Richard Nixon at 100

(AP Photo)

 

My apologies to our readers for not posting anything in a while. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spending between 90 and 95% of my waking hours either studying for the bar exam or searching for a full-time job in the Obama economy. sportsfan is recovering from watching his beloved Fighting Irish get their asses handed to them in the BCS Championship, and the rest of our contributors have various excuses (some very compelling) for not wasting their time on blogging.

 

Still, I couldn't let such a significant occasion pass without acknowledging the man who would have been 100 years old today.

 

Perhaps no U.S. president has had a more mixed record than Richard Milhous Nixon. His achievements included re-opening relations with China, France and Egypt, ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam (and the draft), and lowering the federal voting age to 18. But then there were the scandals. Oh, the scandals.

 

Nixon fit the classic definition of a Greek tragic hero: a great man with a tragic character flaw that brought about his downfall. In his case, it was paranoia. That paranoia drove him to plant listening devices around the White House during his presidency and five members of his re-election campaign to break into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex on an apparently ham-handed investigatory mission. What the White House originally dismissed as a "third-rate burglary" ultimately led to an unprecedented (and, to date, unrepeated) event: our president's term cut short, not by death, but by his own resignation.

The Watergate scandal alone would have been enough to indelibly tarnish Nixon's legacy, but his administration also suffered the taint of corruption from the activities of his vice president, Spiro Agnew, who turned out to have been on the take since his days as Baltimore County Executive. in October of 1973, less than a year prior to Nixon's departure, Agnew pled nolo contendere (no contest) to a charge of federal income tax evasion and resigned his office.

Even as scandal brought down his second-in-command and other scandals threatened to prematurely end his presidency, Nixon never let up in his efforts to further American interests abroad. After making good on his promise to withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam, he met repeatedly with then-Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev, their last meeting taking place while former White House counsel and unabashed weasel John Dean was spinning tales as fast as he could to the Watergate Committee in a desperate attempt to save his own skin. Negotiations between the two leaders (known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT) led to the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972.

Per Nixon's directive, the U.S. provided vital support to Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He visited Cairo in June of 1974 and agreed to provide Egypt with nuclear technology. Not long after that, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment related to the Watergate cover-up. Before the House of Representatives could vote to impeach him, Nixon released transcripts of tape recordings that implicated him in the cover-up and announced his resignation.

Even after leaving office, he remained an authoritative voice on international affairs. President Clinton even reportedly sought his advice, and the New York Times (which seemed to never have a kind word for Nixon when he was alive) acknowledged, "The former President was always strongest writing about foreign policy." He continued to visit foreign countries and meet with world leaders, and he wrote prolifically. (His memoir RN was okay, but if you really want to get a handle on the man's world view and/or mental processes, then Six Crises and The Real War are both worth a read, and I've read good things about Beyond Peace.)

I can remember learning of his death in 1994. I was in first grade; as I left school, I stood under the flagpole gazing at Old Glory. It's my earliest memory of seeing a flag flown at half-mast.

One day not long after that, while rooting through my parents’ closet looking for a box of monies (you know, like every kid does at one point or another), I found a shoebox full of political memorabilia. My father and grandmother had collected it over the years. There were buttons from every presidential campaign from 1900 to 1972, many of them bearing Nixon’s name. It turns out the '68 campaign was the first one my father had been involved in. He told me how he and his best friend David would stand out in front of my grandmother’s house, near the road, with a big NIXON sign, and passing motorists would honk or smile or shout at them (Every once in a while, someone would stick his head out the window and shout, “Vote for George!”—i.e., George Wallace, the Alabama governor and defender of segregation who ran for president in '68 on a states’ rights platform.) Nixon, of course, won the 1968 election but narrowly lost Texas. We still have the issue of the Star-Telegram from the morning after Election Day with the headline “NIXON IS ELECTED PRESIDENT.”

Dad wasn't the only active Nixon supporter in my lineage. Years before my folks ever met, my other grandmother served as precinct chair for Nixon's re-election campaign in 1972. Like many Nixon supporters, she was bemused by the scandals that unfolded so soon after an incredible victory she and thousands of others had worked fervently to ensure.

"All I got out of it was a red face and a letter from John Wayne," she later told me. (The Duke had supported Nixon in all three of his presidential bids and apparently sent letters to those who worked on the campaign, thanking them for their work.)

As a child, I idolized Nixon. Not because of my family, but because of what I learned about the man through my own research. Certainly, Nixon did a lot of things to warrant admiration, even by those who never knew him personally. His ascendancy to the vice-presidency was one of the fastest in U.S. history; after returning home from World War II, during which he had served in the Navy, Nixon was elected to Congress in 1946. While his role in the Alger Hiss investigation arguably stood out as the most salient highlight of his time in the House of Representatives, he also helped write the Taft-Hartley Act (a.k.a. The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947), which passed over President Truman's veto. During his second term in the House, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. His support for civil rights and opposition to price controls, illegal immigration and public power, along with his erudite speeches warning of the threat of "global Communism" endeared him to many conservatives, and in 1952, the Republican National Convention nominated the 39-year-old freshman senator to run for vice president on the ticket with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower and Nixon won in a landslide--twice--even carrying several states in the "solid South" (including Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Virginia). 

 

As vice president, Nixon honed his already keen foreign policy credentials, touring dozens of countries and chairing National Security Council meetings in the president's absence. On a trip to Moscow in 1959, he challenged Khrushchev during their infamous "kitchen debate," bluntly telling the Communist leader, "You don't know everything." 

 

Nixon held the distinction of losing the closest presidential election in U.S. history and winning a presidential election by the biggest landslide in U.S. history. His successful 1968 campaign, waged eight years after a devastatingly close loss to JFK and six years after losing his bid for governor of California, remains one of the great political comebacks of all time. He's the only person to be twice elected vice president and twice elected president of the United States.

My appreciation of his work wasn't ideological, either. Domestically, Nixon could not be called a conservative, not in any sense of the word. He expanded the size of the federal government, signing into law legislation that created, inter alia, the EPA, EEOC, OSHA, CBO and FHLMC (better known as "Freddie Mac"). As part of his "New Federalism" agenda, he proposed a new welfare program that would have guaranteed a minimum payment to all needy American households, regardless of work ethic. He also put in place wage and price controls and took the U.S. off the gold standard. He cut some taxes but raised others, including the capital-gains rate. His administration commenced affirmative action, though arguably at a time when institutional racism was far more widespread in the U.S. than it is today. The federal revenue-sharing program, under which the federal government shares its tax revnues with local governments, also began under Nixon, so every time you see/hear some worthless politician wailing about how spending cuts will mean fewer teachers/police officers/firemen, they're probably lying, but their mendacity is facilitated by one of President Nixon's policies.

His policy mistakes aside, Nixon was a brilliant and hardworking man who made some bad choices. Nothing he is known to have done, however, is/was bad enough to justify ignoring all of his good deeds in damnatio memoriae. Count me as a fan who believes his accomplishments were far greater than his transgressions.

To some, Nixon will always be a villain, but he was certainly a hell of a lot better president than the one we have now.

Hang in there, Tony.

Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, during a Supreme Court
group portrait in Washington on October 8, 2010. (Associated Press)

Of all the concerns about what four more years of President Obama will mean for the United States, perhaps the single most disturbing prospect is an opportunity to shift the balance of the Supreme Court.

Despite this president's consternation, the judiciary is a coequal branch of government, and it has long provided a crucial check on overreach by the other two branches, especially the current executive. Among the current Court's unanimous rebukes of the Obama administration's positions are its decisions in:

• United States v. Jones, where it held, contrary to the administration's argument, that the attachment of a GPS (Global–Positioning–System) tracking device to a suspected drug dealter's vehicle, and the use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements on public streets, was a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment;
• Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where it held, contrary to the administration's argument, that the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment barred employment discrimination suits brought on behalf of ministers against their churches; and 
• Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States, where it held, contrary to the administration's argument, that government-induced flooding that is temporary in duration gains no automatic exemption from Takings Clause inspection. 

The administration has enjoyed some victories before the high court, to be sure, most notably in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, where a five-justice majority upheld the constitutionality of the president's signature health care reform law, with one exception: seven of the nine justices agreed that the federal government couldn't threaten States with the loss of theirexisting Medicaid funding if they decline to comply with the law's Medicaid expansion. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who many expected to be the "swing" vote that would decide the case, instead sided with Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito in a scathing dissent from the core ruling.

The cases in which Justice Kennedy finds himself in the minority are becoming more and more infrequent. Last term, he voted in the majority 93% of the time, more often than any other justice. Of the 42 cases in which the justices split, Kennedy voted with the majority in all but five--again, more often than any other justice.

Because of his pivotal role in so many decisions, the thought of a Democratic president--especially one as hyper-partisan as Obama--appointing Kennedy's succesor is troubling to say the least. Judicial appointments are arguably one of the president's most significant powers; he can stock another branch of government with whomever he wants, restrained only by the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate. President Obama has already made two Supreme Court appointments, but Justices Sotomayor and Kagan replaced like-minded liberals, so there was no significant change in the ideological composition of the Court. In this respect, their appointments weren't a loss for conservatives so much as a missed opportunity. The same could be said if Obama gets to appoint a successor to Justice Ginsburg or Justice Breyer.

If one of the Court's more conservative members should die or retire, however, then this president will have an opportunity to shift the ideological balance of the high court, possibly for decades to come. There's little danger of Chief Justice Roberts or Justices Alito and Thomas stepping down anytime soon, and Antonin Scalia is unlikely to leave with a Democrat in the White House. That leaves Justice Anthony Kennedy, notorious for playing his cards close to the vest.

Although appointed by President Reagan, Kennedy has not been a reliably conservative vote on the Supreme Court. He disappointed the Right on cases involving eminent domain, states' rights, the death penalty and the right of enemy combatants to petition for a writ of habeas corpus. His voting record more closely aligns him with William H. Rehnquist than any of his other erstwhile colleagues. His opinions reflect a comprehensive approach to interpreting the Constitution, going so far as to draw on international law and recent changes in American law and traditions. 

Ideologically, Kennedy is probably best described as a moderate conservative. Some have slapped him with the "libertarian" label. Here's something by David Boaz, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute:

Justice Kennedy seems to be very concerned with liberty. He often sides with conservatives on economic issues (which are actually never mentioned by Time) and campaign speech, and with liberals on civil liberties, gay rights, and school prayer. Pretty inconsistent, huh?

Or then again, maybe Justice Kennedy has a basically libertarian view of the world and the Constitution. The word “libertarian” never appears in the article. Perhaps it should.

And it’s not like the idea of Justice Kennedy’s libertarianism is a deep, dark secret. The writers might have consulted Helen Knowles’s book The Tie Goes to Freedom: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on Liberty. Or Frank Colucci’s book Justice Kennedy’s Jurisprudence: The Full and Necessary Meaning of Liberty. Or Randy Barnett’s Cato Supreme Court Review article on the Texas case, “Justice Kennedy’s Libertarian Revolution.”

I’m not saying that Justice Kennedy is a down-the-line, Nozick-reading, Cato Institute libertarian. He did join the Court’s statist majority in the medical marijuana case Raich v. Gonzales. And he infuriated libertarians by joining the majority in striking down state term limits and upholding state eminent domain. But the books and article cited above, and the Institute for Justice’s 1997 rating of Supreme Court justices, do point to a strong libertarian streak in Kennedy’s jurisprudence.

Kennedy's background certainly doesn't contradict this assessment. As a lawyer in California, he worked closely with then-Governor Ronald Reagan, including on Proposition 1, a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have limited state taxing and spending powers. (Voters rejected it in 1973.) It was Reagan who recommended to then-President Ford that he appoint Kennedy to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 

However he might be categorized, Kennedy has provided critical votes in decisions that struck down government overreach. Had someone in the mold of Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan been on the Court in his stead, dozens of cases likely would have been decided differently. Our jurisprudence on many constitutional issues, involving everything from civil liberties to the commerce clause to substantive due process, would be very different.

It's possible that Kennedy adamantly wants a Republican president to choose his successor and has no desire to give up his seat while Obama is president. It's also possible that he might do the Rehnquist thing and stay on until he's ten toes up. Whatever the case, here’s hoping he sticks it out for at least four more years.

A Disturbing New Twist on the Bradley Effect

The defeat of Rep. Allen West (R., Fla.) means that, come January, the United States Congress will have just one black Republican member, Rep. Tim Scott of South Carolina. West's loss came as a surprise to a number of people, especially considering that every public poll of his race had shown the freshman congressman leading his Democratic opponent, Patrick Murphy. Yet, on Tuesday morning, it was West who conceded to Murphy after a two-week recount confirmed that the incumbent had fallen more than 2,000 votes short of winning a second term.

The race in West’s congressional district wasn't the only one where the outcome defied multiple polls: In Utah's newly-created 4th District, Rep. Jim Matheson, the lone Democrat in the Beehive State's congressional delegation, eked out a victory over Saratoga Springs Mayor Mia Love (R). Less than a week before Election Day, a Mason-Dixon poll showed the six-term incumbent trailing Love by an eye-popping twelve percentage points. About a month earlier, the Deseret News/KSL poll pegged Love's lead at six points, 49% to 43%, but that was a huge shift from their previous poll of the race, conducted in June, which had Matheson up by a healthy fifteen-point margin, 53% to 38%. Despite this apparent momentum toward Love and a huge voter turnout in a state that went for Mitt Romney by a wider margin than any other, Matheson managed to win with 49% of the vote to 48% for his Republican challenger.

The surprising losses of these two prominent black candidates--and the poll numbers that turned out to be so wrong--bring to mind the so-called "Bradley Effect," a phenomenon in which polls of races with one African-American candidate tend to overestimate his/her support or underestimate the support for his/her opponent, or both. The term arose out of another surprising election result, in the 1982 race for governor of California. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley (D) was poised to become the Golden State's first African-American governor. He went into Election Day with a healthy lead over his Republican opponent, then-Attorney General George Deukmejian, in all the polls. Even the exit poll results indicated a big Democratic win. Much to the Bradley campaign's chagrin, however, Deukmejian triumphed, winning the election by less than 100,000 votes out of nearly 8 million cast.

The following year, in the race for mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington, an African-American congressman from Illinois's 1st congressional district, defeated his caucasian opponent, former State Rep. Bernard Epton (R), by about 47,500 votes (less than four percentage points). Multiple polls conducted in the run-up to Election Day indicated it would be a rout for Washington. Three separate polls taken in the final weeks of the campaign showed Washington with a fourteen-point lead.

The obvious discrepancies between the pre-election polling and the actual results of these two high-profile races seemed to cry out for an explanation. Arguably, racial tensions between blacks and whites were stronger, or at least more overt, 30 years ago than they are today, so naturally race was floated as a possible factor in Bradley's loss and Washington's unexpectedly narrow win. (Veteran California pollster Mervin Field was quoted two days after the 1982 election as saying that "race was a factor in the Bradley loss.") While it was clear that these elections had turned out much differently than the polls had foretold, the notion that races between a black candidate and a white candidate presented a special problem for pollsters did not gain widespread acceptance until after a couple of elections with history-making black candidates at the end of the decade.

In 1989, a U.S. Attorney named Rudy Giuliani made his first run for mayor of New York City. Just before the election, two different polls showed him trailing his African-American opponent, Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, by double digits: Dinkins led Giuliani by fourteen points in the ABC/New York Daily News tracking survey of the race, fifteen points according to Gallup, and by eighteen points in a poll conducted by the New York Observer. Even the exit polls overestimated Dinkins's eventual two-point margin of victory.

The more infamous race that year took place in Virginia. I'll let Scott Keeter and Nilanthi Samaranayake of the Pew Research Center explain:

Virginia Democrat and African American Douglas Wilder edged white Republican Marshall Coleman by less than one percentage point to become the nation's first elected black governor. But two of three polls conducted just days before the election showed Wilder leading by double-digits; a third poll had him 4 points ahead.

The exit poll results from the Virginia governor's race were particularly jarring; according to Pew, "an exit poll conducted on Election Day showed Wilder winning by 10 points, while accurately tallying the vote in the other two statewide races." This indicated that some voters must not have been honest with poll-takers. Keeter and Samaranayake noted that, unlike other exit polls that used an anonymous written ballot to collect voters' responses, "this one had interviewers asking voters face-to-face how they voted, a situation that might increase the pressure to provide a socially desirable response."

It didn't take long for major media outfits to trumpet explanations for why the polls in these two particular elections were so far off. Two days after Election Day, the New York Times ran an article about the "broad disparities" between the polls and election results in New York and Virginia: 

In Virginia, Mason-Dixon Opinion Research Inc. acknowledged making a fundamental error in the way it conducted its Election Day polling. Its workers stopped voters outside polling places and asked them face to face how they had voted, rather than following the more widely accepted practice of having them fill out ''secret ballots'' and drop them in a box. All the New York polls used this method.

Brad Coker, Mason-Dixon's president, said that in hindsight he thought some voters might have been reluctant to admit to a poll taker that they had not voted for the black candidate, L. Douglas Wilder. The organization's Election Day polls gave a 10-point lead to Mr. Wilder, the Democrat, and at least three television stations reported the figures right after the polls closed and declared Mr. Wilder the winner. Today it appears that Mr. Wilder did defeat J. Marshall Coleman, the Republican, but by only one quarter of a percentage point.

''I'm a big supporter of pre-election polls and exit polls,'' said Peter D. Hart, a leading Democratic poll taker here, ''but only for figuring out the dynamics of an election and not who is going to win. What bothers me about yesterday is that the exit polls are obscuring the news, setting up incorrect expectations and leaving everyone talking about 'Oops, what happened?' rather than the historic story of the elections of Wilder and Dinkins.''

Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato was even more blatant in his analysis. ''Whites tell pollsters ahead of time that they are voting for the black candidate,'' he said, ''and then they go into the voting booth and can't quite pull down that lever.'' And, a Richmond Times-Dispatch article that ran the same day quoted Coker as saying, "Virginians were put on the spot: If we don't vote for Wilder, [then] we're going to be perceived of as racist." Whatever the reason was, the gap between poll results and election results in races between a black candidate and a white candidate was becoming a recurring problem.

For Wilder, it wasn't the first time his poll numbers had foretold a different election result. In 1985, he was elected lieutenant governor by three precentage points, but pre-election polls had pegged his lead at anywhere from nine to 22 points. The same polls were much more accurate with regard to the governor's race that year. In part because Wilder's experiences provided stronger evidence (and more of it) that voters lied to pollsters about voting for the black candidate than did Tom Bradley's 1982 campaign, some individuals prefer the term "Wilder Effect" to "Bradley Effect". 

Whatever you call it, the concept that the effect was attributable to white voters who were reluctant to tell poll takers they were not voting for a black candidate gained steam following the '89 elections. In 1993, ahead of Mayor Dinkins's rematch wth Giuliani, the New York Times reported on a study by Larry Hugick, the director of political and media surveys at Princeton Survey Research Associates, who concluded that, in general elections that pitted a black Democrat against a white Republican, polls consistently overestimated the black candidate's strength. Said the Times:

[Mr. Hugick] concluded that white Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent voters were more likely than blacks to be undecided, torn between their allegiance to political party and to race. These ambivalent voters told interviewers conducting polls that they were undecided, but overwhelmingly supported the white candidate in the voting booth.

Mr. Hugick speculated that some of these voters were genuinely undecided, while others were reluctant to admit they were voting against a black Democrat, perhaps worried they would be perceived as racially biased.

"To some extent, these voters are torn between party and doubts about the ability of black candidates to do a good job," he said. "It's racial stereotyping. It's a way race affects us in this country. We've understood racial intolerance is highly unacceptable, but that doesn't mean that people have internalized tolerance."

After Giuliani defeated Dinkins in another close race, Hugick sent out a memo to his clients and friends, detailing his findings and asserting that the 1993 New York mayoral election "again demonstrated that late polls in biracial general elections overstate the black candidate's vote-getting ability." Following that election, however, the Wilder/Bradley effect appeared to be waning. African-American candidates who waged multiple campaigns provided a good "control" group with which to examine whether the Bradley/Wilder effect still occurred. Polls showed Mayor Dinkins's 1993 rematch with Giuliani, for example, to be a real dead heat. Giuliani, of course, won the race by a margin comparable to Dinkins's narrow 1989 victory.

In 1990, former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, an African-American Democrat, challenged longtime Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC). Two of three independent polls conducted just before the election showed Gantt leading Helms, but none showed the controversial  senator with a lead of six percentage points, his eventual margin of victory. Six years later, when Helms again fended off a challenge from Gantt, the polls were much more accurate; the incumbent's 53%-46% win was consistent with polling that gave him a modest lead.

Similarly, when Carol Moseley Braun became the first (and, to date, only) African-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, the election results were much closer than polls had suggested. Braun defeated Republican Richard Williamson by a ten-point margin, but polls taken just days before the election showed her with a lead ranging from 17 to 20 points. (Notably, all of these polls pegged Braun's level of support at less than the 53% of the vote she ultimately received, so it's certainly possible that everyone who claimed to be voting for Braun did actually vote for her, but if these polls were accurate, then it would mean that Williamson won nearly all of the late deciders.) Six years later, Braun lost her bid for re-election by less than 100,000 votes, or three percentage points, to Peter Fitzgerald, a wealthy state senator from the Chicago suburbs. It could have been a lot worse; pre-election polls gave Fitzgerald a lead of three to ten points. A strong turnout among Illinois's black voters may have boosted Braun.
 
The cases of Gantt and Braun suggest that, to the extent that polls significantly overstate a black candidate's support and/or undertell his/her white opponent's strength in the black candidate's first run for statewide office, this phenomenon does not repeat itself when the same black politician runs again for the same office. Tom Bradley himself got creamed by Deukmejian in their 1986 rematch, but at least the mayor wasn't misled by poll numbers that showed him to be ahead. Prior to the election, all public polls had Bradley trailing the incumbent by double digits. Though Deukmejian won re-election by a larger margin than the polls indicated he would, none greatly overtold Bradley's level of support.
 
The paucity of competitive general-election match-ups between a white candidate and a black candidate in 2000, 2002 and 2004 made it difficult to gauge whether the Bradley effect was still waning. There was the race for governor of  New York in 2002, in which incumbent Gov. George E. Pataki (R) crushed his opponents to win a third term. Pataki won 48%, finishing well ahead of the state's African-American Comptroller, H. Carl McCall (D), who took 32%, and a slew of other candidates who weren't black. Pataki had led McCall by eleven points in a survey taken in late September. 

In 2004, two members of the U.S. House of Representatives from the Atlanta area squared off against each other for the Senate seat being vacated by Georgia Democrat Zell Miller. Rep. Johnny Isakson, a white Republican, defeated Rep. Denise Majette, an African-American Democrat, winning 58% of the vote to Majette's 40%. The weekend before the election, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the results of a poll that had Isakson leading Majette by thirteen points, 49% to 36%. 
  
Then came 2008. There wasn't a single black candidate, Republican or Democrat, in a highly competitive gubernatorial or senatorial contest that year, but the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama revived talk about the Bradley/Wilder effect. Other than Obama's surprise loss to then-Sen. Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, however, there were no conspicuous gaps between Obama's poll numbers and share of the vote he actually received in the 2008 Democratic primaries. In the general election, Obama experienced a fate similar to that of Washington, Wilder and Dinkins: he won, but some polls overtold hs eventual margin of victory. A lot of polls underestimated voter support for the Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, both nationally and at the state level, but very few overestimated Obama's support. This could simply have meant that late deciders broke for McCain. Whether that's true or not, there was not a single battleground state in which all the polls were way off. Obama did not experience the Wilder effect in November.

Even before the 2008 election, there was a growing consensus among analysts who examined the data that the Wilder effect was a thing of the past. Daniel J. Hopkins, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, conducted the most extensive study and analysis I've seen of the phenomenon and concluded that "there was indeed a Wilder effect" in elections during the 1980s and early 1990s but that "this effect subsequently disappeared."

To what, then, should we attribute the salient discrepancy between the poll and election results in Utah and Florida this year? Regardless of the cause(s), this much is clear: The Wilder Effect still exists, but with a twist; the effect seems to only manifest itself in races between a black Republican and a white Democrat.

I first noticed this correlation between the presence/absence of a Bradley/Wilder effect and the political affiliations of the candidates in 2006. That year saw more competitive races for statewide office between a black candidate and a white candidate than any other election cycle I can remember. The U.S. Senate races in Tennessee and Maryland provided data for a good comparative analysis. Both featured a charismatic, energetic black politician vying against an older, duller white politician for an open U.S. Senate seat. (In Mississippi, State Rep. Erik R. Fleming, a black Democrat, challenged Sen. Trent Lott, a white Republican, for his Senate seat, but that race was not considered competitive, and Lott won re-election by a decisive margin.) 

In Tennessee, Democrats nominated Harold Ford, Jr., a five-term congressman from Memphis, to run for the seat of then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R), who was retiring. Ford and his Republican opponent, former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, traded the lead in the polls back and forth until October, when Corker appeared to be pulling away. Heading into Election Day, independent polls put Corker's lead at anywhere from three to twelve points. The only public polls that showed Ford leading were conducted by partisan Democratic pollsters. Corker did end up winning, but only by about 50,000 votes (less than three percentage points). There had been no Wilder effect in the Tennessee Senate race.

In Maryland, it was a different story. Perhaps no U.S. Senate candidate in 2006 garnered as much enthusiasm as Michael Steele. Four years after becoming Maryland's first African-American lieutenant governor, Steele appeared to be on the verge of beating the odds to win a U.S. Senate seat in a state where 55% of voters were registered Democrats. He had fought the Democratic candidate, ten-term Rep. Ben Cardin, to a draw in the polls. There was even talk of a "Reverse Wilder Effect" in the race.

“With Steele sporting a 7-point lead among white voters,” pondered RealClearPolitics’s John McIntyre just days before the election, “what happens to Cardin's lead if Steele's 12% of the black vote goes to 20% or 25%?” We found out: Steele managed to take 25% of the black vote, according to exit polls, but lost to Cardin by a 54%-44% margin.  

Having followed the 2004 elections as closely as I did, I knew how pollsters could sometimes get it wrong (This was before I looked into the history of the "Bradley Effect" and discovered just how wrong.), but the results of the Maryland Senate race had left a particularly bad taste in my mouth because (1) I had gotten my hopes up, based on what appeared to be momentum towards Steele in the final weeks of the campaign, and (2) I couldn't find another comparably high-profile race that cycle in which so many polls had been so far off.

I should mention that, in the three 2006 gubernatorial contests between a black candidate and a white candidate, there was no such disparity between the polls and the outcome. In Ohio, Republican Ken Blackwell, an African-American who had served as mayor of Cincinnati, state Treasurer and Ohio Secretary of State, lost in a rout to Ted Strickland, a white Democratic congressman from Lucasville. Strickland's 900,000-vote margin of victory accorded with polls that put him ahead of Blackwell by about 20 points. Next door, in Pennsylvania, Gov. Ed Rendell (D) held off a challenge from businessman and former Pittsburgh Steelers Wide Receiver Lynn Swann (R) to win a second term. Swann actually outperformed his standing in most polls, winning 40% of the vote to Rendell's 60%.

In Massachusetts, Deval Patrick (D) was elected the Bay State's first black governor by a 56%-35% margin. Some polls had shown him leading his opponent, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey (R) by more, but every poll of the race had understated Healey's support. Thus, much like the 2008 presidential election, it appears that most undecided voters in the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania gubernatorial races ended up supporting the Republican. Race made no difference.

In light of this data, I was inclined to write off Steele's discouraging loss as a fluke. Then, in 2010, I was again bemused by the results of an election that did not comport with the polling. This time, it was in Colorado. Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D), an aging, white pol from Golden, faced a tough challenge from Aurora City Councilman Ryan Frazier (R), an ebullient young African-American. Things seemed to be going Frazier's way: the left leaning Denver Post endorsed him, and a desperate-looking Perlmutter actually smacked him at a debate in October. Even more encouraging, the only public poll of the race showed Frazier leading Perlmutter, 40%-39%. While a one-point lead is no cause for ecstasy, an incumbent polling at 39% is generally not considered to be in good shape. So you can imagine how disappointed I was to learn that Perlmutter won re-election. It wasn't even close; the incumbent won by nearly 25,000 votes, taking 53% of the vote to Frazier's 42%. Ouch.

Now, the losses of Love and West, belied by multiple polls, add to this pattern of black Republicans who lost elections despite poll results that showed them tied or leading their white Democratic opponents. What could explain this 21st-century version of the Wilder Effect? Are large numbers of white voters reluctant to unequivocally declare their support for a black candidate's opponent? If so, then why did Ford, Blackwell, Swann, Patrick and Obama not experience the Wilder effect? It's certainly possible that the polls in Utah and Florida, like many other polls this cycle, underestimated Democratic turnout and/or overestimated Republican turnout, but then what accounts for the unexpectedly lopsided defeats of Frazier and Steele? I will not endeavor to answer these questions in this post; my only point is that the Bradley/Wilder effect still occurs but (for whatever reason) only in races between a white Democrat and a black Republican. (Take note, Herman Cain.)

Phyllis Diller, R.I.P.

Photo from a discarded box I found in the alley.

This afternoon, I turned on the television, lamenting the sudden case of laryngitis that killed my plans to make a YouTube video today, and was soon hit with a flurry of developments worth blogging about. I could analyze what transpired at today's surprise press conference, President Obama's first at the White House since this Spring, or I could weigh in on the manufactured controversy surrounding Rep. Todd Akin's remarks about "legitimate rape" victims, or I could discuss Condoleezza Rice's historic admission to the Augusta National Golf Club. What ultimately prompted me to cut my wallowing in self-pity short, however, was the sad news that Phyllis Diller had passed away.

Phyllis rose to fame in the 1950s and '60s as a female stand-up comic (a rarity at the time) and soon landed her own TV series. Though The Phyllis Diller Show went off the air after only one season, its star continued to find work and introduce herself to younger generations. I personally got to know her watching old episodes of Matchgame on the Game Show Network and later through her appearances on such Disney Channel series as Boy Meets World and Even Stevens. Many of my contemporaries--and younger Americans--may not recognize the name Phyllis Diller but are probably familiar with her distinctive, cackling voice; in the past fifteen years, the aging comedienne supplied the voices of characters on Animaniacs, King of the Hill, The Wild Thornberrys, Hey Arnold!, The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, The Powerpuff Girls, Robot Chicken and Family Guy, recording her last voice over on the cusp of her 90th birthday.

Diller's influence can be seen even among today's comedians. Prior to breaking out in her own right, Joan Rivers wrote for Phyllis. She was a guest on the first episode of The Chelsea Handler Show, during which the title character recognized her as "the first female comedian." An ebullient and enduring gift to humanity, Diller died in her sleep at her home in Los Angeles. R.I.P.

Are We Now the World's California?

I'm returning to Waco this week. Next Monday marks the beginning of the fall quarter at Baylor Law School, and needless to say, I won't be blogging nearly as much after then. Right now, I'm visiting my folks in Arlington, and later this week, I'll head back to my apartment.

On Sunday, I was watching 60 Minutes with my parents. Leslie Stahl was doing this segment on American corporations moving their headquarters overseas to avoid paying high U.S. taxes. While we were preparing supper, my Mom asked, rather disdainfully, "Why would anybody want to run a business in the United States?" My immediate answer was, "Good quality of life, I guess." That's when it hit me: the U.S. has become the California of the world.

It's no secret that California has one of the worst business climates in America. Its tax burden is also now on par with infamously high-taxing New York and New Jersey, and it has a lower bond rating than any other state. The Golden State has long believed that it can maintain this hostile atmosphere without discouraging people from living there because of what are known as "exploitable amentity asymmetries," which basically means that people will pay more to live in such a nice place. When you're in close proximity to some of the greatest natural splendor this country has to offer (not to mention the cultural meccas of San Francisco and Los Angeles), shouldn't there be some sort of premium on the cost of living?

For decades, the overwhelming answer was "yes." Ever since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, California has been somewhat of an American "promised land," the last, best hope down-on-their-luck citizens have of finding the American dream. (You could go back even farther to the Comstock Lode and ensuing Gold Rush of the 19th Century.) Recently, though, it's become increasingly apparent that California's zenith may be behind her. I just mentioned its current financial woes, and population trends are reflecting it. For the first time since the 1920s, the Great Bear failed to gain a single congressional district following the U.S. Census, a result of slowing population growth.

Back to the analogy: I remember when Gov. Rick Perry appeared on The Daily Show last year. Eventually, the discussion came around to Texas's relatively pro-business climate and why businesses (and jobs) were migrating from the Midwest and Northeast to the Sun Belt. When Perry rattled off statistics indicating just how big the jobs boom has been in Texas over the past decade, Jon asked hmi, "Why do you think that is?" Perry mentioned our low taxes, "fair and predictable" regulatory climate, "a legal system that's fair and doesn't allow for over-suing," and "accountable" school system that produces skilled workers. This exchange followed:

STEWART: Couldn't you make the same argument, though, in terms of globalization, for companies going to India and China? If you are the pressure-valve release for companies in California, [then] who's t'say, would you criticize Texas companies --

[CROSSTALK]

PERRY: Seriously, you wanna live in India, or you wanna live in Texas?

STEWART: Are you -- For real?

[LAUGHTER/APPLAUSE]

It's an excellent point. The U.S. may not have the most favorable business climate, but we have a better quality of life than any other country. That has been our trump card against the growing number of business-friendly states on the global stage. Years ago, John Stossel did a 20/20 episode in which he visited India and Singapore and compared the ease/difficulty of opening a business in each country. In the latter, it took a few hours, much less than it would in the U.S. (and a lot less than in India). He was even able to set up a booth or something in a mall before the end of the day. Singapore also has no capital-gains tax, but on the other hand, you won't get caned for chewing gum in the United States (not by the government, anyway; I can't speak for all parents and boarding schools).

In this age of globalization, it's important for policymakers in D.C. to remain constantly aware that we are competing with countries all over the world, not just for investment, but for human capital as well. A tax code that, as Leslie Stahl put it, "all but forces companies to keep their money out of the country indefinitely" needs to be reformed. This Congress should act on pending free trade agreements that the past two Congresses have pushed aside. We'll lose out on a small amount of revenue that would have come from tariffs, but it will pale in comparison to the capital that will flow into this country when we expand the market for U.S. goods. It may be too late to save California, but the entire U.S. does not have to suffer the same fate.