Brendan Nyhan

Update 7/30 12:51 PM: Pawlenty’s camp claims he was referring to the US corporate tax rate, but that isn’t clear from the context available in either source cited by Politifact. And in any case, the effective corporate tax burden (rather than the statutory rate) is actually relatively low in the US.

The Washington Post reports on a new Kaiser poll showing that the “death panel” myth that plagued debate (PDF) over health care reform is still a significant problem:

The poll found that misconceptions about the legislation persist, including the “death panel” falsehood propagated by opponents of the legislation.

“A year after the town meeting wars of last summer, a striking 36% of seniors said that the law ‘allowed a government panel to make decisions about end of life care for people on Medicare’, and another 17% said they didn’t know,” Kaiser Family Foundation chief executive Drew Altman wrote.

Here’s the question Kaiser asked:

I’m going to read you a list of specific ways the new health reform law may or may not impact Medicare. For each, please tell me if you think it is something the law does or does not do… Would you say the law does or does not allow a government panel to make decisions about end‐of‐life care for people on Medicare?

The question references the charge, made originally by Sarah Palin, that the health care reform bill would create a “death panel” in which bureaucrats decide whether seniors are “worthy of health care.” However, even experts who opposed the plan said the charges were false. While the health care reform law does create an independent board that will make proposals to Congress to restrain Medicare costs, the legislation specifically states that “The proposal shall not include any recommendation to ration health care… or otherwise restrict benefits” (as Media Matters points out). Moreover, these would be systemwide policy changes for Medicare, not specific decisions about end-of-life care for individual patients as Palin suggested.

Here are the crosstabs from the poll in graphical form — it turns out that seniors have somewhat more accurate perceptions than those under 65:

Among the population as a whole, 41% said they believed the law does allow a government panel to make decisions about end‐of‐life care for people on Medicare and an additional 16% said they didn’t know. The corresponding figures were 43% and 16% for those under 65 and 36% and 17% for those who are 65 years or older.

As expected, motivated reasoning appears to play an important role in the persistence of the misperception. Kaiser found that “those [seniors] with an unfavorable view are … more likely to incorrectly think the law includes cuts in benefits or that it allows a government panel to make end‐of‐life care decisions.” 55% of seniors with an unfavorable view of the law believed in the death panel myth, while only 17% of those with a favorable view did so.

For more analysis of the development of the death panel myth and the reasons it is so difficult to correct, see my article “Why the ‘Death Panel’ Myth Wouldn’t Die: Misinformation in the Health Care Reform Debate (PDF) from a recent issue of The Forum.

[Cross-posted at Pollster.com]

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg demolishes the arguments made against the National Popular Vote proposal by Tara Ross, author of Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College, at a recent Cato Institute debate
(via Jon Chait):

Ms. Ross argues that [National Popular Vote] would undermine the two-party system. She says that there would be “five, six, ten Presidential candidates in elections. There’s no reason for there not to be.” As a result, she says, we would end up with a President elected with fifteen per cent (“or it might be twenty per cent, or whatever”) of the popular vote.

In reality, there is a very good “reason for there not to be.” The domination of two large, coalition-like parties is a function of the fact that there can be only one winner of a Presidential election. If it were remotely true that popular-vote elections cause parties to proliferate, then you would expect to find examples of this phenomenon. Since all fifty states elect their governors this way, there ought to be at least a couple that have, or have ever had, this problem. If the problem is a function of size—the larger the electorate, the more likely parties are to proliferate—you would expect to find such proliferation in, say, at least one of the four largest states, each of which is more populous than the entire country was in 1840. You find no such thing. It doesn’t happen in California (pop. thirty-seven million), it doesn’t happen in Wyoming (pop. half a million), and it wouldn’t happen in the United States of America (pop. three hundred million).

So that argument is merely untrue. A second argument—that N.P.V. would empower regional candidates—goes further: it is the exact opposite of the truth. Do I really need to explain why awarding a hundred per cent of a state’s electors to the plurality winner in that state favors candidates whose appeal is regional as opposed to national? “The George Wallaces of the world, which right now have basically no impact on national elections, would have a much larger voice,” she argues. No impact? In 1968, Wallace, whose appeal was regional, got 13.5 per cent of the popular vote and 46 electoral votes. In 1992, Ross Perot, whose appeal was national, got 18.9 per cent of the popular vote and zero electoral votes.

Ross’s argument displays a disturbing failure to grasp basic principles of political science. The reason that we wouldn’t observe a proliferation of candidates under a popular vote system is what’s known as Duverger’s Law, which pundits who hype third-party candidates repeatedly fail to grasp. As one textbook puts it, “In any election where a single winner is chosen by plurality vote (whoever gets the most votes wins), there is a strong tendency for serious competitors to be reduced to two because people tend to vote strategically.” In short, most voters do not want to waste their votes, and the contest is almost always winnowed to the two strongest candidates. Moving from the Electoral College to a popular vote system would not change this dynamic. Indeed, as Hertzberg notes, it might make it stronger by eliminating the possibility of regional candidates capturing a handful of electoral votes.

Update 8/2 11:03 AM: Hertzberg has posted a response to a comment by Rob below. See also Jon Chait for more on the weakness of pro-Electoral College arguments.

Since he became a serious contender for president in 2008, Barack Obama has faced a long string of accusations that he is disloyal to this country. The latest examples come from a pair of virulent Washington Times op-eds by Tom Tancredo, a former Republican House member now running for governor in Colorado as a third-party candidate, and Jeffrey T. Kuhner of the Edmund Burke Institute.

As Media Matters points out, both Tancredo and Kuhner suggest that Obama is a threat to the United States (while making numerous misleading, unsupported, and false claims). Tancredo, for instance, calls Obama “a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda” and “a dedicated enemy of the Constitution”:

For the first time in American history, we have a man in the White House who consciously and brazenly disregards his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. That’s why I say the greatest threat to our Constitution, our safety and our liberties, is internal. Our president is an enemy of our Constitution, and, as such, he is a danger to our safety, our security and our personal freedoms…

When one considers the combination of his stop-at-nothing attitude, his contempt for limited government, his appointment of judges who want to create law rather than interpret it – all of these make this president today’s single greatest threat to the great experiment in freedom that is our republic.

Yes, Mr. Obama is a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda. We know that Osama bin Laden and followers want to kill us, but at least they are an outside force against whom we can offer our best defense. But when a dedicated enemy of the Constitution is working from the inside, we face a far more dangerous threat. Mr. Obama can accomplish with the stroke of his pen what bin Laden cannot accomplish with bombs and insurgents.

Amazingly, Kuhner goes even further, calling Obama an “usurper” who is creating “a socialist dictatorship” and has engaged in “treasonous” behavior by suing Arizona over its immigration law:

President Obama has engaged in numerous high crimes and misdemeanors. The Democratic majority in Congress is in peril as Americans reject his agenda. Yet more must be done: Mr. Obama should be impeached.

He is slowly – piece by painful piece – erecting a socialist dictatorship. We are not there – yet. But he is putting America on that dangerous path. He is undermining our constitutional system of checks and balances; subverting democratic procedures and the rule of law; presiding over a corrupt, gangster regime; and assaulting the very pillars of traditional capitalism. Like Venezuela’s leftist strongman, Hugo Chavez, Mr. Obama is bent on imposing a revolution from above – one that is polarizing America along racial, political and ideological lines…

Mr. Obama’s multicultural socialism seeks to eradicate traditional America…

Rather than defending our homeland, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department has sued Arizona for its immigration law. He is siding with criminals against his fellow Americans. His actions desecrate his constitutional oath to protect U.S. citizens from enemies foreign and domestic. He is thus encouraging more illegal immigration as Washington refuses to protect our borders. Mr. Obama’s decision on this case is treasonous…

Corruption in the administration is rampant. Washington no longer has a government; rather, it has a gangster regime…

Like all radical revolutionaries, he is consumed by the pursuit of power – attaining it, wielding it and maximizing it. Mr. Obama’s fledgling thug state must be stopped…

Mr. Obama has betrayed the American people. Impeachment is the only answer. This usurper must fall.

I’ve added Tancredo and Kuhner’s statements to my timeline of smears against Obama’s loyalty.

Is Sarah Palin too polarizing to be elected president? This has become a central question in political commentary on the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential nominee. What people often fail to recognize, however, is that the debate over Palin’s electability mirrors the debate over Hillary Clinton’s electability during the 2006-2008 period.

Clinton may have a very different personal background from Palin, but both women share a common characteristic — they have sharply polarizing public profiles. However, as this plot of Gallup data illustrates, they managed their image very differently during the pre-campaign period:

Between 2001 and 2006, Clinton largely kept her head down and worked hard as a senator, building relationships with her Republican colleagues and avoiding high-profile controversies. As a result, much of the anti-Hillary sentiment that had built up during the 1990s remained latent, allowing her to cultivate elite support for a campaign that came extremely close to securing the Democratic nomination.

By contrast, Palin’s repeated engagement in high-profile media controversies has reduced her public support from the low levels she had reached by the end of the 2008 campaign (when she may have hurt John McCain significantly). Even before she comes under fire from other Republicans (as she eventually will if she runs), more of the public has an unfavorable impression of her than has a favorable one.

All is not lost for Palin, however. Though Clinton started 2007 as a less polarizing figure than Palin, the public quickly reverted to being sharply divided about her as she began to campaign actively for the Democratic nomination. Assuming Palin’s remaining supporters will stick by her, she may end up with a similar profile in April 2011 as Hillary had in April 2007. In that case, a successful nomination campaign is plausible (and even a general election victory if the economy is in bad enough shape). However, her failure to improve her image during this pre-primary period may cost her the elite support she needs to win the GOP nomination.

Update 7/27 12:34 PM: It’s of course possible that Palin isn’t going to run for preisdent, which would certainly help explain her decision to do things like filming a reality TV episode with Kate Gosselin rather than developing her policy resume.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

Writing in the New York Times, Matt Bai downplays the role of the economy in President Obama’s current political struggles, arguing that “[i]t’s just as likely… that much of the dissatisfaction with the governing party” is the result of Democrats having “failed to establish a rationale for such expansive measures [as the stimulus bill and health care] during the campaign”:

Mr. Obama inherited a perilous economy from his predecessor, and his party has passed a series of consequential laws… yet all indications are that voters in much of the country — and particularly independent voters — remain furious with Democratic incumbents.

There are several trendy explanations for this “paradox,” as commentators have taken to calling it. Conservatives posit that the problem is ideological — that laws enacted by Congress have simply been too liberal for the voters. The president’s allies, meanwhile, suggest that voters are blaming the party in power for a stubbornly sluggish economy…

It’s just as likely, though, that much of the dissatisfaction with the governing party can be traced back to this whole choice-versus-referendum conundrum…

[In 2006] Democrats issued a pamphlet with gauzy notions of “broad prosperity” and health care for all, but almost nothing by way of specific policies or the costs involved. This campaign-by-referendum worked so well that Democrats barely altered the formula in 2008, when Mr. Obama and his party’s Congressional candidates ran, successfully, under the vague banner of “change.”

The problem with this strategy was that “change” meant wildly different things to different people, and neither of these elections amounted to a mandate for any discernible set of choices. The stimulus bill and the health care law may or may not have been good policy, but the sheer scope and cost of those agenda items seemed to jolt a lot of the independent voters who had conditionally supported Mr. Obama. Having failed to establish a rationale for such expansive measures during the campaign, Democrats were easily caricatured by their adversaries as a bunch of 1970s liberals who would spend money wherever they could.

It’s not clear to me why Bai thinks Obama would be more popular if he had been more specific during the campaign. Ronald Reagan was arguably more clear than Obama in 1980 about the agenda he would pursue as president and was very successful in changing the direction of federal budget and tax policy once in office. And yet, given a similarly difficult economic situation, his approval trajectory was virtually identical to Obama’s (PDF):

Indeed, the 1980 election was widely considered to be an electoral mandate at the time. So the fact that Reagan’s initial legislative success didn’t translate into increased popularity during his second year is a problem for Bai’s argument.

One difference is that Reagan, unlike Obama, faced divided government, which limited his ability to enact his agenda. We could thus consider the other president who was widely considered to have received a mandate — Lyndon Johnson, who won a landslide victory against Barry Goldwater in 1964. Under a unified Democratic Congress (like Obama), he was even more successful in passing an expansive legislative agenda, and yet his approval ratings declined significantly through 1965-1966 (albeit from a very high starting point).

What Bai doesn’t seem to realize is that elections do not ever indicate the will of the people in some well-defined sense (there is a vast technical literature on this point). The best political science research to date convincingly argues that mandates should be viewed as a social construction. Moreover, it’s not clear that presidents enact legislation intended to make them more popular. Contemporary presidents tend to pursue the agenda of their party, not the median voter. Finally, the public mood tends to shift in the opposite direction of the party in power. For all of these reasons, the appealing notion that presidential candidates will propose an agenda, enact that agenda in office, and be rewarded by the electorate for doing so rarely occurs in practice.

More importantly, given the primacy of the economy in structuring the public’s view of politics, the idea that “much of the dissatisfaction with the governing party” could have been eliminated by simply “establish[ing] a rationale” for Obama’s agenda during the campaign is implausible. Even if Obama and the Democrats could have anticipated the need for a stimulus bill and proposed one during the campaign, it’s not clear that voters would be satisfied — unemployment is still very high. And Obama did campaign on health care reform (albeit not in the exact form that was enacted).

In short, Bai’s article is yet another invented explanation for Obama’s current political standing.

Update 7/22 9:36 PM: Jonathan Bernstein also notes that “Obama had lots and lots of very specific campaign proposals… and he did, in fact, campaign on those proposals” and “all bill[s] are easily caricatured” regardless of whether you talk about them during the campaign.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]