Supreme Dysfunction

In a recent issue of The American Prospect, columnist Rick Perlstein dismissed concerns about recent polling and reminded readers that considerably more is at stake right now than the “horse race” that media disproportionately focuses on. As he says, that all-too-typical approach to political campaign coverage is increasingly irrelevant.

This year, hearing the political reporters on NPR every morning yammering on about stuff like that, it sounds like the drone of the adults in a Peanuts cartoon. It’s so far down the scale of factors determining how the world might go in 2025 that I cringe, tune out, and wait for the next story to start.

If that typical coverage is “down the scale,” what does Perlstein count as more weighty? He suggests that speculation about how many electoral votes each candidate will get is less significant than concerns about the number of people who might be willing to take up arms to “avenge” a Trump loss.

And then there’s the conventional coverage of the Trump trial. Perlstein points out that the attacks being made by Trump’s GOP sycophants–largely ignored or minimized by the media– are part of Repubicans’ ongoing assault on the rule of law. As he says, “what is actually on trial in New York? Trials themselves.”

Every time the man who once took an oath to faithfully execute America’s laws and may next year do so again acts in ways that would bring criminal sanction to any other defendant, by brazenly and deliberately intimidating witnesses in direct defiance of Judge Merchan’s orders, Donald Trump imparts a lesson to his millions of supplicants: One of the three allegedly coequal branches of constitutional governance in the United States is illegitimate, should its decisions not break Donald Trump’s way.

The attack on the rule of law has, of course, been aided and abetted by the current disaster that is the U.S. Supreme Court–a Court that has been intentionally packed with far-Right ideologues.

It is, of course, a crisis now long in the making. Six mortals with lifetime appointments, five of them named by Republican presidents who never won a popular majority, routinely abandoning even the pretense of intellectual coherence and procedural norms to press changes in how the nation is governed, so right-wing they could never stand democratic scrutiny.

For instance, by seeking to strip the power of nonpartisan experts to adjudicate highly technical regulatory questions. Or to control the split-second decisions of doctors in emergency rooms about how to keep women alive. Or to usurp judgement of municipalities and states to decide who can carry concealed weapons of war—reserving those rights instead to, in order, the 535 members of Congress, the nutjob Republican majority in the Idaho legislature, and the made-up fantasies about the beliefs of powder-wigged men from back before bullets had been invented.

Perlstein went on to describe the truly bizarre arguments that have been advanced for Presidential immunity–and the even more grotesque musings of Justice Alito– in what he called the “aptly named” case of Trump v. United States. 

So here we are.

In a very real sense, it is Trump and his cult versus the United States–at least the United States envisioned by the nation’s Founders. Not only does the MAGA movement pose an unprecedented threat to America’s democratic norms, it does so at a time when the multiple threats posed by climate change promise (at best) enormous social upheavals.

Perlstein argues that the political situation in which we find ourselves was “seeded” in Bush v. Gore, and from a legal standpoint, he may be right. But historians tell us that there has always been a portion of the American public that rejected the philosophical underpinnings of America’s constituent documents–citizens who have resisted every expansion of the civic equality and individual liberty at the heart of those instruments. Today, that resistance is most obvious in the hysterical backlash against women’s rights, “woke-ness” and efforts at racial inclusion.

Reactionaries have always been with us, but for most of our history, they’ve been on the fringes of political life. What is new–and arguably unprecedented–is that they have captured one of America’s major political parties. They have a Supreme Court majority, including two Justices who repeatedly and flagrantly violate judicial ethics. They have made no bones about their plans for 2025 and beyond, should they win in November.

Perlstein is right: treating the upcoming election as a typical horse-race ignores reality. A very dangerous reality.

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OK–Let’s Talk About Those Polls

Survey research ain’t what it used to be.

Back in 2020, the Harvard Business Review summarized the changes that have diminished polling accuracy. The article described the industry as “living on borrowed time,” and predicted that its increasing errors would not be soon–or easily–corrected.

The basic problem is low response rates. Thanks to caller ID, fewer Americans pick up the phone when a pollster calls, so it takes more calls to reach enough respondents to make a valid sample. It also means that Americans are screening themselves before they pick up the phone.

So even as our ability to analyze data has gotten better and better, thanks to advanced computing and an increase in the amount of data available to analysts, our ability to collect data has gotten worse. And if the inputs are bad, the analysis won’t be any good either.

It now takes 40+ calls to reach just one respondent. And there really is no reliable way to assess how those who do respond differ from those who don’t. (I know my own children do not answer calls if they don’t recognize the phone number–are they representative of an age group? An educational or partisan cohort? I have no idea–and neither do the pollsters.) There are also concerns that those who do respond are disproportionately rural.

These things matter.

A sample is only valid to the extent that the individuals reached are a random sample of the overall population of interest. It’s not at all problematic for some people to refuse to pick up the phone, as long as their refusal is driven by a random process. If it’s random, the people who do pick up the phone will still be a representative sample of the overall population, and the pollster will just have to make more calls.

Similarly, it’s not a serious problem for pollsters if people refuse to answer the phone according to known characteristics. For instance, pollsters know that African-Americans are less likely to answer a survey than white Americans and that men are less likely to pick up the phone than women. Thanks to the U.S. Census, we know what proportion of these groups are supposed to be in our sample, so when the proportion of men, or African-Americans, falls short in the sample, pollsters can make use of weighting techniques to correct for the shortfall.

The real problem comes when potential respondents to a poll are systematically refusing to pick up the phone according to characteristics that pollsters aren’t measuring…. if a group like evangelicals or conservatives systematically exclude themselves from polls at higher rates than other groups, there’s no easy way to fix the problem.

As the article notes, with response rates to modern polls below 15%, it becomes extremely difficult to determine whether systematic nonresponse problems are even happening.

These problems go from nagging to consequential when the characteristics that are leading people to exclude themselves from polls are correlated with the major outcome that the poll is trying to measure. For instance, if Donald Trump voters were more likely to decide not to participate in polls because they’re rigged, and did so in a way that wasn’t correlated with known characteristics like race and gender, pollsters would have no way of knowing.

Then there’s the failure of likely voter models.

People tend to say they’re going to vote even when they won’t. Every major pollster has its own approach to a “likely voter” screen, but they all include a respondent’s previous voting behavior. As long as that behavior stays stable, these models work. But when something generates turnout among voters who have previously been absent, all bets are off. That happened when the Obama campaign energized previously apathetic voters, and since the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, we’ve seen evidence of significantly increased registration and turnout among women who hadn’t previously voted.

As the Harvard article noted,

It may be the case that standard sampling and weighting techniques are able to correct for sampling problems in a normal election — one in which voter turnout patterns remain predictable — but fail when the polls are missing portions of the electorate who are likely to turn out in one election but not in previous ones. Imagine that there’s a group of voters who don’t generally vote and are systematically less likely to respond to a survey. So long as they continue to not vote, there isn’t a problem. But if a candidate activates these voters, the polls will systematically underestimate support for the candidate.

Polling is broken, and we need to stop hyperventilating about their results. Remember, Trump has consistently underperformed his polling percentages in every primary thus far this year.
As the saying goes, the only poll that counts is the one on election day.
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And The Evidence Mounts….

Yesterday, I posted about the 2018 book How Democracies Die. My “take-aways” were twofold: first, the authors located the source of today’s efforts to install an autocracy in the racism that has long been identified as America’s “original sin,” and second, they identified warning signs of institutional and normative breakdown.

Several things have changed since 2018, of course, and some of those changes have been positive. Biden’s victory in 2020–a resounding popular victory despite the desperate efforts of Trump and MAGA voters to de-legitimize it–and the failure of the much-anticipated “Red wave” in 2022 come immediately to mind. But other signs are more ominous–especially the pathetic acquiescence of elected Republicans to Trump’s and the far-Right’s increasingly public racism, and the unprecedented and blatantly-partisan behavior of members of the judiciary.

Two examples from just the past week.

The Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, pardoned Daniel Perry, who had been convicted of murder for fatally shooting a demonstrator during a Black Lives Matter protest. Perry had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing Garrett Foster in downtown Austin in July 2020. Abbott’s hand-picked Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously in favor of the pardon.

Witnesses at the trial had testified that the man Perry shot had never raised his weapon, and according to court records, in the weeks leading up to the protests, Perry had sent multiple racist messages about protesters, shared white supremacist memes and talked about how he “might have to kill a few people” who were demonstrating. In one, he compared the Black Lives Matter movement to “a zoo full of monkeys that are freaking out flinging their shit.”

Abbot’s pardon sends a strong–and horrifying–message: in Texas, elected officials will protect racists. Even murderous ones.

Then there’s the even more horrifying disclosure that–in the wake of the January 6th insurrection– a “Stop the Steal” symbol flew on Justice Samuel Alito’s lawn.

You need not be a lawyer to share Robert Hubbell’s reaction:

As a Supreme Court justice, Alito has been unapologetic in his efforts to defend Trump’s lawlessness. He has risen to Trump’s defense with gleeful spite and unveiled resentment against those seeking to hold Trump accountable under the Constitution.

On Thursday, the New York Times revealed that Alito’s home displayed an upside-down US flag during the fraught days after the January 6 insurrection. At the time, flying the US flag upside down was a symbol calling to “Stop the Steal” of the 2020 election from Trump. It was a call to insurrection—proudly displayed by a US Supreme Court justice sworn to defend and protect the Constitution. See New York Times, At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.

In response to an inquiry from the Times, Alito said, I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag.
Notably, Alito did not deny the veracity of the photograph of the flag flying upside down on his lawn. He did not deny the symbolism of the upside-down flag. He did not deny that he was aware of its continued presence in front of his house. Instead, he blamed his wife, whom he claimed flew the “Stop the Steal” banner in response to anti-Trump signs in the neighborhood.

Alito’s response to the Times is a lie. He owns the flag. He owns the flagpole. He owns the property on which the flag was displayed. He permitted it to remain on display on his property. He, therefore, did have “involvement” in “flying the flag.” It does not matter that it was his wife who physically raised the “Stop the Steal” banner on the flagpole. Alito’s hair-splitting denial is misleading and incomplete—and therefore false.

As Hubbell notes, this leaves us with a second Supreme Court Justice whose spouse actively supported an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Those justices—Alito and Thomas—are currently considering Trump’s presidential immunity defense to the indictment alleging that Trump attempted to subvert the election. Under any reasonable reading of Code of Conduct that applies to Supreme Court justices, Alito and Thomas should have recused themselves long ago (under Canons 2 and 3).

In a very real sense, Americans are still fighting the Civil War. Today’s Confederates are more geographically scattered, and the incidents of bloodshed and violence are being perpetrated by individual MAGA racists rather than by an organized Rebel army, but the White Supremacy beliefs motivating the combatants haven’t changed. More worrisome still, years of partisan efforts to subvert racial and religious equality and the rule of law have led to utterly scandalous, unethical, and judicially-unforgivable behaviors by two Justices of the highest court in the land–a profoundly dangerous institutional breakdown.

This is how democracies die.

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It’s All About Race

I’ve been working my way through the numerous books–both the physical ones and the ones on my Kindle–that have been piling up on my nightstand, and I’ve just finished How Democracies Die. It’s a book that has generated a lot of discussion, for obvious reasons. The two scholars who wrote it in 2018, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zimblatt, have spent their academic careers focusing on the ups and downs of democratic governments around the globe. That focus has allowed them to draw conclusions about the normative elements that serve as guardrails protecting democratic institutions, and about the signs  warning of democratic collapse.

There’s a lot to absorb from the book’s copious descriptions of democratic failures in a wide variety of countries–and the authors make no bones about the reality of the threat to American institutions posed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It’s all pretty grim–and entirely persuasive.

That said, I was particularly struck by one of the book’s central observations–probably because it confirms my strong belief that support for Trump/MAGA is almost entirely rooted in racism.

About halfway through the book, the authors identified two democratic norms that are essential to a functioning democracy: mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. In other words, acknowledging the legitimacy of one’s political opponents, and “forbearing” to abuse or over-use institutional weapons like the filibuster or Mitch McConnell’s legal but shockingly undemocratic theft of a Supreme Court seat. Extreme polarization erodes those norms; as they write, when societies sort themselves into political camps whose world-views aren’t just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain.

When the authors analyzed what had allowed America’s politicians to sustain basic democratic norms for a period running roughly from the collapse of Reconstruction through the 1980s, they came to a very troubling conclusion–that during that time period, “The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion.” To the extent that America operated with bipartisanship and experienced reduced polarization during that extended time period, those outcomes “came at the cost of keeping civil rights off the political agenda.”

In the final paragraph of Chapter Six, they write

America’s democratic norms, then, were born in a context of exclusion. As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party was likely to view the other as an existential threat. The process of racial inclusion that began after World War II and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the United States. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction.

That paragraph confirms what a growing body of research has verified–and what any semi-sentient observer can see. The election of Barack Obama unleashed the overt expression of formerly-suppressed hatreds. It seeded the growth of White Christian nationalism, the huge reaction against anything seen as “woke,” the efforts to de-legitimatize efforts at inclusion–and explains the utter inability of most reasonable, non-racist Americans to understand the animus and fury of the MAGA movement.

That paragraph explains so much–as does a sentence in the final chapter, in which the authors concede that it is “difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities give up their dominant status without a fight.”

Even a cursory look at the current crop of GOP nominees up and down the various state ballots shows them publicly expressing opinions that would have been met with horror not all that long ago. Anti-Black, anti-Semitic, homophobic…meanwhile, the numerous Republican campaigns expressing hostility to immigration from the south hardly bother to veil their racism.

It’s been a long time since the Civil War. It’s been a long time since the South was able to dismantle Reconstruction. These days, the country’s accelerating social and demographic changes are making it increasingly difficult to maintain the dominance of White Christians. It’s the recognition of–and hysterical reaction to– that reality that explains Trump and MAGA. How Democracies Die warns us of the way that movement threatens not just social peace/tolerance, but the continued operation of America’s democratic institutions.

I keep thinking about that slogan “The South will rise again.”

It did. It’s now called the Republican Party, and How Democracies Die documents a lesson we have yet to learn: the persistence of this country’s deep-seated racism poses an existential threat to human decency, civic equality and the continuation of American democracy.

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Race, Religion, Money And Vouchers

The nefarious effects of educational vouchers continue to be documented. 

The Washington Post recently reported on a study confirming what a number of prior studies have suggested: that an unexpected rise in racial segregation is largely attributable to the expansion of school voucher programs.

Ahead of the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a study being released Monday shows a pronounced increase in school segregation since 1988, particularly in large school districts with significant numbers of Black students.

Overall, school segregation between Black and White students has increased by 25 percent since 1991 in the 533 large districts serving at least 2,500 Black students — a significant increase but nowhere near the decline that occurred in the aftermath of Brown, according to the study. (Of note: the paper makes clear that most of the school segregation in the United States is driven by demographic differences between districts, not within them.)

The study found that the problem was not housing segregation, although that certainly helps explain school segregation, because housing has become less segregated since 1991. It also found that rising school segregation isn’t driven by economic inequality, which has also declined over this period.

The researchers point to two specific policies: federal courts releasing school districts, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg, from obligations to desegregate schools beginning in significant numbers in the late 1990s; and school-choice policies that let parents pick what school their children attend.

Surprise!–NOT.

Vouchers don’t just promote racial segregation–they also facilitate religiously-based polarization. I have previously written about Indiana’s voucher program, which sends millions of tax dollars to predominantly religious schools. A recent report from North Carolina underlines the role of school choice programs in siphoning public funds from public schools and sending them to religious schools, especially those aligned with conservative Christian churches and activists. Those schools have received hundreds of millions of dollars in state government funding in recent years.

Democrats in North Carolina have criticized the private-school voucher program for taking money — and students — away from public schools and sending them to private schools, where there’s often little public accountability for academic success, and where schools are free to engage in discrimination or hire people without credentials as teachers. Republicans defend offering families the choice of where to educate their children.

The report notes that several of these schools are “unabashedly Christian,” including one that has  

an application form that instructs potential families to provide the name and phone number of their pastor, detail which church ministries they’re involved in, and agree that their child can be expelled if the family doesn’t attend church services at least once a week.

If the data confirming that voucher programs promote racial and religious divisions weren’t troubling enough, a recent Brookings study confirms that–despite pious pronouncements about vouchers enabling poor children to escape “failing” public schools–vouchers have become another handout to the wealthy. The research looked at Arizona, one of several states where Republican lawmakers have created or expanded private-school choice programs to give nearly all students, regardless of their individual need, public funding to attend private schools.

In 2022, Arizona lawmakers opened the program to all students, including those already attending private schools. EdChoice touts the current iteration of the program as the “first to offer full universal funded eligibility with broad-use flexibility for parents.”…

The list of allowable expenses for Arizona’s ESA program is long. It includes everything from tuition and fees to backpacks, printers, and bookshelves. Overall, about 63% of state funds are being spent on tuition, textbooks, and fees at a qualifying school, with “curricula and supplementary materials” (12%) being the next largest expense.

And who, exactly, is benefitting from this taxpayer largesse?

We looked to publicly available data on Empowerment Scholarship Account recipients to get a clearer picture of who is receiving ESA funds. If, in fact, affluent families are securing the lion’s share of ESA funding, that would raise obvious questions about whether these programs are exacerbating rather than mitigating inequities in school access…

The researchers used a number of methods to determine where the funds were going, and the results were unambiguous:

In other words, regardless of the SES measure used (poverty rate, median income, or educational attainment), we see similar patterns in who is obtaining ESA funding. More advantaged communities are securing a highly disproportionate share of these scholarships.

Vouchers were supposed to improve educational outcomes for poor children. The programs have not only failed to improve learning outcomes, they have increased racial segregation, facilitated religious discrimination, and been a windfall for the wealthy (many of whom already had children in private schools), all while robbing the nation’s public schools of desperately needed resources.

They’ve been a civic and educational disaster.

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