7th November 2012, 6:09 PM
Well, it looks like the Maine House did indeed go Dem. Pretty awesome, it was looking like it might not for a while. However, the US House is indeed firmly in Republican control. The Democrats seem to have probably gained a total of about 8 seats (all races are not decided yet), but they needed to gain 25 to win the House. Yeah, see the power of gerrymandering! We really need to fix that someday...
As for Nate Silver, yeah, his Presidential prediction was fantastic, right on the money. The polling was good, and the model worked. All of those ridiculous pundits bashing him for speaking about statistical facts instead of their preferred instinct-based decisions, or whatever, look pretty bad now. That's good to see -- I was expecting 538's model to hold up again, and it did. However, he did miss two of the Senate races, one badly: he said that Tester (MT) had only a 35% chance of winning re-election, and he did win, and worse he gave Heitkamp (ND) under 9% odds of actually winning that seat, but she won by a small margin. I thought Tester would win but Heitkamp would lose (though I'd have put her odds much higher than 9%, personally!), but I think he under-estimated them. Of course sometimes percent-based predictions will go wrong, but I have to think that something was a little off there, particularly for North Dakota... over-estimated Romney's coattails, or something?
Finally, Puerto Rico. Yeah, that one was very, very interesting. I was expecting another indeterminate vote, like the past ones all were, but this one was much closer to being a legitimate endorsement of statehood than they've ever done before. It was a somewhat complicated two-part question, where Q1 asked whether they wanted the current status (territory) or to change status. Change status won, 53-47. The second question asked what alternate status was desired; note that this wasn't "only if you said you want to change status", all were supposed to answer both questions. Q2 ended up with about 800,000 votes for statehood, about 436,000 for a "freely associated state", whatever exactly that would be, 50-something thousand for independence, and 400,000 left that question blank (Q1 had very few blanks, so that was a clear "don't want to change status" answer). So statehood isn't actually over 50% on its own, based on this, but it did poll much better than ever before, and it won the plurality at least, with nearly double the number of votes of either other option -- quite an accomplishment.
So yeah, with that approval, if you accept it as a pro-statehood decision (which I think it is, with qualifications), the US Congress now gets the question, I think. We'll see if they decide to act towards passing a bill that would allow Puerto Rico to write a state constitution and become a state. It took Alaska and Hawaii over a decade of lobbying before they finally got the Congress to let them in, and of course there are political considerations now as ever about such things. So yeah. we'll see. I think that Puerto Rico shouldn't just continue forever in this semi-colonial territory status -- they either should become a state, or become an independent country. Either one would be fine, provided that the people there support it, but seriously, I don't think the territory status does either them or the rest of the US much good...
Finally DJ, on the question of national popular vote, it doesn't actually require a constitutional amendment. Look up the National Popular Vote (NPV) movement -- it's an effort to get state legislatures to sign bills that say that once 270 electoral votes worth of states have passed similar legislation, all of them will promise their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, and not the state's vote only. It's basically an attempt to get a national popular vote without having to go through the very difficult and unlikely-to-succeed constitutional amendment process. 130-something electoral votes worth of states have signed on at the moment, I think, mostly blue states. I think it's definitely an idea worth serious consideration. The current system is so distorted with how it favors a small number of states so strongly... it is pretty funny to be holding an election, and to have the largest states be entirely irrelevant in that process.
As for Nate Silver, yeah, his Presidential prediction was fantastic, right on the money. The polling was good, and the model worked. All of those ridiculous pundits bashing him for speaking about statistical facts instead of their preferred instinct-based decisions, or whatever, look pretty bad now. That's good to see -- I was expecting 538's model to hold up again, and it did. However, he did miss two of the Senate races, one badly: he said that Tester (MT) had only a 35% chance of winning re-election, and he did win, and worse he gave Heitkamp (ND) under 9% odds of actually winning that seat, but she won by a small margin. I thought Tester would win but Heitkamp would lose (though I'd have put her odds much higher than 9%, personally!), but I think he under-estimated them. Of course sometimes percent-based predictions will go wrong, but I have to think that something was a little off there, particularly for North Dakota... over-estimated Romney's coattails, or something?
Finally, Puerto Rico. Yeah, that one was very, very interesting. I was expecting another indeterminate vote, like the past ones all were, but this one was much closer to being a legitimate endorsement of statehood than they've ever done before. It was a somewhat complicated two-part question, where Q1 asked whether they wanted the current status (territory) or to change status. Change status won, 53-47. The second question asked what alternate status was desired; note that this wasn't "only if you said you want to change status", all were supposed to answer both questions. Q2 ended up with about 800,000 votes for statehood, about 436,000 for a "freely associated state", whatever exactly that would be, 50-something thousand for independence, and 400,000 left that question blank (Q1 had very few blanks, so that was a clear "don't want to change status" answer). So statehood isn't actually over 50% on its own, based on this, but it did poll much better than ever before, and it won the plurality at least, with nearly double the number of votes of either other option -- quite an accomplishment.
So yeah, with that approval, if you accept it as a pro-statehood decision (which I think it is, with qualifications), the US Congress now gets the question, I think. We'll see if they decide to act towards passing a bill that would allow Puerto Rico to write a state constitution and become a state. It took Alaska and Hawaii over a decade of lobbying before they finally got the Congress to let them in, and of course there are political considerations now as ever about such things. So yeah. we'll see. I think that Puerto Rico shouldn't just continue forever in this semi-colonial territory status -- they either should become a state, or become an independent country. Either one would be fine, provided that the people there support it, but seriously, I don't think the territory status does either them or the rest of the US much good...
Finally DJ, on the question of national popular vote, it doesn't actually require a constitutional amendment. Look up the National Popular Vote (NPV) movement -- it's an effort to get state legislatures to sign bills that say that once 270 electoral votes worth of states have passed similar legislation, all of them will promise their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, and not the state's vote only. It's basically an attempt to get a national popular vote without having to go through the very difficult and unlikely-to-succeed constitutional amendment process. 130-something electoral votes worth of states have signed on at the moment, I think, mostly blue states. I think it's definitely an idea worth serious consideration. The current system is so distorted with how it favors a small number of states so strongly... it is pretty funny to be holding an election, and to have the largest states be entirely irrelevant in that process.