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Ichingcarpenter

(36,988 posts)
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 09:32 AM Jun 2014

538 and Krugman Eric Cantor upset what happened.

Last edited Wed Jun 11, 2014, 10:30 AM - Edit history (1)







Krugman's take"

Wow — Eric Cantor lost his primary, by a large margin. Amazing.

Obviously I know nothing about his district, or what exactly happened. Fivethirtyeight does have something interesting, pointing out that Tea Party upsets seem correlated with the second dimension of DW-nominate, the Poole-Rosenthal system that maps roll call votes into an implied position space. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I might come back to this, but basically I’m telling you that I remain a serious nerd.

What I think I might add to this discussion is a note on incentives: Cantor’s loss is part of a process that could well unravel movement conservatism as we know it.

Movement conservatism — as distinct from just plain conservatism, which has always been a part of the landscape and always will be — is a distinct feature of modern American politics. It dates, more or less, back to the 1970s, when conservatives, with lots of money from the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife, set about building an institutional infrastructure of think tanks, pressure groups, captive media, etc.. At first this infrastructure mainly provided backing to right-thinking (in both senses) politicians. But eventually it provided a career path for up and coming conservatives.

In particular, being a movement conservative in good standing meant considerable career safety: even if you or the politician you worked for lost an election, there were jobs to be had at think tanks (e.g. Rick Santorum heading up the “America’s enemies” program at a Scaife-backed think tank), media gigs (two Bush speechwriters writing columns for the Washington Post, not to mention the gaggle at the WSJ and Fox News), and so on.

In other words, being a hard line conservative, which to be fair involved some career risks back in the 60s and into the 70s, became a safe choice; you could count on powerful backing, and if not favored by fortune, you could fall back on wingnut welfare............

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/fall-of-an-apparatchik/?smid=re-share


My addition to the story
Anyway one thing we do know is that

Republican internal polls are really bad as this election showed and
Romney's internal polls showed.










538's take

here are a few quick thoughts.

First, this race had a heavy insider vs. outsider dynamic, and the tea party is definitely not dead. As my colleague Nate Silver pointed out previously, it was probably too early to call for the tea party’s demise. Cantor’s loss puts an exclamation point on that.

Yes, the difference between being part of the establishment and being a tea party member can be overplayed. In this case, however, it applies. Brat had the backing of local tea party groups, and you can’t get more establishment than being the House majority leader.

Cantor, in contrast to past victims of GOP primary challenges, such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska or former Indiana senator Dick Lugar, has little history of bucking his party. As you might expect of a Republican in a leadership position, he’s voted with his party 95 percent of the time. Because Cantor’s party is quite conservative, his votes have been quite conservative.

But his position of authority also saddles him with any grievances that voters might have against the GOP leadership.

We can look at the statistical system DW-Nominate scores to confirm this. DW-Nominate ranks members of Congress on two dimensions based on their roll call votes. The first dimension is essentially a liberal-to-conservative measure. Cantor is more conservative than any of the Republicans thought to be in trouble in 2014, according to DW-Nominate. (He has about as conservative a voting record as Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, so he’s no moderate.)

The second dimension of DW-Nominate is less commonly discussed. It describes differences among members of Congress that can’t easily be placed on a left-right scale — for instance, voting on civil rights issues during the mid-20th century. (Many northern Republicans voted in favor of civil rights legislation, while many New Deal Democrats from the South voted against it.) More recently, the second dimension has come to represent something like an insider vs. outsider (or establishment vs. tea party) spectrum.

I don’t want to claim that Cantor’s defeat was all that predictable — it wasn’t but..............


http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-eric-cantor-upset-what-happened/

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MADem

(135,425 posts)
1. Did I miss Nate Silver predicting this? Everything I read said "Cantor in a walk."
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 09:40 AM
Jun 2014

"No contest." "Work on pushing him in the general, don't expect a lot of money; it's his to lose." Even the worst polls had him up by double digits.

I'm curious as to how the "outstanding expert in the field" missed this...or didn't anyone look?

 

Timez Squarez

(262 posts)
2. I said in a earlier thread (months ago) that Nate Silver is an idiot.
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 09:48 AM
Jun 2014

When he predicted that GOP will take the Senate, and hold the House.

Right now, with the primary losses, the House of Monkeys have lost their grip, and it is favored and remains favored (since Jan) that I am of the opinion that the Democratic Senate will be retained, with zero or minimal gains for the Democratic side, and there WILL be a Democratic House with Grayson as the Speaker, not Pelosi.

No more Turd Way compromisers in the Leadership positions. No more currying favors for the Republicans. They've had their turn. It's over.

Yes, I said it's over.

MADem

(135,425 posts)
3. Grayson can't get the votes. A lot of his peers dislike him in a big way.
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 09:51 AM
Jun 2014

The Speaker of the House is a blatant popularity contest--and Grayson doesn't have a prayer of getting the votes for it. If the Dems could take back the House, Pelosi would likely be returned to the podium. She has MAD administrative and negotiating skills, plus she's got a lot of loyal friends seeded throughout the building.

 

Reter

(2,188 posts)
6. Absolutely correct
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 09:56 AM
Jun 2014

I'd also add that leaders in the House and Senate are almost always establishment people. Newt I think was an exception, as he was much to the right of then current Republicans at the time.

Ichingcarpenter

(36,988 posts)
4. I was gonna include Krugman's take also
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 09:53 AM
Jun 2014

since he mentioned 538 and said it was interesting.

Wow — Eric Cantor lost his primary, by a large margin. Amazing.

Obviously I know nothing about his district, or what exactly happened. Fivethirtyeight does have something interesting, pointing out that Tea Party upsets seem correlated with the second dimension of DW-nominate, the Poole-Rosenthal system that maps roll call votes into an implied position space. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I might come back to this, but basically I’m telling you that I remain a serious nerd.

What I think I might add to this discussion is a note on incentives: Cantor’s loss is part of a process that could well unravel movement conservatism as we know it.

Movement conservatism — as distinct from just plain conservatism, which has always been a part of the landscape and always will be — is a distinct feature of modern American politics. It dates, more or less, back to the 1970s, when conservatives, with lots of money from the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife, set about building an institutional infrastructure of think tanks, pressure groups, captive media, etc.. At first this infrastructure mainly provided backing to right-thinking (in both senses) politicians. But eventually it provided a career path for up and coming conservatives.

In particular, being a movement conservative in good standing meant considerable career safety: even if you or the politician you worked for lost an election, there were jobs to be had at think tanks (e.g. Rick Santorum heading up the “America’s enemies” program at a Scaife-backed think tank), media gigs (two Bush speechwriters writing columns for the Washington Post, not to mention the gaggle at the WSJ and Fox News), and so on.

In other words, being a hard line conservative, which to be fair involved some career risks back in the 60s and into the 70s, became a safe choice; you could count on powerful backing, and if not favored by fortune, you could fall back on wingnut welfare............

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/fall-of-an-apparatchik/?smid=re-share



Anyway one thing we do know is that

Republican internal polls are really bad as this election showed and
Romney's internal polls showed.




MADem

(135,425 posts)
15. That is an interesting take. And yeah, I wouldn't let a Republican predict if
Thu Jun 12, 2014, 08:55 AM
Jun 2014

it was gonna rain with the weather channel on! They just suck at it!

I guess when they can't stuff the ballot box, it's harder to come up with accurate numbers...?

hack89

(39,171 posts)
5. I don't think Silver made a prediction.
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 09:53 AM
Jun 2014

I don't think primaries produce enough meaningful polling data for him to apply his methods.

MADem

(135,425 posts)
8. He needs to work on his methods, then.
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 10:00 AM
Jun 2014

I wasn't even following Cantor closely, but I know I saw three or four polls--a couple the "usual horseshit" but even the ones that I usually regard as even-handed had him up by ten or MORE.

hack89

(39,171 posts)
10. He didn't make a prediction so why are you attacking him?
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 10:03 AM
Jun 2014

he knows that his method works best on general elections where there is a greater depth and breadth of data available.

MADem

(135,425 posts)
13. He can't rest on his laurels. He needs to get in there when it's risky. It's easy to
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 10:11 AM
Jun 2014

make predictions when there's an embarrassment of riches.

Ichingcarpenter

(36,988 posts)
14. I took 2 semesters in Political Science on Polling
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 10:27 AM
Jun 2014

back in the 70s for my PS degree.

I used to trust polls and exit polls but then something happened to the system where I found them more and more unreliable and suspect and that was 6 years before `kerry's exit polls in Ohio.

I went to 538 because of Krugman's observation . Neither mentioned how Cantors internal polls were so wrong and why.

so I think I will include that in the OP so not to upset the sensitive.


Demsrule86

(68,351 posts)
7. Democrats voted in the primary
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 09:57 AM
Jun 2014

I have heard from my family that many Democrats voted in this primary...Cantor is blamed for the government shutdown which caused hardship in this area too...not so sure this is a tea party victory ...may they just don't like the guy...low turn out and Democrats crossing over to vote in this primary...who knows? I can't stand Cantor because of his rudeness to Pres. Obama. Thus I am delighted to see him go down.

MADem

(135,425 posts)
12. Well, they need to do several things to win this thing, then.
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 10:10 AM
Jun 2014

They need to depress the GOP vote by bashing, trashing and dragging the name of this Tea nutter through the mud. OPPO research, and plenty of it!!! The minimum wage gaffe he made this morning--pin him down and pin that on him. Get him to say some wildass shit. Find tapes of his old lectures, pull them apart. Get him on the defensive now--early and often, every time he gets back on his feet, hit him w/something else.

GOTV in a big way on the Dem side. Rides, phone calls, take 'em by the hand, get 'em to the polls. "Your social security DEPENDS on it!!!!" Now's not too soon to start reaching out to people and "keeping in touch." Those "What's important to YOU?" phone calls can go a long way towards engaging a voter.

Fundraise, fundraise, fundraise. Buy lots of ads that look home-grown but are subtly sophisticated. TARGET the electorate, and target independents and malleable one-issue Republicans. Make sure the ad buys work and are appropriate --no "young voter" stuff in the middle of a Lawrence Welk rerun.

Get a hold of that Dem candidate and clean him up. He needs a bit of "Media 101" class. He's a prof too, so he can talk on his feet, but he needs to get the national syllabus down and be able to apply it to his district.

It's NOT TOO SOON to start debate prepping the guy. Early and often!

Sunlei

(22,651 posts)
9. I bet hes another R with all his 'employee yes men' pretending they'll vote for him.
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 10:02 AM
Jun 2014

Now that Cantor will be unemployed maybe republican fox will hire the peacock

 

Larkspur

(12,804 posts)
11. The other factor involved in Cantor's defeat is
Wed Jun 11, 2014, 10:07 AM
Jun 2014

he didn't visit his district as much as he had when first elected. And he seemed to be shooting for national GOP leader and thus neglected his constituents.

I saw this happen with Sam Gejdenson D-CT. Sam was a congressman from CT's 2nd district for 20 years, but he lived more outside of his district than in it. He made his family's farm his residence, but he lived with his girl friend in the western part of CT. Sam was defeated in 2000 by Republican Rob Simmons.

Cantor was in Congress for 14 years. Neglecting his constituents added to the anti-establishment feeling running through his district that Eric overlooked. He should have gotten a clue when his hand-picked man for Republican chair lost to a Tea Partier.

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