Two Sudden Developments, Very Little Movement

Two significant news stories have transpired since I wrote yesterday's post about the state of the race. The first is the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scali and the other is the descent of the Republican debate in South Carolina into WWE levels of chaos at times.

I.  The Death of Scalia: Which Poison with the GOP Pick?.

The sudden passing of Justice Scalia will change the composition of the court. The most likely outcome is that President Obama will name a replacement, that replacement will get confirmed and he or she will take the bench sometime this summer.  But of course the Republican party is taking another approach. They claim that the vacancy should be filled not by the current president but by the next one.  I may be overestimating them, but I think this is a bluff.  Let's consider both scenarios.

A. Obama Names the Next Justice.
Barack Obama will nominate a judge in the next few weeks.  He will do so knowing that the senate is controlled by the Republicans and that the Republicans are trying to run out the clock on the last year of his presidency. So he will have to pick someone that is mainstream. He will be tempted to choose someone who Republicans will look silly for attempting to block.

The first name to become a focus of speculation is Judge Sri Srinivasan.  He would be an interesting tactical choice for President Obama.  First, he clerked for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a Reagan appointee. Secondly he was confirmed to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals by the Senate in 2012 by a vote of 97-0. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were both among the senators who voted for him. Lastly, he would be the first Indian justice on the Supreme Court. Another similarly situated contender is Judge Jane Kelley. She was a classmate of the President at Harvard Law School and was unanimously voted to the 8th circuit judge, 96-0 to 2013. Jane Kelly is also an Iowan which could make the decision to not hearings thorny for the Judiciary chair, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for obvious reasons.

So Barack Obama will soon have the ability to put forth a centrist judge with impeccable credentials who very recently sailed through the Senate on unanimous confirmation votes.  This candidate might be a minority or female.   There will be enormous pressure on the Republicans to at least hold hearings. (If only because the media loves these hearings and so do senators. There's no better way to get face time on the nightly news.)  If the hearings fail to produce any bomb shells from the nominee's past, then it will be hard for the senate to vote them down without looking like partisan hacks.  But that might be a price they are willing to pay.

B. The GOP Obstructs the Nominee.

The GOP will see things quite differently. Their presidential candidates all agreed that no vote should take place on the very principled reason that the President is in his last year and they do not like him. The moderator of last night's debate had to correct Ted Cruz' false claim that it had been 80 years since a Supreme Court Justice was confirmed in an election year. (Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in February, 1988.)  Mitch McConnell the senate majority leader quickly said that no vote should be held this year.

Liberals on social media erupted in derision. This morning's Sunday news shows were filled with Democrats mocking the idea and warning about a 15 or 16 month vacancy on the court. But the Republicans are probably just bluffing. Unlike a lot of Democrats they know that the best way to start a negotiation is by being completely unreasonable and obstinate. That way when they eventually do what they pretty much had to do anyway, they look like they are being magnanimous.

If the Republicans are serious about obstructing this nomination than they will put the issue right at the heart of the campaign. The Democratic nominee will have a brown and or female face to point to and say "See, the Republicans just want to obstruct. They can not be reasoned with. And oh yeah, their real goal is to overturn Roe vs. Wade.  Do you want that?"

This is a political loser for them. It will all but guarantee a democratic win and might just cost them the senate. Then 11 months from now President Clinton, Sanders or Warren can appoint almost anyone and get it through the Senate.

So my prediction is this: Obama nominates a candidate the first week of March. The GOP huffs and puffs about holding hearings, but they will give in on that when the politics of this become clearer. They will still try to slow walk it and maybe get to the August recess without a vote but when the Supreme Court begins its new term in October, there will be nine judges on it and William Kennedy's reign as the 2nd most important person on Earth will officially be over.

II.  WWE Winter Slam.

Last night's Republican debate in Greenville, SC was a  half dozen men mostly screaming at each other with one nearly silent black guy off to the side and one obnoxious accent from Queens dominating the proceedings.  This was a much more fitting to tribute to Antonin Scalia than the moment of silence they held to open the night's events.

The most significant line of attack was, of course from Donald Trump. He openly accused George W. Bush of lying about WMD in Iraq and of failing to keep America safe on 9/11. These are not controversial thoughts in most places, but the room was packed with Rubio and Bush supporters who loudly booed him.  This of course gave him the best chance to do his Bobby the Brain Hennan act and insult the crowd for being a bunch of dullards in the pocket of his rivals.

I think his real motivation was to boost up Jeb Bush as the expense of Ted Cruz.  Trump knows he's going to win SC and he wants to run up the score on the most likely 2nd place finisher. As for Cruz he got baited into speaking Spanish by Marco Rubio in the one moment that suggested maybe Rubio learned something from his disaster in New Hampshire. (For the rest of the night Rubio kept repeating his stupid scripted talking points.  I am not optimistic about his future this year.)

John Kasich might be the biggest beneficiary of it all.  He stayed above the fray and coolly pointed out how silly the others were.  Jeb couldn't help but take some offense at things said about his family. That will earn him some sympathy but not much in the way of actual votes.

The predictions markets didn't move that much.  Trump and Rubio each gained 2 points, which came at the expense of Cruz who lost 4.  Kasich went from 2 to 3 percent, which was offset by Bush sliding from 12 to 11 percent.

Updated Two-Step Predict Wise Market.
(Election Column reflects the party's chance of winning the election. The "President" column multiplies their shot at the nomination by their party's chance of winning the general election.)

The lower half of the chart lists the probabilities of the general election match-ups. (From Clinton vs. Trump, which is 41% chance to Sanders vs. Kasich, which is 200 to 1 shot at the moment.)

Candidate	Nomination	Election	President
Clinton	83.0%	61.0%	50.6%
Trump	49.0%	39.0%	19.1%
Sanders	17.0%	61.0%	10.4%
Rubio	24.0%	39.0%	9.4%
Cruz	12.0%	39.0%	4.7%
Bush	11.0%	39.0%	4.3%
Kasich	3.0%	39.0%	1.2%
Match-up	Probabilities
Clinton	Trump	40.7%
Clinton	Rubio	19.9%
Sanders	Trump	8.3%
Sanders	Rubio	4.1%
Clinton	Cruz	10.0%
Sanders	Cruz	2.0%
Clinton	Bush	9.1%
Sanders	Bush	1.9%
Clinton	Kasich	2.5%
Sanders	Kasich	0.5%

The 2014 Midterms: Endorsements and Predictions

I haven't really written anything on this blog about any midterm elections.  They haven't proven very exciting, which means it will be a low turnout election, which always favors the Republicans. People with something to lose are more likely to vote in off-years, and Republicans skew towards the demographics that have something to lose, if say congress raised the income taxes on the top brackets.

I. ENDORSEMENTS:

But here are a handful of the races that I feel most strongly about.

1. Paul Davis for Governor of Kansas. "What's the Matter With Kansas" has been a recurring question in American politics ever since Thomas Frank wrote a book with that title to make the point that lots of people vote Republican even when it is against their own self-interest.  The current governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback epitomizes this dynamic.  He is a zealot for Catholicism and supply-side economics.  The first is largely his business but the latter has resulted in policies so Fubar that hundreds of Republican office holders have endorsed his democratic rival.

Tomorrow night is likely to be a good night for the GOP but a win here will at least expose the great Republican lie that cutting taxes is always popular and always successful. That's why I list this race first. Nate Silver gives Davis an 82% chance of winning.

2. Pat Quinn for Governor of Illinois.  All politics is local and so this race means a lot to me. Bruce Rauner has a reasonable chance (34% per Nate Silver) of winning this race. I'm putting his opponent Bruce Rauner has a reasonable chance (34% per Nate Silver) of winning this race. Pat Quinn this high on my list for two reasons-he's a good man, and I know that a win by his opponent will lead to huge tax cuts that are not matched by comparable spending cuts.  Quinn passed substantial tax hikes and spending cuts a few years ago and he will likely leave them in place.  Rauner's campaign is predicated on repealing that increase and cutting spending.  But here's the catch: there's no way he could get the votes for the spending cuts from a legislature that will still have large democratic majority.  But he will find enough Democrats who will go along with the tax cuts, because they will think its smart politics. The result will be a fiscal avalanche of debt.  We can't afford that, so I'm going to vote for Quinn.

3.  No to Mandatory GMO Labels in Oregon and Colorado.  This may seem like a niche issue but it's not.  Vermont recently became the first state to require food companies to label foods that contain ingredients that have been genetically engineered. in a laboratory rather than through selective breeding. There is simply no scientific evidence that these foods are any more dangerous than "conventional" foods.  Requiring labels will create a false impression that there is something dangerous about those products. It will also increase the cost of food by making food manufacturers segregated their source ingredients for reasons that have nothing to do with food safety.

But the reason I put this food so high on the list is that it has an enormous impact on world health. Genetic modification of food sources holds great promise for feeding the world even as climate change wreaks its havoc on the world in the coming decades.  Research into creating "Golden Rice", the name used to describe rice enhanced with Vitamin A could improve the health of the hundreds of millions of children in Asia whose diets are dominated by rice.  Making the products more expensive (and therefore less profitable) will lead to fewer dollars being spent on the research that could lead to these advancements.

4.  Bruce Braley for United States Senator in Iowa.  I highlight this race because it will be very difficult for the Democrats to retain the Senate if they don't win this race.  Until this morning I haven't paid a lot of attention to this election and just assumed that the Republican nominee, Joni Ernst, was just a run of the mill hack.  But this morning I began my day by reading this interaction between her and a reporter:

ERNST: [Obama] is just standing back and letting things happen, he is reactive rather than proactive. With Ebola, he's been very hands off."

REPORTER:  What should he have done about Ebola? One person in America has Ebola."

ERNST: OK, you're the press, you're giving me your opinion.

REPORTER: It's not an opinion. Only one person in America has it."

Oi vey.

5.  Yes to Minimum Wage Increases in Alaska, Nebraska, South Dakota and Arkansas:  All will pass.  I just hope the margins are huge so that Democrats will learn the obvious lesson: liberal economic policies are popular even in deep red states.

II. PREDICTIONS:

If you've ever had the misfortune of being stuck in a political conversation with me you know that one of my biggest pet peeves is that there are virtually no consequences for political pundits that make terrible predictions.  A personal favorite of this phenomenon is that in December 2006 William Kristol predicted, "Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I'll predict that right now." He still appears regularly on Fox News and the Sunday morning network shows.  And people take him seriously, no matter how often he is wrong.

But you can't through mud at the Dick Morris Class if you don't make some predictions of your own.  So here goes mine:

A.  The House of Representatives.

Did you know that there are 435 House Seats up for election tomorrow?  The most depressing fact in politics is that none of these 435 races have received more than a whisper of national media attention.In 2012 the Democrats "won" the national pop vote by a little over one point, but only won 201 races, while Republicans won 234.  This is the shameful result of the gerrymandering done by Republicans after they got to redraw the state maps because they won the last midterm election in a wave.  The polling average this time has the Republicans up by 2.2%.  I think that will be enough for the GOP to net 10 seats, more than wiping out the 8 that they lost during the 2012 election.

B.  The Senate.

The Democrats start the night with 55 seats, when you include the two independents who caucus with them.  But the Democrats are defending 21 seats and the Republicans are only defending 15. Moreover twelve of those Republican seats, but just nine of the Democratic seats are completely safe for the incumbent party.  That leaves the Democrats protecting 12 seats and the Republicans only have to worry about three.

Vulnerable Republican Seats (All three of them):

i. The Republican will in Kentucky, big.  

ii. The Independent will win in Kansas by 3 points.  

iii. Georgia will go to a run-off, with the Republican getting 48%, the Democrat getting 45% and the Libertarian will get 7%.    

Vulnerable Democratic Seats:

The Republicans can bank on winning in Montana, Vest Virginia and South Dakota, very red states where Democratic incumbents are not running for re-election.  Only Minnesota looks safe for the incumbent, Al Franken.  I also believe the Republicans will win in Arkansas and Colorado. That means they have to win just one of the six truly close Democratic seats to win a majority.  Here are my predictions on those:

i. Louisiana will go to a run off.

ii. The Democrat will win in NH, NC and Alaska.

iii. The Republican will win in Iowa and Colorado.

That leaves the Republicans with 52 seats and good prospects in 2 more Southern Red States. But the night is not without hope for the Democrats.  Which leads me to....

C. Governors.

I think the Democrats have fielded a strong slate here and they will net three governor's mansions tomorrow.  Here are my predictions for the close races with party switches in bold.

i. The Democrats win in: 

Connecticut:by 1.

Maine by 2.

Colorado by 1

Florida by 3.

Illinois by 4

Rhode Island by 5

Kansas by 3

Pennsylvania by 12

ii. The Republican will win in:

Michigan by 1

Wisconsin by 2

Massachussetts by 3

Georgia by 4.

Arizona by 6

And in the closest race of the night, Alaska will elect independent Bill Walker by 2.029 votes.  (The less I know about a race, the more specific I like to be in my predictions.)