I am tempted to use the worn-out image of the canary in the coal mine, but this is more like a vulture pecking at roadkill. The Democrats now find themselves looking up at a 72-78 deficit in the House. The retirement of David Farabee and the party switch by Chuck Hobson have wiped out, without an election, two of the three seats the Democrats gained in November 2008. And the Democrats have a lot of vulnerable seats to defend: Maldanado, Thibaut, Miklos, Heflin for starters. Heflin’s district is a blue island in a red sea; he has to contemplate whether life would be easier as a Republican. Indeed, I wonder if this current spate of party switching hasn’t been orchestrated to build momentum: first the Hardin County officials, then Hopson, then … Heflin? Homer?

Hopson probably didn’t want to switch. He now finds himself on the same side of the aisle as Debbie Riddle, who, upon happening to walk by his desk on one occasion and seeing Hobson and his deskmate poring over an open Bible, said, “Oh, I didn’t know Democrats read the Bible.”

Democrats have been leaking rural seats for some time now. It’s irreversible. Dan Ellis, gone. Robbie Cook, gone. Juan Garcia, gone. Pete Laney, gone. Heflin held Laney’s seat for the D’s on the strength of the last box to come in, against a uninspiring Republican opponent. Who is left? Frost in Texarkana, McReynolds in Lufkin, Homer in Paris. All are popular in their communities, but they have to run in a midterm election with a Democrat in the White House who brings the race issue into play in East Texas. The battle for rural Texas is over, and Republicans have won. The WD-40s are a vanishing breed.

The biggest problem for Democrats — and perhaps this is true for the Republicans as well — is that they do best when the opposition is in power. Their brief renaissance was fueled by the failures of the Bush Administration nationally and the overreaching of the Perry-Dewhurst-Craddick leadership at home. Now that their own party is in power, there is no check on the liberal policies that their leaders want to enact. And that is anathema here. The way things are going, Democrats are going to get their heads handed to them in Texas in 2010. They have no credible statewide candidates. They have a congressional leadership who put their ideological wish list — cap-and-trade and health care — ahead of the economy during a recession. They have a president who has fumbled the Democrats’ hard-earned recognition as more fiscally responsible than the Republicans. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Democratic strength in the Texas House back in the sixties a year from now. Anybody want the over?

The Texas Tribune’s web site has a lengthy (26 pages, many of which involve a lot of funny looking symbols and squiggly lines and tiny letters that aren’t parts of words of just the sort that caused me, after my freshman year at Rice, to change my major from math to history) explanation of the UT/Tribune poll’s methodology. I am going to post the abstract. Just don’t ask me to ’splain it. Read at your own risk.

SAMPLING FOR WEB SURVEYS
DOUGLAS RIVERS
STANFORD UNIVERSITY AND POLIMETRIX, INC.

ABSTRACT. Web surveys are frequently based on samples drawn from panels with large amounts of nonresponse or haphazard selection. The availability of large-scale consumer and voter databases provides large amounts of auxilliary information for both panelists and population members. Sample matching, where a conventional random sample is selected from a population frame and the closest matching respondent from the panel is selected for interviewing, is proposed. It is shown that under suitable assumptions (primarily ignorability of panel membership conditional upon the matching
variables), the resulting survey estimates are consistent with an asymptotic normal distribution. Simulation results show that the matched sample estimators are superior to weighting a random subsample from the panel and have a similar sampling distribution to simple random sampling from the population. In an example involving the 2006 U.S. Congressional elections, estimates using sample matching from an opt-in Web panel outperformed estimates based on phone interviews with RDD samples.

For a link to the complete article, click here.

Tagged: UT/texas tribune poll.

The Morning News’ Trailblazer blog reported Wednesday that Rick Perry had said at a news conference in Dallas that he was a stronger conservative than his gubernatorial opponent. This was fodder for Republican primary voters, but I think it had another purpose. It was a baited hook designed to draw Hutchison into a fight on this point, which the Perry campaign would love to do. It is a fight she cannot win. There is no way for her to get to Perry’s right. In an October AP story Hutchison aides described her as “every bit as conservative” as Perry, pointing to her opposition to gay marriage and to federal funding for abortion. But she’s not, and that is what makes her appealing to Republicans who are tired of Rick Perry.

It is futile for Hutchison to fight Perry for the “most-conservative” label. The more she does so, the less likely she is to attract the silent majority of GOP moderates who haven’t been voting in primary elections. This is why I think bringing in Dick Cheney to campaign for her could backfire. Cheney is too conservative. He favors torture. He favors spying on American citizens. He is one of the most sinister figures to share the American political stage in recent years. He’s anathema to moderates and especially to Democrats who might be tempted to cross over into the Republican primary.

If Hutchison persists in fighting Perry for the most-conservative label, she has no chance. She will alienate the very voters she needs to get to the polls, the suburban soccer mom types. They are mainstream conservatives, and so is she. But she seems afraid to be who she really is.

Tagged: dick cheney, kay bailey hutchison, rick perry.

Democratic pollster/blogger Mark Blumenthal, writing today in politicalwire.com, calculated which polling firms had the most accurate record in calling the two governor’s races. The clear winner was SurveyUSA, which uses automated polling. SurveyUSA nailed the margin in Virginia (18 points) and tied Rasmussen (another automated pollster) for coming closest to calling Christie’s four-point victory in New Jersey. Both firms had Christie winning by three points. I miss having SurveyUSA in Texas. They occasionally had some wide swings in approval ratings from one month to the next, but they provided information that was not available anywhere else. Hard times in the media business caused the TV stations that used the firm to drop them, alas. Some of the most respected names in the business flubbed the Virginia race: Research 2000, the Washington Post, and Mason Dixon all had McDonnell winning, but they missed by the margin of victory by 6 to 8 points.

The mayor of Watertown, New York, one Jeff Graham, is a blogger, and this is his report on the District 23 race. Graham endorsed Hoffman. The blog has a sad ending as he contemplates his community’s loss of a seat that had been occupied by a local Republican.

Plattsburgh attorney William Owens will represent NNY [north New York] in Congress after winning a special election today over Lake Placid businessman and Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman. The victory by some four thousand votes was aided in large part by Mr. Owens strong showings in Jefferson and St. Lawrence Counties.

It appears the effort to drive down Hoffman numbers in Greater Watertown and the withdrawal of DeDe Scozzafava and her enthusiastic backing of Owens made a big difference. Credit veteran political operative June O’Neill for brokering the deal that brought Scozzafava’s core vote to Owens. Another factor is once Scozzafava bailed, it would take upper 40s to win and getting a third party candidate to that level is not easy.

A third factor, to some — Scozzafava became the victim and Hoffman was the bad guy.

For Watertown, an awakening as for years we have had our own Congressman who grew up on South Hamilton Street and worked in City Hall. With John McHugh gone, it now appears a man few know will represent us, and the Democrats gain another vote in the House of Representitive.

Also, it must be said, the Republican party in New York is as close to death as you can get, holding only two of 29 Congressional seats and all statewide offices held by Democrats, who also hold both houses of the Legislature.

After redistricting, it could be a 50 year lock for the Dems.

As for Doug Hoffman, his rise this year was impressive and his campaign generally flawless.

As for Mr. Owens…he stayed on message and didn’t make mistakes.

I congratulate Mr. Owens on his impressive win and wish him the best in this new duties. I am sure the residents of the district will join me in offering whatever help is needed to our new Congressman as he seeks to learn more about the many people who now depend on him for representation.

* * * *

I might add here that the endorsement of Owen by the Watertown newspaper is credited by other observers with having a big impact on the race.

CNN’s exit polls say that independents were the deciding factor in the two big governor’s races, in New Jersey and Virginia. From the network’s web site:

In Virginia, where 30 percent of voters identify themselves as independent, 65 percent cast their ballots for CNN’s projected winner, Republican Bob McDonnell. That’s according to early CNN Exit Poll data. Democrat Creigh Deeds earned the votes of 34 percent of independents.

In New Jersey, the projected winner, Republican Chris Christie, took 60 percent of the independent vote while incumbent Governor Jon Corzine, a Democrat, got only 30 percent.

So who are these independents? I don’t think they are really independents at all. They are what Mike Baselice, the governor’s pollster, likes to call “grumpy Republicans,” people who no longer identify with the Republican party, having become discontented at its march to the right. But, as the UT Poll’s Jim Henson pointed out at a forum I attended last December, they tend to vote Republican, by a margin of about 4 to 3. That is enough to make the difference in most elections. The Democrats have not been able to make much headway with independents in Texas, certainly not in statewide races, and it appears the same was true for the losing Democratic candidates yesterday. It is a mistake to think of grumpy Republicans as true independents. They will vote Democratic when disgusted enough with their former party–the election of Obama was one instance–but in general they retain vestiges of their former loyalties.

What are the implications of the governor’s races for 2010? Obama went to New Jersey five times to campaign for Corzine, to no avail. He comes out of the election with no coattails. Was the New Jersey governorship important enough to risk an election result that will be seen as a rejection of Obama? I don’t think so. On the one-year anniversary of his election, Obama looks pretty vulnerable. His legislative program is stuck, and the Republicans have him on the defensive. A lot can change in one year.

Tagged: jim henson, mike baselice.

The following article was e-mailed to me by a friend, a Plainview native and fellow Rice graduate who lives in California and, as far as I can tell, spends his nonworking time culling obscure publications for interesting articles and e-mailing them to his friends. This one, which compares California and Texas, appeared in City Journal. Consumer warning: The word count is 2,986.

The Big-Spending, High-Taxing, Lousy-Services Paradigm:
California taxpayers don’t get much bang for their bucks.
By William Voegeli

In 1956, the economist Charles Tiebout provided the framework that best explains why people vote with their feet. The “consumer-voter,” as Tiebout called him, challenges government officials to “ascertain his wants for public goods and tax him accordingly.” Each jurisdiction offers its own package of public goods, along with a particular tax burden needed to pay for those goods. As a result, “the consumer-voter moves to that community whose local government best satisfies his set of preferences.” In selecting a jurisdiction, the mobile consumer-voter is, in effect, choosing a club to join based on the benefits that it offers and the dues that it charges.

America’s federal system allows, at the state level, for 50 different clubs to join. At first glance, the states seem to differ between those that bundle numerous high-quality public benefits with high taxes and those that offer packages of low benefits and low taxes. These alternatives, of course, define the basic argument between liberals and conservatives over the ideal size and scope of government. Except for Oregon, John McCain carried every one of the 17 states with the lowest tax levels in the 2008 presidential election, while Barack Obama won every one of the 17 at the top of the list except for Wyoming and Alaska.

It’s not surprising, then, that an intense debate rages over which model is more satisfactory and sustainable. What is surprising is the growing evidence that the low-benefit, low-tax alternative succeeds not only on its own terms but also according to the criteria used by defenders of high benefits and high taxes. Whatever theoretical claims are made for imposing high taxes to provide generous government benefits, the practical reality is that these public goods are, increasingly, neither public nor good: their beneficiaries are mostly the service providers themselves, and their quality is poor. For evidence, look to the two largest states in the nation, which are fine representatives of the liberal and conservative alternatives.

One out of every five Americans is either a Californian or a Texan. California became the nation’s most populous state in 1962; Texas climbed into second place in 1994. They are broadly similar: populous Sunbelt states with large metropolitan areas, diverse economies, and borders with Mexico producing comparable demographic mixes. Both are “majority-minority” states, where non-Hispanic whites make up just under half of the population and Latinos just over a third.

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