The GOP image problem explained in one poll

According to a recent Pulse Opinion Research poll, 55% of likely voters support a plan that "does not raise taxes, cuts $5 trillion and balances budget. Only 28% support a plan that has "$1 Trillion in Tax Hikes & 100 Billion in cuts that does not balance budget". The first of those is the Paul Ryan House GOP budget. The second is the Patty Murray Senate Democrat budget.

The second question is about how to reduce the deficit generally. An even larger majority, 65%, said it should be done mostly by cutting spending (the GOP plan), while only 24% said it should be done mostly by raising taxes (the Democrat plan).

It would make sense then if a majority of people said they approved of the GOP on budget issues, right? Wrong. In the same poll, only 30% support Republicans more on the budget. The plurality, 35%, actually support Democrats. Actually 4% more people support neither party more than Republicans (technically, this is the correct position based on history).

This captures the Republican problem perfectly. Even if it's just this one issue, the vast majority of people support the Republican approach, but less than half of that majority supports the party on the issue. There are two possible explanations for this: 1) the GOP's message on the budget isn't clear, so people don't realize it's the GOP plan they support, or 2) the GOP itself is so unpopular that people can't bring themselves to identify with it even on an issue where they agree. Given that Congress has been debating almost nothing but the budget and how to fix the deficit for the last three years, #1 is simply impossible. If anything, anything has gotten through the media filter as the primary GOP message, it's "cut spending".

That leaves only reason #2. The GOP brand is so damaged that even when people agree with them they refuse to admit it. There's more evidence for this phenomenon too.

One of the major problems with thinking on the right during the last election cycle was our assumption that the polls were wrong, that they were oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans, thus being skewed to show Obama winning when he wasn't. This obviously wasn't the case, as the final polls turned out to be extremely accurate on Election Day. Then what was the problem? Why did we question the sample? Because people refuse to identify as Republicans. The polls weren't undersampling Republicans, Republicans were hidden as Independents. So when places like Gallup found huge support for Romney among Independents, they were actually mostly just Republican-leaners who preferred not to identify with the party.

So how do we get people to stop hating the GOP again? Well, we could start by not doing things like this, this, and this. The official RNC post-mortem report on the election and what went wrong was just released this morning. It's certainly not all what I would suggest, but it's a good start. Elections are by definition an organic thing. People have many reasons for supporting parties and candidates at every level (well, some just one), and thousands of things happen each election cycle to affect the outcome. The final result can't be controlled by the party or even the candidate at the top of the ticket, but we should definitely find those things that we can control and do better there.

CPAC's Most Fabulous Panel, or, Why you should embrace the gay right for what they are

There are many, especially on the left, skeptical of the marriage equality movement's sudden momentum on the right. From Dick Cheney to GOProud to Rob Portman, some of the most prominent voices for conservative support of gay marriage have been shouted down from all sides. This is counterproductive to both marriage equality and to conservatism itself. I realize blind partisans have the knives out for anyone with a different letter designation following their name, but on issues where we agree, we should find support and encouragement, not knee-jerk hostility.

For those who remain skeptical of conservatives' and libertarians' sincerity in supporting marriage equality, I present the following:

This was the rogue CPAC panel hosted by CEI, a free enterprise think-tank, to discuss issues on the gay right, especially intra-movement tolerance and marriage equality. Those involved were some of the biggest names in conservative thought and Republican politics, not just fringe libertarians who would naturally support gay marriage anyway. Jonah Goldberg, editor at the conservative publication, National Review. Jen Rubin, the conservative voice at the Washington Post. Liz Mair, digital campaign strategist for several high profile candidates. Margaret Hoover, one of the most eloquent conservative voices on CNN. And last but not least, Jimmy LaSalvia, founder of GOProud, himself a campaign visionary and thought leader who has been pushing on these issues for years.

The thing is, these leaders aren't pushing the GOP or conservatism to the left to meet gay marriage. They're moving gay marriage to the right, making the case that supporting marriage for anyone is by definition socially conservative. This isn't an issue of compromising to win elections or surrendering an issue for good media coverage. There is real and growing momentum on the right to support marriage equality, and really broader civil rights and liberties across the board. GOProud's fight, this star-studded panel, and the high profile fight about the issue at CPAC is evidence enough.

As I've been saying for years, and one of the panelists here echoed, this issue is a demographic one that will seem quaint and anachronistic to debate in just a few years. Those on the left would be wise to support us on it, and those on the right who don't would be wise to get out of the way.

Rand Paul's New GOP

After his recent 13-hour lightning rod filibuster, everyone expected Rand Paul's welcome at CPAC just two weeks later to be raucous, but no one knew just how far he would push his message. After his speech today, now we know - he's going the full libertarian.

Opening his remarks by complaining about how he had only been given 10 minutes, Rand rehashed the drone issue, civil liberties, and the Bill of Rights. It started to fall flat, and I feared he would lose the great  momentum that he's had recently. Then, just as he needed to do, he transitioned the civil liberties message into a broader platform of what he branded the "new GOP". He talked about gun rights, his upcoming Senate budget proposal (he also introduced them the last two years, both of which failed in the Democrat-controlled chamber), which would eliminate the Department of Education and return many other programs back to the states, bailouts, tax rates (cut corporate in half, 17% flat personal income rate), and marijuana decriminalization. Yes, you read that right. He actually went there.

The most succinct way to put it he did himself:

"The new GOP will need to embrace liberty in both the economic and the personal sphere."

This is as explicit a call as any elected Republican has made to move the party in the libertarian direction that it's destined by demographics to take anyway. And the junior Senator from Kentucky isn't wasting any time making himself into the face of that brand.

Many of the "stale and moss-covered" (as he put it) in the party will not be comfortable with this new direction, but that's the point. The younger half of the right is strongly libertarian, not traditionally conservative. If the GOP wants to win elections again, even with its own side, it must evolve, and fast.

CPAC: Choices

This guy is speaking at CPAC:

The term “gay conservative” is being used by some news outlets in connection with the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and whether certain homosexual groups should be invited to appear. There is no such thing as a “gay conservative,” unless the term “conservative” has lost all meaning. But there is a homosexual movement that has its roots in Marxism and is characterized by anti-Americanism and hatred of Christian values. 

This guy is not:

It's good to be New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. A new Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday shows the Republican with a sky-high approval rating of 74 percent -- the highest a Garden State governor has ever recorded in the 17-year history of the Quinnipiac poll -- and he leads his likely Democratic opponent, state Sen. Barbara Buono, by 37 percentage points.

Any questions?

I have one. Why are you giving these people your money?

Mr Paul Goes to Washington

At 11:47 am EST, Rand Paul began his filibuster of the John Brennan nomination for CIA Director in order to get precise answers from the Obama administration about their perceived constitutionality of assassinating American citizens on American soil by drone strike. When he began, he stood alone.

Within two hours, he was joined by two other "Tea Party" firebrands, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz.

At 12:08 am EST, more than 12 hours later as I write this, almost the entire GOP caucus, and at least two Democrats, have joined him on the floor of the Senate. More than a dozen Senators have spoken in support, including minority leader McConnell, Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Democrat Dick Durban of Illinois.

Rand Paul, not long ago a near-pariah of the GOP establishment in Washington, has in the last 12 hours united the entire party behind him in this crusade, brought along a sizable force of the honest civil libertarian left, and shown that Republicans can lead and lead effectively, honestly, and honorably in defense of liberty and the Constitution that protects it.

Rand Paul is now the de facto head of the Republican Party.

"All the power is yours. You need only reach out and take it." -Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish

Victory or purity?

Ramesh Ponnuru has a fascinating piece at Bloomberg today asking whether conservatives really want to win elections.

People who want to see American politics take a turn to the right, and a few who don’t, have been giving a lot of advice to conservatives lately. Move this way on the social issues; move that way on economics; get more technology-savvy. You've heard it all, sometimes from me. 

Maybe all this advice is based on a false premise. We've been assuming that conservatives want to start winning political and policy victories again. But a few news items from last week suggest that many of them have different priorities.

Read the whole thing.

We've long known that some conservatives care more about being right and choosing the ideologically correct candidates than winning. If their candidate doesn't win the primary, they threaten to stay home. If the party's nominee has the wrong views (most often on abortion), they're just as bad as the other guy. If we just lose this one election, the other guy will be proven to be a massive failure, the country will learn its lesson, and we'll win big next time. That might have looked like a viable strategy after what happened in 2010, but after 2012 it's been proven to be dead wrong.

So where does this all come from? Why would some conservatives rather be right than win? And more importantly why do some seem to relish being in the minority? I think part of it can be traced back to the Christian and evangelical prominence within the movement. The Bible is full of praise for victim status, and most importantly for our discussion, perception of and satisfaction in persecution, and instructions to sacrifice worldly things (election victories?) in order to follow the faith (ideological purity?). I'm not saying that Christian conservatives are actively forsaking campaigning and winning elections for their faith, but if you combine these spiritual guidelines in the foundation of your philosophical outlook, it's easy to see how for the party whose support literally correlates with religiosity it becomes second nature to accept victimhood as your lot in life, even politically. Somehow the idea still finds traction that Christianity is widely persecuted in a country that's over 75% Christian. If people can believe that in national religious terms, it would be even easier to translate into political terms, where the coalitions are much smaller and more tenuous.

Unfortunately, as the parties increasingly split on religious terms, this phenomenon may become even more prominent, and Republicans may settle into the comfortable role of permanent minority. Sadly that seems to be just fine for some, as long as they're right.

Think Progress builds a narrative

On Twitter today, I came across this post from statist blog, Think Progress, the"journalistic" arm of Democratic "think" tank, Center for American Progress. It's a perfect encapsulation of how a media narrative gets constructed using data distortion, correlation instead of causation, and confirmation bias.

HIV Infection Is Most Concentrated In The South, Where Students Don’t Learn About It In School: The CDC’s most recent HIV Surveillance Report contains the first-ever comprehensive data set allowing researchers to map HIV infections across the entire country.

They include the following CDC map of the data, which makes their headline and "conclusion" seem self-evident:

WOW! Look at all that dark shading covering the whole South (except Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia...)! Even a moron can see that the South (and by extension conservatism) has an HIV problem. And that's exactly the problem. They want you to use the critical thinking skills of a moron, see the obvious pattern, add the obvious conclusion to your mental catalog of ideological reference material, share it with a few friends, and move on. But let's look further.

Notice the ranges of infection used in shading. The lightest shade covers roughly 0-5 infections per 100,000 people, the next covers 5-10, the next 10-20, and the next...20-180??? So two categories are groups of 5 infections per population, one is 10, the darkest shade covers a range of 160? That's a perfect example of skewed data. Why would you group 20-180 all together? Why not 20-30, 30-40, and so on?

Let's look at the data itself to find out why. The rate of infection for all states ranges from 1.9 (Utah) to 30.6 (Maryland). The outlier is the District of Columbia at 155.6. DC being entirely urban has a naturally high rate of infection, as any urban area would. So let's toss that out. We'll also then adjust the shades so that they're a more equal representation of the data. Voila:

Not a huge change, but it certainly dilutes the premise of the article. You could go even further by splitting it into all groups of 5 instead of two groups of 5 and two of 10. Regardless, it's not really "the South" that has an HIV problem, it's Louisiana and Maryland. "The South" has a roughly equivalent HIV problem as New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. In fact, only three states in the South have higher infection rates than New York - Louisiana, Georgia, Florida.

While the map has problems, the real logical leaps here come with the connection of HIV infection rates to HIV education policies. I don't have access to statistical analysis software, but it doesn't seem the Think Progress author did either, as there is no actual correlation drawn, only enthusiastically assumed. TP uses data from the Guttmacher Institute showing which states mandate sex ed in their curricula, and specifically HIV education. They then make a broad statement about how few states mandate sex/HIV ed without even attempting to correlate the data. It turns out that's because they couldn't if they tried.

Nationally, 33 states require HIV education in their curricula. Only three of the thirteen states with infection rates of 20+ aren't on that list. If there were a correlation between lack of HIV education and HIV infection rates, this data doesn't show that, even less the implied causation. In fact, of the five states with the highest infection rates (Maryland, Louisiana, New York, Florida, Georgia), three have mandated HIV ed, and one (Georgia...in the South!) has mandated sex and HIV ed. Another talking point bites the dust.

There's actually a much more obvious correlation to be drawn from the CDC data and map. What else correlates strongly with most of the darker shaded states on the above map? The politically correct Think Progress wouldn't dare to say it - African-Americans.

It has long been an unfortunate scientific fact that HIV infection is much higher in the black community than any other ethnicity. According to the CDC, there were 12,500 new HIV infections in the white population in 2010. There were 20,550 in the black population, which is only 13% of the total population! In terms of the infection map, of the 13 states with more than 15% African-American population, only 4 (Virginia, Tennessee, Delaware, Arkansas) aren't in the darkest shaded areas, though they're all in the next group down. This isn't an exact correlation either, of course. The state with the highest ratio black population, Mississippi, has "only" the 6th highest HIV infection rate.

That's the trouble with drawing fast conclusions from data like this; it's impossible. Even if we know the main factors that lead to these things, they're difficult to quantify, and even more difficult to analyze. But instead of looking at the data and trying to transmit important information clearly to their readers, Think Progress looked at a map that had a lot of Southern (read: conservative) states highlighted and shrieked, "OOH! Bias confirmed!"