What We Can All Learn from Truckers & Poker Players
For many of us, reading the latest economic indicators has become the new masochistic pleasure in our mornings – surely other people have a tickler reminding them of the latest BLS Employment Situation Summary and the Gallup mid-month underemployment statistics? The problem with those indicators is that even when they show improvement, they still reflect a dispiriting reality. This is why a recent article about a new economic indicator holds such appeal. First, it reveals facts about our economy that are divorced from the personal impact reflected in other statistics. Second, it actually has a cautiously optimistic tale to tell.
The Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index, essentially, tracks the diesel fuel purchases of professional truckers, providing a graphic description of the movement of goods across the country. While the system has its drawbacks, it does provide some data regarding industrial production. In fact, if economists had been paying attention, it would have provided a warning about the recent downturn.
Americans don't know what to think about climate change anymore. A few years ago, the public more or less trusted the science that said human activity was raising global temperatures, but now that Congress and the Obama administration have hemmed and hawed about climate issues, we're not longer so sure.
Forty-eight percent of Americans-more of us than ever before-believe that reports of global warming are "generally exaggerated," according to a new Gallup poll. Climate science hasn't changed, so it's not crazy to look at these numbers and think that conservatives' incessant critiques of climate change may be working.
A perfect political storm
These shifts in opinion started around 2008. Aaron Wiener at the Washington Independent argues that the politics of climate change are driving American opinions about the reality of global warming. The percentage of Americans willing to put the blame for climate change on humans is about equal to the percentage of Americans still behind President Barack Obama's agenda, he notes.
"What was once a broad moral and scientific issue is now a centerpiece of the Democrats' legislative agenda," he writes.
Republicans have taken a political stand on climate change, too, one that reinforces the message that we can afford to ignore global warming. At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum links the Gallup numbers to confusion about Copenhagen and to negative "Climategate" stories about a few climate scientists' unprofessional emails.
But taking a wider view, Drum points out another big problem: "The Republican Party has largely decided that climate change simply doesn't exist. It's a hoax," he says.
Green xenophobia
It's also politically convenient for a party that throws a tantrum every time the president produces a policy idea. But in another corner of the right's world, conservatives are eager to defend the country's environment against the burden of immigration.
Jamilah King reports for ColorLines that Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR), which is linked to a conservative anti-immigrant group, is warning that immigration "is pushing our country deeper into ecological deficit."
King refutes this notion, citing reports that population and pollution are not directly linked. "In fact, newly arrived immigrants are probably among the most ecologically friendly folks around," she writes. "They're more likely to use public transportation and less likely to waste food."
Impacts of climate change
Conservatives who'd prefer that immigrants stay on the other side of the border would do better to worry about Republicans' studied blindness to climate change. Without action, global warming could send waves of people north, as places like Mexico grow warmer and can no longer support the same amount of agriculture.
Inter Press Service lays out some of the detrimental effects of climate change on poorer countries, particularly on the female half of the population. Women are more vulnerable to the natural disasters that accompany global warming, and the tasks that they take on, like collecting water and firewood, will grow harder as water becomes more scarce.
Overall, Thalif Deen reports, "The negative fallout from climate change is having a devastatingly lopsided impact on women compared to men."
Slow Senate progress
The Senate is trying to move forward on climate change legislation. A key group of Senators met this week at the White House with President Obama, but coming out, the legislators had only "vague observations" to share about progress, according to Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard.
Part of the problem with the Senate's process is that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) have already said that they'll likely discard the sort of cap-and-trade provisions that the House bill used to regulate carbon emissions. From an environmental point of view, the Senate is getting close to doing nothing at all.
"It's really clear that whatever attains 60 votes in the US Senate at this stage in the game is at best an extremely incremental step forward," Gillian Caldwell, campaign director at the environmental group 1Sky, told Sheppard.
The new progressive energy
The Senate seems more eager, along with President Obama, to embrace nuclear energy as a climate solution.
"I happen to be one of the Senators who's concerned about waste," Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said at a recent summit, reports TPMDC. "But most progressives in the Senate believe nuclear power is part of the solution at this time."
"If we don't expand nuclear power, there are going to be more coal plants and more oil plants," Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) added. "Nuclear power has been accepted as part of the solution [to climate change] among progressives."
Considering the political will the Senate has been able to muster behind climate legislation, one might as well believe that reports of global warming are "greatly exaggerated." After all, you'd think that if there was a potentially catastrophic threat looming in the future, our elective representatives might want to, you know, do something about that.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Americans are still pessimistic about employment and the economy, according to several recent polls. A majority agree that young people will not achieve the same standard of living as the previous generation or that it is more likely that families will suffer "economic reversals" in the next 5 to 10 years. Support for the stimulus bill has dropped and opinion is now deadlocked on the bill, though some aspects, such as spending on infrastructure and public works, remain popular among a majority. A majority of Americans think that some of the recent federal measures should be lasting, while fewer Americans – although still a majority – feel that President Obama's policies will help in these tough economic times.
Jobs A nationwide poll conducted in October by Gallup, consisting of 1,013 telephone interviews with adults age 18 and older, found that a small share of Americans believe now is a good time to find a quality job (10%). This percentage has been wavering between 9% and 11% since February 2009, and has dropped dramatically since January 2008 (33%). Findings from an October nationwide Pew Research Center survey of 1,500 adults are consistent with this trend: 84% of Americans say that today good jobs were difficult to find, up from 73% in July 2008 acording to another Pew survey.
Since comments to Quick Hits are not working and fedupliberal wanted to post a reply to something I posted, I think this is something worth talking about. I'd normally reserve this for the weekend, but I plan on being out of town with sporadic internet access and I do plan on having a series of diaries about third party politics.
I posted a Quick Hit noting that in a recent Gallup poll, only 8% of respondents said that the Democratic Party is too liberal. Doing the math, if we assume that few Republicans would say that, then 10% of independents feel that way and 15-20% of self-identifying Democrats think so, with most of the other Democrats being satisfied with the party as is. I suggested that this is evidence that the ground isn't as fertile for a third party challenging Democrats from the left as some here would hope.
Frequent church-goers were the only demographic subgroup to show no decline in GOP allegiance from 2001 to 2009, according to a new survey brief from Gallup. Declines among conservatives and those 65 and older were also minimal--the only bright spots reported for the GOP....
Democrats gained most from further consolidating support in their strongest demographic groups, rather than winning over Republican core groups, a shift that goes contrary to President Obama's repeated overtures to the GOP base....
The chart below (which adds a fourth column to the one released by Gallup) shows a loss of at least one in five GOP supporters among eight of the nine groups where the GOP lost eight or more percent support among the population at large. For example, the nine percent loss among moderates in general, from 37% to 28%, translated into a loss of 24% of GOP moderates--just shy of one in five. Combined with a 47% loss of GOP liberals and a 0% loss of GOP conservatives, this is yet another indication that the GOP is becoming more extreme as it shrinks
The logic here seemed incredibly obvious and straight-forward to me: If GOP losses were minimal among their core conservative demographics, and heavy elsewhere, then the party as a whole was becoming more extreme, and hence more unreachable via bi-partisan gestures, directly contrary to the basic logic behind Obama's repeated stress of a commitment to bi-partisan "pragmatism": if the pragmatists are fleeing the GOP in droves, then who's there left to be bi-partisanly pragmatic with?
The utter lack of any serious policy proposals from the GOP since Obama came to office would only seem to underscore the obviousness of the point I was making. But instead, I got a range of counter-arguments, plus several folks who claimed to not understand what I was saying. Obviously, it wasn't as obvious as I thought it was. Hence, this diary.
Frequent church-goers were the only demographic subgroup to show no decline in GOP allegiance from 2001 to 2009, according to a new survey brief from Gallup. Declines among conservatives and those 65 and older were also minimal--the only bright spots reported for the GOP:
Democrats gained most from further consolidating support in their strongest demographic groups, rather than winning over Republican core groups, a shift that goes contrary to President Obama's repeated overtures to the GOP base:
Aside from education, for which the parties were basically at even strength in 2001, the Republicans' losses tend to be greater among groups that were not strong GOP supporters to begin with. These include self-identified liberals and moderates, church non-attenders, and lower-income and young adults. Thus, a big factor in the GOP's overall decline is the Democratic Party's consolidating its support among normally Democratically leaning groups.
As President Barack Obama was assuming office in January, 93% of Americans said that restoring public trust in government should be a top priority (63%) or an important but lower priority (30%) for the new President. Take it as an absolute value, this is a stunningly high percentage; put it in comparison with the other seventeen (widely discussed) issues tested in an AP-Gfk survey, and you will find out that only improving the economy, creating more jobs, making the government more efficient and increasing the country’s independence scored higher.
It’s good to be reminded that people crave trust in government — despite well coordinated efforts that tell a different story. I won’t debate here the relationship of the individual to the “state” (an Aristotelian term in loan) but, in my bi-weekly visits to The Opportunity Agenda blog, I will translate the latest findings on public attitudes on public policy issues, voting patterns and trends, elections and elected officials.
Without an ideological lens, I will help understand Americans’ opinions on issues of public interest such as health care, immigration, the economy, and human rights; and explore how these opinions relate to people’s experience of a deeply held American value: the promise of opportunity. People’s outlook to the President's economic stimulus package can tell a true story about their perception of security,equality, mobility, voice, redemption, or community which make up opportunity, as explained in our newly released report The State of Opportunity in America.
Gallup has just released "State of the States: Political Party Affiliation", the first in a four-part series to be released this week on Gallup.com, based on Gallup Poll Daily tracking data collected throughout 2008. And the results could not be clearer: GOP plurality states (including leaners) have been reduced to a mere handful: the Mormon mountain heartland, plus Alaska and Nebraska. That's it:
This contrasts sharply with what Gallup found as recently as 2002:
A pointless exercise? Not necessarily...if you do it reasonably. In one recent thread, Chris Bowers said that he tried to do it in '04 but gave up when huge swings from day to day were required to account for the most minor shifts in the tracking poll numbers.
A recent blog post that got a lot of attention was this one, during the Dem convention, which showed some rather startling results in attempting to divine the daily Gallup numbers: McCain up 6 on Monday, Obama up 8 on Tuesday, followed by Obama up 16 on Wednesday. Talk about a bounce! It fit the reported Gallup numbers, but it sure looked screwy.
What was even more crazy was that if you accepted those particular guesses at the daily numbers, the next day's Gallup tracking number went up by 2 (from 48-42 Obama to 49-41), but to make that work with the prior numbers, Obama's 16 point lead the day before had to vanish COMPLETELY, all the way down into a tie! So what was the problem?
In a word: rounding. The tracking polls report 3-day averages that are rounded to the nearest integer, which means that what looks like a 2 point swing (say, from 45-45 to 46-44) could actually be as little as a 0.4 point swing (from 45.4-44.6 to 45.6-44.4). And when you're guessing daily numbers before averaging them into a 3-day tracking number, if you require integer (i.e. non-rounded) values for each single day, you're magnifying potential rounding errors by several times as much again.
So what I tried to do was go into the Gallup tracker for the last two weeks and get some numbers that made sense, by guessing at daily numbers down to the tenth of a point, i.e. adding one decimal place. So no more guessing that one day's numbers were either 45-45 or 46-44; they could be 45.3-44.6, 45.8-44.2, etc. Then I averaged those numbers and rounded to get the 3-day tracking result.
The results are here, and I'll explain them a bit now. The integer values in the right-most columns are the actual Gallup tracking poll average, with the dates they were reported in the column to the right. The left-most columns are my guess at what the daily numbers have been. The 3-day average for 8/21 came from the daily numbers from 8/18-8/20, the 3-day average on 9/2 comes from the 8/30-9/1 daily numbers, etc.
Now, those daily numbers are guesses, but they're almost guaranteed to be closer to the real numbers than any purely integral values would be. You can fiddle with the daily numbers and still get the same tracking numbers to come out. Each daily number is, of course, restricted by the fact that it contributes to three different tracking poll results, so the permissible "range" for any individual daily number is going to be relatively small, usually no more than 0.2 or 0.3 in any direction. Now, if you change one of those numbers, you'll affect the permissible range for some of the other daily numbers both before and after it, so there's no way to guess the "right" daily numbers.
So does this actually tell us anything? Well...not really. But it might be a good sanity check for anyone who obsesses over these tracking polls too much (like myself, obviously)!
I'm on the Gallup panel (one of the many Americans they survey in their polls). I received the Domestic Social Issues Survey recently. Thought I'd pass on this question about leadership qualities, and find out more about what Open Left readers are looking for in their leaders, at least in regards to the qualities Gallup is looking at. Any suggestions on what they left out?
I had to truncate some of the words and remove an article or two to make the answer options fit the Open Left physical poll parameters.
If I had the option, I would pass on other poll questions, but the Open Left polling system only allows you to do one poll per diary.
Caveat: This is the first time I've ever set up the polling function, so I don't know if this is going to work.
December 7, 2007 Democratic Party Winning on Issues
Democrats preferred to handle 6 of 10 issues; Republicans lead on 2
by Lydia Saad
PRINCETON, NJ -- Less than a year before Americans go to the polls to choose the next president and the 111th Congress, Gallup finds the Democrats holding a considerable advantage over the Republicans in public perceptions of which party can handle a variety of national issues.
Overall, the Democratic Party is perceived as better able to handle 6 of 10 issues that are likely to be heavily debated in the 2008 campaigns, and they roughly tie with the Republican Party on another 2. The Republicans lead on illegal immigration and terrorism, but their previously substantial advantage on terrorism has been cut by two-thirds since 2004.
According to the new USA Today/Gallup poll, conducted Nov. 30-Dec. 2, 2007, the Democrats' strongest issue areas include healthcare, the housing market, protecting Americans' rights and freedoms, corruption in government, the economy, and Iraq. The two parties are roughly tied on moral values and taxes. The Republican Party leads in public perceptions of which party can better handle terrorism and illegal immigration, but not by as much as the Democrats lead on their best signature issues.
Most significantly, for shifts in opinion since January 2004, Iraq (26 point shift) and terrorism (20 point shift) lead the way, even though Democrats still trail on the latter:
Gallup recently ran a poll in anticipation of General David Petraeus reporting to Congress.
I don't really feel like messing around with tables, so here are some of the results. When asked whose recommendations they had confidence in, the public gave the responses of "great deal" or "fair amount" for the following people in these percentages: General Petraeus 63%, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military leaders 58%, Congressional Democrats 44%, Congressional Republicans 41%, George W Bush 38%, and Iraqi Officials 27%. On the other hand, 43% of people say that they have almost no confidence in President Bush, way more than other parties. Petraeus gets this support despite only 40% believing he will give an independent and objective report vs. 53% who believe he will say what the Bush administration wants.
The reason I bring up this archive is because today Bush reached a historic milestone. His current disapproval rating in the latest Gallup poll, 66%, equals Richard Nixon's highest Gallup disapproval rating of 66%, registered the week before he resigned from office. Back then, Gallup was the only organization conducting presidential approval polls, and thus the Gallup poll is always taken as the gold standard for historical comparisons. This figure also puts Bush only 1% away from the all-time highest disapproval, set by Harry Truman in early January, 1952.
Here is a chart featuring the all-time worst Gallup poll results for every president over the past 70 years:
President
Low Approval
High Disapproval
High Margin
Bush 2
29
66
-37
Clinton
36
50
-14
Bush 1
29
60
-31
Reagan
35
56
-21
Carter
28
59
-31
Ford
39
45
-6
Nixon
24
66
-42
Johnson
35
52
-16
Kennedy
56
30
+26
Eisenhower
48
36
+12
Truman
22
65
-43
FDR
48
43
+5
Note that I mentioned above how Truman's highest disapproval was 67%, but here it is listed as 65%. This is because, for the purposes of this table, I took the single poll for each President that resulted in the lowest overall approval / disapproval margin. Truman's overall worst gap was -45, but it did not come from a single poll. Nxon's overall worst gap was -43, but it did not come from a single poll.
Update: As noted in the comments by Max Fletcher, remarkably, no President had a negative approval / disapproval margin from February 1953-March 1966. In fact, every poll taken during that time period registered at least double-digit approval for the sitting President. No wonder the late sixties are viewed as such a tumultuous time in America, as they were clearly following the most remarkable period of general contentedness we have ever seen. For the flip side, from April 1966 through August 1983, presidential approval ratings were in the net negative more than half of the time.
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