Month: November 2014

So, two Libertarian Party Senate candidates in prominent races
beat the spread between their major-party opponents. In North
Carolina, Libertarian Sean Haugh got 3.74 percent, with Republican
Thom Tillis winning with 49 percent and Democrat Kay Hagen at
47.21.

It isn’t common for Democrats to accuse Libertarians of
“spoiling” elections for them, but a look
at NBC News exit polls show that Haugh voters indeed came more
from people who consider themselves “moderate” (5 percent of
self-identified moderates went Huagh) and even “liberal” (4 percent
of liberals voted for Haugh) than from conservatives (only 2
percent of whom voted for Haugh). Those were the only three choices
for self-identification.

Only 1 percent each of self-identified Democrats or Republicans
voted Haugh, while 9 percent of Independents did. (Those again were
the only choices.)

In other exit poll results, Haugh’s portion of the vote fell
pretty steadily as age groups got older—he got 9 percent of the
18-24 vote, and only 2 percent of the 50-and-over crowd.

Haugh did strongest among white women in race/gender breakdowns,
with 5 percent of that crowd, and only 1 percent of black men or
black woman–and no polled number of Latino men or women.

Other interesting Haugh exit poll results: His overall man/woman
breakdown was the same, 4 percent of each in the exit poll. Haugh’s
numbers got progressively smaller as voter income got bigger–he
earned 6 percent ofthe under-$30K vote but only 1 percent of the
over-$200K vote. Libertarians aren’t just for plutocrats.

Interestingly, Haugh got more votes from people who want to
raise the minimum wage than from those who don’t, giving credence
to the notion that he represents a libertarianism
not that interested in economic liberty issues. He got more
votes from those against the wars in Syria and Iraq than those for
it, and only slightly more votes from pro-gay marriage types than
anti-gay marriage types–5 percent of the pros, 4 percent of the
antis.

Now for Robert Sarvis, who you can bet will be accused by some
of “costing” Republican Ed Gillespie the Senate election. Sarvis
got 2.45 percent of the vote; winning Democrat Mark Warner got 49
and Gillespie 48.48.

What can
NBC’s exit poll tell us about where Sarvis voters came
from?

Sarvis drew equally from liberals, moderates, and conservatives
according to this poll–3 percent of each.

But when it gets to party identification, he drew statistically
nothing from Democrats, 3 percent from Republicans, and 7 percent
from Independents. Independents were otherwise split evenly 47-47
between Warner and Gillespie. So, there is indeed some cause for
GOPers to think that Sarvis’ presence in the race was bad for
them.

In other Sarvis exit poll results from NBC, Sarvis did best
among Independent men, with 7 percent, and best among college
graduates, with 6 percent. In term of family income, he did best
among the under-$50K crowd, with 4 percent of those, vs. just 2
percent of the $100K or more folk. 

Sarvis did only slightly better with the antiwar crowd, getting
3 percent of them vs. 2 percent of the pro-war crowd. Sarvis got
statistically zero among members of the military, and did better
with the pro-gay-marriage crowd, getting 5 percent of the pro and
only 2 percent of the anti. He also did better with small city and
rural than suburbs or big city folk, getting 4 percent with the
former and only 2 percent with the latter.

Two years ago, by a
margin of more than 2 to 1, California voters approved Proposition
36, which reformed the state’s draconian “three strikes” law by
requiring that the offense triggering a mandatory sentence of 25
years to life be “serious or violent.” That initiative made about
3,000 prisoners eligible for resentencing. Yesterday voters
approved another important sentencing reform by passing
Proposition 47, which redefines certain low-level, nonviolent
felonies as misdemeanors. The initiative, which was
favored by 57 percent of voters, will have a broader impact
than Proposition 36, allowing some 10,000 inmates to seek shorter
sentences.

Proposition 47 covers simple
drug possession, plus several property crimes, including theft,
shoplifiting, check forgery, and receiving stolen
property, when they involve a loss of $950 or less. The
maximum sentence for these offenses would be one year in jail. By
contrast, cocaine possession, if charged as a felony, currently
can result in
up to three years in prison. So can check kiting, another “wobbler”
that can be
treated as a misdemeanor or a felony. Under Proposition
47, check kiting would have to be charged as a misdemeanor if it
involves $950 or less, as opposed to the current limit of $450.

An interesting dynamic is contrasting
tonight’s embrace of Republican politicians – votes in favor of
increases in the
minimum wage.

So far, South Dakota, Arkansas, and Nebraska have voted to
increase their minimum wages today. You will note that these states
are not hotbeds of progressive politics. Alaska has a pending vote
to raise theirs as well. We should not be surprised to see it pass
either. We know from polls that raises in minimum wages are popular
up until people are told that increases may cost jobs. Then they
turn against it. Emily Ekins explains
how that polling works here. A majority are okay with it
increases in minimum wages driving up prices. But if it costs jobs,
a majority turns against it. 

And so the debate becomes about costing jobs. Does it really? We
have a real world example to explain. In Los Angeles, the city
passed an ordinance requiring “living wages” for employees of
hotels near the city’s airport back in 2008. As they considered
expanding the law to all large hotel workers in the city earlier
this year they commissioned studies to analyze the impact of their
previous increase. Here’s what Christopher Thornberg of Beacon
Economics
discovered:

The data clearly show that hotels around the airport have seen a
sharp decline in employment relative to hotels in Los Angeles
County overall. Some 12% more people are employed at hotels in the
county than in 2007. The increase is apparent not only at hotels in
general but within individual hotels, which means the jump cannot
be attributed to an increase in the number of hotels elsewhere in
the county. But in the airport hotels covered by the law, hotel
employment has declined 10%.

As for the seeming disconnect between steadily high room
occupancy and fewer jobs, modern large hotels are far more than a
place to sleep at night. They offer a variety of restaurants, bars,
parking garages, banquet and conference halls and tourist
information centers. Anecdotally we have heard that many of these
secondary lines of business have been sharply curtailed or
eliminated because of the increase in labor costs. If higher wages
have made banquets, say, more expensive to hold at airport hotels,
it would be no surprise if organizations have decided to hold their
banquets elsewhere.

Unfortunately the city didn’t seem to actually care about
Thornberg’s report and voted for the increase anyway. 

The most startling—and telling—poll I read before
tonight’s election came in a Sept. 22
column from former Obama White House
regulator/administrator in chief Cass Sunstein:  

In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats
said that they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter
married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers
had reached 49
percent and 33 percent. 

There it is, ladies and Germans, your real
Last Acceptable Prejudice. This the engine behind such odd
human behavior as political parties sending creepy,
we’re-watching-you
letters to voters before Election Day,
campaign ads showing either party abetting Death
itself, anti-interventionist, pro-immigation activist Grover
Norquist
urging a Team R vote over anything else (and doing it well!);
or even aging journalists
having the occasional sad that a retired rock drummer may have
attended a Tea Party rally that one time.

Let’s go back to the research:

To test for political prejudice, Shanto Iyengar and Sean
Westwood, political scientists at Stanford
University, conducted a
large-scale implicit association test with 2,000 adults. They found
people’s political bias to be much larger than their racial
bias. […]

In a further test of political prejudice, Iyengar and Westwood
asked 800 people to play the trust game, well known among
behavioral scientists: Player 1 is given some money (say, $10) and
told that she can give some, all or none of it to Player 2. Player
1 is then told that the researcher will triple the amount she
allocates to Player 2 — and that Player 2 can give some of that
back to Player 1. When Player 1 decides how much money to give
Player 2, a central question is how well she trusts him to return
an equivalent or greater amount.

Are people less willing to trust people of a different race or
party affiliation? The researchers found that race didn’t matter —
but party did. People are significantly more trusting of others who
share their party affiliation.

Pause a moment to savor just how gross
this is (the mounting political bias, not the receding racial
animus). Democrats should automatically trust John Edwards more
than, I dunno, Bob Dole? Ted Stevens should get the nod for
Republicans over Russ Feingold? To cite a personal anecdote, I
married into a family of French Catholics—they could have been
“displeased” at the unbaptized Amerloque, but
that would have been pretty messed up to the daughter they love and
trust, non? (Current
box-office trends in France notwithstanding.)

Any election night is a victory for what Sunstein calls
“partyism”—the tribal pull of collective political action, in-group
rallying, organized hatreds. But it’s also the most vivid
demonstration project of how partyism is suffering a long-term and
richly deserved demographic decline.

In a
long piece at Vox.com about Gamergate, Ezra Klein used
some of Sunstein’s cited studies to point out (and decry) “the
politicization of absolutely everything.” Excerpt:

Politicized media outlets and activist information sources have
incentives to cover the worst of the other side, and to play to the
fear, anger and even paranoia of their own side. Structurally, each
side only becomes familiar with the most extreme members and
interpretations of the other side — and so comes to loathe and fear
them even more.

But as Nick Gillespie, no stranger to
the politicization of everything, pointed
out over at The Daily Beast,

Sure, dead-enders are more bitter than ever. But what Klein
can’t acknowledge is that fewer of us actually invest in our
political identities. That helps explain why party
self-identification keeps heading south and approval for political
parties has been on the skids for a long time.

Does it ever. Those parents seriously considering getting mad at
their daughters for marrying outside the designated major party may
want to drink in this recent Gallup chart, which shows that the
leading political self-identification of EVERYONE YOUNGER THAN AGE
59 is neither Democrat nor Republican, but “independent“:

Look, too, at who was
tuning this latest election out as the Partyism was kicking
into high gear the last few weeks:

Perhaps even worse for the long-term health of the two big
parties, it was the independents who leaned closer to the tribes
who were turned off the most:

When even a “wave” election like tonight was ultimately
an election
about nothing (aside from hating on
Obama and his ‘care),
all that life-and-death urgency from the Partyists begins to feel
like electro-shock therapy on a corpse. The target audience after a
while can’t help but respond accordingly.

Watching the analysts on Fox News tonight—George Will, Charles
Krauthammer, Brit Hume—it’s striking how unanimous they are that
this election really doesn’t have much to do with Republicans
suddnely waking up and smelling the vision; they just didn’t get in
the way of a restive electorate during a particularly painful
six-year-itch. This pendulum swing will soon be widely
misinterpreted as a meanginful shift toward pro-Republican
sentiment in the electorate, but the long-term trendlines remain
clear: Fewer and fewer people see their identities as either
Democrat or Republican, making each election cycle that much more
volatile, while hopefully opening up the political process to such
long-overdue developments as
rolling back the drug war and maybe even pushing the newly
victorious Republicans a teensy bit closer to the fiscal
responsibility they’ve been
dining out on for years.

Unsettling addendum: David Brooks
decries partyism; Jonathan Chait
defends. NOW WHAT DO I DO???

So-called “personhood” measures have failed in
both states where
they were on the ballot this election. Voters in North Dakota
rejected Measure 1, a constitutional amendment declaring an
“inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of
development.” And Colorado voters rejected Amendment 67, Personhood
USA’s efforts to change the Colorado constitution to define “unborn
human beings” as people. 

Personhood USA fought for—and Colorado voters rejected—similar
changes to Colorado’s constitution in 2008 and 2010.

“Voters in Colorado have, for the third time, seen through an
attempt to advance an extreme measure that wouldn’t just ban
abortion, but potentially throw women and their doctors behind bars
for obtaining or providing many basic reproductive health care
services including contraception and fertility treatments,” said
Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive
Rights.

Amendment 67 was rejected by
about 64 percent of Colorado voters, according to The
Denver Post.

The Colorado personhood initiative wasn’t expected to pass, but
anti-abortion advocates had higher hopes for North
Dakota. 

“Today’s victory at the North Dakota ballot box is yet another
in a long history of voters from different political backgrounds
and personal philosophies rejecting these extreme and
unconstitutional ballot measures,” said Northup.

That’s the ballgame: Multiple news organizations
are now projecting that Republican Joni Ernst has won the Iowa
Senate race, definitively giving Republicans 51 seats in the
Senate.

It’s officially a Republican Senate, folks, and the margin is
likely bigger than one seat. The Associated Press and CNN have
already called the North Carolina Senate race for Republican Thom
Tillis, giving the GOP at least 52 vote majority in the upper
chamber, and possibly more. And there’s still a runoff yet to come
in the Louisiana Senate race, which is likely end up going to the
GOP as well. The results of the Alaska Senate race are also still
outstanding. 

This is a seven seat pickup for the GOP for sure, and could end
up being a nine-seat win for the party. 

It’s looking like a big enough win that MSNBC commentators Chris
Matthews and Chuck Todd both just described this election as “a
wave.” Expect the Dem blame-game to go full-blast starting…well,
tonight. 

What this means is that longtime Kentucky Senate veteran Mitch
McConnell, who was widely described as in danger of losing his own
Senate race even over the last few days, will be the Majority
Leader. Republicans will control both chambers of
Congress. 

The 52-vote majority, which could end up being even larger, also
means that Republicans don’t just have control for now—they have a
bit of a buffer built in for the 2016 elections, when the map is
expected to be much less favorable to the GOP. 

It looks
like Oregon is about to become the third state to legalize
marijuana. With more than 50 percent of precincts
reporting, the results are 55 percent in favor, 45 percent
against. Residents of Washington, D.C., also
voted to legalize marijuana today. 

Oregon’s
Measure 91, also known as the Control, Regulation, and
Taxation of Marijuana and Industrial Hemp Act, combines elements of
Colorado’s Amendment
64 and Washington’s I-502.
Like both of those initiatives, it allows adults 21 or older to
purchase and possess up to an ounce of marijuana at a time. Like
Amendment 64, it allows nonprofit transfers of up to an ounce. That
provision protects people from arrest for sharing pot, which
otherwise can be treated as criminal distribution, even if it’s
limited to passing a joint. 

Measure 91’s decriminalization of marijuana use does not apply
to consumption in any “public place,” defined as “a place to which
the general public has access.” By comparison, Colorado prohibits
“consumption that is conducted openly and publicly,” while
Washington forbids consumption “in view of the general public,”
both of which seem to cover less ground. Like Colorado (and unlike
Washington), Oregon’s initiative allows home cultivation, but with
stricter limits: up to four plants and eight ounces of usable
marijuana per household, compared to six plants and whatever amount
they produce per adult in Colorado. 

The Oregon initiative takes a different approach to taxation
than Colorado or Washington, both of which imposed levies based on
a percentage of wholesale and retail prices. Oregon’s initiative
instead would impose taxes on cannabusinesses based on weight: $35
per ounce of buds and $10 per ounce of leaves, plus $5 per immature
plant. 

One distinct advantage of the Oregon initiative is that it does
not change the standard for driving under the influence of
intoxicants (DUII, a.k.a. DUID). Under current law, convicting
someone of DUII requires showing
that he was “affected to a noticeable degree” by marijuana or
another controlled substance, based on
the “totality of the circumstances.” By contrast, Washington’s
current rule, established by I-502, says any driver whose blood
contains five or more nanograms of THC per milliliter is
automatically guilty of DUID, a standard that in
effect prohibits driving
by many daily consumers, including patients who use marijuana as a
medicine, even when they are not actually impaired. 

Amendment 64 did not directly change Colorado’s DUID law, but
after it passed the state legislature approved a law that created a
“rebuttable
presumption” of DUID at five nanograms, which in practice may
have the same impact as Washington’s law. Oregon’s initiative
instead instructs the state Liquor Control Commission, which as in
Washington would be charged with regulating the newly legal
cannabis industry, to study “the influence of marijuana on the
ability of a person to drive a vehicle” and advise the legislature
on whether changing Oregon’s DUII rule is appropriate.

Gleaned mostly from the Libertarian Party’s own updating
page of news of note from election night, herewith the governor
races in which the L.P. is now breaking 2 percent. (There aren’t
many.):

•Dan Feliciano of Vermont is very much beating the
spread at
4.36 percent in a race currently un-called but with
Democrat Peter Shumlin with a narrow lead. This could be
a real chance for GOPers to get mad at Libertarians, whether for
justified reasons or not. (This is one the L.P’s own page hadn’t
caught.)

•Andrew Wyllie in Florida, beating the spread handily in a race
where Republican Rick Scott won, so this is an interesting data
point for the “who do L.P. candidates possibly divert votes from?”
debate,
at 3.76 percent.

•Keen Umbehr in Kansas is beating the spread handily, again in a
race with a Republican, Sam Brownback, winning, with
3.86 percent.

•Barry Hess in Arizona
at 3.83 percent–far better than the 2.2 percent he got running
for the same office in 2010.

•Mark Elworth in Nebraska
at 3.35 percent.

•Andrew Hunt in Georgia
at 2.44 percent.

•Dee Cozzens in
Wyoming at 2.41 percent.

As their prospects dimmed on the approach
to Election Day, Democrats shifted goal posts. They conceded they
wouldn’t win the House. They conceded they’d probably lose the
Senate. Over the last week they settled on making the election
about Scott Walker. If
Walker lost, the conventional wisdom went, it didn’t matter how
well Republicans did elsewhere. Well, Scott Walker won. So did

Rick Synder in Michigan and
Rick Scott in Florida, two other Republican governors who
dabbled in union reforms and were targeted by Democrats in close
races.

In the meantime, as of 11:00 p.m. ET, gubernatorial races in
solidly Democrat Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts are all
too close to call. NPR called
the Vermont race for incumbent Democrat Peter Shumlin but no one
else has. Connecticut has an incumbent Democrat too, one that isn’t
so popular despite
raising taxes, increasing spending, and demonizing guns.

Get the latest results at
Reason 24/7.