On polls and election predictions

If nothing else, the BC Liberals' entirely unexpected and dominating win in BC last night will be a useful lesson in humility for pollsters and those that rely on them to prognosticate about elections. All the polls showed a strong (and possibly growing) lead for the NDP, and poll aggregators like threehundredeight.com were predicting a 98.3% chance of winning the popular vote and the actual results were outside of the predicted likely seat range. Clearly the polls (and thus any model based off the polls) were horribly wrong. Yet on the flip side with the last US Presidential election we saw that the polls in general, and aggregators like the Princeton Election Consortium and 538 in specific, were incredibly accurate. What gives?

Polls have always been, at best, a proxy for measuring what we are actually interested in: how people are going to vote. We know there are numerous distinct biases that come up with polling (such as calling landlines gives a different set of people than calling cellphones), and pollsters and aggregators both attempt to adjust for those biases. To some extent, especially, when there is lots of good data, these can be adjusted for, but never completely and at times the biases can be surprisingly strong in a particular arena.

The value that an aggregator gets is often overstated. Nate Silver of 538 was viewed as a sort of mathemagician for his prominent display of a very accurate prediction (although not the most accurate out there). The more down to earth reality is that creating a poll aggregation model probably can hope to increase the accuracy of a prediction by a few percent. Indeed, in the US Presidential election case, simply taking a rolling average of polls in each of the states was also a pretty accurate predictor of the outcome (partly because the pollsters themselves do a lot of the adjusting for likely voters and the likes themselves). Having a ridiculous complicated model, as 538 and others do, that adjust a range of parameters due to various correlations, imput economic data, etc may help. But only a bit. Enough, perhaps, to make the right call in a pretty tight election with very good polling data, but nonetheless not a huge difference.

The same is true in BC. Eric Grenier at threehundredeight's model (although far simpler than what is done a PEC or 538) can hope to be, at best, a little better than just averaging polls. And it was. However, the reality is that polls themselves were so grossly wrong there is nothing he can do about it. For a US Presidential election there is an enormous deluge of polling information, with dozens of different polls released today broken up into different regions. Compared to the trickle in BC, it is an amazingly dataset and gave amazingly accurate results. Polling for a minor provincial election in Canada is just simply of far worse quality, and we have seen that manifested here today. Indeed, the simplicity of Eric's model is partly a necessary reality given that he doesn't have the extra data to do some of the more complicated stuff.

It should be noted that adjusting in a bad way can cause harm. The Romney camp, and much of the GOP establishment, was making predictions much worse than the average of the polls because they used a different likely voter model that gave different results. These errors cost them dearly.

The real value in polling:
We all have an insatiable desire to know the answer to unknowns (as a poker player, I distinctly profit off the tendency of poor players to call just because they desire to know what I have, even when it is clear they are likely beat). Who wins an election is a big deal, and we want to know the answer to who will win as soon as possible. People who prognosticate about elections are filling the role of satisfying that desire, which is why they get attention. Outside of that, however, the value in predicting election results is rather limited, and has limited impact on our political scene (there is the issue of predictions feedbacking into the dynamics of the race and how people vote; I will ignore this because the mechanisms for all of this are so unclear at this point in time).

That said, I still believe there is incredible value in the polls, but this is because as a political analyst I am interested not just in the end result of who wins and election, but also in knowing how people react to various political events. Polls are very good at that, they are very good at demonstrating that there is or is not a sharp change in direction in people's sentiment when something happens (a gaffe, a release of a platform, a news event, etc). Nate Silver has said similar things before, that much of the value in regularly reading a blog like 538 is not in that it is slightly more accurate in predicting the election the day before the election, but to give an indication of how well the messaging worked at the Democratic National Convention, say.

Marginal vs absolute value:
The fundamental dynamic going on is that polls from the same company done in the same way give a very good measure of the marginal changes. We can see that over a period of time there was a change of a particular magnitude in a particular direction. They are reasonably good at that. They are much less good, however, at having an accurate absolute value. As in, if we see an uptick in poll averages from 50% to 55% we can be quite confident that there has been a marginal change in support. But we are much less confident that the actual support rests at 55%. Whatever biases exist to make this poll a poor proxy remain in both measures, so while the 55% may be wrong because of the biases, that there has been this change occurred when the biases remain constant is significant.

Eric Grenier's Mea Culpa:
I was impressed to see that Eric gave an appropriately humbled questioning of the validity of his work in light of this result. It is refreshing to see such honesty in the face of objective results. However, I actually think he goes too far. Or at least, if one has already reduced one's expectations to that which I have discussed above, he has nothing to apologize for. His work certainly still has value, it just isn't necessarily of the value one might hope of being able to accurately call every minor Canadian election within a couple percent.  I will close out with the copy and paste:

"It puts into question the validity of the work I do. I write about polls every day for this site, for The Globe and Mail, for The Huffington Post Canada, and for The Hill Times. I give radio and television interviews about them. It is my full-time job. I've always approached it as a professional and have tried to provide insightful analysis of polling, separately from my role as a forecaster. No one in Canada who doesn't work for a polling firm writes about polls as much as I do. 

How can I credibly continue to do so when I myself doubt that the results are reliable? While I was shocked when I saw the results last night, a part of me was not surprised that I was shocked and that they got it wrong all over again. If I go into every election assuming that disaster is more likely than triumph, what is the point? 

This site was meant to be a way to cut through the confusion in polling and give a good idea of what, as a whole, the polls are saying. The site can still do that, but if what the polls are saying is not reflective of reality, what use is it? 

My projection was wrong because the polls were wrong. Again. I am sorry that it was so. I can blame the pollsters for providing me with unreliable information, but I am nevertheless responsible for what is posted here, for the defense of polling I have mounted for the last few years, and for whatever confidence I expressed when analyzing the numbers in an attempt to inform readers about the state of the race in British Columbia and elsewhere. I apologize for that. Where do we go from here?"

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Thank you Westboro Baptist Chuch

Westboro Baptish Church - made infamous for picketing military funeral in a protest against homosexual tolerance in America - has reached, unbelievably, a new low. They are now threatening to picket the funerals of victims of the Boston bombings, again for some incoherent homophobic reason. As disgusting as this all is, and as much as I feel for those who actually have to experience these bigots first hand in a moment of grief, there is, perhaps surprisingly, an upside. Indeed, I submit that there is a fairly strong positive social consequence of the wide spread attention that Westboro Baptist Church has gotten.

Any time Westboro Baptish Church comes up, there is unanimous, unqualified condemnation of their actions. Most issues manage to find some way to be divisive and fit into existing sociopolitical schisms, but this example is so egregious, so ridiculous, that no halfway reasonable person can condone it and, indeed, effectively nobody does. Instead, we get to engage in a round of collective condemnation and give ourselves pats on the back for having done so.

Going through this process every once in a while, I think, is a positive thing for a society to do. Particularly for those who don't normally find themselves supporting LGBT rights and equality, this gives a practical example for people to defend gay citizens even if they oppose, say, marriage equality. It gives us practice and gets us into the mindset of defending LGBT people. As a society we should have limits on acceptable behavior, and it is a positive experience to be able to come together and agree that a certain action is indeed out of acceptable bounds. It helps build our social cohesion and create a common moral framework that we can build from. If nothing else, we can't be hurt by this exercise. 

The discussion also tends to bring out a rather robust affirmation of the great American value of freedom of speech, a value that is somewhat more firmly entrenched than in other countries like Canada with our hate speech laws and the like. Core values tend to be eroded first at the extremes which is why we should be especially careful to affirm them in extreme cases. One could be tempted, for instance, to try and punish Westboro Baptish Church for hate speech or hateful actions. Thankfully, the overwhelming thrust of conversation on this point seems to have people agreeing that while Westboro Baptish Church certainly is allowed to do and say the things they do and say, the correct response is to condemn it, not to prevent it. In other words, the general consensus is exactly correct.

On related note, I was briefly worried, when checking Twitter sometime after the Boston bombings but before the suspects were identified, to see that #Islam was trending. It was quite refreshing to note that people were overwhelmingly affirming the basic idea that we should not judge the entirety of the religion based on the actions of a few, particularly when we didn't even know the religion let alone the full motivating of those few. Hear, hear. Of course, this issue is very polarizing and undoubtedly we have seen in the last few days considerable Islamophobia and fear mongering and generalizations and that won't go away any time soon. But briefly, the narrative was focused on a positive point. This isn't always the case. I still have not quite forgiven the American public for the "controversy" over the so called ground zero mosque. That was an example when the public narrative got lost on very negative sentiments, sentiments that I fully reject.

So thank you, Westboro Baptish Church. Thank you for providing an example of homophobia so extreme that all of us can come together and universally condemn it while affirming the kinds of basic values that provide the bedrock for our society.

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Windows 8 is a flop, and there is little they could have done differently

The recent release of an IDC report shines a pretty bad light on Microsoft. Windows 8 is selling very poorly with the steepest declines ever in the PC market, and in particular it has entirely failed to gain traction in tablets, with companies like Samsung even pulling their Windows RT products in some places. Especially given the enormous importance of succeeding in tablets, this has caused many commentators to bluntly call Windows 8 a flop. They are probably right. However, I submit in this post that many of the big decisions made by Microsoft were ones where they could not have reasonably acted differently, and that the fact that Windows 8 was a flop was at least in part determined by the evolving market conditions and positioning of other companies. There simply was no clear alternate path to doing pretty close to precisely what they did.

Microsoft's market position:

Microsoft's defining competitive advantage has always been its enormous "moat". That is, Windows is the de facto operating system for desktops and laptops that everyone uses, everyone thus knows how to use Windows, is trained in its use, can be found everywhere, has every program imaginable written for it, etc. And since it has all those things, it is thus the de facto operating system. It is this feedback cycle which has allowed Microsoft to make relatively small evolutions time after time in each iteration of its OS with little worry as any newcomer, even if they were to offer a superior OS, has to get over this enormous moat. Incidentally, Facebook has a similarly powerful moat in that everyone continues to use Facebook because everyone continues to use Facebook; breaking that cycle even by a superior platform will be extremely difficult.

Going into Windows 8, Microsoft had little to fear on the desktop front. Linux, while getting better and more user friendly was still not gaining meaingful market share. Apple desktops and laptops do well, but their growth is limited by their business model. The big new entrant was Chrome, presumably for the ultra low end even if they position themselves differently at times (see the Chromebook Pixel) for example. But for the most part, the Microsoft position on desktops and laptops was reasonably secure. They can hope to provide a better product that quickens the upgrade cycles, but they were going to remain desktop king no matter what. 

The big threat was a shift away from desktops and laptops, where Microsoft faced little threat, to an entirely new form of computing on smartphones and tablets where Microsoft had little traction. Thus the core judgement on the success of Windows 8 should be in whether it was able to move into tablets. While a successful OS might drive some momentum in the desktop space, the desktop market was destined to decline no matter what, and that this happened can only partly be blamed on Microsoft. Given the truly phenomenal success of the iPad, and subsequent Andriod tablets, Microsoft found its position reversed. It had no software for these popular devices, and Apple and Google were quickly growing precisely the kind of moats in things like number of apps that once gave Microsoft its advantage. The only reason this shift happened was because Windows fundamentally does not work on a tablet and need a fundamentally new operating system. 

How Microsoft responded, and had to respond:
So what is Microsoft to do? To keep their advantage, they need to have access to the old way of doing things with all the apps (or programs, as they used to be called) and power that Windows, together with Intel chips, provided. Scrap that and they are starting from ground zero. So you had to keep the old system, the old "moat". They also had to make a completely new OS designed for touch screens, since the old system simply didn't work in this domain. So some combination of the old and new was simply mandatory, the only question is how the combination works.

The problem turned out to be a hardware one, as much as a software one. The kind of chips capable of running "full" windows need to be fast and this needs tonnes of power and thus resulted in bulky, battery filled cases, too bulky for a tablet, or computers with horrible battery life. A cheap, lightweight tablet with a decent battery life just could not run full windows from the hardware standpoint. Perhaps in another year this will be possible, but not in 2012. So Microsoft had no choice but to release one version that only did the tablet centric stuff. Something that could run on a cheap ARM mobile chip, the type of chips that can't run photoshop. Hence Windows RT.

So Microsoft had no choice but to have Windows be both tablet and desktop centric, and no choice but to release a completely tablet version. So the next question is whether they should have made the other version be the weird combo of a tablet side (or Metro as it used it be called) and the original desktop side. Could they instead have done what Apple does, with two entirely separate and incompatible operating systems?

Again, the answer is no, they were forced to do what they did. If it was just Windows RT, a satisfactory ARM tablet OS, and a separate Windows 8 desktop that was a small upgrade of Windows 7, there is no justification to jump from Apple and Andriod to Microsoft in the tablet space. While they needed Windows RT because of the hardware problems, they had no ability to compete in tablets if they just had Windows RT. The advantage of Microsoft is the legacy moat, if you don't have that, you are left fighting a tablet war from scratch against the stalwarts. The other two had enormous app libraries and install bases, enormous popularity and support, and there would then be little to no justification for someone to jump ship to the windows tablet OS. Andriod in specific is being offered with a less than free model (see below) and thus Windows RT would have to offer enormous benefits to be able to justify itself. It is a good tablet OS, perhaps a better tablet OS, but it can be expected to have - and did have - trouble getting over the moat by itself. By creating an OS that works as it does on the Surface Pro, they present a legitimate argument and appeal by having the needed tablet centered OS, with the ability to run all the windows legacy apps which is so necessary.

Now that the split of having an ARM tablet without legacy windows functionality and an Intel tablet with it was established, the only remaining question is what to do with the desktop side of things? One is hardly hurt by having the Metro tablet-centric stuff in the Windows 8 OS. I never use it, it is just there, but I am not hurt and in fact slightly prefer the superior start button. In order to preserve continuity, and in order to appeal to all the touch screen hybrid devices that are not just tablets, it makes sense to include both functionality in the desktop etc versions.

The last question, perhaps, is whether the legacy and Metro components should be as segregated as they are or whether it should have been more tightly integrated. This point is a bit more debatable, but I think what they did is the best option. In a normal desktop situation  one is not hurt by having the touch-centric stuff in the Metro UI available, it just might not be used. Most seem to prefer just using it as if it was Windows 7. In a touch configuration, none of the legacy software was going to make much sense in a touch interface anyways, so you can't cross it over. Any suggestion I have seen on how to more tightly integrate the two very different favors of windows 8 into a single thing are generally very bad. So I think Microsoft's decision was correct and forced here too.

The main point here is that the major decisions in Windows 8 (to make a tablet-centric OS, to make an ARM version of that and an Intel version, to make the Intel versions be this combination of the two, and have that be only loosely integrated) were all decision that are largely forced. They had little choice but to do what they did. As the market numbers indicate, it didn't work out great, and Microsoft really lost out on the tablet market in particular, even as the desktop market declines across the board. But just because it didn't work out great, doesn't mean there was any easily identifiable thing they could have done differently. This was just how it played out given the market forces and company positions.

One might object about this or that detail of Windows 8. Of course there are many details Microsoft could have done differently, some of which would have made it a more desirable and successful product. I don't mean to take away from all the good commentary done by others in this direction. Focusing on the details, however, and all the little ways Microsoft could have been more innovative and successful can, at times, miss that the broader picture and big decisions was largely determined for them.

It's all about the business models:
The old clash between Microsoft and Apple in the desktop computing market was primarily a contest of business models. Apple created software exclusively for its own hardware devices and sold a complete package. Microsoft let any hardware company use its software. They could charge a high premium for doing so based on the strength of their moat creating a de facto monopoly outside of Apple. Today, that business model difference remains as Apple pushed into iPhones and iPads. Apple creates an entire integrated platform of software, hardware and services and tries to justify its amazingly high premiums based on the appeal of this platform. Microsoft today keeps its old business model with Windows 8, letting any OEM use it.

Google's biggest innovation, however, was to entirely transform the business model in a way that makes the old difference between Apple and Microsoft look trivial in comparison. Instead of charging high premiums, Andriod operates on a "less than free" business model. For a company to use Andriod, they not only don't have to pay for it (ie free), they get to share in revenues generated by the OS (so less than free). Of course, a company like Samsung has some development costs as well, particularly as they try to add special differentiating features and skins over top of vanilla Andriod, but the basic less than free model nonetheless applies. It is a risky strategy in the sense of opportunity costs. Android is wildly successful, and probably wouldn't have been as successful as fast were it not for the less than free business model, but one might argue that Google could have made vastly more money if they had charged Microsoft prices for Andriod. Rightly or wrongly, the difference between the three companies is primarily one of business models.

Incidentally, many will suggest that Andriod is a copy of iOS, and that many of the ten inch tablets are clearly copying the ideas behind the iPad. Whether any actual patents have been violated (or what patent law should actually be) is a separate question, but I think the general idea that Google and Samsung and the rest did certainly attempt to emulate Apple is unquestionable. This isn't a bad thing, in a market the good ideas survive and coalesce as companies identify what works and then everyone is doing that. The big innovation, however, was not in difference between the OS or the hardware from the OEMs, it was the business model and in that sense Google didn't copy a thing.

On innovation:
Has Microsoft been innovative with Windows 8? Partially. It recognized the fairly obvious fact that they had to make a tablet centric OS, and went and made one in more or less the only reasonable way. Windows 8 is certainly a big change from its predecessor in this way. But it was made in the context of keeping an identical business model in a changing time, and as argued above, most of the decisions were forced on them. This is not necessarily bad, they had an amazing business model for a long time and it shouldn't be changed just for the sake of change. Apple, for instance, kept its old business model and just translated it into what it did for phones and tablets and experienced remarkable success. However, Microsoft simply made the correct moves possible given the existing market. Apple genuinely took a huge risk in the development of the iPhone and iPad. Google genuinely took a huge risk in the development of Andriod, which while not truly innovative in itself was very innovative in its business model. Microsoft simply hasn't done something to shake up and change the market, merely reacted correctly given the market as it has been defined, largely by others. Microsoft's mistake was not being the innovator to create the tablet (and phone) market that Apple and Google made possible. After that, everything was more or less determined.

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The pestering begins: Liberal leadership candidates with campaign debt (Updated twice)

I was very critical after the NDP Leadership election that the inboxes of supporters were full of emails from the candidates who did not win the leadership, but had extensive campaign debt to repay. Unfortunately, it looks like that story may repeat itself with the Liberals.

When a leadership election occurs, afterwards is a great opportunity to reach out and connect with the numerous new people who have just started paying attention to your Party. It is a time to entrench support, not to push people away. I understand that it is also a good time to get donations, which is why I don't object that Justin's first email is one asking for donations. However I do object to this email from Deborah Coyne:

I am currently working to retire my campaign debt. I have run a frugal campaign with minimal expenses, and have only to repay the Liberal Party's entry fee. A donation of $20, or whatever you can afford to give, would be of great assistance, and much appreciated.

I look forward to serving Canadians and to seeking a nomination to run in a riding for the next election. And I will continue to be a voice in our party for the principles and vision I have resolutely stood for in this campaign.

 The Liberal party took the (good ) step of limiting the amount of debt that can be carried by a candidate to $75,000 dollars after past embarrassments (like Martha Hall Findlay not paying off her 2006 leadership debts until October of 2012, in the middle of another campaign). The $75,000 dollar figure represents the same as the entry fee for the race, the amount the candidates have to pay to the Liberal party to be able to run. It is still a very large amount of money considering that the runner up Joyce Murray raised perhaps a quarter million and she did much better than Deborah Coyne who received less than 1% of the vote.

If we are going to accept the principle that campaigns can go into debt that takes years to pay off, at the very least we should insist that the Liberal party mailing list can not become a proxy for paying it off. It is up to them, and if begging for money is going to hurt a candidate it hurts just them and their own mailing list of supporters, and not the broader party. Hopefully it will not become as bad as it was for the NDP, because they are squandering a precious opportunity to connect with new Liberals.

Update: Thankfully, emails from Martin Cauchon and Joyce Murray were appropriately congratulatory and about coming together as a party. Joyce Murray had a small PS for donating for her campaign debt, but it gave a significantly different tone than Deborah Coyne's.

Update 2: Karen McCrimmon also sent out an email asking for donation and apparently is going to have to work very hard to pay it off. Again, this is from someone who received less than 1% of the vote.

If you thought I contributed to making this a campaign of which we all can be proud and if you want to help me become an MP in the next election, please make a donation to the campaign as I won't be able to concentrate on my next challenge until I have completed this one!

This fall I plan to travel from coast to coast to coast to continue the work of rebuilding and retiring my campaign debt. Please contact me at ***** if your riding, club or commission is interested in hosting an event.

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Justin's not so positive acceptance speech

The full text of Justin Trudeau's speech can be found here. I wanted to highlight the section talking about the Conservatives and Stephen Harper. It is the first major section after thank you's, and while there are many positive things that come after this lengthy section, the gloves sure came off quickly. Note that this isn't substantive policy criticism, it is presenting a caricature of Steven Harper and the Conservatives to vilify.

At least he didn't do what Bob Rae did, and comment that the only two pieces of furniture in Sussex was a throne and a mirror. Okay, okay, I admit it is pretty funny. But it isn't positive politics, and we can't pretend it is, even if the way one does negative political attacks is to attack the negative politics attacks of the other side.

Canadians want better leadership and a better government. Canadians want to be led, not ruled. 

They are tired of the negative, divisive politics of Mr. Harper’s Conservatives. And unimpressed that the NDP, under Mr. Mulcair, have decided that if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them.

We are fed up with leaders who pit Canadians against Canadians. West against East, rich against poor, Quebec against the rest of the country, urban against rural.

Canadians are looking to us, my friends. They are giving us a chance, hopeful that the party of Wilfrid Laurier can rediscover its sunny ways.

Hopeful that positive politics has a fighting chance against the steady barrage of negativity that you and I both know is coming soon to TV screens across Canada. The phone messages, our volunteers tell us, have already started.

To adapt a sentiment from the great American President Franklin D. Roosevelt: never before in this country have the forces of negativity, cynicism and fear been so united in their hostility toward one candidate.

The Conservative Party will now do what it does. It will try to spread fear. It will sow cynicism. It will attempt to convince Canadians that we should be satisfied with what we have now.

For at the heart of their unambitious agenda is the idea that “better” is just not possible.

That to hope for something more from our politics and our leaders, more humanity, more transparency, more compassion, is naive and inevitably, will lead to disappointment.

And they will promote that divisive and destructive idea with passionate intensity. They will do so for a simple reason…
They are afraid. 

But… And I want to make this perfectly clear… My fellow Canadians, it is not my leadership that Mr. Harper and his party fear.

It’s yours.

There is nothing that these Conservatives fear more than an engaged and informed Canadian citizen.

Stephen Harper, you see, is a cynical, unambitious, divisive coward, content to promote the destructive path of pessimism while quivering in his boots at the threat of Justin, and responding with unrelenting negativity.

I have no lost love for Stephen Harper, any reader of my blog knows that. And I certainly acknowledge the efficacy of negative ads in politics; I don't pretend to believe as a deontological precept that one should not be negative. But we should be honest about it, and not pretend that what is clearly negative character attacks are anything but. I had presumed we were going to have to wait till Question Period to see it quite so poignantly, not the first substantive section of his acceptance speech. The Liberals may choose, perhaps for financial reasons, not to run negative attack ads for a while. However, in everything else, there is no reason to expect anything else but the above.

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Obama tries to regain the narrative on the Sequester

When Obama decided to give back 5% of his salary to the Treasury, he made a political move not done since Herbert Hoover. In so doing, he undoubtedly aims to reclaim the momentum and the narrative on the Sequester that has been lost over the last month.Before the Sequester was implemented, public opinion was largely on Obama's side with enormous attention being given to the threat. Now that it is in place, however, that attention has waned, and there is little public pressure being put on either party to end the Sequester as soon as possible; Obama's poll numbers have sharply dropped relative to Congressional Republicans.

More importantly, time happened. The news media is good at reporting new things that occur, but much less good at keeping the momentum up on a story that persists with little change, even if it is a negative thing that persists. There was tones of stories about the sequester leading up to it, as this big dramatic thing was about to happen. After it happened, however, the reporting dropped way off. Unless one is directly impacted by a furlough  say, effects like marginally lower quality services, and downward pressures on economic growth, even if legitimate in aggregate, are just not easily felt individually and not easily noticed unless someone is there talking about it. Obama tried to ratchet up the threat before hand by and got some egg on his face due to some over the top claims that were objectively false about the consequences of the Sequester. After the Sequester went into place, he got some attention by canceling the tours of the White House, but it just came off as petty and not something to worry too much about. 

By returning his salary, Obama buys himself an excellent round of positive attention, not just that he is a good guy for returning his salary, but more importantly as a reminder that the Sequester is still in place, and that there is significant pain being caused by it, even if we have forgotten or not noticed. It lets him paint the narrative that there really is something significant going on that takes a fairly historic move from him to respond to, and that we need to buckle down and deal with this as we go into the next segment of negotiations. The issue is worth drawing attention to and needs to be dealt with, but it was getting lost. 

Incidentally, by explaining the political dynamics, I don't mean to take away from Obama's act. He donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to various causes anyways, one could not say he is not charitable. He may very well genuinely believe he is doing the right thing reducing his pay while his employees are having theirs reduced. However, he also gets a political benefit that is certainly well calculated and, hopefully, will manifest in real returns. 

A genuinely bad idea:

Turn back the clock to when the original deal was passed into the law. The idea behind sequestration was that given how intractable the two sides were at agreeing on anything, they would agree to have this really bad thing - the Sequester - occur on a specific date to try and force them to make a deal by that time. The Sequester would be part spending cuts (with the idea that Democrats would object to those) and part defense cuts (with the idea that Republicans would object to those). With this big threat, the needed motivation to make a deal would help the process along. Incidentally, as previously noted, the deal was asymmetric from the start since the Democrats, and in particular Obama, strongly oppose defense cuts as well and this part would surely get overturned somehow. So the only threat was in the Democrats and spending. Balancing this asymmetry, was the entirely separate one sided threat to Republicans of the end of the Bush era tax cuts. 

Now of course, the big awful thing has happened. They didn't agree to a deal, and they couldn't even agree to avert the big awful thing from happening that they imposed on themselves. All it takes is an up/down vote to end it. The Canadian in me just has to laugh at the dysfunction. 

Republicans are for spending cuts. I disagree, at least as a general point, but I understand the perspective. However, the sequester cuts are among the worst ways to cut government spending with nonspecific across the board cuts on already established budgets that doesn't highlight and remove the worst excesses of government. Any person interested in effective governance, even effective small governance, should object to the truly ineffective way these cuts are implemented and should instead be trumpeting targeted cuts that eliminate the least beneficial and most wasteful programs first, leaving in tact efficient programs with large amounts of benefits. And of course, for those of us who believe the services offered are valuable, doubly so in a time of needed Keynsian spending not so called austerity to boost the economy, the entire thing reeks. 

If the question, however, is on scoring partisan victories, and a spending cut equals a point, the Republicans won. They got massive spending cuts, with no concessions and no political consequences. Even for those that recognize these cuts are an inefficient way to do cutting,  they will surely take the victory and move on. Indeed the GOP rhetoric has been precisely this simplistic, that spending cuts are generically a good thing, with no consideration for what is or what ought to be cut. If we want to change this, they need to feel political heat. To have political heat, Obama needs to get the narrative correct, and this is why it is so crucial that they regain that. If nothing else, he paid $20,000 to buy himself a positive news cycle. 

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Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus

Some days it feels like the different sides of the US political map really are different species. Today was one of those days. Controversial freshman Republican Senator Ted Cruz got into a bit of an exchange with a Dianne Feinstein, a stalwart of the Senate Democratic leadership, over gun rights.

The video of this exchange lit up on the blogosphere today (yes, I am making one of those self indulgent posts where a blogger comments on the state of the blogosphere). What was interesting, however, is how both sides considered the victory an amusing knock out win for their side. 

Here is Redstate, one of the most prominent right wing blogs: 

A Ted Cruz Missile Strikes Dianne Feinstein: 

If Ted Cruz keeps this up in the Senate, Democrats might try to impose gun control on his Cruz missile strikes. Earlier today at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on guns, Ted Cruz directly challenges Dianne Feinstein to answer how her gun bans are constitutional if the same language protecting the right to bear arms (“the right of the people”) is used for the First and Fourth Amendments, which presumably, nobody would try to limit in the same way. Of course, she had no answer, except to act like a pugnacious school child.

This sounds bad, the left must be pretty embarrassed. Nope, here is Mother Jones, one of the most prominent left wing blogs: 

Feinstein Smacks Down Cruz Over Gun Ban: "I Am Not a 6th-Grader"...but not before Sen. Ted Cruz, the freshman Republican from Texas, aimed to give Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the five-term Democrat from California, a lesson about the Bill of Rights. He suggested that it was a slippery slope from banning bazookas to banning books. Feinstein was not impressed.

...and so it went. 

I get that people can disagree on policies. I get that people can disagree on values. But we are losing our collective ability to be accurate judges of, well, just about anything that even tangentially intersects with politics.  This isn't a case of the Romney 47% video where the left makes a big deal and the right ignores it. This isn't the "you didn't build that" microquote from Obama triumphed just by the right to fit their narrative.   The same video is being simultaneously triumphed by both sides as a clear win demonstrating the idiocy of the other side.

We saw this just so poignantly in the last election where numerous Republican's - up to and including Mitt Romney and his core team - fervently believed in an alternate reality where they were going to win the election. Reading the rightwing blogs at the time and it was all discussion of biases in likely voter models, and how turnout was going to be adjusted from 2008, etc. Election forecasting should, in principle, be entirely nonpartisan. Yet they aren't as opinions about things like election forecasts had deep set partisan divides.

You would think the left and the right could have a discussion about all the different topics that are related to politics (like election forecasting). But the reality is that the ingroup/outgroup identifications are so strong, and so pernicious, that for most of the time the two groups could just as well be from different planets. 

I should add that I am usually one of those that thinks there are considerable similarities between the two parties and while there are important differences, they are actually far closer than we give them credit for. However, this is a comment about values and policy positions, when it comes to forming partisan teams and parsing everything through that lens, they are as far away as ever. 

And since I can't really pretend I am not a partisan, I will note for the record that the Democrats in the video definitely laid the smack down on Ted Cruz, and not the other way around. Constitutional universalism is a viewpoint that has been widely and repeatedly rejected by the courts, and Feinstein is correct to lay it on thick when the simplistic red meat throwing "but what about the 2nd amendment?" style questions get thrown at her. 

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How to vote in Trudeau's coronation

Even before Justin Trudeau announced his candidacy to be the next Liberal leader, pundits were tripping over each other to declare the inevitability of his eventual success. With Marc Grarneau dropping out of the race following internal polling showing Trudeau lightyears ahead, the outcome truly is certain (read this is you still have your doubts). The question now is whether there remains any point in voting and, if so, who to vote for?

Is there still value in voting?
I believe that there is still considerable value in voting in the leadership election and that the question of who to vote for is still important. While the dominant goal of a leadership election - choosing a leader - has been decided, there are still many other still important goals. Namely, it doesn't just matter who the leader is, the relative balance of values and policies being pushed by the base have a real effect on constraining and shaping the actions of the leader and the party.

There are two ways in which voting for someone other than Trudeau can have influence. Firstly, if that person has a strong value or policy agenda, voting for that person is a proxy for pushing the relative prominence of that agenda. In the 2012 NDP leadership election, for instance, a vote for Nathan Cullen was a proxy for a vote for the idea of cooperation with the Liberals. Or take a vote for Ron Paul in the 2012 GOP Presidential candidate election; Paul was never going to win, but voting for him pushed the relative prominence of his libertarian values and ideas.

This idea that there is value in the framing of the political debate, and that votes are a form of signalling that shift policy has been a theme on this blog. In fact one of my first posts was on the value of voting for third parties.  I don't think this always applies, however, as it depends on a strategic consideration of the specific election. This election is one where we don't have to vote strategically as the outcome is assured. This frees us up to be the type of election where we vote based on signalling and framing of the political debate and pushing values and issues we care about. These things do make real differences, such as the effect that green parties - Ontario being a case in point - have had on shifting real policies.

The other way voting can have influence is by increasing the prominence of specific people, not just as a proxy for their values. After the NDP leadership election, losing candidates like Peggy Nash and Nathan Cullen have risen to considerable prominence within the party. Even people like Niki Ashton who performed poorly, will undoubtedly have raised her prominence and can take further leadership positions in the future. It isn't just to us voters that elections are more than just choosing the leader. The candidates recognize this as well; often many of the other candidates have their own goals and aspirations that are not necessarily just about becoming the leader. For instance, I spelled out some of the motivations behind the other GOP contenders here and here. As such, a vote for someone who is not Justin Trudeau can be a way to increase their relative prominence within the party in the future and ensure that their voice, which you are endorsing, gets that much louder.

Who to vote for? 
The above has argued that, in principle, there can be value in voting for inevitably losing candidates. Given that, who best to vote for? Well, I will leave that decision to you.

I will note that the candidate who is most clearly a proxy for some value is Joyce Murray who is the candidate proposing cooperation with the NDP. If you believe that there is value in some level of cooperation with the NDP (even constrained to something like forming a government in a minority situation), a vote for her is much like a vote for Nathan Cullen was in the NDP election. It signals that the base is supportive of the idea of this cooperation. Personally the chance of direct electoral cooperation at the riding level in 2015 was always remote; even if Joyce Murray won, Thomas Mulcair has ruled it out. However the need to form a government, possible a coalition government, in 2015 is high if no party gets a majority. So this issue of cooperation is not going away and a strong signal that the Liberal base supports cooperation could have a huge effect on our political landscape.

Unfortunately, despite my proposal that this race should be focused on policy, it largely wasn't. Justin Trudeau openly admitted he didn't intend to lead on policy and is opting to try and take a longer perspective on policy formation that was inclusive of Canadian's opinions, a position that Marc Garneau tried to hammer despite offering very few policies of his own. Martha Hall Findlay was the alleged policy wonk, but outside of a few random things here and there like opposition to supply management, really didn't lead on major policy initiatives. This pattern repeats for most of the others. In fact, outside of George Takach who ran as the self proclaimed "tech candidate" before dropping out, none of the candidates could in the slightest way be identified as a proxy for a specific policy, and most barely even managed to espouse any policies. See my debate coverage for a few of the various specific ideas mentioned. As such, I submit that with the exception of Joyce Murray, there is no real point to voting for anyone except Justin Trudeau on the grounds that I have spelled out earlier.

And of course, one can still vote for Justin Trudeau. Doing this shows the strength of his support and helps to build momentum for a Liberal resurgence.

Comparison to the Mitt Romney:
Justin Trudeau may well have outdone the air of inevitability that shrouded Mitt Romney as he was being nominated for the GOP's most recent presidential candidate. It was recognized in both contests that it was these leading candidates races to lose, that it was "their turn" at bat. However, there the similarities stop. The reality is that while Trudeau soared to very high levels of support, Romney experience a constant battle with numerous surges in the polls for almost every other candidate. It emphasizes, once again, just how fundamentally poor Mitt Romney was as a candidate and how he could not even manage to get his base to rally around him until, belatedly and unenthusiastically  in the general. Sorry, I couldn't help myself take just one more belated wack at poor Romney. That Trudeau has not experienced this drop demonstrates that his skills as politician are legitimate and not just resting on name brand recognition. 

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Specific policies mentioned in the Toronto Liberal Leadership Debate

In keeping with my goal of policy centric coverage of the Leadership contest, this post contains largely a list of various policies mentioned by the respective Candidates at the Toronto Liberal Leadership Debate. The ability to articulate a clear policy vision for Canada, not just utter platitudes and generalities, is paramount to the Liberals being able to find electoral success. As such, I ignored appeals to values or general principles, and also ignored criticism of Harper. This is a pretty exhaustive list of the first hour of the debate which contained the excellent one on one debate format that is vastly superior in terms of flushing out policy specifics than larger group debates. I finish with a few miscellaneous comments. 

David Bertschi:

• Favours family reunification in immigration policy
• Increased recognition of foreign credentials with federal, not just provincial, leadership
• Wants to maintain the supply management system on dairy/poultry
• Supports a "fair managed trade" opposed to free trade; also aims for trade engagement not isolationism
• Tax cuts for the middle class
• Encourage apprenticeship programs

Martin Cauchon:

• No comments

Deborah Coyne:

• Parliamentary committee for electoral reform with a subsequent national referendum
• Change nomination races in the Liberal party to make them more democratic
• Wants to change the Canada Quebec Accord on immigration, favoring a more federal approach as opposed to the provincial nominee program. 
• Simplify tax code; reducing micro deductions such as abuses in child care tax credit. 
• Double immigration rates over the next ten years

Martha Hall Findlay: 

• Supports a West to East pipeline, using underutilized refining capacity in New Brunswick.
• Wants to abolish the supply management system on dairy/poultry. 
• Supports active engagement with countries on human rights or environmental concerns, not isolationism. 
• Supports targeted immigration opposed to letting just anyone in. 

Marc Garneau: 

• Supports the Preferential Ballot, but sees no need for a referendum on the issue

Karen McCrimmon:

• Secondary Resource development (such as milling or refining of lumber and oil) support
• Increase low income tax credit and increase personal deductions

Joyce Murray:

• Electoral cooperation with the NDP 
• Supports a price on carbon
• Tax cuts for the middle class, paid for by closing loopholes

George Takach:

• Favours family reunification in immigration policy
• Eliminated employment taxes in exchange for carbon taxes
• Higher R&D tax credits
• Broadband access to rural communities, and a range of other high support as the self proclaimed "tech candidate"

Justin Trudeau:

• Supports the Canada Quebec Accord on immigration; different regions have different immigration needs, particularly Quebec, and as such opposed a one size fits all federal program

Don't read too much into the number of comments each made. Some of the questions, as determined by the debate, were not as amenable to specific policies. For instance, an opening debate between Marc Garneau and Justin Trudeau was on the somewhat vague topic of leadership and as such neither candidate had much opportunity  to list specific policies the way a debate on, say, immigration necessarily does. That said, it is certainly the case that Trudeau, Garneau and Cauchon were happy to spend time talking more about values than policies. This can be a reasonable debate strategy. But it means one has to look to other places to find their policy positions and if they continue to shy away from this it can be troubling. 

Electability: 

My coverage of the Vancouver Leadership Debate focused extensively on the key characteristic of electability. While I have identified the importance of policies, the reality is that to implement a policy one has to first get elected. The frontrunners in that debate (Trudeau, Findlay, Garneau) remain, I think, the frontrunners in this debate in terms of their command of rhetoric, stage presence, and overall electability. However, I would say that the field leveled itself out a bit. People like Karen McCrimmon who was very unimpressive in the first debate stepped it up considerably, while Martha Hall Findlay did not have quite the presence she had the first time round. So the relative rankings remain fairly similar, but the differences were less so. 

If Trudeau is a lock, should we care?

Any time a political race is deemed as if not inevitable than quite likely, there is a tendency towards apathy. However, there is still tremendous value in going through this process and being involved in it. A leadership race is not just about choosing a leader, even if that is its ostensible goal, but also about setting the direction of values and policies. By having these debates on values and policies, and by seeing the support among the base for various values and policies, it helps clearly identify the direction. 

In the NDP leadership races, we saw that various candidates like Peggy Nash and Nathan Cullen both rose to considerable prominence within the party and retain influence both within the party and within the media. This means that the policies and values that they represent retain importance. So there is value in the relative rankings of the candidates as a proxy for their underlying values and policies and it can make a legitimate difference to the future direction of the party even if the eventual leader is Trudeau in all reasonable scenarios. This touches on the broader point of the value of voting for third party candidates generally. 

Winning is not everything. We also want to have the optimal relative rankings of values and policies so that when we win we can do as much good as possible. As such, these debates still have - and must have - value. 

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