The Power and the Money

The 2020 Horserace (regressions)

Joint with Leticia Abad

The 2020 election was strange, and not just because the President denied he had lost, was believed by millions, and inspired a violent plot to use a mob to seize control of Congress and overturn the election.

No, it would have been strange even without all that. Georgia and Arizona went blue. Florida went red. Donald Trump picked up nonwhite votes — open bigotry notwithstanding — and upscale suburbanites voted for what may be the most left-wing Democratic platform since 1976. (Or maybe 1948.)

So what happened? Well, we have been gathering county-level electoral, Covid, and BLM-related data for another project. Numbers in hand, we decided to take a look at the 2020 election.

The first thing we did was to look at some simple correlations. What county-level characteristics were related to a bigger swing towards Donald Trump between 2016 and 2020?

Figure 1 Simple correlations with the 2020 swing towards the GOP, by county

The above figure shows our results. Negative numbers represent swings towards the Democratic candidate. Dark shading means that the correlation is tight and significant at the 95 percent level; moderate shading means it’s significant at 90%, and very light shading means that it is not significant. The ethnic markers refer to self-identified ethnicity and not foreign-origin; in other words, in all cases they represent mostly citizens (save for Central Americans).

These results, of course, don’t mean much. Several of those variables are highly correlated with each other. For example, did Mexican-American counties swing towards Trump because they are Mexican-American or because Mexican-Americans are relatively young? Moreover, they don’t all for geographic variation. Did Puerto Ricans move away from Trump because they are Puerto Rican or because lots of them live in New York and New Jersey? So all the above numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, both the ones that jibe with the conventional wisdom and the ones which don’t.

To start the long process of teasing out which variables mattered, we ran a simple OLS “horserace” regression. And here is where things get interesting!

Figure 2

Let’s take it from the top. The above figure shows the coefficient (i.e., the correlation controlling for other things) for various variables. It also shows the error bars. If the error bar crosses the zero line, then there is a good chance that the effect you see is really the product of random chance. Positive numbers mean a swing towards President Trump; negative numbers mean a swing towards Joe Biden relative to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Conceptually, these regressions compare different counties within a state. That is, swings in one way or another that uniformly affect every county and voting group within a state are already accounted for. (In technobabble, we use state fixed effects and cluster standard errors at the state level.) These numbers capture the average swing for a group across the country relative to the statewide swing where they live. 

So what do we get? First, a pair of mysteries! One, Covid deaths do not seem to have had much effect. Two, BLM protests in a county are associated with a small (but statistically significant) swing towards the Democrats … and if anything, the swing was greater if the protests were violent. Admittedly, this result is neither surprising nor free from endogeneity.* But it is different from what Omar Wasow found when he analyzed the effect of the 1960s-era protests and riots.

The Latino swing towards the GOP shows up fairly clearly. The higher the share of Mexican-Americans, Cubans, or Dominicans in a county, the bigger the swing towards the GOP. Asian-Americans show the same pattern. On the other hand, Blacks and Puerto Ricans swung fairly clearly towards the Democrats: reports from the exit polls of Trumpian inroads among African-Americans do not appear to be borne out in these data.**

Finally, an unexpected result, which you can’t quite see in this data. A lot of ink has been spilled on the rural-urban divide in America. And it’s real! But it’s not really cultural. From our data, large central metro counties swung about three percentage points more Democratic in 2020 than the rest of their state, ceteris paribus. But everyone else — exurban counties, small metro areas, “micropolitan” counties, and rural places — was about the same. That is to say, when you account for demographic differences, there isn’t much of a rural/urban split in this country. There’s just a small giant-center-city/everyone-else split.

But there’s a problem with these results! The regressions treat every county equally. Alpine County, California, (population 1,129) is treated the same as Los Angeles (population 9,969,510). It could very well be that small shifts in tiny counties are driving our results. So we weighted our regressions by population, and report both results below.

Figure 3

So what changes? First, our coefficients on covid deaths, the share of college graduates, and BLM protests doesn’t change. Neither does the African-American swing towards the Democrats.

Second, the effect of unemployment goes away. That was driven by small counties. That effect disappears when you give the big cities their proper weight. (Yes, that is a little surprising.)

Third, the peculiarities of Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominican-Americans also go away. It turns out that the Mexican and Dominican swings towards the GOP were driven by small tiny counties. (We identified a few counties with precisely one Dominican resident.) Same thing with the Puerto Rican swing towards the Democrats. When you give the populous counties their due weight, the effects all disappear. Only the Cuban swing holds up as a real thing that happened.

This isn’t to say that it’s a bad idea for Democrats to try to appeal to the Mexican-American voters in the Rio Grande Valley who broke hard for the Republican incumbent. It’s never a bad idea to try to appeal to any constituency! But they seem to have been a peculiar group and we’re not sure that the putative Latino swing to the GOP is really worth bothering about, since we’re not sure that it happened. (Cubans, that’s a different story. They really did swing towards Trump, but the reasons are not that mysterious. Even you did not expect the GOP’s demonization of socialism to work as well as it did — and we did not — it should not come a massive surprise that it did work.)

Finally, it does indeed look as though Asian-Americans in the big cities and suburbs swung back towards the GOP. We can try to break that out by ethnicity, and we will! But that’s the real swing in our data, the one that nobody seems to be talking much about, maybe because it’s more fun to blame things on Mexicans.

To end with a plea: any thoughts on research designs designed to tease out the reasons behind the counterintuitive results on Covid deaths and BLM-related unrest?

* Yes, yes, “endogeneity” is technobabble. Sue us.

** A problem with Central Americans is that most are not citizens. If you include a variable for the share of noncitizens in a county, then the coefficient on Central Americans disappears. Since non-citizens do not vote, it is possible then that the effect is actually that citizens in counties with lots of non-citizens tend to be related to those aforementioned non-citizens, and people with non-citizen relatives swung towards the Democrats. But because the share of non-citizens and the share of Central Americans tend to be correlated, it’s hard to disentangle what’s going on.

What’s the matter with Texas?

Nothing. Texas went purple … ish.  Joe Biden did better than previous Democrats, but still got beat by six points.  Texas is not quite red any more. Call it magenta, or rose. 

But why did it not not go purple, what with the massive turnout?

TLDR: the GOP got a boatload of new voters to turn out in the state’s big cities, suburbs, and exurbs. It wasn’t Mexican-Americans, it wasn’t rural voters.

Here are the basic numbers. Democrats turned out 5.2 million voters, up from 3.9 million in 2016. If Republican turnout had remained around the 4.5-4.7 million that it had been stuck at for most of the 21st century, then the state would have gone blue. Total turnout would have been around the 10.0 million that you would have expected from an exciting election like 2008 and the Democrats would have won. 

We here at TPTM did not expect a blue victory. We expected  the Democrats to up their turnout substantially, but the Republicans would nonetheless manage to get a few hundred thousand new votes and win the election with a bit over 5 million votes. 

But neither scenario is what happened. GOP votes came to 5.9 million. The Democrats turned out out 1.3 million new voters (net) but the GOP almost matched that with 1.2 million new voters. 

For the GOP to beat the super-high Democratic turnout they only needed 533,000 votes, not 1.2 million. They netted 356,000 new votes out of the central counties of Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin.  The remainder came out of the northern exurbs of Dallas (100,000 in Collin and Denton counties), the exurbs of Houston (83,000 in Fort Bend and Montgomery), and the northern exurbs of Austin (34,000 in Williamson). Add in another 37,000 in other Houston exurbs and you’ve got more than enough to win the state. The 500,000 people that the GOP got out of smaller cities and rural areas was nice but it wasn’t what won it.

It wasn’t South Texas. There aren’t enough people! The GOP gained only 88,652 votes, against 8,175 for the Democrats.

And it wasn’t Mexican-Americans! The above-right chart graphs the Latino share of the country against the percentage swing towards the Republicans. Outside of South Texas, there wasn’t much of a correlation. This looks really different from Florida, by the way, where it really was Latinos what swung it, not just Cubans. But in Texas, the swingy Latino voter is a Río Grande Valley thing, not a Texan thing. 

I don’t know what the implications are for 2024. Turnout will swing back, but will it swing back more for Republicans or for Democrats? Is persuasion possible? Could Marco Rubio swing some blue voters or might Amy Klobuchar or Andrew Cuomo get some red ones? I have no idea. What I do know, though, is that the Trump campaign energized voters in the big cities and their exurbs. The GOP has to keep them turned out in 2024 and the Democrats have to keep them home.

But the Democratic Party of Texas should really not be tying itself in knots trying to figure out what happened in the Río Grande Valley. Please stop blaming the election outcome on Mexicans. There’s been enough of that going around the last five years. 

Make Canada Greater: What would change if New York joined Confederation?

I am reading “Divided We Fall” by David French. He may be the first thoroughly mainstream commentator to seriously posit that the American federation may break up under the weight of our political differences. Cheery reading for another happy election day, or not.

Even a mutual breakup of the United States would be a tragedy, but not because of American exceptionalism or any such thing. No, any collapse of a political union is a tragedy. It means that differing peoples could not share a fate or manage a common endeavor. It means shrinking horizons and cramped futures. Even when divorce is better than the realistic alternatives, it is still a tragedy. 

But there is one way that the American federation could break up and avoid such a tragedy! Instead of retreating into smaller polities, blue American states that wanted out (or were being thrown out) could replace one expansive continental dream with another. They could link their fate with their better-governed neighbors to the north!

Such a move would also be amazing validation of the Great White North—for Canadians to reject it would show a lack of confidence and a fear of dreaming big. Canadians should have confidence and dream big! (Yes, I thought Maximum Canada was a great read, why do you ask?)

One Canadian certainly has no fear of success: the Prime Minister invited American states to join as new provinces!

But enough with the blather. Let’s say something happened to crack the American federation. What would a switch entail in practical terms? In order to get my mind off the damn election (and grading exams) I decided to take a preposterous idea seriously. What would happen if New York State became the Province of New York?

The name

Well, first, NYS would not need to rename itself. Canadian law can handle a province that calls itself a “state” as easily as the U.S. constitution handles states that call themselves “commonwealths.” But let’s call the new jurisdiction “New York Province” anyway, just to make things easier.

Integrating the judicial systems

The biggest issue isn’t the one you’d think. (Although I’m getting there.) The biggest issue is that under current Canadian law, state criminal law will be replaced by the Canadian federal criminal code. The transition would be tough. State judicial elections would go out the window. I think you could continue to elect the Attorney General, but her authority would shrink considerably. You could probably continue to have elections for sheriff, but it would also be a departure from Canadian norms. The Canadians would also have to decide how much leeway to give New York in its civil codes. If they mandate that New York conform to the Canadian system, then civil courts will lose much of their power and many trials that were previously decided by juries will switch to judges.

Integrating the two systems would be a major headache for judges and lawyers. I have no idea how long it would take them to adapt. One year? Two? Ten? Canada would have to agree to long phase-in period during which the New York court system would be linked to Canada’s but not integrated into it. During this time every lawyer in New York State will have to effectively retrain. Law schools would also have to revamp their curricula.

Alternatively, the Canadians could work out an exception for the new province(s). Conceptually, such an exception would be relatively easy to implement and administer. (Australia and the United States do it and New York allows certain municipalities to create their own criminal offenses.) It would be a departure for Canada but it would not mean that the federal criminal code would cease to apply to New York. Rather, it would mean that New Yorkers were subject to two (or three) separate criminal codes, much as they are today.

Business ownership

In some industries, American companies operating in the state that weren’t locally owned would be required to pull out and sell their assets in that state to a Canadian company. (Canada would of course now include New York and any other states that made the switch.) These industries are pretty broad, including transportation, airlines, railways, shipping, publishing, financial services and telecommunications.

Telecoms and airways are pretty straightforward. U.S.-owned airlines would need to divest their operations for point-to-point flights between New York and other parts of Canada. Ditto, telecoms companies would need to sell or spin off their New York operations. Canada has been pretty liberal with allowing foreign ownership of transportation companies, so there shouldn’t be major problems for trucking or railroads. Some retail chains might want to spin off their New York operations, but that won’t be that difficult.

Some banks with equity of $8 billion or more and large demutualized insurance companies would need to be restructured. Canadian law requires that no person may own more than 20 percent of any class of voting shares or 30 percent of any class of non-voting shares. In addition, a majority of the board of directors and the CEO of every bank or federal insurance company would need to be Canadian residents.

Publishing is a weird one. Existing operations would only need to sell their operations to Canadian buyers if they intended to acquire an existing Canadian company. But it’s equally likely that you’d have big New York publishing houses would not qualify for Canadian subsidies or be able to acquire smaller Canadian competitors. It would probably get weird very quickly, but there shouldn’t be any constitutional problems. The Canadian government could continue to protect small Canadian operations against large New York-based Canadian operations. Of course, how long that would last once the New York representatives from the federal branch of the Working Families Party entered the Canadian parliament is a different question …

Unions

New York employers are going to be unpleasantly surprised. Most New Yorkers are going to love it. Of course, a lot depends on what the politicians in Albany do with their liberation from the strictures of American labor law.

Gun laws

There may be some disquiet in parts of upstate (as there is in rural Canada) but most New Yorkers are going to love this as well.

Fiscal federalism

Canada channels significantly fewer resources through its federal government than does the United States. Gross federal spending in New York (sans interest payments and direct purchases of goods and services) came to 13.2% of state GDP; the equivalent number for Ontario was only 10.9%. (The high level of direct purchases in Ontario is due to the fact that the federal government is based in Ottawa.)

Let’s take each category in turn. For retirement spending, the transition would be smooth. Canada could take over Social Security payments for existing retirees without much problem while transitioning younger workers into the Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security.

For other transfers (not including medical care) the Canadian federation is about as generous as the United States, giving a bit more directly to individuals and a bit less to the governments of rich provinces like Ontario. (The whole thing is actually distorted by Alberta’s oil money, but let’s leave that for now.) On the margin, New York Province will receive a bit less non-health federal aid than New York State.

Federal spending and taxation as a % of jurisdictional GDP

	Retire-ment	Medical care	Revenue sharing	Individual transfers	Goods and services	Total spending	Gross federal taxation	Surplus to Feds
Ontario	5.1%	1.7%	1.8%	2.2%	4.0%	14.8%	(18.2%)	(3.4%)
NY State	4.6%	4.7%	2.5%	1.5%	1.4%	14.7%	(16.3%)	(1.6%)
NY Province	4.6%	1.1%	1.6%	2.2%	1.4%	10.9%	(18.2%)	(7.2%)

But health care … oh boy. A back-of-the-envelope calculation (using 2014 numbers, so at the beginning of Obamacare) shows that public and private entities in New York state spent about 8.4% of GDP on covered medical services. That’s more than most Canadian provinces, since health care is more expensive in the USA, but not prohibitively so: the Province of Ontario spent 7.1% of GDP in 2014.

New York is going to have a problem under the Canada Health Act. Medicare and Medicaid transfers from the U.S. federal government will dry up, and here (somewhat perversely) the United States is way more generous than the Canadian confederation. New York will lose Medicare and Medicaid money worth 4.7% of GDP. The Canadian Health Transfer (CHT) would come to only 1.1% under the current formula, blowing giant holes in the New York provincial budget. New York State currently spends about 2.0% on Medicaid, but adding the Canadian Health Transfer to that leaves a minimum budget hole of 5.3% of GDP (8.4% covered spending that will need to be made free – 2.0% existing spending – 1.1% CHT.)

And that figure of 5.3% is a minimum since Medicare and Medicaid are (again, perversely, I know) more generous than Canadian health care, even though they require co-pays. (More generous for the minority of people that they cover, that is.) You can’t tell seniors that they are going to be worse off now that they are Canadian, can you? That would be thoroughly un-Canadian!

New York Province could fill the hole with a VAT rate of 12% on top of existing sales taxes, or a tripling of state income taxes, or some combination thereof. That’s not an impossible thing. In this world where the U.S. peacefully divorces passing some version of Medicare-for-all should be popular. But it would be very expensive. Add to that the fact that the province would be passing upwards of 7% of GDP to Ottawa and becoming Canadian looks like a bad deal, even with all the benefits from being part of a big continental federation. 

Only there is here the outline of win-win deal for everyone involved, which is simply that New York Province is going to be a huge net payer into the Canadian federal budget.

The Canadian federal government could sign a Medicare Accession Grant Agreement (MAGA) with New York Province that would kick back, say, half the cost of establishing single-payer system. New York would get a federal tax point transfer worth 4.2% of GDP, and the Canadian taxpayers would still come out ahead with a net transfer of 3.0% of New York’s GDP. Win-win for everyone!

TLDR: Joining confederation would be a headache and New York would lose some fiscal revenue from the federal government. But if Ottawa is willing to be flexible it could be a win-win for everyone involved. 

I leave the effect on Canadian politics as an exercise for the readers ...

The Purple Rose of Texas is here

All eyes are on Texas.

I love Texas! And I have for a very long time. Maybe this dates back to a trip to Dallas to visit my stepfather back in 1986? Or maybe there’s just something about the state that I like? The food? West Texas? (Yes!) The Germans? (Hell, yes!) The Tejanos? (Double hell yes!) The state’s utterly insane history? The weird way Texans know about their state’s utterly insane history? I can’t say. I know that I’d be happy to live there, and that’s weird for a die-hard New Yorker like myself who only likes Washington because it has a subway system.

So it gives me more satisfaction to imagine Texas turning blue than it would for, say, Georgia. (Although MARTA, hey. And Atlanta does have the best BBQ in America.) It makes me want to believe that things like the below really are astonishing:

Something astonishing is happening in Texas. It's hard to know what it will actually mean for the result, but it's highly likely that the number of early votes will eclipse the *total* number of votes cast in 2016. The tally is already up to a whopping 91% of the total 2016 vote.

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) October 29, 2020

The turnout numbers do not yet mean that we have a revolution in the Lone Star State. The polls may mean that we’re seeing a Lone Star revolution, but not one big enough to put Biden over the edge without some luck. But not the turnout data, not yet anyway.

Start with the fact that registrations in Texas are only up from 78.2% of the voting age population in 2016 to 78.5% in 2020. If turnout rises back to 2008 levels (59.0%, versus 56.7% in 2016) then we will see the number of total votes cast rise from 9.0 million to 10.0 million. As of yesterday, the total number of early voters was 9,009,850 . That would be about 90% of our “expected” turnout. (Today is the last day for early voting.) That is way up from the 4,497,431 (or 52%) recorded in 2016. 

But ... we do not know is how many of those voters are new and how many have simply decided to vote early due to Covid fears or because early voting has expanded. It is quite plausible that all those early voters simply means that fewer people are going to show up on Tuesday. If we wind up with a turnout of 10 million voters, then Biden-Harris will need to snag basically all of the 1.0 million “new” voters. 

Is there any good news in the data, then?

Well, one solace is that the Democrats do not really need to snag all of the new voters. Lots of people have either passed away or moved out of the Lone Star State. The actual number of new voters will be larger than 1.0 million. A reasonable back-of-envelop calculation (which assumes that people who die or move out-of-state vote the same as all other Texans) would cut the share of new voters that the Democrats need to win to 70%.  

In other words, it is plausible (but not likely) for Democrats to win the state without a massive turnout surge. Consider the number of votes that major party candidates have attracted over the past 44 years. The number of Republican votes has been basically flat since 2004:

Let me note two weird things in the Texas data. The first is the jump in turnout from 1972 to 1976. First, why was turnout so incredibly low in 1972 and what caused it to spike in ’76? Federal action under the Voting Rights Act? The 26^th Amendment? It’s weird.

The second is the gyrations in the voting-age population (including non-citizens) as a share of the total population. It goes from 73% in 2008 to 69% in 2016 before shooting back up to 74% in 2020. For a state with more than 20 million people that seems like a lot of variation in birthrates or migration. 

TLDR: the turnout surge in Texas means less than you think it does. But even if Texas does not go blue, as is likely, purple Texas is already here. 

Propaganda in the age of artificial intelligence

Have you ever watched television commercials from the 1950s? They seem crude and unpersuasive, even silly. Political propaganda from the 1930s even more so and don’t get me started on print adverts from the 19th century. They actually persuaded people?

Well, yes, they probably did. Our culture has evolved in the presence of ever-more sophisticated advertising. Our defense mechanisms have also risen; ads either have to very sophisticated or do nothing more than present basic information in order to succeed. (See “Len the Plumber” for an example of the latter. All it does it tell you that you can get same-day service at that number; considering the cost of searching for a same-day plumber, it gets business despite presenting no information other than that it exists. And an annoying earwig to make sure you do not forget.)

New technology, however, allows for new ways to get around our cultural immune systems. We have seen the rise of Fox (cable television being the technology)  and fake news (going through social media). But two things are about to make the situation incredibly worse. (Hat tip: Will Baird.)

1. It is getting easier and easier to fake video of people saying things that they never actually said. It is no coincidence that the researchers at the link used footage of President Obama to create their fake clip. 
2. It is getting easier and easier to automate fake online comments and reviews, aka “crowdturfing.” The authors propose some potential fixes which might work for review websites ... but maybe not so much for social media. 

I am fairly sure democracy can survive these innovations. I am also fairly sure that democracies will work less well and lose legitimacy because of them. My worry is that our cultural immune systems will never adapt, or worse yet, adapt by crawling into our own epistemic fortresses.

The 2020 election is shaping up to be awful; 2024 more so; and I do not want to think about 2028 or 2032, when my children will be able to vote. 

Anyone able to provide an optimistic counterargument? Surely some techno-optimists are left, or any form of optimist, really.