Coronavirus, democratic backsliding and electoral uncertainty
Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, your blog could miss something.
Please, don't do the Ben Stein thing to me. It wasn't funny the first time, and it certainly isn't funny now, after having listened to that "joke" for 34 years. Stop it. Seriously.
Anyway. Where was I? Not too long ago, I was devoting virtual ink to posts about democratic backsliding, in the terminology of Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, along with presidential forecasting models, which seemed headed for a generic-R victory in 2020. My conclusion? A probable Trump reelection, and even if Trump lost, there would be court battles, votes thrown out on the flimsiest of "fraud" claims in order to keep him in office, and generally speaking, we weren't likely to be headed for a clean election.
And now? The country is a different place, even from a week ago. The economy is in the process of shutting down. It is likely already in a recession. Keep in mind the technical definition of "recession"-- two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. And if are watching the stock market, investors are freaking out, yesterday's rally notwithstanding. As of now, I don't entirely blame them. Last week, I wrote about the difficulty of pricing assets in the current environment, and the key lesson for any sane, rational person is to be a long-term investor rather than a trader, with an asset allocation based on short-term needs for cash. That way, you can ride this out. Traders, though? Trying to trade coronavirus is a mug's game. Which is why they're all getting mugged. That is both predictive of a recession, and a potential contributor. As people lose money, they pull back on spending, and consumer spending is about 2/3 of the economy, so yeah. The economy ain't lookin' too hot.
And we're looking at, by rough estimates, 2 million dead in this country if 1/3 of the population is infected with a virus that has a mortality rate of 2%. (330,000,000)*(1/3)*(.02) = 2,200,000. As I analogized the other day, that's the equivalent of combining cancer and heart disease, and doubling that. Yes, there are huge error bars around that estimate, so take that with more grains of salt than a doctor would advise, but the point is that this really could be big, in terms of raw numbers. Your individual chances of dying are probably low, depending on age, current health, lifestyle, etc., but this is big. My point the other day was to distinguish between individual-level probabilities and aggregate numbers, which is hard for many people to do. That's why we have math. In raw numbers, though, here's another way to put it. 2 million is 1/6th of a Holocaust. (6 million jews, 6 million assorted others Hitler hated.) And that's just the US.
On that Godwin-ian note, let's shift to forecasting models. 2020. If I could have thought of a segue, there would have been one, but... I suck. If we think in terms of Abramowitz's "Time for a Change" model-- my favorite-- COVID-19 changes 2020 dramatically.
I'm not quite ready to say, "throw out everything I've written up to this point," but as of today, I will say that there is a real breaking point. And that's where I'm going with the rest of this post.
Abramowitz's model uses three variables-- GDP growth in the second quarter of the election year, the president's approval rating (even when the incumbent isn't running), and a penalty when the incumbent party has won at least two terms in a row. If GDP goes negative next quarter, along with Trump's below-water approval rating, that makes the math really difficult for the Republicans. True, they won't be facing a two-term penalty, but a preternaturally unpopular president amid a recession whose only saving grace has been presiding over the end run of the longest growth stretch we've seen... he's going to have problems. Right now, to forecast a forecasting model, the "Time for a Change" model is starting to look bad for the GOP. The question hanging over that model so far has been the disjuncture between a strong economy and the President's low approval rating. If, as it appears, the economy tanks, those come into alignment, and the Abramowitz model will predict a generic D victory over a generic R. And yes, the Abramowitz model predicted a generic R victory in 2016.
Then, let's add in Doug Hibbs's "Bread & Peace" model. OK, this is a weird one. Hibbs uses RDI and troop deaths. I kind of like Hibbs's model, partially because I am fond of "real disposable income" as an economic measure. It gets you the combination of unemployment and inflation, which are in tension with each other (remember the Phillips Curve?), so it's kind of a "misery index" thing, but you also factor in a bunch of other stuff. I could ramble a lot about it, but basically, I think it is a good measure, and over time, it has had some strong predictive power. Hibbs has used that along with troop deaths to predict presidential elections. Of course, that latter variable has been, let's say, historically contextual. It's a weird model. Anyway, we aren't really losing troops. For whatever else can be said of Trump, he hasn't gone around starting new wars. (So far.) At least on this point, the fears of people like Admiral James Stavridis haven't been borne out.
Yet, let's take the concept. High civilian death tolls. That can't be good.
I'm not quite ready to say, "throw out everything I've written up to this point," but as of today, I will say that there is a real breaking point. And that's where I'm going with the rest of this post.
Abramowitz's model uses three variables-- GDP growth in the second quarter of the election year, the president's approval rating (even when the incumbent isn't running), and a penalty when the incumbent party has won at least two terms in a row. If GDP goes negative next quarter, along with Trump's below-water approval rating, that makes the math really difficult for the Republicans. True, they won't be facing a two-term penalty, but a preternaturally unpopular president amid a recession whose only saving grace has been presiding over the end run of the longest growth stretch we've seen... he's going to have problems. Right now, to forecast a forecasting model, the "Time for a Change" model is starting to look bad for the GOP. The question hanging over that model so far has been the disjuncture between a strong economy and the President's low approval rating. If, as it appears, the economy tanks, those come into alignment, and the Abramowitz model will predict a generic D victory over a generic R. And yes, the Abramowitz model predicted a generic R victory in 2016.
Then, let's add in Doug Hibbs's "Bread & Peace" model. OK, this is a weird one. Hibbs uses RDI and troop deaths. I kind of like Hibbs's model, partially because I am fond of "real disposable income" as an economic measure. It gets you the combination of unemployment and inflation, which are in tension with each other (remember the Phillips Curve?), so it's kind of a "misery index" thing, but you also factor in a bunch of other stuff. I could ramble a lot about it, but basically, I think it is a good measure, and over time, it has had some strong predictive power. Hibbs has used that along with troop deaths to predict presidential elections. Of course, that latter variable has been, let's say, historically contextual. It's a weird model. Anyway, we aren't really losing troops. For whatever else can be said of Trump, he hasn't gone around starting new wars. (So far.) At least on this point, the fears of people like Admiral James Stavridis haven't been borne out.
Yet, let's take the concept. High civilian death tolls. That can't be good.
Time to revisit some comments I made earlier about coronavirus and 2020. I referenced Achen & Bartels's analysis of the 1918 influenza epidemic in their paper, "Blind Retrospection," and their conclusion that while voters will hold incumbents responsible for things outside a politician's control, that didn't happen in the case of the 1918 influenza epidemic. Why not? In that case, they argued that voters saw it as so intrinsically disconnected from politics that nobody could plausibly blame a politician. In order for voters to blame politicians for "natural" events, they must be able to tell a narrative about politicians having a responsibility to respond in an appropriate manner, and the incumbents' failure to do so. Achen & Bartels argued that, in 1918, this simply wasn't the case.
The question I raised in my earlier analysis was about whether or not peoples' expectations of government have changed, as they relate to health and medicine. I think they likely have.
So. "Valence." Time for a bit of a refresher. I wrote frequently about the concept of valence during the 2016 election because the valence discrepancy was so stark. Donald Stokes brought the concept to the forefront of spatial models (my subfield) with a paper called "Spatial Models of Party Competition." He distinguished between two types of issues. A positional issue is an issue about which we disagree on the desired outcome, such as abortion. Should it be legal or illegal? A valence issue is an issue about which we agree on the goal, but disagree either on how to achieve it, or who can achieve it. Classical valence issues are issues such as a strong economy.
Or... not dyin' of some crazy new strain of coronavirus. That'd be nice. I think we can all agree on that goal, right? See? Valence issue.
But, who can achieve that goal?
And this is where the concept of valence has gotten all twisted around. In spatial theory, we define a mathematical policy space in which everyone has an ideal point and single-peaked, symmetric preferences. Orthogonal to that policy space is a valence dimension, and candidates have scores in that valence dimension. However, while voters want candidates who are as close as possible to their locations in the policy space, they just want candidates who have the highest score possible in that valence dimension.
OK, quick rant here that I think everyone does the math incorrectly on policy spaces. I wrote a book about it-- Incremental Polarization: A Unified Spatial Theory of Legislative Elections, Parties and Roll Call Voting. It doesn't matter where a legislative candidate's ideal point is-- it matters what votes that candidate would cast. The math there is very different. Anyway, we now return you to your regularly scheduled rant on a totally different topic.
So, candidates have scores in a valence dimension, and voters want higher scores on that valence dimension. So, what is the valence dimension? It consists of good stuff, like competence and honesty. Wouldn't it be nice to have honest and competent people in office?
I'd say, "stop laughing," but I think you stopped laughing long ago. Anyone sane did.
Donald Trump. As a pure, factual matter, he is not honest. He lies on a scale that is difficult to document because he lies so frequently and so egregiously. As far as competence goes, in cowboy-speak, the phrase is, "all hat, no cattle." Since Trump plays a different role, try this: "all suit, no portfolio."
COVID-19 is a case in which competence and honesty, or rather incompetence and dishonesty interact in a truly fatal way. When there is a fatal disease spreading, we have institutions that need to respond. The president is in charge of those institutions, and must manage them, while also communicating honestly about what is happening. Lies, such as telling the public that there is no problem at all, everything is fine, there will be a "miracle," and it will disappear... combine that with complete organizational incompetence, and it is actually, literally lethal.
Lies kill. Incompetence kills. The interaction of lying and incompetence is a perfect demonstration of why we, in political science, use the concept of "valence." Valence traits produce valence outcomes.
Watch and learn.
As I wrote many times back on The Unmutual Political Blog, presidents matter primarily in times of crisis. Here's the crisis. This is when valence traits matter.
Does this mean Trump loses in November?
I have no idea. Remember what I said about error bars? Big error bars. Predictions go out the window right now. When the data come in for forecasting models, I'll plug in the numbers, and assess.
But... democratic backsliding. One of the other things I have been writing is that even if Trump loses, the problem is that he won't step down voluntarily. The question will be how everyone else responds. The precise nature of his refusal? I couldn't say right now. Court challenges? Certainly. State-level shenanigans? Oh, yeah. However, in 2016, when the polls all said Trump didn't have a chance, and he was railing about how everything was "rigged," just like his all-too-similar buddy, Bernie Sanders, he was challenged with the question of whether or not he would accept the results if he lost. His response was that he would accept the results, if he won, and he kept telling insane lies about everything being "rigged." Then, after winning, he kept telling insane lies about "voter fraud," and conspiracies within the "deep state," and such. Can anyone seriously look at his words and actions and find justification for a claim that Trump would voluntarily accept a loss? An evidence-based argument. Not a patriotic ode to American democracy, but an evidence-based assessment of Donald Trump.
I have also been writing about the Republican Party, "ideological collusion," and, "democratic backsliding," as Levitsky & Ziblatt call the processes. Essentially, a party gives undue power to a demagogic authoritarian because they see short-term policy gains, and in the process, they erode democratic norms while leaving merely the illusory shell of democracy. If Trump were to lose, what would Mitch McConnell do? If it looked like an imminent loss, how would governors around the country respond, proactively? You see where I've been going here.
What would Bill Barr do?
We're already seeing "investigations" of Joe Biden ramp up, and Trump knows full well that his "victory" owes a great deal to James Comey's surprise announcement, right before the election, of a re-opened "investigation" into Hillary Clinton's email thing.
Bill Barr. Watch Bill Barr. Watch him very closely.
So, this has been where my analysis was going.
Now let's add COVID-19, and all of the chaos. What does this do? Error bars. Could elections be canceled? I'm not ruling that out. It would have been much sketchier before COVID-19, but now? Now there's a better excuse. There are also far more opportunities for whatever shenanigans Trump and his people could use to affect the process.
On the other hand, if things really turn south, the more blatantly antidemocratic a president's actions get amid clear incompetence handling such a crisis, the more it could backfire. Democratic backsliding is not the overthrow of democracy. It is the hollowing out of democracy. It doesn't work without some thin veneer. If Trump and the GOP had to take so many actions that the veneer got sandblasted away, the danger of violence and social chaos may get beyond their capacity to tolerate. Error bars. The risk calculation changes. It may be easier, under the circumstances, for the GOP to throw Trump to the curb. Would Trump accept a loss and go voluntarily? No. Of course not. But, without his party backing him and trying to keep him in office in the face of a legitimate loss, he's gone.
What then? I have no clue. The office of the Presidency has been empowered beyond any reason by ideological collusion. The Republican Party won't want Joe Biden to have anything near that level of power. What kind of steps they take to claw back that power... I don't know. What happens in congressional elections... I don't know. The whole point of this scenario is... I don't know.
COVID-19 creates a whole mess of I-don't-know. It ramps up pressure on the GOP to use every institutional power they have to prevent the insanely-empowered executive from falling into the hands of an ideologically distant opponent. Biden isn't Sanders, but ideological polarization is real, and Biden is nowhere near them. They don't want that kind of power in his hands. And depending on whom he picks for a VP... remember, he's old. Just sayin'. Yet, if the country is in sufficient disarray in November, the risks associated with blatant cheating are much higher than they would be in a more orderly country. And while Trump will do anything to win, his party may not. They actually care about a future beyond Trump.
What happens? I don't know.
OK, quick rant here that I think everyone does the math incorrectly on policy spaces. I wrote a book about it-- Incremental Polarization: A Unified Spatial Theory of Legislative Elections, Parties and Roll Call Voting. It doesn't matter where a legislative candidate's ideal point is-- it matters what votes that candidate would cast. The math there is very different. Anyway, we now return you to your regularly scheduled rant on a totally different topic.
So, candidates have scores in a valence dimension, and voters want higher scores on that valence dimension. So, what is the valence dimension? It consists of good stuff, like competence and honesty. Wouldn't it be nice to have honest and competent people in office?
I'd say, "stop laughing," but I think you stopped laughing long ago. Anyone sane did.
Donald Trump. As a pure, factual matter, he is not honest. He lies on a scale that is difficult to document because he lies so frequently and so egregiously. As far as competence goes, in cowboy-speak, the phrase is, "all hat, no cattle." Since Trump plays a different role, try this: "all suit, no portfolio."
COVID-19 is a case in which competence and honesty, or rather incompetence and dishonesty interact in a truly fatal way. When there is a fatal disease spreading, we have institutions that need to respond. The president is in charge of those institutions, and must manage them, while also communicating honestly about what is happening. Lies, such as telling the public that there is no problem at all, everything is fine, there will be a "miracle," and it will disappear... combine that with complete organizational incompetence, and it is actually, literally lethal.
Lies kill. Incompetence kills. The interaction of lying and incompetence is a perfect demonstration of why we, in political science, use the concept of "valence." Valence traits produce valence outcomes.
Watch and learn.
As I wrote many times back on The Unmutual Political Blog, presidents matter primarily in times of crisis. Here's the crisis. This is when valence traits matter.
Does this mean Trump loses in November?
I have no idea. Remember what I said about error bars? Big error bars. Predictions go out the window right now. When the data come in for forecasting models, I'll plug in the numbers, and assess.
But... democratic backsliding. One of the other things I have been writing is that even if Trump loses, the problem is that he won't step down voluntarily. The question will be how everyone else responds. The precise nature of his refusal? I couldn't say right now. Court challenges? Certainly. State-level shenanigans? Oh, yeah. However, in 2016, when the polls all said Trump didn't have a chance, and he was railing about how everything was "rigged," just like his all-too-similar buddy, Bernie Sanders, he was challenged with the question of whether or not he would accept the results if he lost. His response was that he would accept the results, if he won, and he kept telling insane lies about everything being "rigged." Then, after winning, he kept telling insane lies about "voter fraud," and conspiracies within the "deep state," and such. Can anyone seriously look at his words and actions and find justification for a claim that Trump would voluntarily accept a loss? An evidence-based argument. Not a patriotic ode to American democracy, but an evidence-based assessment of Donald Trump.
I have also been writing about the Republican Party, "ideological collusion," and, "democratic backsliding," as Levitsky & Ziblatt call the processes. Essentially, a party gives undue power to a demagogic authoritarian because they see short-term policy gains, and in the process, they erode democratic norms while leaving merely the illusory shell of democracy. If Trump were to lose, what would Mitch McConnell do? If it looked like an imminent loss, how would governors around the country respond, proactively? You see where I've been going here.
What would Bill Barr do?
We're already seeing "investigations" of Joe Biden ramp up, and Trump knows full well that his "victory" owes a great deal to James Comey's surprise announcement, right before the election, of a re-opened "investigation" into Hillary Clinton's email thing.
Bill Barr. Watch Bill Barr. Watch him very closely.
So, this has been where my analysis was going.
Now let's add COVID-19, and all of the chaos. What does this do? Error bars. Could elections be canceled? I'm not ruling that out. It would have been much sketchier before COVID-19, but now? Now there's a better excuse. There are also far more opportunities for whatever shenanigans Trump and his people could use to affect the process.
On the other hand, if things really turn south, the more blatantly antidemocratic a president's actions get amid clear incompetence handling such a crisis, the more it could backfire. Democratic backsliding is not the overthrow of democracy. It is the hollowing out of democracy. It doesn't work without some thin veneer. If Trump and the GOP had to take so many actions that the veneer got sandblasted away, the danger of violence and social chaos may get beyond their capacity to tolerate. Error bars. The risk calculation changes. It may be easier, under the circumstances, for the GOP to throw Trump to the curb. Would Trump accept a loss and go voluntarily? No. Of course not. But, without his party backing him and trying to keep him in office in the face of a legitimate loss, he's gone.
What then? I have no clue. The office of the Presidency has been empowered beyond any reason by ideological collusion. The Republican Party won't want Joe Biden to have anything near that level of power. What kind of steps they take to claw back that power... I don't know. What happens in congressional elections... I don't know. The whole point of this scenario is... I don't know.
COVID-19 creates a whole mess of I-don't-know. It ramps up pressure on the GOP to use every institutional power they have to prevent the insanely-empowered executive from falling into the hands of an ideologically distant opponent. Biden isn't Sanders, but ideological polarization is real, and Biden is nowhere near them. They don't want that kind of power in his hands. And depending on whom he picks for a VP... remember, he's old. Just sayin'. Yet, if the country is in sufficient disarray in November, the risks associated with blatant cheating are much higher than they would be in a more orderly country. And while Trump will do anything to win, his party may not. They actually care about a future beyond Trump.
What happens? I don't know.
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