SILVER; US House

Last week I posted the complete SILVER listings for the US Senate, now for the US House. First a graph of the House Republicanss, just like when I did this for the Senate, the DW-Nominate scores are plotted on the x-axis and PVI on the y-axis.

GPI update; SurveyUSA's Dem Downer Tour

SurveyUSA has shown some particularly bad numbers for Democrats this cycle and while their latest poll on the Minnesota governors race isn't bad news, it certainly isn't good. Here are the toplines:



There has been some significant movement towards Tom Emmer from the last SurveyUSA poll, both of which have been polls of likely voters, while Tom Horner has doubled his polling number. As I mentioned previously SurveyUSA has been Rasmussenesque in their election polling this year, often showing the Democratic candidate doing far worse then other pollsters, but they had been bucking that trend in Minnesota, until now that is.

Waiting for Tom Emmer's budget, A Samuel Becket play in many acts

Tom Emmer has now released parts 1 and 2 of his budget plan, and yet we still wait for Tom Emmer's budget plan.

(peers into shoe)

Part 1, the "jobs" part, consists of tax cuts that will magically pay for themselves. Part 2, the "kids" part, consists of kicking the can down the road, Pawlenty style, for another four years and a complete education reform that will, also magically, not cost any money.

What will Part 3 be? Will it be the end, or does Tom have yet more acts to follow it? Like Vladimir and Estragon we will have to wait, however impatiently, for our Godot to arrive.

(peers into hat)

What shall we do to pass the time? Let me think.

(places hat on head)

(thinks)

I've got it! Let's play a game. What will Part 3 of Tom Emmer's magical budget plan be? Will it be a unicorn for all little girls and a hockey stick for all little boys? Will it be fairy dust that when sprinkled on problems magically makes them go away? Will it be something else, something not so magical, like the elimination of LGA?

Play along in the comments for your chance to win nothing!

SILVER; US Senate

As promised here are the SILVER rankings for the entire U.S. Senate, but before we get to that, a few graphs.



That's a scatter plot of Senate Republicans, the X axis represents the DW-Nominate score and the Y axis is the PVI score. You'll notice that the scatter plot is basically random and that is reflected in the r-squared number, there isn't much of any correlation between Senate Republicans voting tendencies and the partisan nature of the states they represent.

Here's the Senate Democrats scatterplot:



What you see is a somewhat tighter, somewhat more linear distribution, with an r-squared value approaching 50. The Senate Democrats DW-Nominate and PVI scores are more correlated than the Senate Republicans.

When you put the two graphs together and you can actually see the partisan split.



What you can also see by looking at the SILVER rankings for the entire Senate GOP below, and as Nate pointed out last week, the Tea Party has actually been pretty smart in the incumbents they've taken out, as Bennett and Murkowski are among the least valuable GOP Senators according to this metric.

The GOP's missed votes

While looking at missed votes for my earlier post on Tom Emmers missed votes there was something else I noticed, Tom Emmer wasn't the only Minnesota House GOPer who missed a lot of votes. The member that missed the second most votes was a Republican, Slayton Rep. Doug Magnus. Third most was also a from the GOP, Jim Abeler. Fourth most, you guessed it, Republican Paul Kohls. Fifth was Paul Thissen, the first Democrat on the list.

It gets worse though. The DFL has 87 members in the house the GOP has 47, the DFL missed a total of 1,194 votes, the GOP missed 1,370. The DFL has 85% more members in the house and yet the GOP still missed 15% more votes. Even excluding Mr. Emmer and his gargantuan 147 missed votes the GOP still missed more votes than the DFL. To further an analogy, if Tom Emmer is the Babe Ruth of missed votes, the house GOP are the New York Yankees.

I suppose when you're as deep in the minority as the Minnesota GOP is in the house you can get kind of discouraged about voting, but really, is there any excuse for this kind of systematic failure to show up and do your job?

County hPVI Map

After making the map of the counties Mark Dayton won in the DFL primary I got a little map making crazy and made a bunch of maps. One of them is a map of the County hPVI list I posted awhile ago.



The way the color coding works is any county with an hPVI of D+5 to R+5 is white, any county with an hPVI of D+6 to D+20 is light blue and any county with an hPVI greater than D+20 is dark blue. The GOP counties followed the same parameters, so light red is R+6 to R+20 and dark red is R+21 and greater.

GPI update, another weird Humphrey poll

With the release today of a new MPR/Humphrey poll I can once again update the GPI. Below is a list of the current polls included in the index followed by the current numbers.





Joe posted an excellent analysis of the Humphrey poll earlier today pointing out some of the issues with it. These are not the kinds of issues that disqualify a poll from being included in the index and is in fact the main reason for wanting to get a composite number from a combination of polls rather then relying on a single poll.

Having said all of that, partisan sampling problems do seem to be something of a trend for MPR/Humphrey institute polls. I posted this about their governor's race poll from May:

...the MPR/Humphrey Institute poll's sampling was 42% DFL, 42% GOP and 15% Independent. I honestly don't know where they got these numbers from, perhaps their rectum, but they certainly are not representative of Minnesota's partisan breakdown. First of all 15% is an incredibly low number for Independent's in Minnesota.

This polls breakdown is similar to the Humphrey poll from May in that the partisan breakdowns in both polls look nothing like the partisan breakdowns being used by anybody else who's polled this state. Now, maybe Humphrey knows something that all of the other pollsters don't, but judging by their 3.15 pollster rating, the sixth worst score of any pollster in Nate's database, my guess is that their polling suffers from a flaw in the methodology somewhere.

From MPR's article on the poll:

The survey data has also been weighted to accomodate for factors such as the number of telephone lines, cell phone usage, gender, age, race and ethnicity to approximate the demographic characteristics of the state's population according to the Census.

There is no mention of weighting the partisan numbers, so they probably don't, which would explain why they ended up with the split they did and probably also explains why they have such a poor track record.

Putting that aside, and as Joe pointed out, no matter how you slice it this is bad news for Tom Emmer. In a poll that consists of 46% republicans he could only manage to get the support of 34% of them. In what has to be considered a best case scenario for Tom Emmer he's only at parity with Mark Dayton. Don't let the media reports over the next few days fool you, this race is not "deadlocked" right now, Mark Dayton is clearly in the drivers seat.

Tom Emmer's missed votes

Alliance for a Better Minnesota is currently running an ad highlighting Tom Emmer's habit of missing votes in the legislature. It just so happens that I am currently in the process of compiling all of the legislative votes of all of the current legislators for the formulation of a state level DW-Nominate style scoring system, meaning I just so happen to have a database of all of the roll call votes for the 2010 session and can evaluate these claims.

Anytime you hear "so and so has done a thing X number of times," it's helpful to know what X is relative to Y and Z. In this case Alliance for a Better Minnesota claims that Tom Emmer missed 142 votes of 621 taken, so at the very least it would be nice to know what the average number of votes missed is.

My database includes a total of 650 votes for the 2010 regular session and special session combined (there were two votes that took place in a one day special session) and Tom Emmer missed 147 of those votes. I'm not sure which votes I'm including that Alliance for a Better Minnesota isn't, the link they provide for their source is the same source I used to compile my database.

So while Alliance for a Better Minnesota claims Tom Emmer missed one out of every five votes (it's actually more, over 22% if you figure 142/621) according to my database Tom Emmer "only" missed over 18% of votes. The word only in that sentence is in quotes because Tom Emmer only missed more votes than any other legislator and it's not even close.

Again according to the database I compiled of roll call votes Tom Emmer missed 147, second in missed votes was Doug Magnus with 111 and they're the only two who missed more than 100. The mean number of votes missed was 19, but in a skewed data set like this one mean is not the measure that you want to use for average, median is and the median number of votes missed was 9.

That's rather staggering when put into context, Tom Emmer missed 147 votes and the average legislator missed 9. The z-score, standard deviations from the mean, of Tom Emmer's missed votes is an out of this world 4.61. You could say that Tom Emmer is the Babe Ruth of missing votes.

To be fair to Tom let's just compare him with other Representatives who were running for Governor.



Even among those house members who were also running for Governor, Tom Emmer was the gold standard of missed votes. The guy he beat for the Republican nomination, Marty Seifert missed only 1 vote.

I would say that the missed votes critique is a perfectly fair one and if anything Alliance for a Better Minnesota went easy on Tom Emmer by just focusing on how many votes he missed without putting it in the context of how many votes other legislator's missed.

SILVER 2.0

Back in June I introduced SILVER as a metric to measure how partisan a member of congress is compared to the voting tendencies of their district or state. I did this by combining PVI and DW-Nominate and I scaled it (or attempted to) to the same -1 to 1 scale that DW-Nominate uses. Since that time I’ve been forced to give the issue some more thought because of a baseball stat called NERD.

Believe it or not when I first developed the SILVER stat I was not aware that Crisitunity from the excellent Swing State Project blog had already developed a similar thing. Crisitunity computed his version in a different way, ranking the PVI and DW-Nominate scores of all members of the house on a 1 to 435 scale and then using the difference between the two rankings as his score. This might be a better method than the one I employed in my first version, but in the end we’re trying to measure two different things.

The system that Crisitunity developed measures house members against each other without regard to party affiliation, the point is to measure the overall liberalness of a legislator in the context of their district against the house as a whole. SILVER is meant to measure a legislator against his or her own party, not the entire legislative body.

A victory for public defenders, maybe

From the Pioneer Press:

A Steele County judge has ruled that public defenders in the 3rd Judicial District may not drop 46 criminal defense cases they say they're too short-staffed to handle.

Instead, the district's office of public defense must contract attorneys to represent the defendants, who would otherwise not be able to afford to hire their own private attorneys.

The ruling sets the wheels in motion for a possible showdown with state officials over staffing and funding for those attorneys constitutionally required to represent defendants facing possible incarceration.

This is a big deal for a criminal justice system, public defenders in particular, that have been on the receiving end of a number of budget cuts. The judge has given them the green light to hire the needed attorneys on a contract basis, although at this point no one is quite sure how it will get paid for.

That these services need to be funded was central to the judge’s ruling, from Chief Public Defender Karen Duncan’s interview with MPR:

"I think it's dangerous for our citizens if we're deciding that we no longer need to fund core government services," she said. "Public defense and the criminal court system is a constitutional mandate. It's not an option. It's not frosting for the citizenry."

The actual series of events that lead to Duncan asking for relief from the 46 cases is unusual, a combination of six attorneys taking a leave of absence and a case coming in with 17 co-defendants, all needing a public defender. But the underlying problem is real.

Again from Duncan’s interview with MPR:

"All of these things were happening at once," Duncan said. "And then I'm seeing more staff people still at work after midnight, working at 4 o'clock in the morning. And it was just so obvious that we cannot continue to do this."

Duncan said that, as a result, attorneys missed several court hearings that week.

"I'm not sure how much worse it can feel to go to court and have your lawyer not be there," she said.

The big question now becomes, will there be more of this? The 3rd Judicial District is not the only one with an overworked public defender’s office and it will be interesting to see if similar requests are made in other districts.

The entire interview is worth a listen:

Primary Post Mortem

The body has been lying in the streets for a week and the decomposing has begun, undaunted I am going to rip apart the stinking carcass of the DFL primary and try to determine exactly what happened and why. Sorry for the imagery, that’s where the title took me.

87 Counties

I posted this last week, but I still think it’s the most illustrative reason of exactly why Mark Dayton won the DFL primary.



Joe pointed something out in the comments of that post, which is that you don’t get a sense of population density from this map and that’s true, but in a way it sort of misses the point. The reason Margaret Anderson Kelliher made it close was because she racked up big vote totals in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis in particular, but the reason Mark Dayton won is that he racked up small vote totals all across the state and that’s what this map helps to illustrate.

Kelliher won Hennepin County by 16,255 votes. She won Ramsey County by 5,527 votes. Dayton won Anoka County by 2,670 votes, Itasca County by 1,129 votes and 65 counties by vote margins of less than 1,000. Kelliher won a handful of counties with less than a thousand votes as well, but most of these were won with less than one hundred votes.

Dayton’s campaign was a take on Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy, you could call it the 87 county strategy.

The Decider

Here are the final numbers:



Mark Dayton won the election by 6,972 votes. One county I didn’t mention above, St. Louis County, he won by 7,332 votes. That’s the election right there.

Losing St. Louis County by that much, coupled with losing the vast majority of counties by smaller margins, made Kelliher’s task in the metro all but impossible. I said this prior to the election:

If MAK is going to win though, she has to do better in the Twin Cities than the polls have shown. If she can’t get to parity in her base areas she doesn’t really have a chance. In order for her to win her grassroots focused campaign has to turn out the Twin Cities and St. Louis County, otherwise it’s Dayton in the general.

Kelliher did what she needed to do in the Twin Cities; it was a failure to gain any traction in St. Louis County that cost her the primary.

The X-Factor

It’s hard to say how much of this was due to Yvonne Prettner Solon’s presence as Mark Dayton’s running mate, but clearly she had an impact on the results, much more so than Kelliher’s running mate, John Gunyu did.

It’s impossible to know now what would have been, but if Kelliher had picked Tom Rukavina as her running mate would he have been able to bring home some iron range votes for her? Would it have been enough matter? These are fun questions, but in the end, the choice was made and the election is now in the books and we’ll never know what could have been.

This may have been the critical decision of the campaign when all is said and done though, Margaret Anderson Kelliher picked someone who could help her govern, Mark Dayton picked someone who could help him win the primary. Who made the right choice?

Below is a breakdown of Hennepin County into Minneapolis and not Minneapolis.



What you can see looking at this is that Kelliher dominated in the city of Minneapolis, but in the rest of Hennepin County Dayton kept it close.

Now the same breakdown of St. Louis County.



In contrast Dayton won Duluth handily and won greater St. Louis County by even more. This is where a Rukavina selection could have helped Kelliher the most since his Virginia base is in the heart of St. Louis County. I don’t mean to keep harping on this point and I honestly don’t know if a Rukavina selection gets her over the hump, but many DFLers, including myself, were a little skeptical of the Gunyu selection and the outcome of this election just amplifies that skepticism, right or wrong.

The Third Wheel

The conventional wisdom prior to the election was that Matt Entenza would hurt Kelliher more than Dayton, but there really isn’t any evidence that happened. There isn’t a lot of correlation between the candidates when you compare their number of votes per county, meaning there isn’t any evidence that Entenza affected Kelleher’s numbers more than Dayton’s. In fact the highest correlation was between Dayton and Kelliher, which is what you would expect.

As I said the correlations are not strong, but it would appear that Matt Entenza actually took votes from Mark Dayton just a little bit more than from Margaret Anderson Kelliher, it’s not to a high enough degree to be significant though. Of course, that’s just looking at the final numbers, if Entenza hadn’t been in the race the entire texture would have been different so who knows what would have happened.

Turnout

To evaluate turnout I compared this year to the average turnout in 2002 and 2006. As we all know by now DFL turnout for the primary election was much more robust than most had expected, approaching almost 15% of eligible voters when most, including SOS Mark Ritchie, thought 10% would be more likely. This was more than a 50% increase over the average turnout in 2002 and 2006.

The below table of the counties with the highest turnout increase contains two numbers, “% change” is the percentage that voter turnout increased in that county versus the average of the previous two gubernatorial primaries, “vs state” is that change minus the increase of the state as a whole. So the “vs state” column is the percentage of increase above and beyond the increase of the state as a whole.



Kelliher won Carver County, Entenza won Lyon County and Dayton won the rest. These counties do not have a lot of voters though, so let’s look at some counties that do.



Above are the six counties that had the most voters on primary day, seventh place, Olmsted County had almost 10,000 less voters than Washington County, so these are the six big counties. What you see here is that Kelliher did very well in the most populous places and the counties she won had a higher turnout than the rest of the state. But this trend was confined to the most populous counties; her campaign didn’t display any particular ability to turnout the less populous counties.

Looking at the turnout from all the counties there was little correlation between turnout and the performance of any of the candidates, so while in the most populous counties Kelliher won, she seems to have done so by turning out her base, this didn’t happen in greater Minnesota and it especially didn’t happen in St. Louis County.

Conclusion

Unlike my colleague, Two Putt Tommy, I don’t view this election as a systematic failure on the part of the DFL party. Mark Dayton is known statewide and liked by longtime DFLers, no matter who got the endorsement and what the DFL did, this was going to be a tough race to win. Add to that the fact that Dayton didn’t make any forced errors and had the money to run lots of ads made their task even more daunting and yet, they almost pulled it off.

Post Primary GPI update

With the release of the first post-primary poll of the Minnesota governor’s race I can update the now slimed down GPI, which is still using two pre-primary polls in its average.





I don’t want to read too much into a poll taken right after an election victory when Mark Dayton’s name has been in the news quite a bit, but the Rasmussen poll pretty much confirms what other pollsters have found, Mark Dayton has about a ten point lead on Tom Emmer.

Here are the toplines from the last two Rasmussen polls:

Dayton 45 (40)
Emmer 36 (36)

This falls in line with what the most recent polls have shown, Dayton at or above 40%, Emmer at or below 36% and Tom Horner right around 10%. This poll also has the lowest number of undecided voters of any poll done on the race so far, 10%.

It’s still early and there haven’t been any attack ads against Dayton yet, but they’re coming. If he can manage to ride it out and keep his numbers above 40% though, he’ll be tough to beat.

A map of Mark Dayton's victory

This is based on still unofficial now official numbers from the Secretary of State.

Primary Election Polling and Turnout

This post is about pre-election polling and turnout expectations; I’ll wait until all the numbers from the Secretary of State are official before I go into any more detail.

Primary Election Polling

Here’s the final GPI update I posted before the primary election:



And here are the final results (unofficial):



The polling for Mark Dayton and Matt Entenza was pretty accurate; the polling for Margaret Anderson Kelliher was way off. Why was this? For one thing primary elections are notoriously difficult to poll, not only because of questions about who’s going to actually show up on Election Day, but also because in an intra party election, voter preference is likely to be more fluid than in a general election, in a three way race that tendency is even more pronounced. This election also featured the added uncertainty of a new primary election date in the summer to further compound the pollster’s difficulties.

But how do you get two candidates so close and miss one so badly? What the GPI doesn’t show is the 9.33% undecided number that, if added to MAK’s total, puts her much closer to where she finished. Of course you can’t assume that 100% of undecided voters broke for MAK, in fact, my assumption before the primary was that undecided voters would break her way at about a 70-30 split with Dayton, weather that actually happened, who knows.

Clearly MAK had the superior ground game, but that appears to have been largely confined to the metro area where she was able to turn out her base. Outside of the metro area was a different story and just as he did in the 2000 primary Mark Dayton cleaned up in the non-metro counties. The difference, as many suspected, turned out to be St. Louis County, where thanks to the help of Yvonne Prettner Solon, Mark Dayton did better than probably anyone expected.

Again, these numbers are unofficial (and incomplete as St. Louis County isn’t fully reported as of this writing) but Dayton beat MAK 56-29, if she could have kept that margin respectable she could have won, but to do that badly in such a key county is the main reason she lost. Joe predicted before the election that Prettner Solon would be the x-factor and it appears he was right.

In the end I suspect the discrepancy in the polls and the results is due to two factors, undecided voters breaking for MAK (something which will be difficult to prove) and a fantastic turnout operation (something that can be looked at when we have final SOS numbers).

The other option is that she was always in contention and the polls somehow completely missed a good portion of her support. Seeing how much space I’ve given to the two theories you can probably guess which one I favor.

Turnout

Here is the expected turnout table I posted before the primary:



Unofficial turnout stands at 441,982 as of this writing, with 99.93% of precincts reporting, so we can guess that the final number will be about 442,500. This falls comfortably into the “no penalty” category of adjustments for the summer date, meaning that when using 1998 as a turnout template there was no perceivable drop off in primary participation due to the summer primary date.

The reason for this is likely twofold; a record number of absentee ballots cast in a primary election combined with the Kelliher campaign’s (and maybe to a lesser extent the other two DFL campaigns) effective turnout effort. Once we get final numbers from the SOS, which will certify results on the 17th, all of these theories can be tested to a certain degree, but until than let the speculation begin.

The party for the party is at Jax

I was liveblogging primary night from Jax Cafe, site of the DFL unity party, here is the transcript, from Minnesota Progressive Project:

[Update 12:40pm]: And I was wrong about the concession speech too, Dayton's lead just ended up being too large, in relative terms.

That's it from Jax where the drinks are too damn expensive for a DFL event. Seriously people, this needs to change next time. If I can't get a beer for a decent price why do I even want to go?



[Update 12:17pm]: As Dayton pulls past the 2,000 vote mark there is still no sign of Margaret. I doubt we'll get a concession tonight as I'm sure she'll want to wait for the re-canvassing, just in case.

[Update 12:03pm]: 92% in and Dayton now has a 1300 vote lead. I might have been premature in concluding this is heading for a recount. Dayton might win it outright.

[Update 11:52pm]: 91% in and Dayton is now winning, by only 335 votes.

[Update 11:48pm]: It's down to a 60 vote margin with 90% in. This one's going to a recount folks.

As soon as I write that Amy comes to the podium to give us an update.



[Update 11:30pm]: It's down to 425 votes with 87% in.



[Update 11:22pm]: WCCO appears to be ahead of the SOS website, they are reporting that with 86% in the margin is less than 1,300 votes.

[Update 11:10pm]: A number of the counties yet to report are counties that Dayton did well in during his 2000 primary race. These include Aitkin, Cass, Lincoln, Roseau and Swift.

Of course what I said earlier still holds, if MAK can keep it close in St. Louis County she can win. With just over 7% in though, Dayton is leading 60% to 25%.



[Update 11:01pm]: With over 65% in it's now a two point race. St. Louis County looks like it will decide the election.

[Update 10:50pm]: Turnout right now is at almost 350,000 and it looks like it could approach 400,000.

[Update 10:42pm]: 60% in and it's now MAK 41.89, Dayton 39.25 and the SOS site only shows 7% in from St. Louis County.

[Update 10:35pm]: Chris Coleman is now speaking.



[Update 10:30pm]: The race just keeps getting closer. With 52% in it's 42.33 to 38.87, only 5 points of difference now with Ramsey and Hennepin almost all reporting. It's going to be a tight one.



The Big E has left the building but below is a picture of him and me hard at work. The only thing missing is a beer.



[Update 10:20pm]: A few elections that can be called; Barb Goodwin will be the nominee in SD50. Paul "not the gay one" Gazelka will likely win in SD12, which could open up that seat for a DFL takeover. In SD67 John Harrington will be the nominee. In 15B Zachary Dorholt will get the opportunity to take on King Banaian and in 65A Rena Moran is the winner.

[Update 10:03pm]: John Gunyu is speaking right now after a blackout/internet issue caused a slight delay and bit of nervousness.



[Update 9:38pm]: With almost 30% in reporting in SD50 Barb Goodwin is winning 70-30 over Satveer Chaudhary.



[Update 9:33pm]: Al is speaking. He sure knows how to whip up a crowd.



[Update 9:32pm]: Another update; Entenza concedes.

[Update 9:21pm]: Amy is revving up the crowd right now. You can feel the excitement building with every minute that goes by.

"It's happening." Someone shoouts.




[Update 9:10pm]: With over 92% of precincts reporting it looks like John Harrington is going to win in SD67.

[Update 8:50pm]: Tony Sertich is speaking right now. He gave us the update we were all waiting for, Twins 8, White Sox 3.

[Update 8:35pm]: The latest update from the SOS website shows Hennipen county 81% in and Kelliher with 48% and Dayton with under 35%. These are good numbers for her.

[Update 8:30pm]: The place is buzzing now with red shirts everywhere. People are excited about seeing Margaret in the lead, they have the Secretary of State's website up on a projection screen for everyone to see the results coming in.

The early lead for Kelliher we're seeing is coming in from Ramsey and Wright counties primarily. She needs to keep that up to pull this one out.

[Update 8:00pm Polls are Closed!]: The room is filling up and you can feel the anxiety in the room, people with the campaign are nervous but optimistic.


[7:15pm]: I just got to Jax and plugged into the intertubes. Some of the networks are here, MPR and some other bloggers, but no one else yet.

Amy, Al and Keith are all supposed to show up, along with Margaret of course. I'll be updating this thread with all the latest news from here as things develop.



Robin (she's taking all the pictures)



Tony (I'm typing all the words)