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State of the Statehouses
The Crystal Ball's New Governor Ratings for 2010
, February 4th, 2010
With the primaries in Illinois this past Tuesday, the first ballots have now been cast in the 2010 elections. Naturally, most attention by national pundits has been lavished on the Senate and House contests, since members of Congress—wherever they are elected—have an impact on all of us. Governors affect only their own states in most circumstances, but the 37 statehouse races on the November ballot are every bit as revealing about American politics.
The problem with early analysis of the statehouses is that quite a few remain in the formative stages—and it is difficult to project forward without a good idea of the likely autumn match-ups. For example, in Maine twenty-four candidates have filed for governor. Minnesota has even more: thirty-five gubernatorial aspirants.
Even in Illinois, some last minute ballot counting and the potential for disputes in both parties’ razor-thin results may keep the line-up murky for a while longer. By the way, despite Illinois’ absurdly early primary date, independent candidates can still register up until June 21 and are not even allowed to begin soliciting signatures until mid-March. If hard feelings in either or both Land of Lincoln parties persist, could there be a secessionist movement leading to multiple November candidacies?
Despite all the uncertainties, if the election were held today, the Crystal Ball can outline its early projections: Republicans would pick up nine governorships currently held by Democrats, but lose three they currently occupy. Therefore, the GOP would have a net gain of six governorships, plus opportunities to play offense in three more toss-up races in states where Democrats now reign. The Crystal Ball foresees sizeable Republican gains in both houses of Congress, so it isn’t a great surprise that the GOP would add statehouses, too. The same voters will cast ballots simultaneously in federal and state elections. However, the overall number of probable governorship gains for Republicans may raise a few eyebrows in the political community.
Republicans certainly don’t have an easy ride in all states. In addition to the three currently Republican governorships we think they will lose, the GOP has five toss-up seats left to defend—meaning the party could drop up to eight governorships they now possess in a worst-case scenario for them.
It is difficult to overstate the change coming to the states in just nine months. Since there are already 21 open governorships with no incumbent running, just four incumbent governors need to lose in the primaries or the general election to produce a turnover of half the fifty governors in a single year. We believe that outcome is likely.
Crystal Ball 2010 Governor Ratings
Only major candidates, as determined by the Crystal Ball, are listed below. Candidates are listed in order of their primary chances, with frontrunners at top. Probable candidates who have yet to announce are listed in italics and incumbents seeking reelection are listed in bold.
* Dave Freudenthal (D), the incumbent, is technically term-limited but may sue to overturn the state law, allowing him to run again. If incumbent Freudenthal is running, he will be the favorite. If he is not, the Republican nominee will win.
What Is Wrong With Those Tea Partiers?
, February 4th, 2010
The truth has triumphed, at least for those attending this week’s Tea Party convention in Nashville: Obama is a socialist fascist communist statist Muslim whose healthcare “reform” would destroy the world’s greatest healthcare system and force Americans to wait in long lines so that their medical requests could be reviewed by death panels. This is not truth as you and I know it, but this statement (or at least parts of it) is believed to be true by the millions of Americans who coalesced into the Tea Party movement of 2009, which reinvigorated the political right just a few months after it had been declared dead. “What is wrong with those people?” ask so many people on the left. The answer from research in moral psychology is: Nothing.
Moral psychology historically confined itself to the study of altruism and justice. When morality is defined as being nice, then the angry rantings of right-wing protestors seem to have nothing to do with morality, and psychologists have long searched for non-moral explanations of conservatism. (Frustration? Racism? Fear of change?) In contrast, the righteous anger of left-wing marchers for peace and “social justice” was sometimes held up by social scientists as the pinnacle of moral development. But the new synthesis that has recently occurred in moral psychology—merging social psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory—gives us a new set of tools for understanding political movements, which are always moral movements, whether left-wing, right-wing, or something else. This new moral psychology is based on three principles, each of which can help outsiders understand the tea party movement:
1) Intuitive Primacy. Moral judgments, like aesthetic judgments, are best understood as quick gut feelings, not as products of reasoning. We have feelings about people and ideas within the first second of encountering them. We engage in reasoning too, but reasoning is slow, spread over many seconds or minutes, and it takes place within a mental workspace that has already been pre-structured by feelings. So if one third of Americans had negative feelings toward Obama on election day, and if many independents developed negative feelings as talk of tax increases and Wall Street bailouts escalated, then, by the summer of 2009, more than 40% of Americans were emotionally ready to receive the narrative about socialism and statism being formulated by conservative talk radio hosts such as Glenn Beck and Mark Levin.
2) Moral Thinking is for Social Doing. People are extremely bad at solving simple logic problems that are unconnected to their interests, but we are all geniuses at justifying our prior actions and at making the case for propositions we favor. We are intuitive lawyers gunning for victory, not intuitive scientists seeking truth. In fact, research on everyday reasoning finds that people are largely incapable of searching for evidence that contradicts their initial hypothesis. So when passions run high, as they do among tea-partiers, their reasoning doesn’t get turned off. Rather, their reasoning is working overtime, and very elaborate belief structures (such as conspiracy theories) can be constructed out of the flimsiest materials (such as rumors about forged birth certificates). This is normal, and readers on the left should ask themselves how often they searched for counter-evidence that would have contradicted the worst things their friends said about George W. Bush.
3) Morality binds and builds. Morality, like politics, is really a team sport. Western philosophy often reduces ethics to the individual level (“How should I act?”). But many researchers now join Charles Darwin in believing that human morality was shaped in part by the competition of tribe vs. tribe. One of the main “tricks” that human tribes developed was the psychology of sacredness—the positing of a god, a person, a piece of land, or in more modern times a book or an idea, which was perfect, and which united a group in its defense. The left made racial equality its sacred principle in the 1960s, which led them to sacralize oppressed minorities. (Sacralization means that an object becomes perfectly pure, good, and unassailable.) It is a taboo on the left to “blame the victim,” and the left is therefore still prone to charging its opponents with racism. But the right chose freedom (understood as freedom from oppressive government) back in the days of the cold war, and it began to sacralize free markets in the 1980s (under Reagan and Thatcher). Is it any wonder, then, that that the right now uses “statist” and “socialist” as its all-purpose epithets? Is it so irrational to apply these labels to Obama? He does, after all, want to increase the government’s role in regulating healthcare, Wall Street, and anything that produces carbon dioxide.
Liberal readers may object that 1) Obama has been governing more as a centrist than as a left-wing collectivist; 2) George W. Bush was the real enemy of liberty with his contempt for civil rights, and 3) Healthcare costs and global warming are looming catastrophes for which vigorous action is a necessity. All true, in my opinion. But that’s the funny thing about moral psychology: it compels people on opposing teams to believe in conflicting and incompatible truths. Everyone on both sides asks: What is wrong with those people?
Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. His work can be found at www.JonathanHaidt.com
Keeping Our Senate Sensibility
, February 4th, 2010
The Crystal Ball was the first to project that Republicans had a good chance to pull Democrats all the way down to 52 Senate seats in November. (See our latest Senate article here). So we’re certainly not hesitant to predict big Republican gains. But any serious suggestion that the GOP can win outright the 51 seats it needs for control is getting well past the data we have available. Republicans would first need to reelect all their incumbents who are on the ballot plus hold all their open seats (OH, NH, KS, MO, FL, KY). This is doable, though no one is yet going to bet the farm on New Hampshire, Missouri, and Kentucky, given the strong Democratic candidates that give the party a real shot in those states. Republicans would also have to defeat Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Arlen Specter (D-PA), and Harry Reid (D-NV). Current polling suggests this is quite possible—though one or more could recover ground by November. Then Republicans would have to grab Democratic open seats in North Dakota, Delaware, and Illinois. The GOP will get North Dakota, has a very good shot at Delaware, and starts out with at least a 50-50 chance in Illinois.
If all of that goes perfectly for Republicans—a big “if” from the perspective of February—then the GOP would need 3 additional seats. Those three would have to come from some combination of the following seats: Barbara Boxer (D-CA), open seat of Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI). Right now, Republicans don’t have a single announced candidate who credibly leads in any of these contests. Yes, the GOP has “dream candidates” such as Dino Rossi (WA), George Pataki (NY), and Tommy Thompson (WI) that the party would like to see run. Former Sen. Dan Coats could possibly be a real threat to Bayh, if somehow Coats can compete with Bayh’s enormous $12 million warchest. But at this moment, a ‘no’ is more likely than a ‘yes’ from the dream candidates in WA, NY, and WI. As far as Barbara Boxer is concerned, observers always say she’s vulnerable and she ends up winning handily every time. In Connecticut it is difficult to see how Democratic nominee Richard Blumenthal loses, from the perspective of February.
An experienced analyst must add: Anything can happen, and a tsunami could elect little known candidates in November. But as far as I can see, there isn’t a stable full of appealing, surprise GOP candidates such as Scott Brown out and about for 2010—at least not yet. Republicans may not achieve their Senate goal in 2010, but as the Crystal Ball pointed out last fall, there are about twice as many Democrats defending their seats in 2012 and 2014 combined (43) as the Republicans (a mere 22 in those two elections). The odds favor the reestablishment of a Republican majority in the Senate before too long—almost certainly in 2014 if President Obama is elected to a second term and has his “sixth year itch”.
