to. Either way, right now state legislature races seem to me to be where the very most leverage is.

Crossposts: https://totient.livejournal.com/175228.html

I like to give little bits of money to Senate candidates and it has been handy to be able to, for instance, call up Heidi Heitkamp's office and identify myself as a contributor to her 2012 Senate campaign when joining the chorus of people who asked her to vote no on Kavanaugh. Lately I've been giving to House candidates too and I suspect that the range of candidates I've given to has landed me on a list of likely suckers, which has had some amusing side effects.

The most recent of those was a week and a half ago when I got a call from someone on the Warren campaign asking if I were free this last weekend to go canvass in New Hampshire. I was, so I agreed, and on Tuesday I got a followup call from someone coordinating specifics and arranged to meet at a Starbucks in Londonderry at 10am on Saturday for a couple of hours of walking around nearby subdivisions. We got a little training talk and some good documentation and a clipboard and a cell phone app and I got paired off with a woman named Karen from Eastie to go knock on 40 or 50 doors. It was a gorgeous day to collect 10,000 steps, and also a gorgeous day to be out doing something other than waiting at home for canvassers so most of the doorbell rings went unanswered. But we had a couple of great conversations, including one with someone who's likely to volunteer on the campaign and another with a registered Republican who was very interested and who I bet would vote for her in the general (it's too late to change parties for the primary). We contributed to the GOTV dataset with info on who was still living at those addresses and who had moved away. And I had a lot of great conversations with Karen. At one point I caught my left middle finger in her car door which was pretty painful for a bit there but the folks at the Dunkies down the street gave me a cup of ice for it and apart from a nice purple color it seems to be doing OK now.

On the way back to the Starbucks to hand off our clipboard and our leftover handouts we passed a PYO apple orchard, and after we were all done I went back for cider and donuts. Neither were made on site and the donuts were not particularly worthwhile but the cider is pretty decent.

Apparently while I was gone someone came by the house canvassing for Will Mbah, who I think is awesome. I'm amused at the reason I missed them and I'm told they were amused too. The fact that I was canvassing for Warren was enough to make the Mbah canvasser think I'd vote for him, and that's probably quite a good correlation in general.

This year's City Council election is a difficult one to figure out tactics for. You get to vote for four at-large councilors and it's usually pretty possible to figure out the four progressive candidates with the best chances to win, and lately that has been enough to keep the trolls off the council. But this year, one of the progressives, Stephanie Hirsch, has said that she may have to leave part way through, and if that happens whoever came in fifth gets her spot. This means that unless we want to jettison Hirsch -- and it'd be awesome to have her even half a term from -- we need to make sure the troll comes in sixth, and since each voter only gets four votes it calls for tactical variation among the progressive voters. The question is which sets of tactics introduce a risk that the troll comes *fourth* and how much risk of that is worth keeping him from polling fifth.

I suspect that a enough people will vote non-tactically that I'll be able to come up with a tactic that dovetails with what I think other voters will be doing and have some endorsments. But I am not there yet.

Today, Kristen Strezo knocked on my door and I had a conversation with her. She didn't have an answer to my tactical question but I think it's likely that she'll land on my endorsements list. Her issues are certainly ones I care about a lot, and as she's living them she has some great ideas on how to address them, and she made it very clear the things the city is doing now -- which sound great on paper -- need a lot more intersectionality before they're any use.

She says she has knocked on 4300 doors. That's a lot, but it's still only about 15 percent of the doors in Somerville. She's got a lot of knocking still to do if she's going to come ahead of Jack Connolly.

Yesterday morning, The Hill published a list of the top ten most competitive Senate seats. This list looks a lot like a bunch of similar lists people have been publishing. But for people like me who are looking for where to contribute money, it's in the wrong order. What I'm looking for is the race that's most likely to be the tipping-point for control of the Senate. If only Republican states were in play, this would be the fifth state on The Hill's list. But some Democratic seats are also at risk. A 40% chance of flipping for a Democratic seat equals a 60% chance of Democratic control, so ordering the states by chance of flipping isn't the same as ranking their chances of winding up in the D column. Plus, once you identify the most-likely tipping-point state, what's the next-most-likely: the one above it, or the one below? Most of these lists don't have Nate Silver-style probabilities on them.

So, to help you decide where to contribute money, my personal assessment of the ten most likely tipping-point states, in order:

Ohio. So likely that my primary vote for President was based on who I thought would have longer coattails here. The candidate himself, Ted Strickland, does not particularly excite me. But he would be the deciding vote for someone like Jane Kelly to fill the next vacancy on the Supreme Court, and generally for anything getting done in Washington for two years.
Pennsylvania. The Senate primary here is not until next month, but Katie McGinty has a good shot at the Democratic nomination. Might be closer than Ohio, or might be less close.
Florida. An open seat that's also likely to be pretty close. Ranked here for now but will likely move up or down once the primaries are over.
New Hampshire. Maggie Hassan has a good enough shot that this is probably around the third most likely to flip, and thus not the tipping-point. But I'll be contributing money here just in case.
Nevada. Catherine Cortez-Masto is favored to keep Harry Reid's seat blue, but of the seats the Democrats are defending this is the most important.
Wisconsin. A rematch of the very close 2010 election under more favorable conditions for the Democrat. Not a slam dunk to flip, but pretty likely.
Illinois. Tammy Duckworth is the Democrats' very best shot for a pickup, and isn't likely to have trouble raising money. A targeted donation strategy could reasonably consider her a sure thing and skip contributing to her. On the other hand, she's just so awesome.
North Carolina. Back to the less-likely side in terms of chances overall. Deborah Ross might well squeak out a win if the Democratic coattails are long, and it's nice to have some insurance.
Missouri. There hasn't been much polling here, but the state makes a lot of top-ten flip lists, usually in a pretty similar position to the spot I'm giving it in mine.
Arizona. This isn't likely to be the tipping-point race, but a serious threat from Ann Kirkpatrick will certainly help the Democrats' chances overall by making the Republicans spread their resources more thinly, so she's getting some money from me.

You may notice a very interesting trend among the candidates I've mentioned. I don't think it's a good idea to leave Ted Strickland off your list because he doesn't fit it. But I'm mightily pleased at the potential makeup of the Senate nonetheless.

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/163437.html

If you're like me, you may be wondering whether to vote for a third party candidate who will almost certainly lose, or for the lesser of two evils. One factor I'm considering for this is the likelihood that mine is the deciding vote. If the chance of this is better than 1/n, where n is the number of voters in the election, then it seems to me that I'm better off voting for the lesser of two evils. If it's worse, then I might as well vote my conscience.

The statistics behind this comes from modeling the behavior of the voters, and from modeling the accuracy of the polls. It turns out that the latter effect is vastly more significant than the former, and roughly speaking if a tie vote is within the 90% error bars for the aggregate polling then your undecided vote carries more than average weight in the head-to-head race, and if it's outside the error bars then it carries less.

I was a little surprised to see that Nate Silver was giving much chance of winning to the particular lesser evil I'm considering. But as long as that's true, I think the chances of a one vote margin are too high to ignore.

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/159152.html

On politics, local and national:

There's a meeting next Tuesday on a proposed Beacon St cycle track. I started to put together a long, involved analysis of why this is a bad idea, citing the Dana Laird crash as an example of why Somerville's citation of Cambridge as a model for cycling infrastructure does not mean that we should copy Central Square as Somerville's proposal suggests. Even Cambridge doesn't put cycle tracks in areas with so many cross streets; theirs are along Concord Ave and Vassar St where traffic is much more suitable. For safety, the Vassar St cycle tracks reenter the roadway for 250 feet before (and after) each intersection; if Somerville did this along Beacon St there would be hardly any cycle track left. I think that point alone is probably enough to kill this dumb idea.

Republican handwringing about the election seems to be coming to a focus on immigration policy, on which Boehner is signaling that he will now cooperate. Of course his choice is cooperate or receive a black eye for failing to do so, since Obama is sure to push Lindsay Graham's immigration reform proposal through the Senate. The chief opponent to this is Steve King (R-IA) whose phrasing makes it clear that he is not interested in anyone actually leaving, but rather that he wants to see the creation (or more cynically, the perpetuation) of a permanent, exploitable underclass. But apparently we can't talk about class in America so no one will acknowledge this. Still, getting the Republicans off the xenophobia horse will have the side effect of getting them off this particular class warfare horse too. Small steps, there being a large herd of such horses, but nice to see.

Democrats are talking about going over the "fiscal cliff" and then negotiating from there. I like this idea: No one has to violate any promises they made to Grover Norquist. I'd like it more if sequestration allowed the administration to ignore earmarks, but instead the earmarks are cut only proportionally. Still, this is a chance for a good tactician to get what the administration actually wants and cut down on the pork some. Maybe we can start by killing the Space Launch System, which is not only a solution in search of a problem but also a terrible design for a rocket even if there were a problem to solve.

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/154029.html

Making the rounds of the blogosphere: A gun nut (and I mean that in the kindest way) in Arlington MA made a blog post the title of which I can most charitably describe as stupid and the cops came and impounded all his guns. People are getting upset about his freedom of speech, or his right to bear arms, and posting pictures from Spartacus in solidarity.

The blog has been taken down, and I don't have a copy of the whole post, so I can't judge whether it's reasonable to prosecute him for threatening or inciting to violence or conspiracy, all of which are IMO perfectly reasonable for a society to consider crimes of speech. And I also know, because TJIC is a friend of mine, that some of his weaponry is beyond what I feel requires constitutional protection.

But the episode makes me profoundly uncomfortable anyway, because there aren't any charges. I don't like that cops can just take anything they feel like, handwave that there might be a trial about it someday, and then you never see your stuff again. I don't know if TJIC should get his guns back or not, but I do know that a jury should decide that, not a police chief.

"Fuck you, George W Bush" had already won the 2002, 2005, and 2007 Nobel Peace Prizes. That makes the 2009 prize recipient not so strange at all.

$11.2 billion for a replacement for Marine One? You could build a deep-bore tunnel from the White House to Andrews for half a billion. No wonder Obama is reviewing that program.

88 lines about 44 presidents

[A] nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.

I'm just old enough to remember some lyrics from 1980...

Wall street has a mess on its hands. Cleaning it up is going to be tough; someone is going to be stuck with a big bill. But finance is not a zero-sum game and we should not be treating it as such. We need to look at where money is still leaking out of the system and plug the holes.

The first place to look is the lawyers. Whenever there's money bleeding out of a system you can be sure lawyers are benefiting. In this case it's about the record number of foreclosures, which are very expensive for the banks. We need a "safe harbor" law to let people walk away from underwater properties. No bankruptcy, no lawyers, just a law that says if a homeowner wants to be rid of a property he can fill out a standard form, sign on the dotted line, and walk away. This could be a government homebuying program, or a requirement on the primary lender, or something else, it doesn't matter, as long as the lawyers get cut out of the feeding frenzy.

The next place to look is vacant properties. How inefficient it is to have houses go vacant and therefore unmaintained? These are also a health risk (mostly from mosquitos breeding in the pools) and drive down nearby property values. Banks don't have the resources to show properties and mandating that they somehow grow this ability is foolishness... but there are such things as real estate agents, and there is an obvious tenant in the form of the previous owner. Setting a rental price might be tricky, but it's a lot easier than setting a fair market price for bundled mortgage securities. Even if the owner doesn't wind up there, better to rent it at section-8 prices than let hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of house burn up because no one was there to hear the smoke alarm go off.

Finally, whatever you feel about the economic justice of people who bought houses beyond their means, a side-effect of the foreclosure boom is that a lot of renters are getting evicted when their landlords are foreclosed upon. This is crazily inefficient, and it should be stopped.

I'd much rather have the ballgame as the background for the work I'm doing than the debate. Even though we're losing 8-3 to the Yankees and it's only the top of the fourth. Even though a Red Sox loss today would clinch the division for the Rays. Even though Aardsma just hit Giambi on the hand. It's still vastly better for my blood pressure than the other thing.

... and they even spelled my name right! The quote is an amalgam of two actual sentences, but it's a reasonably fair distillation of the conversation I had with the reporter outside the polling place yesterday. And I like how the closing quote from Kerry comes back to what I was saying.

Here's a picture of what W was up to three years ago Friday, while New Orleans was getting clobbered by Katrina.

You might recognize the other fellow in that picture.

In 30 days, it will become legal for same-sex couples to marry in California. In November, there is some chance it will become illegal again, and even a chance that same-sex marriages conducted in the meantime will be invalidated.

If California leaves marriage intact in November we have the potential for a full-faith-and-credit test case as there is no residency restriction there as there is in Massachusetts.

But even if they do pass an amendment, we still have a test case. While California can invalidate marriages performed there, it can't invalidate marriages performed in Massachusetts; it can only refuse to recognize them. California residents are now (or will soon be) allowed to marry here. And the 1913 law is concerned only with legality at the time of the marriage -- once they're married, they'll stay married.

Here's a gamble I'd take if I were Barack Obama.

I'd agree to seat Florida and Michigan according to the rules the Republicans are applying to those states, which is that the number of delegates is reduced by 50%. This is totally in line with the rest of the Democratic party's rules: the later your primary is, the more delegates you get.

The reason to take this gamble is what happens if Michigan gets their do-over. Sure, it's fair. But Hillary probably wins it and because it's in June it gets a disproportionately high number of delegates.

Better to give her back 20 delegates or so than to risk giving her 50. And the PR points might make those numbers back in Pennsylvania.

"I thought he was saying yesterday no whining. So is it no whining or whining? He can't even keep a straight answer on the whining or no whining question. So here's a guy that's taken the no whining position now the whining position."

-- Mike Huckabee, responding to Mitt Romney's, well, whining about the behavior of McCain supporters in West Virginia

After a conversation about election dynamics with Pat Jehlen (who was conveniently holding a Berman sign outside my polling place), I decided to vote for LaFuente as well as White and Berman, but not to vote for Sullivan. Sullivan was reelected, as was Desmond... by 38 votes over LaFuente. So I feel like I did the right thing there. And it's nice that of the returning aldermen Desmond is the vulnerable one.

The Progressive Democrats of Somerville have endorsed only two candidates for Alderman at large: Bill White and Fred Berman. I agree with them, and generally think it'd be nice if Bruce Desmond were not reelected. But I'm not at all convinced that voting for, say, Dennis Sullivan and Tony LaFuente is the right move, for all that Dennis appears to be a reasonable enough guy and Tony seems to have gotten with the progressive program since his last run for office four years ago. Bruce is likely to win election anyway and this year I'm more concerned about electing Fred than I am about defeating Bruce.

phi

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