From the Sioux to the Navajos: Hillary Clinton seems to have done very weakly with American Indians

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Monday November 21, 2016 · 4:10 PM PST

2016/11/21 · 16:10

A review of the election results in the ten counties whose population is at least two-thirds American Indian reveals a disproportionate drop-off in support for Hillary Clinton compared to Barack Obama's 2012 result. Turnout fell in most of these counties. Trump barely increased the Republican tally — at least in absolute numbers — but Jill Stein did well in the two North Dakotan counties.

All I wanted to know, initially, was how the Standing Rock Sioux tribe voted in the election. What, if any, influence did the long-running #NoDAPL protests — and the harrowing police brutality the protesters have faced — have on how the locals voted in the presidential election?

I ended up looking more broadly at the election results across the most Native American parts of the country. Here is a teaser table comparing the 2012 and 2016 results; for all the relevant detail you'll need to look below the fold.

nimh

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday November 13, 2016 · 8:00 AM PST

2016/11/13 · 08:00

When the polls closed, while the pundits pundited, I was making an election night wish list on Google Sheets. What would be my dream result? I had races on there from President to local ballot initiative, but the sheet would soon turn depressingly red. So many targets — some that were always unrealistic, some that had seemed perfectly realistic — left unmet.

I had included all battleground US Senate races, of course, and those that had fallen off the battleground list during the campaign as well. Same for the gubernatorial races. Of the lot of them — 22 in total — I got to format just 8 in blue by the end. And two of those involved having Jim Justice winning in West-Virginia while also leaving at least 4% for the Mountain Party.

But how are we to evaluate all those losses, and some of those wins? What lessons can we draw from them? Was it because of candidate quality (ours or the opposing side's), campaign quality, demographics? I'd like to hear your answers, but first we need benchmarks. And I can think of three.

First: how well did each Democrat who ran for the Senate or for Governor perform in comparison to Hillary Clinton? Did they run ahead of her? Did they do worse than her, even as she lost her own race? I will include every candidate whose race looked at any time like it could be competitive:

Outperforming - or underperforming - Clinton
State	DEM CANDIDATE	GOP CANDIDATE	DEM MARGIN	Clinton margin	Difference
	US SENATE
ILLINOIS	Duckworth	Kirk	14.2	16.6	-2.4
Colorado	Bennett	Glenn	3.9	4.2	-0.3
Nevada	Masto	Heck	2.4	2.4	0.0
New Hampshire	Hassan	Ayotte	0.1	0.4	-0.3
Pennsylvania	McGinty	Toomey	-1.7	-1.1	-0.6
Missouri	Kander	Blunt	-3.2	-19.0	15.8
Wisconsin	Feingold	Johnson	-3.4	-0.9	-2.5
North Carolina	Ross	Burr	-5.8	-3.8	-2.0
Florida	Murphy	Rubio	-7.7	-1.2	-6.5
Indiana	Bayh	Young	-9.7	-19.0	9.3
Arizona	Kirkpatrick	McCain	-12.3	-3.9	-8.4
Georgia	Barksdale	Isakson	-14.2	-5.3	-8.9
Ohio	Strickland	Portman	-21.4	-8.5	-12.9
iowa	Judge	Grassley	-24.5	-9.5	-15.0
	GOVERNOR
West-Virginia	Justice	Cole	6.8	-42.2	49.0
Montana	Bullock	Gianforte	3.8	-20.5	24.3
North Carolina	Cooper	McCrory	0.1	-3.8	3.9
New Hampshire	Van Ostern	Sununu	-2.3	0.4	-2.7
Missouri	Koster	Greitens	-5.9	-19.0	13.1
Indiana	Gregg	Holcomb	-6.0	-19.0	13.0
Vermont	Minter	Scott	-8.7	26.5	-35.2

Data sources: NY Times (Senate), Politico (Governor), 2016 National Popular Vote Tracker by David Wasserman (President)

Possibly surprising fact: 11 of the 14 Democratic nominees for Senate who were, at least at some point, touted as credible nominees did worse than Hillary Clinton. At least if you use this measure (the winning margin between Republican and Democrat). Catherine Cortez Masto, in Nevada, did exactly as well as Clinton. Just two of these Democrats did better; but they did a lot better: Jason Kander and Evan Bayh.

It works out a little bit differently if you go by Democratic share of the vote (because of the relatively high percentage going to Johnson and Stein in the presidential race), but only a little. If you look at it that way, Maggie Hassan and Michael Bennett pull ahead of Clinton, but Masto falls behind her.

So much for Hillary being a flawed candidate who dragged down Democratic prospects? Maybe, but you can also turn the comparison around. 11 of the 14 Republican candidates in these races got a better margin than Donald Trump did. As ubiquitous as the analyses this week are about how Trump turned out to have unique strengths that explain why he won, he still ran behind his downballot Republican colleagues in the Senate races in most of these states. Which is why the National Review's Dan McLaughlin crowed that “This was a big night for Republicans and a terrible one for Democrats, and that extends far beyond the personalities of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.”

The picture looks very different in the gubernatorial races. Here, most Democrats ran well ahead of Clinton. In West-Virginia, mining magnate Jim Justice pulled off a comfortable 7-point win even as Clinton lost to Trump by an unprecedented, lopsided margin of 27% to 69%. The 50-point difference between their margins is easily the biggest you'll find in this diary. But it wasn't just him. Steve Bullock, incumbent Governor of Montana, got reelected by a margin that was 24 points better than Clinton's. Chris Koster in Missouri and John Gregg in Indiana both lost, but both by 13 points less than Clinton.

So what did Kander, Bayh, Justice, Koster and Gregg have going for them that Clinton didn't? Do they have lessons to offer for national Democrats? There are always specificities, of course. Bayh had his family name, and a jealously-guarded campaign funding war chest from yesteryear. Justice, Koster and Gregg benefited from running for Governor rather than Senator, when ticket-splitting has become much more rare in federal races. Nevertheless it might be useful to look at these five politicians — and especially Jason Kander — as the Democrats try to figure out how to move forward.

Vice versa, are there lessons to be drawn from the races that underperformed most? Ted Strickland was buried by attack ads in a race where campaign funding was among the most unevenly distributed. He was also dragged down by having governed the state right when the world economy tanked in 2008. Sue Minter was up against a personally very popular, middle-of-the-road Republican. It's still striking how much they trailed Clinton, though. It's even more striking how Patty Judge bombed so badly in Iowa. She performed worse, by this measure, than Strickland.

There are other ways to explore whether these Democratic candidates overperformed or underperformed, though. For example, how did they fare compared with what the polls had been predicting?

OUTPERFORMING - OR UNDERPERFORMING - the polls
STATE	DEM CANDIDATE	GOP CANDIDATE	DEM MARGIN	polling MARGIN	DIFFERENCE
	US SENATE
ILLINOIS	Duckworth	Kirk	14.2	13	1.2
COLORADO	Bennett	Glenn	3.9	9	-5.1
NEVADA	Masto	Heck	2.4	1	1.4
NEW HAMPSHIRE	Hassan	Ayotte	0.1	2	-1.9
PENNSYLVANIA	McGinty	Toomey	-1.7	4	-5.7
MISSOURI	Kander	Blunt	-3.2	0	-3.2
WISCONSIN	Feingold	Johnson	-3.4	4	-7.4
NORTH CAROLINA	Ross	Burr	-5.8	-2	-3.8
FLORIDA	Murphy	Rubio	-7.7	-6	-1.7
INDIANA	Bayh	Young	-9.7	1	-10.7
ARIZONA	Kirkpatrick	McCain	-12.3	-8	-4.3
GEORGIA	Barksdale	Isakson	-14.2	-10	-4.2
OHIO	Strickland	Portman	-21.4	-16	-5.4
IOWA	Judge	Grassley	-24.5	-16	-8.5
	GOVERNOR
WEST-VIRGINIA	Justice	Cole	6.8	5	1.8
MONTANA	Bullock	Gianforte	3.8	n/a
NORTH CAROLINA	Cooper	McCrory	0.1	3	-2.9
NEW HAMPSHIRE	Van Ostern	Sununu	-2.3	3	-5.3
MISSOURI	Koster	Greitens	-5.9	5	-10.9
INDIANA	Gregg	Holcomb	-6.0	5	-11.0
VERMONT	Minter	Scott	-8.7	n/a

Data sources: NY Times (Senate), Politico (Governor), Huffington Post Pollster (polling trendlines). Where HuffPo Pollster did not identify enough polls to define a polling trend, I've put n/a.

The overall picture here is even more depressing than above. In all but three races, the polls had foreseen a better result for the Democrat than what emerged. (At least when using HuffPo Pollster as source; in the Presidential race, Pollster identified larger leads for Clinton than e.g. RealClearPolitics.) The polls had even foreseen a sweep of the gubernatorial races, unless you count a last-minute SurveyMonkey poll which saw a narrow loss for Steve Bullock in a race that lacked enough polls to define a trendline. In the end, the Democrats won less than half of them.

The three candidates who did better than the polls had suggested were Tammy Duckworth, Catherine Cortez Masto, and Jim Justice. Very different candidates in very different races, and each of their winning margins outperformed the polls by less than two points.

The candidates whose chances were overestimated most by the polls were some of the same who still ended up outperforming Clinton by the greatest lengths: Evan Bayh, Chris Koster, John Gregg. This doubtlessly has a lot to do with just how much Trump outperformed the polls in those red states at the top of the ticket. Pollster had Trump leading by ten points in Indiana, and seven in Missouri; in both cases the real margin turned out to be 19 points. The Republican candidates for Senator and Governor outperformed the polls by roughly the same amount.

Bayh faced some strong headwinds at the end of his campaign over revelations about his lobbying work and (lack of) residence in his supposed home state. So it's interesting that, in the end, he heavily underperformed the polls, but not by more than Gregg did as gubernatorial candidate in the same state.

Beyond Bayh, Koster and Gregg, the candidate who underperformed the polls most was Patty Judge, who was at the bottom of the list in the comparison with Clinton.

I could think of one last way to try to evaluate the performance of these Democratic candidates. It's an obvious enough one: how did they do compared to the last election?

This gets a little tricky, however. The last time these Senate races were on was in 2010, an annus horribilis for Congressional Democrats. The last time the gubernatorial races were on was in 2012, a pretty good year for Democrats. So the performance of the Democratic candidates on the two lists cannot be easily compared when using this yardstick:

OUTPERFORMING - OR UNDERPERFORMING - the previous election
STATE	DEM CANDIDATE	GOP CANDIDATE	DEM MARGIN	DEM MARGIN	DIFFERENCE
	US SENATE			2010
ILLINOIS	Duckworth	Kirk	14.2	-1.6	15.8
COLORADO	Bennett	Glenn	3.9	-1.7	5.6
NEVADA	Masto	Heck	2.4	5.7	-3.3
NEW HAMPSHIRE	Hassan	Ayotte	0.1	-23.2	23.3
PENNSYLVANIA	McGinty	Toomey	-1.7	-2.0	0.3
MISSOURI	Kander	Blunt	-3.2	-13.4	10.2
WISCONSIN	Feingold	Johnson	-3.4	-4.8	1.4
NORTH CAROLINA	Ross	Burr	-5.8	-11.8	6.0
FLORIDA	Murphy	Rubio	-7.7	3-way race
INDIANA	Bayh	Young	-9.7	-14.6	4.9
ARIZONA	Kirkpatrick	McCain	-12.3	-24.2	11.9
GEORGIA	Barksdale	Isakson	-14.2	-19.3	5.1
OHIO	Strickland	Portman	-21.4	-17.5	-3.9
IOWA	Judge	Grassley	-24.5	-31.1	6.6
	GOVERNOR			2012
WEST-VIRGINIA	Justice	Cole	6.8	4.7	2.1
MONTANA	Bullock	Gianforte	3.8	1.6	2.2
NORTH CAROLINA	Cooper	McCrory	0.1	-11.4	11.5
NEW HAMPSHIRE	Van Ostern	Sununu	-2.3	12.1	-14.4
MISSOURI	Koster	Greitens	-5.9	12.3	-18.2
INDIANA	Gregg	Holcomb	-6.0	-2.9	-3.1
VERMONT	Minter	Scott	-8.7	20.2	-28.9

Data sources: NY Times (2016 Senate), Politico (2016 Governor), FEC (2010 Senate); Ballotpedia (2012 Governor)

In the category of small favours, this year's Senate results don't look so bad when you compare them to 2010. All but two of the candidates in (at some point) competitive-seeming Senate races this year did better than the Democrat in that race in 2010. Even the exceptions (Masto and Strickland) only had a 3-4 point worse margin, though it's worth noting that Strickland actually did worse than the unheralded Lee Fisher.

The greatest improvements were accomplished in New Hampshire, where Hassan unraveled the 23-point buffer Ayotte built up last time, when she ran against Paul Hodes; and Illinois, where Duckworth turned a narrow Kirk victory over Alexi Giannoulias in 2012 into a major defeat for him now. The power of incumbency did not help either Republican very much at all.

Other double-digit improvements over previous results were achieved by Jason Kander in Missouri, where Robin Carnahan had lost by 13 points in 2010; and Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona, where Rodney Glassman suffered an ignominious 24-point defeat in 2010.

The Democrats running for Governor this year had a tougher benchmark to meet in the 2012 election results, and most didn't make it. The big exception is North Carolina's Roy Cooper. While doing a little worse than the polls had suggested and only winning by a hairwidth, he still proved a major upgrade over 2012 candidate Walter Dalton, who'd lost by a double-digit margin.

In Montana, now benefiting from incumbency, Steve Bullock improved his winning margin a little. In West-Virginia, Jim Justice outdid his predecessor Earl Ray Tomblin by a little, at least in terms of his winning margin. Not so in terms of his share of the vote: Tomblin had gotten 51% to his Republican opponent's 46%, while Justice won 49% to 42%. Both parties’ candidates performed worse this year as the environmentalist Mountain Party increased its share from 2.5% to 6.4%.

Major backsliding in Democratic performance took place in New England, however, where Van Ostern and Minter far underperformed the Democrats who had won the same races in 2012; as well as in Missouri, where the margin now was 18 points worse than in 2012.

So whom should national Democrats turn to for some potentially useful advice by this metric? It's a mostly different set of names than the first table, above, suggested: Duckworth, Hassan, Kirkpatrick... Jason Kander's the only name that emerges again.

One could argue that their stand-out improvements over the Democrats’ 2012 scores are somewhat less than meets the eye because the 2012 candidates in those states were particularly weak. But Hassan and Duckworth still succeeded in turning out, respectively humiliating, two incumbents, and Hassan won her race in an intensely-fought swing state.

On the flip side, are there lessons to be learnt from the weak performances of Sue Minter and Colin Van Ostern? Minter has the excuse of facing a particularly strong opponent, but she did underperform both Peter Shumlin and Hillary Clinton by truly imposing amounts. And Van Ostern underperformed by all measures. His result was considerably worse than Maggie Hassan's performance when she won the gubernatorial office four years ago; worse than the polls had suggested; and worse than Hillary Clinton's performance in the state.

Poll

28 votes Show Results

Who has best proven themselves in this election?

28 votes Vote Now!

Who has best proven themselves in this election?

Steve Bullock

1 vote

Roy Cooper

0 votes

Tammy Duckworth

3 votes

Maggie Hassan

2 votes

Jim Justice

2 votes

Jason Kander

18 votes

Catherine Cortez Masto

2 votes

The demographics of upcoming Democratic primary states: what did the electorate look like in 2008?

nimh

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday March 09, 2016 · 10:05 AM PST

2016/03/09 · 10:05

Of all the different demographic and political categorizations which exit polls ask about, there have been three, this Democratic primary season, which have shown by far the largest divides between Hillary and Bernie supporters. Age, race/ethnicity and party ID.

As nobody who spends time here needs to be explained, older voters, non-white voters (and especially African-Americans) and Democrats have gone for Hillary in almost every primary, often by huge margins, while younger voters, whites and independents have gone for Bernie in most states, regularly by equally impressive margins. The only thing that might surprise regular visitors here is the extent to which these divisions overshadow all others, for example by gender or ideology. (That's the link you want to click if you're intrigued by the header image of this diary, by the way.)

The only other divide that has come near the same salience is that between those who attend religious services on a weekly basis and those who attend only occasionally or never — but that question was only asked in four states (up through Super Tuesday, at least), all of them in the South, and seems to have de facto served as something of a proxy for race/ethnicity.

Since age, race/ethnicity and party ID play such an outsized role in determining the preferences of the primary electorate, what can we say in this respect about the five major states that will be voting on March 15?

Between now and then, only the Northern Mariana Islands will be choosing 11 delegates for the Democratic convention, and the results for the global Democrats Abroad primary should be getting in too, and that's 21 delegates. But on March 15, primary voters in five populous states will elect 792 pledged delegates — no less than 17% of the full convention count: 246 from Florida, 182 from Illinois, 159 from Ohio, 121 from North Carolina, and 84 from Missouri. I've gone back and looked up what the electorate looked like in those states back in the 2008 Democratic primaries, and thought I'd share:

2008 DEMocratic PRIMARY ELECTORATE IN MAJOR UPCOMING STATES
	% OVER 50	% NON-WHITE	% DEMOCRAT
FLORIDA	61%	34%	79%
ILLINOIS	44%	43%	79%
MISSOURI	49%	24%	73%
NORTH CAROLINA	55%	38%	76%
OHIO	46%	24%	69%
compare (also '08 data):
nevada	n/a	35%	81%
massachusetts	51%	15%	65%

There were lots of older voters in Florida, and to a lesser extent North Carolina — advantage Hillary. More whites in Missouri and Ohio — advantage Bernie. Fewer Democrats in Ohio too. All in all, based on these numbers, Ohio should be the best state for Bernie — and perhaps surprisingly, Missouri would come next when you purely look at these demographics.

I've added in the exit poll data (from 2008, not this year!) from Nevada and Massachusetts, since those two races were close this year, and might therefore suggest benchmarks of sorts. I would have added Michigan, but the 2008 Democratic primary in Michigan was all weird.

The comparison suggests a somewhat uphill fight for Bernie, mostly because the five upcoming states are a lot less white than Massachusetts. They are comparable to Nevada when it comes to the non-white share of the vote, but "non-whites” in this context may be altogether too broad a category, considering Bernie does a lot worse among blacks / better among Latinos, relatively speaking. It might therefore make sense to break this down further:

2008 DEMocratic PRIMARY ELECTORATE IN MAJOR UPCOMING STATES
	WHITE	BLACK	LATINO
FLORIDA	66%	19%	12%
ILLINOIS	57%	24%	17%
MISSOURI	76%	17%	4%
NORTH CAROLINA	62%	34%	2%
OHIO	76%	18%	4%
compare (ALSO '08 DATA):
nevada	65%	15%	15%
massachusetts	85%	6%	5%

Ohio and Missouri were strikingly similar in this regard. The Democratic primary electorate in both states was whiter, in 2008, than in Nevada — the share of black voters was comparable but there were many fewer Latinos — but they were less white than Massachusetts, with a larger share of black voters.

The other three states were all about as white as Nevada or less white than that, and much less white than Massachusetts. In addition, the balance between black and Latino share of the vote leaned more to the former than in either Nevada or Massachusetts. That would make them tougher to get for Bernie than Ohio or Missouri. North Carolina would seem the toughest of the three, in this respect.

Based purely on the numbers on race/ethnicity, Florida would seem most promising after Ohio and Missouri — but there is a snag. Let's break down the age category a bit more:

2008 DEMocratic PRIMARY ELECTORATE IN MAJOR UPCOMING STATES
	17-29	30-64	65+
FLORIDA	9%	63%	28%
ILLINOIS	15%	70%	15%
MISSOURI	14%	66%	19%
NORTH CAROLINA	15%	66%	20%
OHIO	15%	70%	14%
COMPARE (ALSO '08 DATA):
nevada	13%	n/a	n/a
massachusetts	13%	67%	19%

There's not a whole lot to see here — most states were very similar — with one clear exception. Florida. Democratic voters there were disproportionately old in ‘08, presumably thanks to all the snowbirds. And considering how large the age gap has consistently been in primaries so far, this should favor Hillary.

All in all, then, if past is prologue and we look only at these key indicators, Ohio and Missouri might be close, while the other three states present more of an advantage to Hillary. But as Michigan proved, one can always be surprised.

Poll

32 votes Show Results

How many states will Bernie win on March 15?

32 votes Vote Now!

How many states will Bernie win on March 15?

Zero

3 votes

One

6 votes

Two

10 votes

Three

6 votes

Four

4 votes

Five

3 votes

Upcoming state elections in Germany tell two very different tales

nimh

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday March 09, 2016 · 7:10 AM PST

2016/03/09 · 07:10

On March 13, German voters in the states of Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate), Sachsen-Anhalt (Saxony-Anhalt) and Baden-Württemberg will go to the polls to elect new state legislatures. The DKE International Elections Digest published last weekend provides a short summary on each election. But there is more to say!

Baden-Württemberg: Green Power

If you will read anything about these elections in the English-language press, it will likely focus on the race in Baden-Württemberg, one of the country's largest and most prosperous states. It's definitely an interesting one: traditionally a conservative state, Baden-Württemberg's politics were upended when the Green Party scored a surprise result with no less than 24% of the vote in the 2011 state elections. That was twice as much as it had ever gotten, and got it a symbolically important, unprecedented second place ahead of the social-democratic SPD. Subsequently those two parties formed a coalition government, locking the christian-democratic CDU out of state government for the first time in almost 60 years.

The christian-democrats were confident the result would remain a fluke, blaming it on the fall-out of mass protests over the Stuttgart 21 project and more in particular, the in Germany particularly strong public reaction to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, which happened in the same month as the elections. But the Green Prime Minister, Winfried Kretschmann, has proven very popular, and his party seems set to easily outdo its 2011 result. While some of its gains have come at the expense of cannibalizing half of the SPD's support base, its appeal has reached well beyond that too. The election campaign, which the Greens have largely centered on Kretschmann's popularity, seems to have been particularly good for the party: last month the party surpassed the CDU for the first time. The Christian-Democrats, in their turn, are burdened by a boring lead candidate, party divisions over the refugees issue (with said state leader opposing Chancellor Merkel from the right), and the related bleeding of votes to the anti-refugee, anti-Muslim, Euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD).

As the International Elections Digest pointed out, the Greens were somewhat distracted by the arrest of Volker Beck, a major Green politician who also happens to be from Baden-Württemberg, for the possession of crystal meth (seriously). The Greens have long advocated a more relaxed policy towards ‘soft drugs’ like weed, but obviously meth is quite a different thing. Plus, as a political analyst pointed out to Deutsche Welle, the reason the Greens are leading in Baden-Württemberg right now is because “they're fishing far beyond their pond". They're not just dealing anymore with the usual Green voters, who might care less than most about drugs; “they have moved far beyond their core constituency, into those that think more conservatively, more faith-based, more rules-based people - with those people this behavior doesn't go down well." We'll see what, if any, electoral fall-out there will be. For now, the polls look rosy:

Baden-Württemberg: state of the polls
	Election result 2011	average of january polls	average of march polls
CDU	39%	35%	29%
greens	24%	28%	33%
spd	23%	14%	13%
fdp	5%	6%	7%
left	3%	3%	4%
afd	-	11%	12%
others	6%	3%	3%

As a model for Green Party success, the election will be both instructive and limited in applicability. Kretschmann has proven no typical Green Party politician, pulling the party a fair amount to the right, to the point where he even seemed to criticize Merkel over the refugees issue from the right. He also simply seems to be a rare political talent who is well at home in his state: a down-to-earth guy who is as comfortable in the traditionalist rural parts of the state as in the larger cities and university towns where the Greens do best. According to one recent poll, voters would opt for him over his CDU challenger and the leading candidate for the SPD by 51% to 12% and 8%, respectively, if they could elect the Prime Minister directly. Not just would 44% of the SPD voters opt for him, even 44% of the CDU's own voters would prefer him!

Sachsen-Anhalt: a very different story

I wanted to focus on one of the other states, though — Sachsen-Anhalt. Maybe because it's in the East, maybe because I've visited a few times.

Sachsen-Anhalt is the smallest and poorest of the three states which are voting, and located in the east of the country, in the former GDR. A kind of forgotten corner of it as well, where heavy and chemical industries provided many jobs under communism but largely collapsed afterward. Until 2005 unemployment in the state remained at 20%, and while it has fallen to 11% since, that's still well over the national average. Net disposable household income stands at $1,000, two-thirds of the national number. Yet when asked what the most important and urgent political issue is, the percentage which answered “the labor market situation” (61%) was rivaled by “the refugee situation” (60%).

Although the most recent, widely-reported arson attack in Germany on an asylum-seeker center took place in the neighboring state of Sachsen, which tops most rankings of extreme-right violence against refugees, a village in Sachsen-Anhalt called Tröglitz made the news last year for similar reasons. A prospective asylum-seeker center there was torched and neo-nazis went as far as threatening to behead the local MP. A study last year showed that “respondents from Saxony-Anhalt emerged as the most anti-immigrant of Germany's regions, with 42.2 percent making xenophobic statements in interviews conducted for the study”.

It's perhaps not entirely surprising, then, that polls for Saxony-Anhalt suggest losses for all of the three main left-of-center parties, and a depressingly impressive result for the Alternative for Germany, which is polling at 17-19%.

In general, East-Germany has been kind to the left for most of the postcommunist era, thanks to strong numbers for the Left Party (and the ex-communist PDS before it). But Angela Merkel's popularity in the East eroded the left's relative advantage in the last decade, and now, even as Merkel's own popularity has sagged significantly, it's the rise of the AfD that's adding to the trend, since it is particularly strong in the east.

In Sachsen-Anhalt, where state elections sometimes diverged from the federal trends for East-Germany in general, left-of-center parties pooled a whopping 60% of the vote in 1994 and 59% in 1998, with the social-democratic SPD pulling over a third of the vote and the PDS almost a fifth. This yielded a then-unprecedented and extremely controversial arrangement where the SPD (initially in coalition with the Greens) formed a minority government which relied on the PDS for parliamentary support. In the 2002 state elections the SPD lost heavily; left-of-center parties fell to 43% when added up, and a right-wing government took over. (It should be noted, though, that just half a year later the SPD reigned supreme in the state's vote in the federal elections, and left-of-center parties in total pooled over 60%; a testament to East-German voters being much more willing to change parties and camps than their peers in the West). Since 2007 the state has a “grand coalition” of christian-democrats and social-democrats, and thanks in part to the Greens finally (re)gaining a foothold in the state, left-of-center parties have recovered ground to pool 51% in 2006 and 56% in 2011. But now they'd barely get over 40%, if the polls are to be trusted. It might even turn out to be worse: like other far-right parties, the AfD tends to overperform the polls).

If you take the average of the last four polls (each conducted by a different pollster), this is what you get:

Sachsen-Anhalt: State of the polls
	ELECTION RESULT 2011	AVERAGE OF MARCH POLLS
CDU	33%	31%
left	24%	20%
spd	22%	16%
greens	7%	5%
fdp	4%	4%
afd	-	18%
others	11%*	6%
	*incl. 5% for the extr-right NPD

One thing that would be interesting to see, if there will be exit polling showing this kind of data, is the extent to which these numbers reflect the SPD and the Left losing votes directly to the AfD, and to which extent they lose voters to the CDU, which in turn loses votes to the AfD. I don't doubt many working class voters of both the SPD and the Left will defect directly to the AfD. Still, I wonder — with an eye as well on how many people vote on the basis of national politics rather than state-specific concerns — if some other voters of left-wing parties might go over to the CDU in appreciation of Merkel's success in seeming moderate and centrist, not least on the refugee issue.

Poll

192 votes Show Results

Which party would you vote for?

192 votes Vote Now!

Which party would you vote for?

CDU (Christian-democratic)

11 votes

SPD (Social-democratic)

46 votes

Left Party (Socialist)

51 votes

Greens

60 votes

FDP (Liberal - in the European sense)

10 votes

AfD (Nationalist conservative)

12 votes

Other

2 votes

A flowchart for the Republican primary

nimh

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday March 07, 2016 · 8:26 AM PST

2016/03/07 · 08:26

Imagine you're thinking about voting in the GOP primary — unlikely, if you're a Daily Kos reader, but just imagine — and you don't know whom to vote for. How do you make your choice?

You're going to need a flowchart. Something like this, or this, or this, but for the Republican primary.

I'm not as clever or funny as the people who made those, but I tried my hand at one anyway — tongue firmly planted in cheek, of course. Still, doesn't this just about cover it? :-)

View it in full size here!

(Alternatively, right-clicking on the picture and choosing “Open image in new tab” helps a bit with legibility too.)

Poll

15 votes Show Results

This flowchart..

15 votes Vote Now!

This flowchart..

.. needs more arrows

5 votes

.. needs more questions

7 votes

.. needs more Republicans

3 votes

No more cherrypicking: A comprehensive look at how Hillary & Bernie fare against Republicans

nimh

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday January 22, 2016 · 7:02 AM PST

2016/01/22 · 07:02

If you're on Kos, you'll have seen them: diaries and comments which tout a poll to show that either Hillary or Bernie clearly does better than the other when matched up against potential Republican nominees in a general election.

Usually, the poll in question is picked because it showed a particularly pronounced difference. If you're a bit skeptical, you'll have shared my wariness about these polling results having likely been cherry-picked to make the favored candidate of the diarist or commenter look especially strong. So what do the numbers look like when you review all recent polls? That's what I set out to discover.

To get a sizable enough sample of polls to counter-weigh their natural volatility (which is especially strong when measuring margins between candidates rather than candidates' individual percentages), I’m listing all the polls which include match-ups between both Hillary and Bernie against Republican candidates since November 1. And I'm including both national and state polls, though I'll list them separately.

As source for all these polls I've used RealClearPolitics. It's a conservative site, but the way they list the polls make this exercise a lot easier than how Huffington Post's Pollster site lists them. I did check to see if I missed any by going through HuffPo's feed of recent polls for any that said “Presidential GE”, though, and by checking the (woefully incomplete) Polling Report's page on national GE polls. Picked up at least one extra poll that way. If I still missed any let me know!

To ensure a scrupulous comparison, I’m listing only those poll results where both Bernie and Hillary were pitted against the same Republican. So if a poll pitted only one of Hillary and Bernie against Republican candidates but not the other, I do not list it; and if a poll pitted Hillary against, say, five Republicans, but Bernie against only two of those, I am listing only the results against those two Republicans, and omitting Hillary's results against the other three. Otherwise the resulting averages would not be fairly comparable with each other.

I've highlighted the very latest ones (from 2016), which is important because a trend break of sorts may be going on. If Bernie did not, in fact, do significantly better than Hillary in this kind of match-up last November and December (however upset pointing this out made the occasional Bernie supporter), he has certainly been doing better than Hillary in the polls that have come out so far in 2016.

In general it's a pity that relatively few pollsters ask these match-up questions, and fewer still ask them for both Hillary and Bernie. That means we are largely relying on two pollsters here -- PPP and Quinnipiac provide a majority of the listed polls. Considering how pollsters often have a "house effect," determined by their methodological choices, this necessitates a note of caution.

There are more of those, which I will try to cover below, but first: the data. I'll first try to paste them in as an image:

Too small to read? You can also just go and look at the data here.

Since I had to define advantages somehow, I have gone — rather arbitrarily — for describing a difference of at most 1% between Hillary's and Bernie's margins as No advantage, a difference between 1% and 4% as a Slight advantage, a difference between 4% and 7% as a Moderate advantage, and anything more than that as a Strong advantage. Your mileage may differ, and if you feel that those thresholds should have been defined differently I'm all ears. Before doing so do check out the section below about margins of error and how they might multiply when you compare the lead of one candidate over another and then the difference between the leads of two candidates in parallel questions. It suggests not to set these thresholds too low.

More below the story break.

nimh

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday October 02, 2015 · 5:45 PM PDT

2015/10/02 · 17:45

As ChadmanFL pointed out in Friday's DKE Live Digest thread, there are parliamentary elections in Portugal on Sunday, and they should be interesting. At a time when the right is dominant in a firm majority of European countries and Greece's Syriza experiment has turned into humiliation, Spain and Portugal have long seemed like the only places where the left could look forward to electoral success. The governing right-wing coalition of the misleadingly named Social-Democrats (PSD) and the conservative CDS-PP became extremely unpopular as a result of the austerity policies it implemented under pressure from the EU, and for most of the past two and a half years the oppositional Socialists enjoyed double-digit leads over the PSD.

Things have changed, however. The PSD and CDS-PP merged into a common list, Portugal Ahead. The tepid but consistent economic recovery seems to have belatedly been rewarded by the voters with a sudden upswing in the "Portugal Ahead" vote in the polls in just the last week or two. Portugal Ahead is now clearly, well, ahead of the Socialists in the polls. It's polling at about 37-41% to some 31-34% for the Socialists. So could the left miss out on a long-promised, clear victory at the last moment, the way Sweden's left did last year?

Keep reading below the fold!

Poll

125 votes Show Results

Which party would you vote for, if you could vote in Portugal's elections?

125 votes Vote Now!

Which party would you vote for, if you could vote in Portugal's elections?

Portugal Ahead (i.e. PSD + CDS-PP)

32 votes

Socialist Party (PS)

37 votes

Democratic Unity Coalition (i.e. communists and greens)

33 votes

Left Bloc

16 votes

Democratic Republican Party (PDR)

1 vote

Livre

2 votes

Other

4 votes

Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the curse of the dropping favorables?

nimh

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday August 28, 2015 · 8:16 AM PDT

2015/08/28 · 08:16

In a FP diary on Wednesday, echoed by another one by Laura Clawson yesterday, David Nir made the argument that Hillary Clinton's falling favorable ratings are wholly unsurprising and in any case don't "matter nearly as much as you might think".

Without getting into the latter point, is it true that Hillary's falling favorables are nothing but the unremarkable, natural consequence of her transition from respected office-holder to campaigning presidential candidate? Is Laura right to suggest that Joe Biden would experience the very same drop in popularity if he were to wade in as well?

I tried to find out by looking for parallels, and digging up archived opinion poll data about Al Gore in 1999-2000, and Hillary Clinton herself, in 2007-2008. I feel there's not enough directly comparable data to warrant any all too confident statements -- but just enough to feel uneasy about the ones they made.

More (and charts!) below the swirl.

Poll

124 votes Show Results

Do you worry about Hillary's falling favorables?

124 votes Vote Now!

Do you worry about Hillary's falling favorables?

No, this is a temporary blip, she will recover easily

12 votes

Yes, I don't want to speculate about reasons and prospects, but a consistent pattern like this is always reason for worry

22 votes

No, they are the effect of scaremongering and sensationalism and she has survived worse

23 votes

Yes, I think it's a sign that the media is out to get her and won't let up

7 votes

No, I don't believe in any polls

0 votes

No, polls can be useful but are meaningless this far out

6 votes

Yes, I think it's a sign of a fundamental flaw in her candidacy

36 votes

No, what good is worrying? Focus on what we can do and do our best, that's all we can do

4 votes

Yes, what can I say? I tend to worry about things

2 votes

Yes, for another reason

3 votes

No, for another reason

5 votes

I don't know, but this poll isn't very serious!

4 votes

The First GOP Debate: Google Trends

nimh

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday August 07, 2015 · 9:17 AM PDT

2015/08/07 · 09:17

Last night, as the first GOP debate stumbled and lumbered on, I saw the Fivethirtyeight liveblog use an interesting metric for how the different candidates were doing: Google's real-time info of whose names Internet surfers were googling as the debate unfolded. They first did it for the 'kiddie table' debate (which left Fiorina by far the most searched name). During the main event, sometimes Nate Silver just linked to the real-time info for five of the candidates, sometimes they posted their own list, indexed to have The Donald (who trumped everyone else in search traffic) at 100.

Since it's now the day after, I thought I'd quickly redo the exercise, but making sure to cover the data over time for (almost) all candidates, and with an eye on whose names people kept googling even as the focus on the debate itself was replaced with a focus on media coverage about the debate.

Since Trump got far more search traffic than anyone else, I've followed 538's example and used him as reference point. Google Trends doesn't seem to allow you to track more than five names at a time, so I made two charts - but I included Trump in both, to make it easier to compare the two charts (and keep the axis anchored at the same values). That meant dropping one of the ten candidates, though - and since Huckabee turned out to be the least googled one of the lot of them, he's the one I left out. I used the data are for the U.S., specifically, not worldwide.

Here are the first two charts: I think you just need to click them to enlarge them.

Observations and more charts (featuring Fiorina fever?) behind the fold.

nimh

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday July 02, 2015 · 7:40 AM PDT

2015/07/02 · 07:40

I spent way too much time the last few days reading news, opinions and analyses about the crisis in Greece, and thought I'd use the opportunity to share some of the pieces and quotes that struck me most.

These are mostly opinion and analytic pieces, as there's little sense to rehash the day-to-day turns of events. I've tried indicating where a piece is more reporting than analysis, though, even if it's not always as easy to distinguish the two. Since I'm a lefty, the emphasis in this selection of pieces and quotes is on criticism of the Eurogroup and the IMF, but there's no lack of criticism of the Syriza government in these pieces too. The links are mostly more analysis than agitation, and are mostly taken from relatively establishmentarian media; there's a separate list to be made of articles from radical and socialist sites. Also, of course, they're just the pieces I happened to come across, I can't imagine how many more good pieces must be out there. Maybe just add them in the comments?

But first, right below the fold, a word about polling:

Poll

35 votes Show Results

In the Greek referendum, would you vote:

35 votes Vote Now!

In the Greek referendum, would you vote:

Yes

10 votes

24 votes

I would not vote (or spoil my ballot)

1 vote

Israeli elections: Despite all the sound and fury, the results by 'block' show astounding stability

nimh

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday March 17, 2015 · 10:48 PM PDT

2015/03/17 · 22:48

It's 7 AM in Israel, 6 AM where I'm at, and I tried to compile a Google Sheet to compare the results of the Israeli elections today with those of 2013.

It's based on:

(a) The Israeli Election Committee's data on numbers of votes and percentages, with almost all the votes counted;

(b) The latest update on the Haaretz live blog about the projected numbers of seats.

I was going to do a write-up on the Israeli election open thread but it's become too long for that, so here it is as separate diary:

The comparison with the last elections would seem to give a bit more perspective. Compared to what the polls were showing last week, of course, the results are hugely disappointing, and they don't bode well for the immediate future of Israel and the occupied territories. Compared to the results of the 2013 elections, however, not all that much has changed.

In terms of seats, the left made some modest gains. The Arab parties gain 3, the Zionist List parties gain 3, and Meretz gets squeezed in between, losing 2. Net gain: 4.

The right suffered some losses overall, despite Netanyahu's impressive performance: Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu together pool 5 more seats than when they ran a joint list last time, but Jewish Home loses 4 and the religious/haredim parties lose 5. Net loss: 4.

In the center, Yesh Atid loses 8 seats, and Kadima's 2 seats also disappear, but Kulanu wins 10.

So that would, in total, make for a slight shift to the left. Except that my impression is that Kulanu is a bit to the right of where Yesh Atid and Kadima were, so maybe it's more of a wash.

(I'm purely talking about the electoral landscape, of course. The government that will appear from all of this might well be to the right of the previous one, but that's a separate discussion.)

In terms of percentages, the stability is even greater - once you add in all the smaller parties that don't show up in most lists because they didn't make the electoral threshold.

The Arab parties go from 9.2% to 11.0%.

The left-wing parties, one you add in Eretz Hadasha (2013) and the pro-marijuana Green Leaf party (2013+2015), go from 22.8% to 23.6%.

The centrist parties, once you add the 2013 results for Kadima and Am Shalem (which splintered from Shas but sounds, per Wikipedia, like it was more a mixed/moderate than a haredim party), go from 17.6% to 16.2%.

The religious/haredim parties (Shas, UTJ and the very right-wing Shas splinter Yachad) go from 13.9% to ... 13.9%.

Finally, the right-wing nationalist parties, once you include the far-right Otzma LeYisrael for 2013, go from 34.2% to 34.9%.[1]

The very smallest parties go from 2.2% to 0.4%.

That's ... a surprising amount of stability, even stagnation. So much for all the sound and fury of the campaign and news coverage!

Finally, in terms of votes, the balance was towards making gains, since there were some 272 thousand more votes this time, thanks to a mix of slightly rising turnout and an increase in the number of eligible voters. But among the parties that ran in both elections, Yesh Atid, Shas, Jewish Home, Meretz and Green Leaf lost votes, and mostly the first three.

[1]There's a slight wrinkle here in that Otzma LeYisrael merged into Yachad and crossed 'camps' in that sense - I suppose you could fit Yachad into either of the last two 'camps'.

Not so quiet before the storm: Local elections in Budapest, Hungary

nimh

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday September 27, 2014 · 6:52 PM PDT

2014/09/27 · 18:52

For the third time in a year, on October 12, Hungary is having elections, this time for mayors and municipal councils. They're predictably depressing. If you want to know more about them anyway, go on ... take the plunge below the fold!

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From the Sioux to the Navajos: Hillary Clinton seems to have done very weakly with American Indians

The Democrats who ran for Senator or Governor: how should we evaluate their performance? An attempt

The demographics of upcoming Democratic primary states: what did the electorate look like in 2008?

Upcoming state elections in Germany tell two very different tales

A flowchart for the Republican primary

No more cherrypicking: A comprehensive look at how Hillary & Bernie fare against Republicans

The left has been looking forward to Portugal's elections on Sunday, but things might get awkward

Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the curse of the dropping favorables?

The First GOP Debate: Google Trends

The crisis in Greece and the #Greferendum: A reading list

Israeli elections: Despite all the sound and fury, the results by 'block' show astounding stability

Not so quiet before the storm: Local elections in Budapest, Hungary