The decision by the Senator Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio, to announce his support for same-sex marriage may come to be seen as a watershed moment for gay rights advocates. Mr. Portman’s announcement, which he said he made in part because his son is gay, has so far yielded relatively little pushback from Republicans on blogs and social media, or from other Republican office-holders. Instead, gay rights advocates are increasingly finding support from influential Republicans.
But the rank and file of the Republican Party may be different, and the polling suggests that they have largely not changed their views on same-sex marriage.
According to Pew Research polls conducted each year, support for same-sex marriage has increased to 62 percent from 43 percent among Democrats since 2001. Among independent voters, support has risen to 52 percent from 43 percent over the same period. However, only 25 percent of Republican voters supported same-sex marriage in Pew’s poll last year, barely changed from 21 percent in 2001. Read more…
There are more than 1,000 days before the 2016 Iowa caucuses, but several polls have already been released testing national support for prospective candidates for the Republican and Democratic nominations for president.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has a huge lead on the Democratic side. Surveys show the possible Republican field as more competitive, with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida out front and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey clustered with several other candidates in the top tier.
But isn’t it too early to even look at such polls? Aren’t they more valuable as entertainment than information?
Not necessarily.
An examination of pre-midterm presidential polling since 1984 — surveys conducted from the day after the preceding presidential vote to the day before the midterm elections — shows that while early primary polls are not determinative, they are not meaningless, either. Read more…
The selection of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as the new pope, Francis, was largely unexpected by betting markets and Vatican experts, in part because of his advanced age. Cardinal Bergoglio, 76, is probably the ninth oldest of the 266 popes at the time of his election, accounting for some uncertainty because the age of many early popes remains unknown.
As a matter of actuarial science, Francis is not likely to have an especially long tenure. The nine previous men who were known to be 75 or older at the time of their election to the papacy served for an average of only five years.
That may be too pessimistic an estimate in the case of Francis: it is based on a small sample size and does not account for modern improvements in health and medical science. Acknowledging that there are considerable lifestyle differences between an Argentinian pope and an average American citizen, the life expectancy for a 76-year-old American man is now about 10 additional years. Of course, Francis could follow Benedict XVI’s precedent by resigning the papacy before his death. It is probably safe to say that a tenure shorter than five years would be considered brief for Francis, while a regime of much more than 10 years might be unexpectedly long.
The cardinals who elected Cardinal Bergoglio are probably not looking up actuarial tables, but they presumably have some intuition about how long his papacy might last. So one question is whether they saw his advanced age as a liability — or an asset.
How might Francis’ age be advantageous? One reason is that, if he were to serve 5 to 10 years, that would actually be very well in line with historical precedent Read more…
“Go in a pope, come out a cardinal.”
The selection of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, who did not appear on various preconclave lists of likely popes, seemed to confirm that old line about papal selection. “The chances of being elected pope decreases in proportion to the number of times he is described papabile in the press,” George Weigel, a Vatican expert, told CNN in 2005. Mr Weigel refers to the pattern as the Pignedoli Principle, after Cardinal Sergio Pignedoli, a much-discussed candidate who was not chosen as pope in 1978.
The Pignedolis of 2013 were Cardinal Angelo Scola, of Italy; Cardinal Odilo Pedro Scherer, of Brazil; and Cardinal Peter Turkson, of Ghana, the favorites of oddsmakers and some experts. In the wake of the selection of Cardinal Bergoglio – Pope Francis – you can expect to hear more about “Go in a pope, come out a cardinal.”
But is it actually a useful guide to conclaves? Probably not. Read more…
Intrade may have shut down, but the election of a pope still offers a good chance to study the predictive value of betting odds. Eight years ago, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger ascended to St. Peter’s throne, the oddsmakers looked prescient: he was the favorite, or a co-favorite, in several places. Thirty-five years ago, the bookies – and, by extension, the wisdom of crowds – did much less well: Cardinal Karol Jozef Wojtyła, soon to become Pope John Paul II, was nowhere among the favorites.
This time, the favorite is Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan, as he was when we last checked in with the betting markets on March 4. A 71-year-old Italian with an intellectual bent, Cardinal Scola has a chance of between 25 percent and 33 percent of being elected, according to various oddsmakers.
But after Cardinal Scola the oddsmakers’ choices have shifted a bit. Read more…
The popular prediction market Intrade, which in November shut down its markets to United States residents after a complaint from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, announced on Sunday that it was closing down entirely.
I’m less interested in speculating upon the business or legal reasons for Intrade’s shutdown than in pressing a simple point: billions will still be wagered on the outcome of the 2016 elections, with or without Intrade in place.
Some of this is because there are other betting markets and bookmakers who offer odds on the election. Several of these sites are already taking bets on the identity of the 2016 Republican presidential nominee, for instance, along with any number of other races. Most of these sites are not open to Americans. But they tended to perform more rationally than Intrade over the course of the 2012 campaign, with their prices more closely tracking polls, prediction models and news events.
The billions I’m referring to, however, will be wagered somewhere else: Wall Street. Read more…
In oral arguments before the Supreme Court last week, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. introduced a statistical claim that he took to imply that an important provision of the Voting Rights Act has become outmoded.
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which is being challenged by Shelby County, Ala., in the case before the court, requires that certain states, counties and townships with a history of racial discrimination get approval (or “pre-clearance”) from the Department of Justice before making changes to their voting laws. But Chief Justice Roberts said that Mississippi, which is covered by Section 5, has the best ratio of African-American to white turnout, while Massachusetts, which is not covered, has the worst, he said.
Chief Justice Roberts’s statistics appear to come from data compiled in 2004 by the Census Bureau, which polls Americans about their voting behavior as part of its Current Population Survey. In 2004, according to the Census Bureau’s survey, the turnout rate among white voting-aged citizens was 60.2 percent in Mississippi, while the turnout rate among African-Americans was higher, 66.8 percent. In Massachusetts, conversely, the Census Bureau reported the white turnout rate at 72.0 percent but the black turnout rate at just 46.5 percent.
As much as it pleases me to see statistical data introduced in the Supreme Court, the act of citing statistical factoids is not the same thing as drawing sound inferences from them. If I were the lawyer defending the Voting Rights Act, I would have responded with two queries to Chief Justice Roberts. First, are Mississippi and Massachusetts representative of a broader trend: do states covered by Section 5 in fact have higher rates of black turnout on a consistent basis? And second, what if anything does this demonstrate about the efficacy of the Voting Rights Act?
One reason to be suspicious of the representativeness of Mississippi and Massachusetts is the high margin of error associated with these calculations Read more…
In Vatican City on Monday, the College of Cardinals will gather to decide on when to hold the papal conclave to select the next pope. There are no polls of the 115 cardinals who will vote in the conclave, and FiveThirtyEight is not making any predictions. But plenty of others are — notably, bookies and bettors.
Betting on the papal succession goes back centuries. In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV forbade Catholics from betting on the election of a pope or the length of a pope’s term in office. According to Dr. Edward N. Peters, canonist at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, however, Gregory’s edict was part of an older system of canon law that was abrogated in 1918 (which is not to say the Catholic Church would now recommend wagering on the next pope).
During the last conclave, in 2005, the oddsmakers did well. One day before Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, Frank Delaney, an Irish novelist and journalist, wrote in The New York Times, “if the smart money is telling it right, the next pope will be one of the following three men” — Joseph Ratzinger, Carlo Martini or Jean-Marie Lustiger.
This time around, international bookies like Paddy Power in Ireland have set odds on roughly 90 candidates, according to a list of betting lines compiled by Oddschecker.com (betting on the pope is illegal in the United States). Most of those candidates are long shots, and some are beyond long shots (including Bono, Oprah Winfrey and Lance Armstrong).
But at the top of the list, the bookmakers’ favorites are largely in line with analyses by Vatican experts. Oddschecker.com compiled the odds from 13 bookies. Here is a list of those odds — converted into probabilities and averaged — for the top 25 contenders as of 10:30 p.m. Sunday. Read more…
The same week the Obama administration filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to strike down California’s ban on same-sex marriage, a new Field Poll was released showing that support for same-sex marriage in the state has increased drastically since the ban was passed there a little more than four years ago.
The Field Poll, conducted Feb. 5 to 17 among 834 registered voters, found a record majority of Californians, 61 percent, say they support extending the right to marry to same-sex couples. Just 32 percent were against doing so.
California voters approved the state’s ban on gay marriage, Proposition 8, in November 2008. At the time, a Field poll found that 51 percent of registered voters supported same-sex marriage; 42 percent were against it. Still, Proposition 8 passed, 52 percent to 48 percent.
Since 2009, however, support for gay marriage in California has risen sharply. Read more…
Since President Obama’s re-election in 2012, Republicans have worried about what an increasingly diverse electorate will mean for their future as a national party. Democrats, meanwhile, have started talking about turning ruby red states like Arizona and Texas blue.
How worried should Republicans be? And how realistic are those Democratic aspirations? A new study released on Thursday — based on data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey — points toward some answers: Republicans should be worried, but Democrats in Austin and Phoenix shouldn’t stock up on confetti just yet.
The study, from the left-leaning Center for American Progress, projects the growth in eligible voters in 12 states by 2014 and 2016. The projections — which broke down the eligible voter growth by race — show that fast-paced minority growth coupled with slow or negative growth among non-Hispanic whites has a substantial impact on the eligible voter makeup of the 12 states that the center examined.
According to the center’s projections, 600,000 Hispanics will be newly eligible to vote in Florida in 2016. Over the same period, fewer than 125,000 new white voters will be eligible in Florida. In Arizona, more than 175,000 Hispanics will enter the voter pool as roughly 10,000 white voters leave it. In Texas, 185,000 new white eligible voters will be overwhelmed by the roughly 900,000 Hispanics expected to enter the electorate.
The report — by Patrick Oakford, a research assistant, and Vanessa Cárdenas, the director of the the center’s Progress 2050 — chose states that were crucial electoral battleground, home to rapid nonwhite population growth, or both. In each state the center analyzed, the white share of eligible voters decreased in 2014 and again in 2016. Read more…
