Who do the betting markets think will win today?

If your money is on the line you might be a bit more careful.

- Betfair.
- PredictIt.
- Hypermind.

From the New York Times: Spread of Early Voting Is Forging New Habits and Campaign Tactics

As many as 50 million people may have voted early, and since this has become increasingly commonplace, it has altered campaign tactics - as is reported below.

Early voting is also an example of what we refer to in 2306 as policy diffusion. A policy developed in one state that is adopted by others.

- Click here for the article.

In 1977, a flood control measure on the ballot in Monterey, Calif., became what historians say was the first modern American election decided by people who voted before Election Day.

It was a strange moment even for some who participated; elections had traditionally been a kind of civic gathering, on one day.

But the practice caught on with voters, and it eventually spread from the West Coast to 37 states and the District of Columbia. Today, at least 43 million Americans have already voted in the presidential election. And when the ballots are tallied nationwide Tuesday evening, more than one-third of them will have come from people who voted early — a record.

Voting before Election Day has become so commonplace that it is reshaping how campaigns are waged, and how Americans see the race in its final, frantic days.

“The idea that one wakes up and it’s Election Day in America is actually a rather quaint idea now,” said Russ Schriefer, a Republican consultant who has worked on presidential campaigns for two decades. “It is as much as a monthlong process to draw people in. And so your advertising tactics, your messaging tactics and certainly your ground game have changed completely.”

The spread of early balloting is forging new habits that are forcing campaigns to rethink how they allocate their resources. And it tends to favor those campaigns that are more technologically sophisticated and can identify, draw out and measure its support over a longer voting period.

In Florida, a battleground state where just a few hundred votes can tip an election and victory can guarantee the White House, new behaviors are rapidly taking hold. Hispanics, who have tended to turn out mostly on Election Day, are voting earlier in much larger numbers this year, after a major Democratic-led effort to mobilize them. This is especially true among young and first-time Hispanic voters, who are just forming their voting habits and are likely to retain the practice of casting ballots early, according to those who study early voting.

That will mean that future campaigns will need to further adapt and dedicate more time and money to chasing votes up to six weeks before Election Day.

The Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency

I thought this would be appropriate to discuss today - no matter who wins the presidency, they will be saddled with all the promises they made during the campaign. The bulk of these promises are beyond the ability of presidents to do. So we're going to be disappointed no matter what, but is that because we expect too much of the occupant of the office - and offices hemmed in by checks and balances?

The Green Lantern Theory was developed during the Bush Administration to come to terms with this tendency to think that sheer will on the part of the president to solve all the problems in the middle east, and extended to the Obama Administration to think that similar will was all that was needed to solve social and economic problems.

- Here's the heart of the theory:

Up at Cato Unbound you can find Reuel Marc Gerecht's latest argument for bombing Iran. I think I've covered the policy arguments on this score extensively elsewhere, so let me just note something in particular about Gerecht's essay. Like a lot of conservative writing on foreign affairs it puts a huge amount of weight on things like will, resolve, and perceptions of strength and weakness. It's a view of things that reminds me of nothing so much as the Green Lantern comics, which I enjoy a great deal but regard as a poor guide to national security policy.

As you may know, the Green Lantern Corps is a sort of interstellar peacekeeping force set up by the Guardians of Oa to maintain the peace and defend justice. It recruits members from all sorts of different species and equips them with the most powerful weapon in the universe, the power ring.

The ring is a bit goofy. Basically, it lets its bearer generate streams of green energy that can take on all kinds of shapes. The important point is that, when fully charged what the ring can do is limited only by the stipulation that it create green stuff and by the user's combination of will and imagination. Consequently, the main criterion for becoming a Green Lantern is that you need to be a person capable of "overcoming fear" which allows you to unleash the ring's full capacities. It used to be the case that the rings wouldn't function against yellow objects, but this is now understood to be a consequence of the "Parallax fear anomaly" which, along with all the ring's other limits, can be overcome with sufficient willpower.

Suffice it to say that I think all this makes an okay premise for a comic book. But a lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.

What's more, this theory can't be empirically demonstrated to be wrong. Things that you or I might take as demonstrating the limited utility of military power to accomplish certain kinds of things are, instead, taken as evidence of lack of will. Thus we see that problems in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't reasons to avoid new military ventures, but reasons why we must embark upon them: "Add a failure in Iran to a failure in Iraq to a failure in Afghanistan, and we could supercharge Islamic radicalism in a way never before seen.

For more: The Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency, explained.

What happens to the Supreme Court after the election?

Some - not all - Republican Senators promise to block all nomination to the court if Clinton wins.

- ScotusBlog offers the following thoughts.

At Reuters, Lawrence Hurley reports that several “intriguing scenarios could unfold after Tuesday’s U.S. election to break the deadlock over filling a Supreme Court vacancy that has provoked a bitter nine-month standoff between President Barack Obama and Senate Republicans.” Burgess Everett reports in Politico that Republican Sen. David Perdue has called “plans for a unilateral blockade” of Supreme Court nominations if Hillary Clinton is elected tomorrow a “’dereliction of duty.’”At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick breaks down the Senate Republicans who have spoken out recently about the possibility of a blockade, into “two distinct teams,” listing the members of what she terms “Team Obstruction” and “Team Responsible Governance,” and hoping that the latter “team wins the day.” At Think Progress, Ian Millhiser contends that a blockade would precipitate a “constitutional crisis.” But in an op-ed in The Hill, Chris Bryant contends that an eight-member court offers advantages, observing that “the Justices are obliged to cooperate and driven to rule on narrow grounds, disposing of the actual cases that come before them while refraining from sweeping pronouncements,” and suggesting that this enforced moderation promises “in turn to diminish, over time, the intense divisiveness currently characterizing Supreme Court nominations.”

In a New York Daily News op-ed, Rick Hasen argues that the election constitutes “an all-out ideological war over the future of the Supreme Court.” Additional commentary on the court and the election comes from the editorial board of The New York Times, which argues that in “the next Congress, regardless of who wins on Tuesday, the very survival of the court as an independent body will be at stake.” More pleas to keep the Supreme Court nomination process free from partisan politics come from the editorial boards of the Chicago Sun-Times and the Boston Globe, and the Walla-Walla Union-Bulletin. In an op-ed for Bloomberg, Jonathan Bernstein argues that if “there’s ever any hope for effective conservative government in the U.S., the first job is to reclaim the Republican Party for conservatives who actually try to do the hard work of governing.”

Fair Housing Act

The previous post referred to it.

Here's background.

- Wikipedia: Fair Housing Act.

The Fair Housing Act is a federal act in the United States intended to protect the buyer or renter of a dwelling from seller or landlord discrimination. Its primary prohibition makes it unlawful to refuse to sell, rent to, or negotiate with any person because of that person's inclusion in a protected class. The goal is a unitary housing market in which a person's background (as opposed to financial resources) does not arbitrarily restrict access. Calls for open housing were issued early in the twentieth century, but it was not until after World War II that concerted efforts to achieve it were undertaken.

The legislation was the culmination of a civil rights campaign against housing discrimination in the United States and was approved, at the urging of President Lyndon B. Johnson, only one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Fair Housing Act was enacted as Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and codified at 42 U.S.C. 3601-3619, with penalties for violation at 42 U.S.C. 3631. It is enforced by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Since it was part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, here's a link to background on it:

The Civil Rights Act of 1968, (Pub.L. 90–284, 82 Stat. 73, enacted April 11, 1968) is a landmark part of legislation in the United States that provided for equal housing opportunities regardless of race, creed, or national origin and made it a federal crime to “by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone … by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin.”[1] The Act was signed into lawduring the King assassination riots by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had previously signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law.

Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 is commonly known as the Fair Housing Act and was meant as a follow‑up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibited discrimination in housing, there were no federal enforcement provisions.[2] The 1968 act expanded on previous acts and prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, and since 1974, gender; since 1988, the act protects people with disabilities and families with children.

Victims of discrimination may use both the 1968 act and the 1866 act via section 1983[3] to seek redress. The 1968 act provides for federal solutions while the 1866 act provides for private solutions (i.e., civil suits).

Titles II through VII comprised the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, which applies to the Native Americantribes of the United States and makes many, but not all, of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights applicable within the tribes[4] (that Act appears today in Title 25, sections 1301 to 1303 of the United States Code).

A rider attached to the bill makes it a felony to "travel in interstate commerce...with the intent to incite, promote, encourage, participate in and carry on a riot". This provision has been criticized for "equating organized political protest with organized violence".[

Guess who doesn't care that its election day?

The Supreme Court.

I might be making too much of this, but they always seem to argue cases on election day. I take it as a sign that they present themselves as immune to politics. The cases they are hearing touch on issue we will raise in the sections on economic and social welfare policymaking (specifically the Fair Housing Act) - as well as items we covered in civil rights and the equal protection clause.

From ScotusBlog:

- Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami
- Wells Fargo & Co. v. City of Miami

And a description of the case, also from ScotusBlog:

This one from the Washington Post might be more accessible.

- To recoup losses from the housing collapse, Miami pursues a novel suit.

The housing collapse of 2008 nearly broke the city of Miami. Now, its leaders have embarked on a novel and aggressive legal strategy to recoup losses from the big banks they say created the crisis with discriminatory and predatory lending practices.

It is a high-stakes effort that is being encouraged by many cities, and the banks Tuesday will ask the Supreme Court to stop it before it takes root.

Miami sued Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup under the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which bars discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of housing. The law states its purpose as providing for fair housing “throughout the United States.”

The city says that it can prove the lending institutions discriminated against Hispanic and African American residents by directing them into high-interest, risky loans. The resulting defaults destabilized Miami’s poorest neighborhoods, and the resulting loss of tax revenue sent the city to the brink of bankruptcy, they say.

In Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, another vacant property is torn down. (Angel Valentin/For The Washington Post)

“It took us three years to really start recovering,” said Miami Commissioner Francis Suarez. “We decided unanimously as a commission that we wanted to hold the banks responsible for their lending practices, which we learned were discriminatory in nature.”

Banks have been sued by individuals and taken to task by the federal government for lending practices, but these new cases are the first in which cities are the plaintiffs and are demanding that banks be held accountable for harming their communities.
The banks counter that there is a reason such Fair Housing Act suits are novel: Congress never intended for the law to be used for such purposes.

“Municipal suits like this one were unheard of until recently, when enterprising contingency-fee counsel began pushing them,” Bank of America told the court in its brief.
The banks warn of a “trickle-down” approach that would let anyone affected by a neighborhood in decline — from the next-door neighbor to the corner dry cleaner — to sue under the act.

From the Texas Tribune: Report: Texas has closed most polling places since court ruling

Another reason voter turnout tends to be low in the state.

And another consequence of Shelby v Holder.

- Click here for the article.

Five Texas counties rank among the top 10 nationwide for closing the greatest percentage of their polling places since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, according to a new report released less than a week before Election Day.

And taken together, Texas counties have closed more polling places than any other state, the report found.

According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a civil rights advocacy group, since the high court found Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional — ruling that Texas and other states with history of racial discrimination no longer needed federal pre-clearance when changing election laws — Texas counties have closed at least 403 polling places. This will be the first election in 50 years conducted without the full force of the Voting Rights Act.

Fisher, Medina, Aransas and Coke and Irion counties ranked the highest in polling place reductions, closing more than half of their voting locations.

- Click here for the Great Poll Closure.

From BallotPedia: 2016 State and Local Ballot Measures

- Click here for state measures.

In 2016, 162 statewide ballot measures have been certified for the ballot in 35 states. Of these measures, 71 were put on the ballot by citizens through signature petitions, rather than by state legislatures. Eight measures were on pre-november elections, leaving 154 measures for statewide ballots in November.

- Click here for local measures.

From ProPublica: Clay Pigeons: How Lobbyists Secretly Woo Top Election Officials - Secretaries of state, who oversee ballot measures on topics from gun control to the minimum wage, are increasingly courted by interest groups and industries with billions of dollars at stake.

If elections are indeed rigged, this might be why.

- Click here for the article.

Big-money corporate lobbying has reached into one of the most obscure corners of state government: the offices of secretaries of state, the people charged with running elections impartially.

The targeting of secretaries of state with campaign donations, corporate-funded weekend outings and secret meetings with industry lobbyists reflects an intense focus on often overlooked ballot questions, which the secretaries frequently help write.

The ballot initiatives are meant to give voters a direct voice on policy issues such as the minimum wage and the environment. But corporate and other special interests are doing their best to build close ties with the secretaries because a difference of even a few words on a ballot measure can have an enormous impact on the outcome.

The influence campaign has intensified, with more citizen-driven ballot initiatives to be decided on Election Day this year than at any time in the past decade.

Emails and internal memos show top election officials soliciting industry groups for contributions specifically because they are facing unfavorable ballot initiatives. Read more.

Secretaries of state from Washington, Ohio, Colorado and Nevada — all Republicans — participated in closed-door meetings in May with representatives from Reynolds American, the nation’s second-largest tobacco company; the National Restaurant Association; and the National Rifle Association, while ballot initiative signatures in those states were still being collected, documents obtained through open records requests show.

At a weekend retreat last month at a hunting lodge in Kansas, Republican secretaries of state mingled with donors, including a representative from Koch Industries, as they shot pheasant and clay pigeons. The owners of Koch Industries — Charles G. and David H. Koch — have funded groups involved in several ballot initiative fights this year, including over a solar energy measure in Florida.

“The Koch brothers out with the Republican secretaries of state — that’s a news story I don’t need,” Allen Richardson, a Koch lobbyist, joked, unaware that a reporter was in attendance.

Groups aligned with Democrats have also targeted secretaries of state, mobilizing during the 2014 campaign to try to elect more officials sympathetic to their causes.

From the Pew Research Center: Confidence in election, views of U.S. democracy

Since questions have been raised about the integrity of the electoral process, it might be appropriate to look at the views different groups have towards the norms of democracy.

- Click here for the article.

Overall, a majority of voters say they have a great deal (32%) or fair amount (32%) of confidence that the presidential election will be open and fair. About one-in-three (35%) say they have little or no confidence the election will be fair and open.

Among Trump supporters, however, most (56%) say they have little or no confidence the election will be fair, while 43% have at least a fair amount of confidence.

Clinton supporters are overwhelmingly confident the election will be fair. Fully 88% of Clinton voters express this view, including 58% who are very confident the election will be fair and open. Among Trump supporters, just 8% have an equally high degree of confidence this will occur.

Voters who support Trump strongly are especially likely to have doubts the election will be fair and open. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say they have little or no confidence the election will be fair, while just 36% have at least a fair amount of confidence in this. Among those who back Trump less strongly, about half (48%) doubt the election will be fair and open. Among Clinton supporters, large majorities of those who support her strongly (92%) and less strongly (84%) express confidence in a fair election.

 

From the Washington Monthly: The Real Comey Effect

An inside look at how Democrats at the national level tried to target vulnerable Republicans in the U.S. House and possible flip it. The Comey letter seems to have derailed that effort.

- Click here for the article.

Back on October 12th while Donald Trump was staggering from the fallout surrounding the Access Hollywood tape, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Ben Ray Luján circulated a memo he had solicited from a man named Evan Coren.

According to the memo, Evan Coren “served 7.5 years on the National Security Council staff” and “has 20 years of experience working in Democratic politics and non-partisan municipal politics.” He also has experience as a campaign manager.

Coren had taken a look at all 435 House races with an eye for finding gems in the rough. The DCCC was already committed to 43 Red-to-Blue candidates and seven more “emerging” candidates. Coren’s job was to identify additional seats that could fall in an especially bad wave election, as then seemed much more possible than the polls indicate is likely today.

His approach wasn’t anything special. He looked at Republican representatives who were either low on money or simply not spending any money on media and ads, or both, and then did a quick survey of how the districts had voted in the 2008 and 2012 elections. This was a potentially flawed analysis because the districts were redrawn between the 2008 and 2012 elections, and it’s not clear to me if he adjusted his numbers to reflect that. Either way, though, it provided a framework for a strategy he recommended to the DCCC.

Essentially, he wanted to replicate “what the Republicans did to us in 2010” and catch a lot of them napping by dumping one million dollars (each) into a couple dozen races that no one thought were competitive. The money was to be spent on “media buys, web ads, social media ads, Spotify/streaming services ads, and (energizing) GOTV volunteers.”

From Sabato's Crystal Ball: Is Clinton Slipping?

This is from Friday - which might as well be last year - but it shows tightening in the race, but maybe mot enough to swing the race - maybe.

- Click here for the article.

Hillary Clinton has picked an awful time to hit one of the rough patches that has plagued her throughout the campaign. Now with just days to go until Election Day, there’s added uncertainty about the outcome. But while she may not be on the brink of an Electoral College win the size of Barack Obama’s in 2008 or even 2012, her position as the clear frontrunner in this race endures.

Now, granted, some of this is, for her, bad luck and poor timing out of her control: The “Comey Effect,” referring to FBI Director James Comey’s controversial decision to inform Congress of new emails potentially related to the bureau’s investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server, has put a dent in Clinton in the final stages of the race, although the contest was tightening in some ways before the news. The campaign’s actions also tell us that there must be at least a little bit of alarm in Brooklyn: It is putting some advertising money (not huge amounts but very noticeable) into some states that the campaign has largely ignored in recent months, like Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Trump has also campaigned in these states recently and has said he is advertising in those states.

The pro-Clinton interpretation of these moves is that the campaign is so flush with cash that they can afford some last-minute spending to block Trump in these states; the anti-Clinton view is that the campaign is panicking and took some of these states, all of which are basically must-wins for Clinton, for granted.

From the Pew Research Center: U.S. electoral system ranks high – but not highest – in global comparisons

Are American elections really fair?

More on rigged elections.

- Click here for the article.

As the long presidential campaign winds down, GOP nominee Donald Trump’s claims that the process is “rigged” against him – and suggestions that he might not accept the result as legitimate if he loses – seem to have struck a chord with his supporters. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 56% of Trump voters said they have little or no confidence that the election will be “open and fair,” compared with 11% of Hillary Clinton backers. Among those who say they strongly back Trump, nearly two-thirds (63%) say they have little or no confidence that the election will be fair.

Given that level of skepticism, it’s worth noting that the U.S. generally ranks highly on the overall freedom and fairness of its elections when compared with other countries, though not without some caveats.

Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization (though it receives funding from the U.S. government), has ranked nations on political and civil rights for more than 40 years. In its most recent report, Freedom House gave the U.S. electoral process 11 out of 12 possible points on its “electoral process” scale – the same rating the nation has had since 2007 (when its score was raised from a 10).

The electoral process scale is one of seven that go into Freedom House’s overall ratings of countries as free, partly free or not free. It covers three major areas: whether the head of government or other chief national authority is chosen through free and fair elections; whether national legislators are chosen through free and fair elections; and whether a country’s electoral laws and framework are fair. Among the things that go into making elections “free and fair”: “Is the vote count transparent, and is it reported honestly with the official results made public?”

Of the 195 sovereign countries Freedom House ranked this year (using 2015 data), 61 scored 12 out of 12 on the group’s electoral process scale – among them Australia, Canada, Japan and the UK. Besides the U.S., 16 other countries received 11 points out of 12. Freedom House didn’t detail where the U.S. fell short, but commented in its report that “… its elections and legislative process have suffered from an increasingly intricate system of gerrymandering and undue interference by wealthy individuals and special interests.”

From CityLab: In the U.S., Almost No One Votes in Local Elections - In most major cities, fewer than 15 percent of voters turn out to cast a ballot for mayor.

And - as we know - its worse locally.

But is this deliberate?

And note that old folks do vote - and that matters.

- Click here for the article.

Fewer than one in five eligible residents in Los Angeles vote in mayoral elections. In New York City, that figure falls to less than 14 percent. In fact, in 15 of the 30 most populous cities in the U.S., voter turnout in mayoral elections is less than 20 percent.

As if incredibly low voter turnout weren’t dispiriting enough, mayoral elections in the U.S. are also barely representative of the population. In the most recent mayoral elections across 50 U.S. cities, the median voter age was 57—evidence of an enormous gap in civic participation between retiring Baby Boomers and rising Millennials. Worse still, perhaps, voters are overrepresented in some neighborhoods and dramatically underrepresented in others.

A new report from Portland State University finds that almost nobody bothers to vote in mayoral U.S. elections. Those who do tend to be much older than the median resident and hail from more affluent neighborhoods to boot. That’s not necessarily a surprise, although the degree of disparity in local voting patterns is alarming.

In Dallas, for example, the median age of voters in mayoral elections is 62, even though the median age of the adult population is 41—a difference of an entire generation. Only 6.1 percent of eligible voters across the city participated in the last mayoral election (May 2015), with most of them clustered in voting “oases” in relatively affluent Dallas neighborhoods to the north and northeast.

From ProPublica: America’s Most Important Workers on Election Day Aren’t Paid Like it

I can relate - you get paid about $11 an hour to run an election. Less if you aren't the election judge. But at ;east the hours are long!

Do we really want well run elections? we're not willing to pay for them.

- Click here for the article.

Elections cost millions of dollars to organize and run, but some of the most crucial work is performed by low-wage workers, specifically poll workers.

American elections are run locally, which means government officials need to recruit and pay people to work at voting locations. But the requirements for the jobs, which include being available and able to work for 12 hours or more on Election Day, can make it difficult to find people willing to sign up.

“It is a predicament that plagues almost every jurisdiction in the country and it grows worse every year,” begins a 2014 report by the federal Election Assistance Commission.
The commission found that more than half of all states had jurisdictions that reported it was either “somewhat” or “very” difficult to recruit poll workers for the 2012 election. Every one of Louisiana’s parishes rated it somewhat difficult that year, while more than half of Indiana’s election-day voters live in counties where it was at least somewhat difficult to find poll workers. In 2014, all 120 counties in Kentucky reported that recruiting poll workers was very difficult.

Here’s why it matters: Without enough poll workers, voters can experience longer lines, polling places can open late, and there may not be workers available to tackle issues that voters might encounter.

Long waiting times are one of the most visible and significant issues that can occur on Election Day. And although they can have a number of causes, a lack of poll workers is an important factor, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice.

There are a few reasons why recruiting poll workers has gotten harder. The increased participation of women in the workforce and new technology that older Americans can find daunting have played a role. Under the Voting Rights Act, some polling places need to have poll workers with specific language skills. Then there’s the pay.

From ProPublica: America’s Most Important Workers on Election Day Aren’t Paid Like it

I can relate - you get paid about $11 an hour to run an election. Less if you aren't the election judge. But at ;east the hours are long!

Do we really want well run elections? we're not willing to pay for them.

- Click here for the article.

Elections cost millions of dollars to organize and run, but some of the most crucial work is performed by low-wage workers, specifically poll workers.

American elections are run locally, which means government officials need to recruit and pay people to work at voting locations. But the requirements for the jobs, which include being available and able to work for 12 hours or more on Election Day, can make it difficult to find people willing to sign up.

“It is a predicament that plagues almost every jurisdiction in the country and it grows worse every year,” begins a 2014 report by the federal Election Assistance Commission.
The commission found that more than half of all states had jurisdictions that reported it was either “somewhat” or “very” difficult to recruit poll workers for the 2012 election. Every one of Louisiana’s parishes rated it somewhat difficult that year, while more than half of Indiana’s election-day voters live in counties where it was at least somewhat difficult to find poll workers. In 2014, all 120 counties in Kentucky reported that recruiting poll workers was very difficult.

Here’s why it matters: Without enough poll workers, voters can experience longer lines, polling places can open late, and there may not be workers available to tackle issues that voters might encounter.

Long waiting times are one of the most visible and significant issues that can occur on Election Day. And although they can have a number of causes, a lack of poll workers is an important factor, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice.

There are a few reasons why recruiting poll workers has gotten harder. The increased participation of women in the workforce and new technology that older Americans can find daunting have played a role. Under the Voting Rights Act, some polling places need to have poll workers with specific language skills. Then there’s the pay.

What happens to the Republican Party after the election?

The internal struggle continues.

Little has been written about what happens to Democrats - I'll post what I find soon - and if this plays into a potential realignment of the parties.

A couple sources:

(note the reference to the 1948 election - there's nothing new going on)

- From Politico: The GOP’s Breakdown Is Only Just Beginning.

For years, pundits have predicted that the Republican Party is breaking apart. But it took Donald Trump to make it happen.

The Republican Party is like a gigantic Antarctic ice shelf with fissures we’ve watched develop for years. Those cracks were evident in 2010, when the Tea Party emerged, and in 2014, when GOP primary voters rejected establishment favorites, including the sitting House Republican Leader, Eric Cantor.

The obvious legacy of the 2016 election is a split between pro- and anti-Trump forces, but this division has a twist rarely seen in American political history: The party’s voters and its elites are not only separate constituencies, but ones whose interests and beliefs are incompatible. The two groups are starting from different places and ending up perhaps even further apart.As the fractures grew, the party held together—for the past eight years, opposition to President Barack Obama was more or less enough to ice over major intraparty differences. But in the glaring sun of Donald Trump, those dividing lines are no longer survivable: The party has melted down and cracked apart, and its various components are drifting away.

In the past, party splits have frequently been unclear, messy and short-lived. When the Democratic Party splintered over civil rights in 1948, the faction of the party that didn’t like President Harry S. Truman or the platform walked out and formed its own

“Dixiecrat” ticket. In 1952, some of those Democrats who didn’t like Adlai Stevenson endorsed Dwight D. Eisenhower. And Theodore Roosevelt ran on his own Bull Moose ticket in 1912 after losing the Republican nomination to incumbent President William Howard Taft. In the end, those divides either healed over in some way, or they happened so quickly that the Band-Aid was ripped off, the pain ended and the parties could get to work building new electoral coalitions.

By contrast, this year’s Republican unwinding is hesitant and halting—and it’s not clear at all where it will end. Trump’s nomination and, at this point, presumptive loss is probably just the beginning. Nationally, there is much more infighting yet to come. At this point, the possibly alarming news for Republicans is that what defines the GOP breakup isn’t its severity or depth: It’s the great degree to which it’s still incomplete.

- From Vox: The Republican civil war starts the day after the election.

If Donald Trump loses the election next week, “there will be a lot of blood left on the floor between November and the 2020 primaries,” predicts GOP consultant John Weaver, who advised John Kasich’s campaign.

For all the attention on the fights between Trump and a faction of Republicans who have refused to support him, most GOP elected officials have so far taken the path of least resistance. They’ve supported their party’s nominee, even if they’re not thrilled about him.

These Republicans — from Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Reince Priebus to Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and many others — have calculated that since Trump was the nominee chosen by Republican voters, and the only person standing in between Hillary Clinton and the presidency, they should stand by him.

Should Trump lose on Election Day, though, many Republicans will want to say "I told you so" and turn the page on the Trump experiment, returning to a more generic Republicanism that they see as a better vote-getter and a more substantively defensible ideology. And to discredit Trumpism, they’ll make the case that Trump is to blame for his defeat — that he blew what should have been a winnable election for Republicans.

Many of Trump’s most passionate supporters won’t see it that way at all, though. They’re being primed to see a candidate betrayed by an out-of-touch establishment that is compromised by its social and economic ties to a cosmopolitan elite. So if Trump loses, his backers will try to turn grassroots disappointment at his defeat into grassroots rage against Republicans who were insufficiently supportive, thus leveraging their own way into power. (If he wins, the party will face a whole different set of issues.)

From Radiolab: Eye in the Sky

For our look at the 4th amendment, and privacy - among other things.

You are never not monitored, but neither are criminals.

- Click here for the article.

In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with an idea. With a small plane and a 44 mega-pixel camera, they figured out how to watch an entire city all at once, all day long. Whenever a bomb detonated, they could zoom onto that spot and then, because this eye in the sky had been there all along, they could scroll back in time and see - literally see - who planted it. After the war, Ross McNutt retired from the airforce, and brought this technology back home with him. Manoush Zomorodi and Alex Goldmark from the podcast “Note to Self” give us the low-down on Ross’s unique brand of persistent surveillance, from Juarez, Mexico to Dayton, Ohio. Then, once we realize what we can do, we wonder whether we should.

From ScotusBlog: Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.

The court has decided to take up the case involving the transgender student in Virginia, but will not concern itself with equal protection issues.

It's going to be much more boring.

- Click here for the article.

Issue: (1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

From the Texas Tribune: Abbott, Patrick disagree on special session for school funding

School funding promises to be a dominant issue during the next regular session. A special session would take some pressure off.

- Click here for the article. 

Days after Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested that Gov. Greg Abbott call a 30-day special session to overhaul the state's school funding system, Abbott said Monday that no such special session was needed.

Patrick told the Midland Reporter-Telegram last week that there is not enough time during next year's 140-day regular session to discuss overhauling the controversial “Robin Hood” school funding system, which redistributes money from property-rich school districts to property-poor districts. Patrick has since said that he was "not advocating for a special session."

“If the governor is willing, I am willing to address it in a special session,” Patrick told the newspaper.

But Abbott made clear Monday that he is not willing. His office issued a statement saying the matter should be thoroughly discussed in regular session -- not a separate special session.

“Governor Abbott believes Texans deserve for issues—including fixing a broken Robin Hood system—to be thoroughly debated and addressed in a regular session where responsible and hardworking legislators have plenty of time to address these serious topics. Texans don’t want a full-time legislature, they want a legislature that can get their work done and then go home,” spokesman John Wittman wrote in a statement.

"No reason to put off to tomorrow what we can do today," Abbott added on Twitter.

Later Monday, Patrick's office issued a statement saying he was not pushing for a special session. A Patrick spokesman said the statement was similar to remarks the lieutenant governor made Monday afternoon while discussing school finance at an event in Houston.

"Reforming school finance is a very complex, multibillion-dollar issue that is a high priority for me and for many lawmakers," Patrick said in the statement. "I am not advocating for a special session. I am simply saying that at some point, if we are truly serious about dealing with this issue, I believe that is what it will take."

From the Texas Tribune: UT/TT Poll: Texas voters wary of those they perceive as outsiders

Make sense to me.

- Click here for the article.

Texans are split on whether to subject American Muslims to greater scrutiny than citizens who observe other religions, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

Overall, 45 percent said “Muslims living in the U.S. should be subject to more scrutiny than people in other religious groups,” and 40 percent said they should not be subject to that.

Republican voters were strongly in favor of scrutinizing American Muslims: 69 percent said they would support that, while 20 percent were against it. Eighteen percent of Democrats support higher scrutiny of American Muslims; 66 percent oppose greater scrutiny. Independents, like Republicans, were more likely to favor greater scrutiny of Muslims: 59 percent, while 26 percent oppose it.

Half of the state’s voters don’t think the state should accept Syrian refugees who have passed through security clearances. Again, there is a partisan split in the numbers: 64 percent of Democrats would accept them, while 77 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents would not.

From NPR: A Look At How The Revolving Door Spins From FDA To Industry

For our discussion today.

- Click here for the article.

More than a quarter of the Food and Drug Administration employees who approved cancer and hematology drugs from 2001 through 2010 left the agency and now work or consult for pharmaceutical companies, according to research published by a prominent medical journal Tuesday.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and assistant professor at Oregon Health and Science University, sought to understand the so-called "revolving door" between the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, which he said is often discussed but hadn't been quantified.

"We all know about these anecdotal cases" of a person who was "often a major player at the FDA, someone in an important role — and then they leave the FDA and go and work for industry," Prasad said, but he couldn't find anyone who knew whether this happened "5 percent or 60 percent" of the time.

Prasad and his colleague Dr. Jeffrey Bien, an internal medicine resident also at OHSU, tracked 55 FDA reviewers in the hematology-oncology field from 2001 through 2010, using LinkedIn, PubMed and other publicly available job data. The researchers found that of the 26 reviewers who left the FDA during this period, 15 of them, or 57 percent, later worked or consulted for the biopharmaceutical industry. Put another way, about 27 percent of the total number of reviewers left their federal oversight posts to work for the industry they previously regulated.

Prasad and Bien published their findings as a research letter in The BMJ,formerly The British Medical Journal.

Going to work for industry after leaving the FDA isn't inherently bad, but it does raise some questions.

"If you know in the back of your mind that your career goal may be to someday work on the other side of the table, I wonder whether that changes the way you regulate," Prasad said. "Are you more likely to give [companies] the benefit of the doubt? Are you less likely to beat them up hard over [using bad comparisons in drug studies]?"

From the Fiscal Times: How Big Pharma Lobbyists Keep Medicare Drug Prices High

For our look at interest groups and iron triangles.

- Click here for the article.

For nearly a decade, veteran Democratic Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont has been waging a lonely battle to empower Medicare officials to negotiate the price of prescription drugs, just as Medicaid, the Veterans’ Administration and other government health care providers are entitled to do.

When Congress enacted the Medicare Part D subsidized prescription drug program for seniors in 2003, the drug industry secured an amendment that barred the federal government from negotiating rebates or lower drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries – a sweetheart deal that subsequently provided drug manufacturers with many billions of dollars in extra profits.

Welch, a liberal Democrat, condemned the restrictive policy as the ultimate in “crony capitalism” and sponsored or co-sponsored at least six bills to allow drug price negotiations.

But a well-financed drug industry thwarted Welch and his allies at every turn, and the proposed legislation repeatedly was bottled up in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, or simply ignored. He concluded that big-money lobbying efforts and generous campaign contributions to key Republican and Democratic lawmakers effectively blocked his legislation, even as many consumers and policy advocacy groups clamored for ways to control soaring prescription drug prices.

“It truly is exhibit A in the intersection between crony capitalism and big money in politics,” Welch said in an interview on Thursday. “The whole essence of a free market is that willing buyers and willing sellers can negotiate prices and reach a market price … How in the world can one explain that the government actually passed a law saying that you can’t negotiate prices?”

According to Welch and political watchdog groups, the answer is fairly simple. The pharmaceutical industry spent unprecedented sums on lobbying and campaign contributions to get the prohibition on price negotiations into the original legislation and to keep it there, despite the best efforts of Welch and others to eliminate the provision.

An analysis jointly published this week by the Center for Responsive Politics and FairWarning, a non-profit news organization, highlights the political clout exerted by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a major industry group, and some of the largest U.S. drug companies.

The Department of Justice Organization Chart

Because it seems suddenly appropriate.

- Click here for it.



For everything you could possibly want to know about the organization of the US government:

- The United States Government Manual.

From Lawfare: The Attorney General’s Role in the Clinton Email Mess

The Attorney General is the FBI director's boss.

The author suggests that she may bear some responsibility for recent events.

- Click here for the article.

Leave aside, for a moment, the question of whether Comey acted rightly or wrongly, a matter we addressed in depth on Saturday and on which we think his moves are not above criticism.

But there’s an elephant in the room alongside all these DOJ officials who are clucking about the FBI director’s having gone rogue: Attorney General Lynch, having been consulted ahead of time, let him do it.

Lynch could have ordered Comey not to send the letter. She declined to do that, and instead acted in a manner that minimized her own responsibility, as the head of the Justice Department, for what Comey did.

This is not the way the matter is playing in the press. Many news stories over the weekend, citing anonymous Justice Department sources, suggested that Comey acted contrary to Justice Department wishes. The idea is that the DOJ was somehow helpless to prevent an out-of-control investigator from meddling in a presidential campaign with actions undertaken either to gratify Comey’s ego and arrogate power and responsibility to himself, or to help Donald Trump—or because Comey just couldn’t help himself.

But that’s not how the Justice Department works, and that’s not what happened here. If you think what Comey did was beyond the pale, Lynch does not get to escape accountability for the action.

The wishes and preferences of the attorney general and deputy attorney general, such as they were, were, in fact, conveyed in a tepid, responsibility-eschewing way. The New York Times reports that “the Justice Department strongly discouraged [sending the letter to Congress] and told [Comey] that he would be breaking with longstanding policy.” It then adds that “Senior Justice Department officials did not move to stop him from sending the letter,” but “did everything short of it.”

Well, not everything, it turns out. Lynch, and her deputy, Sally Yates, did not demand that Comey hold off on sending the letter until they could make a decision for the Department about it. They did not pick up the phone or insist on a meeting to discuss the issue or even to express their views personally to Comey. “There was no direct confrontation between Lynch or Yates and Comey,” reports CNN. “Instead, the disagreements were conveyed to Comey by Justice Department staff, who advised the FBI chief his letter would be against department policy to not comment on investigations close to an election.”

From Roll Call: Minnesota Blue Dog Isn't Ready to Give Up His District - Collin Peterson’s seat will almost certainly flip when he retires

Not that many Blue Dog Democrats can be found anymore - these were brought in one of my classes recently. This is one of the last of a dying breed of conservative Democrats.

- Click here for the article.

Collin C. Peterson is the last thing keeping Minnesota’s 7th District blue.

Democrats are always worried that the 13-term congressman is going to retire. Because if he does, his heavily agricultural district will almost certainly send a Republican to Congress.

But Peterson, one of the original and last surviving Blue Dog Democrats in the House, is giving no hints of slowing down. In fact, the 72-year-old says he’s enjoying Congress more these days, which likely comes as good news to Democrats already looking to minimize House losses in the 2018 midterms.

“As long as I think I’m making a difference, I’ll probably keep going,” Peterson said in an interview last week at a fish fry for his Democratic-Farmer-Labor colleague, 8th District Rep. Rick Nolan.

Peterson said he’s had a better time in Congress the last couple of years because his attitude has changed slightly.

“I lightened up a little bit,” Peterson said. “I just figured there’s so much stuff I can’t do anything about anyway, so I just pay attention to what I can do something about and don’t worry about the rest of it.”

For more on Blue Dogs:

- A BRIEF HISTORY OF: Blue Dog Democrats.
- What is a Blue Dog Democrat?
- Yellow Dog and Blue Dog Democrats.
- Bye-bye, blue dog “Democrats”: What the end of conservative Dems means for America.

The Comey Letter

From Politifact: Clinton campaign says Comey letter violates Justice Department protocols

I'll hunt around for more on the FBI's protocol involving elections.

- Click here for the article.

. . . the Justice Department — which oversees the FBI — not only explicitly prohibits employees from interfering with elections but urges employees avoid the appearance of interfering with elections.

In August 2008, President George W. Bush’s attorney general, Michael Mukasey, sent an internal memo entitled "election year sensitivities" to employees on the department’s policies on political activities. Part of it reads:

"Simply put, politics must play no role in the decisions of federal investigators or prosecutors regarding any investigations or criminal charges. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors may never select the timing of investigative steps or criminal charges for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party. Such a purpose is inconsistent with the Department's mission and with the Principles of Federal Prosecution."

Attorney General Eric Holder resent the memo in March 2012.

While the memos don’t discuss limitation of timing specifically, former U.S. attorneys have alluded to an unwritten guideline about not filing cases or commenting on investigations in the 60 days before an election.

Citing the policy, several former prosecutors and department employees have aired concerns and criticisms.

Two former deputy attorney generals under the Clinton and Bush administrations called Comey’s actions a departure from the department’s traditions and "real-time, raw-take transparency taken to its illogical limit."

Conservative Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, a former prosecutor and New York county court judge, said Comey’s letter "disgraces and politicizes" the bureau.

"You know I support Donald Trump and want him to win, but whether it's Hillary Clinton or anyone else, Comey's actions violate not only longstanding Justice Department policy … but the most fundamental rules of fairness and impartiality," Pirro said.

Daniel Richman, a former prosecutor and current Columbia Law School professor, noted that while the Justice Department’s election sensitivities policy does stand, Comey also had different obligations to consider.

Department policies "are subject to judgments by the highest officials in extraordinary circumstances," Richman said. "Less flexible is the FBI’s directors duty of absolute candor to Congress, requiring the correction of statements when new facts arise."

From Lawfare: James Comey, Hillary Clinton, and the Email Investigation: A Guide for the Perplexed

In case you need it - I do.

- Click here for the article.

Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey threw the presidential election campaign into turmoil with a letter to Congress declaring that the Clinton email matter was, perhaps, not entirely done after all.

Ben analyzed this disclosure yesterday, and a great deal of digital ink has been spilled both blasting Comey’s decision and trying to figure out what it means.

The Clinton forces are furious, with the candidate declaring that “we are 11 days out from perhaps the most important national election of our lifetimes, voting is already underway in our country, so the American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately,” and campaign chairman John Podesta saying, “It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election.”

The Trump forces, meanwhile, are triumphant, with Trump—who only recently was calling the FBI corrupt—saying, “I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the Department of Justice are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made. This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understood, and it is everybody’s hope that it is about to be corrected.” The chant from Trump’s crowd yesterday: “Lock Her Up!”

Below are eighteen questions on the subject of the campaign, the email investigation, and the actions taken by Comey and the FBI, along with our views as to the answers.

Full disclosure: We know Director Comey personally and one of us has worked with him in prior government service. Of course, we are writing this on our own behalf, not his, and stating only our own views of these matters.

We are also writing it based on the information we have as of 2:30 pm on Saturday afternoon. Our views may change as further facts emerge.

From CNN: What is the Hatch Act -- and did James Comey break it?

We discussed the Hatch Act in the section on campaign finance.

- Click here for the article.

Congress passed the Hatch Act in response to concerns that federal employees had been used to support candidates during the 1938 congressional elections. Its general intent is to greatly restrict the ability of most federal employees to engage in political campaign activities (such as soliciting campaign donations or actively working on behalf of individual candidates), especially while on the job -- or to otherwise "use [their] official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election."

And as its text suggests, the law does not require that the employee's wrongful conduct actually interfere with or affect the result of an election.

Of course, laws that restrict speech will often implicate the First Amendment. But the Supreme Court has twice rejected First Amendment challenges to the Hatch Act, and it has, more recently, taken a narrower view of the First Amendment rights of government employees -- especially when speaking in their official capacity.And although the law is 77 years old, it has been repeatedly amended by Congress, most recently in 2012 to, among other things, clarify the available penalties for violations of the Act and allow a broader class of employees to run for political office without resigning.

For more:

- Wikipedia: Hatch Act.

From Vox: The debate over FBI director James Comey's new Clinton email letter, explained

The latest.

- Click here for the article.

On Friday, FBI Director James Comey sent a three-paragraph letter to several members of Congress, in which he said that new emails related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation had been discovered.

The timing of Comey’s letter — sent just 11 days before the presidential election — created a media and political firestorm, and seemed to pose the prospect of some sort of smoking gun deeply implicating Clinton that could swing the election.

But as more facts have emerged after hours of leaks from anonymous government officials to various media outlets, it’s become pretty clear that what actually happened is not necessarily all that earth-shaking. Namely: 

- The new batch of emails is from a laptop that Clinton aide Huma Abedin shared with her husband, former Congressman Anthony Weiner.
- The FBI came upon them because they’re investigating Weiner’s reported sexting of an underage girl, not anything related to the Clintons.
- The FBI doesn’t seem to even really know what’s on the new emails yet. They could well be duplicative of emails the bureau has already examined.
- And there are conflicting reports about whether any of them are even from Hillary Clinton.

As a result, Comey has fallen under intense criticism for his handling of this public disclosure.

Who is James Comey anyway?

- Wikipedia: James Comey.
- Wikipedia: Director of the FBI.

My Statesman: Greg Abbott presses Texas Supreme Court to limit gay-marriage ruling

More - expected - conflict between Texas and the U.S.

- Click here for the article.

Ratcheting up pressure on the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, Gov. Greg Abbott and other leading GOP officials Friday urged the court to revive efforts to abolish employee benefits the city of Houston provides to married same-sex couples.

The case has become a rallying point for the state’s social conservatives, with the stakes growing larger now that Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Attorney General Ken Paxton have weighed in — telling the court that the Houston lawsuit provides an opportunity to limit the impact of last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down the state’s ban on gay marriage.

“This court should take this opportunity to remind the lower courts that all disputes involving the right to same-sex marriage have not been resolved,” Abbott, Patrick and Paxton said in a friend-of-the-court brief.

The Houston case presents a particular challenge for a court that strives to appear above politics while its justices are forced to run every six years as members of a particular political party.

Opponents of same-sex marriage have peppered the court with dozens of emails asking justices to strike down the Houston benefits or face a voter backlash in future Republican primaries. The barrage makes it clear that some GOP voters view the case as a litmus test for party loyalty and adherence to Christian values.

From the Washington Post: Supreme Court takes up school bathroom rules for transgender students

This happened much quicker than I thought it would.

- Click here for the article.

The Supreme Court said Friday that it will decide whether the Obama administration may require public school systems to let transgender students use bathrooms that align with their gender identity, putting the court once again at the center of a divisive social issue.

School districts across the country are split on how to accommodate transgender students amid conflicting guidance from courts, the federal government and, in some cases, state legislatures that have passed laws requiring people to use public restrooms that match the sex on their birth certificates.

The justices accepted a petition from the School Board of Gloucester County, Va., seeking to overturn a lower court’s order that 17-year-old Gavin Grimm, who was born female but identifies as male, be allowed to use the boys’ restroom during his senior year of high school.

In August, the Supreme Court voted 5 to 3 to temporarily stay that lower court’s ruling while it remained on appeal. In that order granting the stay, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he was joining the conservative justices as a “courtesy” that would preserve the status quo while the court considered whether to accept the case.

From the NYT: Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

Yet another October surprise.

- Click here for the article.

The presidential campaign was rocked on Friday after federal law enforcement officials said that emails pertinent to the closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server were discovered on a computer belonging to Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of a top Clinton aide.
In a letter to Congress, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said the emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, which law enforcement officials said was an F.B.I. investigation into illicit text messages from Mr. Weiner to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, is married to Huma Abedin, the top aide.

Mr. Comey's letter said that the F.B.I. would review the emails to determine if they improperly contained classified information, which is tightly controlled by the government. Senior law enforcement officials said that it was unclear if any of the emails were from Mrs. Clinton’s private server. And while Mr. Comey said in his letter that the emails “appear to be pertinent,” the F.B.I. had not yet examined them.

By the end of a day that brought stinging criticism of Mr. Comey from both Democrats and Republicans, he appeared on the defensive, saying in an internal email to bureau employees that he had felt obligated to inform Congress, and “we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails.’’

From the Washington Post: How incumbency, not gerrymandering, may protect the Republican House majority

While the chances that Democrats win the majority of House seats has increased, it's still unlikely./

Here's analysis.

- Click here for the story.

As we enter the final stretch of the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump’s struggles have led to speculation about serious consequences for House and Senate Republicans. Some are even suggesting that control of the House is up for grabs.

The counterargument, however, is that House Republicans are protected by the Republican-led gerrymandering after the 2010 Census. As the story goes, this redistricting simultaneously increased the size of the Republican House majority and made those districts incredibly safe for the GOP legislators who represent them.

But how much is gerrymandering really helping House Republicans? My analysis suggests only a little bit. Incumbency appears to be the more important factor.

From NPR: Why Texas Is Closer To Turning Blue Than It Has Been In Decades

No one is predicting a Clinton victory, but the race is tighter than it would normally be.

We would not be having this conversation if Senator Cruz was the Republican nominee.

- Click here for the story.

Polls show the presidential race in Texas is closer than it's been in decades. Some even show the two candidates within the margin of error.

Does Hillary Clinton actually stand a chance in Texas? It's unlikely, but it could be closer than at any time in the past 20 years. The reason for how competitive the race looks lies in two demographic groups — Republican-leaning suburban women offended by Trump's comments about women, and Latinos, who are fired up to vote against him.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Ballot Pox - It's time to stop pretending that there's such a thing as a rational voter

This supplements recent conversations we've been having about what drives people to vote.

It also suggests that Trump's success will not only have an impact on the parties, but on a key aspect of political science research.

Do we expect too much from voters?

- Click here for the article.

Perhaps it is finally time to stop pretending there is such a thing as a rational voter who seeks information to vote based on the issues alone, as decades of political-science research has assumed. Instead, Achen and Bartels argue, we can only progress by accepting that most voters are deeply uninformed and lack meaningful preferences, and even those who do know and care about politics are all just partisan loyalists. Can we acknowledge that social-group identities are the most important structuring force in politics, and politics is really at heart just identity politics? And can we build new theories around the undeniable evidence that politics is and always will be based on emotion and conflict, not logic and consensus?

It's time to make peace with a simple fact of political life: Rationality is a chimera.

For political science, this argument actually amounts to a rediscovery of old truths about group conflict being the center of politics. A half century ago, these were the mainstream views in the discipline. At that time, political science was also much more qualitative — for example, congressional scholars actually hung out in Washington and spent hours talking to people who worked there, instead of only staring at computers analyzing data — and sociological, in that scholars focused more on norms and cultures and folkways than they did on modeling individual incentives.

But sometime in the 1960s, political science took a turn away from groups and toward "rational individualism." Scholars began to treat both voters and politicians as utility-maximizing actors who had consistent and externally determined preferences along some unidimensional left-right spectrum. (Where these preferences came from, it was never clear.) And scholars also assumed these voters knew enough to adequately express these preferences meaningfully. Voters and officeholders and groups all existed in a "game" in which they tried to move policy to their "ideal point." Voters tried to hold politicians "accountable" for their performance, while politicians "maximized" their utility from office holding. Economics, not sociology, became the model discipline. Incentives replaced norms and cultures.

These assumptions were popular in the academy because they made both formal modeling and fancy statistical analysis more tractable, and therefore made political science more "scientific." Plus, there was plenty of easily accessible data on elections, roll-call votes, and public-opinion surveys to be tilled into publishable journal articles. "The result," Achen and Bartels write, "was a body of work that was simultaneously advanced in its methods and antiquated in its ideas."

They were also popular because they fit with the prevailing good-government idea, what Achen and Bartels dismissively call "the folk theory of democracy." Under the folk theory, "Democracy makes the people the rulers, and legitimacy derives from their consent." Elections should and can be meaningful events that truly empower the people. Therefore, if democracy has gone wrong, it’s merely because our voters are too uninformed, our candidates are too corrupt, our political discourse is too awash in lies. Like political science, good-government reformers pursued an idealized world of informed voters making meaningful independent choices that could give them actual power.

For Achen and Bartels, all this reformist moral exhortation is an exercise in futility. All the standard bromides of good-government reformers — more participation, better civic education, a more responsible media — represent mountains of wasted good intention that will never lead to more responsive government.

The most obvious flaw of the folk theory is that it expects far too much out of citizens: "Can ordinary people, busy with their lives and with no firsthand experience of policy making or public administration, do what the theory expects them to do?" Of course not. "Mostly," Achen and Bartels write, "they identify with ethnic, racial, occupation, religious or other sorts of groups, and often — whether through group ties or hereditary loyalties — with a political party."

From the Hill: Vulnerable House freshmen passed most bills in decades, analysis finds

The list includes the Republican now holding Texas' only competitive congressional district.

- Click here for the article.

Three House Republicans facing competitive reelection races this year have gotten more of their bills passed than any other freshmen in decades, according to a new analysis.

Quorum, a D.C.-based data tracking firm, found that of all freshman lawmakers since 1989, Reps. John Katko (N.Y.), Martha McSally (Ariz.) and Will Hurd (Texas) were the top three for sponsoring the most bills that passed the House in their first terms.

Katko’s name was featured on 13 bills to pass the House in his first 20 months in office, the highest of any freshman lawmaker in Quorum’s analysis provided to The Hill.

McSally came in second with nine sponsored bills. Two of those measures became law, most prominently a bill to make former female World War II pilots eligible for inurnment at Arlington Cemetery.

Hurd, with eight bills to pass the House, is tied for the third-most bills with former Reps. Bobby Jindal (R), the ex-Louisiana governor, in the session of Congress that began in 2005, and Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) for the session that began in 2003.

House and Senate leadership frequently grant floor time to legislation authored by lawmakers in tough races for reelection. Those lawmakers can then tout the passage of those bills while campaigning back in their districts.

. . . Hurd is considered the most vulnerable of the three House lawmakers. He faces a rematch against former Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego in the southwestern, Hispanic-majority Texas district that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates as a “toss-up.”
Katko and McSally both hold an edge to win reelection despite representing districts that have swung toward Democrats in recent years.

One reason these freshmen have managed to get more of their bills passed may be a result of House GOP leaders granting them all subcommittee chairmanships at the start of this Congress.

Many of Hurd’s bills that made it to the House floor have dealt with information technology and cybersecurity, likely because of chairing a House Oversight subcommittee on information technology.

. . . GOP leaders promoted McSally and Hurd, in particular, as two of their best recruits during the 2014 election cycle. Both lawmakers add racial and gender diversity to the overwhelmingly white and male House GOP: Hurd is one of two African-Americans and McSally is one of 23 women in the 246-member conference.

For more on Hurd:

- Wikipedia.
- House website.
- GovTrack.

From 538: What Went Wrong For Gary Johnson

Winner-take-all elections are brutal for minor parties.

- Click here for the article.

Johnson’s decline isn’t shocking. Third-party candidates usually lose steamthe closer we get to the election. But Johnson is faltering even against that standard. Based on his polling in late August, FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus model, which accounts for the drop-off third-party candidates usually experience, projected Johnson to get around 7 percent of the vote. The same model has him down to just 5.6 percent now.

What went wrong? You could point to Johnson’s missing the debates. He has lost about 1.5 percentage points from his national poll numbers since late September (when the first debate took place). However, he may have already been on a downward trajectory before the debates took place; on Sept. 25, the day before the first debate, he had 7.3 percent, on average, in national polls, compared with 9 percent a month before. So, it’s quite possible Johnson’s numbers would have continued to dip even if he appeared on the debate stage. Johnson, of course, has committed some policy-related gaffes— not knowing basic facts about the Syrian War or being able to name a foreign leader he admires — that suggest perhaps the debates would have been rough on him.

Another plausible explanation is that Johnson was simply a “protest” choice. Perhaps many voters who said they were going to vote for him weren’t really interested in Johnson specifically but were merely voicing frustration with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton instead. There’s evidence for this. In August, when Johnson was flying high, a majority of voters had no opinion of him. In addition, many younger voters who as a group voted heavily for Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary said they were going to vote for Johnson, even though Johnson and Sanders have very different ideologies. That seemed at least a little unsustainable. Indeed, as the campaign has taken shape and Sanders stumps for Clinton, Johnson’s numbers seem to be falling with young voters as Clinton’s rise.