Unlikely Voter

It’s all over. The Internet’s dying. They’ve been screaming for a year and a half that in order to Save the Internet, we needed to keep it heavily regulated. Today is the test.

Let me be clear: today is a day that has been a year and a half in the making. In crafting the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, Chairman Ajit Pai and the FCC team have sought to make it an airtight process. They’ve taken their time, held hearings, taken many public comments, dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t’. Pai does not want this one thrown out of court on a technicality.

So it’s taken about a year and a half since Donald Trump took office, for this key piece of Barack Obama-era regulation to be dismantled fully. But finally, no more will the Internet be subject to price and content controls according to the whims of the FCC.

“What, price and content controls?” you may be asking. “I thought this was about throttling and discrimination.” LOL, no, as the kids say online. The Obama-era regulations were about regulating the Internet the same way we regulate telegraphs and telephones. And yes, kids, Title II of the Communications Act includes both.

In fact, price controls are one of the central elements of Title II (47 USC 201). Except for government. Government is allowed to get free bennies from Title II-regulated carriers, but that’s it (47 USC 210).

Title II would have the government involved in micromanaging the valuation of infrastructure investments in the Internet (47 USC 213).

And get this? Do you want more Internet service? Too bad: Title II bans any building of new lines without regulatory approval (47 USC 214). Imagine government slowing down the Internet from rolling out faster and better to more people!

And yes, content controls are there. Were you a fan of the Communications Decency Act, that tried to regulate obscenity off of the Internet? Well, Title II Reclassification put the Internet under control of 47 USC 223, which bans obscenity over covered carriers. Further, screening of offensive material is part of the law at 47 USC 230.

Title II was a disaster if you want an open and free Internet, innovating for the benefit of all. Today, the day the Internet is freed of Title II, is a good day for everyone who likes an open Internet.

Did Darrell Issa quit just in time? By counting the votes in California, we can see if there’s at least a blue wave in that state, even if nowhere else.

I said yesterday that there were three keys to the race. Let’s see how each one fared.

First, I said that both parties needed to keep from splitting the vote too much, or else they’d risk not advancing any candidates to November. It turns out the Democrats were split pretty evenly, with three candidates at 12, 16, and 17% as of this writing, with 83% of precincts in. However the Republicans were so concentrated that it didn’t matter. The top GOP candidates were at 26% and 9% as of this writing.

Second, it mattered whether this was a referendum on Issa, or on Trump. Republican Diane Harkey, the top vote getter, was endorsed by both GOP county parties in San Diego and Orange, Darrell Issa, and other local members of Congress. It does not appear that change from Issa was the motivating factor here.

Third, it mattered whether this was a wave election, with Democrats motivated (to beat Trump), and Republicans depressed (because of Trump). As of now, the answer appears to be yes. As of this writing, total Republican votes amount to 53,343. Democrats, led by Mike Levin, add up to 55,927.

Conclusion: Even if most of the country might not be seeing a wave, California is. Trump is toxic there, even with a number of Republicans. California small-government conservatism is incompatible with Trump’s big-government cronyism.

To be honest, they’re a bit concerned with the perceived white nationalism as well. When you grow up with people with names like Tran and Hernandez, as you do if you grow up in that part of California, Trump’s crowds looking out for White America just don’t sound right.

With Darrell Issa retiring in California, sixteen candidates are on the ballot today fighting to see who will be the top two to advance to November. Hollywood reality TV comes to San Diego county politics.

The 49th District is primarily in northern San Diego county, including the city of Oceanside, but it also straddles the county line, reaching into Orange County to the north. San Diego and Orange are of course the most Republican-friendly large counties in the state, with Orange County in particular being well known for a traditional small-government, Don’t-Tread-On-Me conservative libertarianism, aptly led by the Orange County Register editorial line.

The 49th district in particular also includes Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, one of the major Marine Corps bases, and the home of Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, better known as the west coast boot camp. That adds to the unique flavor of the district, as anyone who wins there needs to be able to reach out to the Marine family population in the district.

All that said, Democrats see themselves as having a great opportunity to flip the 49th district. Donald Trump lost Orange County in 2016 as his big-government populist message tuned for the upper midwest flopped hard.

Of the candidates running, there are four Republicans and four Democrats seen as the most credible contenders to make it out of the June 5 jungle primary. Together, they have spent 15.3 million dollars, making it one of the most expensive House primaries ever. That’s how hungry the Democrats and Republicans are, because this seat is a core battleground for 2018 and could swing the majority.

Issa himself barely hung on in the Trump storm, winning versus Democrat Doug Applegate 50.3-49.7, about 1600 votes, in 2016. This may be a key reason he’s chosen to retire this year. This is a reason that open seats are more competitive: incumbents sometimes retire rather than fight hard for re-election. Before Trump he tended to win going away: 60-40 in 2014, 58-42 in 2012.

So these are the keys to the race:

• Can the Democrats and Republicans avoid splitting their votes so badly, that one party gets both of the top two seats? This is a jungle primary. The top two vote getters, regardless of party affiliation, will advance to November. Four major Democrats could easily split at 13% each, while four major Republicans plus four minor Republicans could do even worse.
• Is this a referendum on Donald Trump, or a referendum on Darrell Issa? Issa has opposed Trump on key policies, including the partial repeal of the State And Local Tax deduction, and Trump isn’t even on the ballot.
• Will this be a wave election, in which Democrat turnout is magnified, while Republican turnout is depressed?

The last point may be most important. If the votes for Democrats end up above the total votes for Republicans, then the Republicans are definitely at risk of losing the seat. But if this election reverts back to the old normal, without Trump on the ballot, then Republicans will have very little to worry about here in November.

Political people love the illusion of accuracy. Political pollsters and analysts should not feed into that by feigning precision that does not exist.

If we’re going to call it ‘scientific polling,’ and we do every time some random Internet survey is circulated that doesn’t follow the conventions of scientific polling, then the way we write about polling must also be scientific.

An oft-overlooked concept in scientific reporting is “significant figures.” Significant figures describe writing a number to communicate how accurately we know what that number is. Sound complicated? Let me give an example.

Let’s say we need to measure a strip of paper to do an experiment. Our ruler is marked in inches and tenths of an inch. We measure the paper and we see that the paper goes somewhere just past the mark for 1.4. So, we say “1.4.” That measurement has two significant figures. It doesn’t have three or four, because we can’t say for sure if it’s 1.41, or 1.42, or 1.405. It’s just 1.4.

Individual polls don’t need to use significant figures. Instead they tell us precisely what the margin of error is. They’ll tell us that Donald Trump is running at a 44.5% approval rating, with a margin of error of 4.

To bring that back to the ruler, it would be like saying the piece of paper was 1.405 inches long, with a margin of error of 0.02 inches. As you can see, that “0.005” is virtually meaningless, because the margin of error dwarfs it.

Significant figures carry over even when you do math. If you take that 1.4 inches and divide by 8, the answer isn’t 0.175 inches. The answer is 0.18. You still only have two significant figures. Dividing by 8 does not make your data somehow more precise than it was to start with.

This carries over to poll averages. You can’t take 10 polls with margins of error of 3, 4, 5, 2, and 6.4, average them, and get something that’s accurate to one decimal place. That’s just not the way it works, and to write a poll average with a decimal place misleads anyone reading it.

You just can’t say that Donald Trump has 44.3% approval, or that his net approval is -11.4, when you’re working with margins of error well above 1.

It may be case that a poll average is more accurate than any given poll. But it is not more precise than the polls that were used to make it. It can’t be, it won’t be, and it shouldn’t be written as though it were.

People love general election matchup polling. For some it’s the ultimate way to decide which candidate is the best choice to win a primary. But even if that’s true, it is possible to run such polls too soon.

Right now, it’s too soon to poll the 2016 Presidential race.

One thing Barack Obama has done very, very well for Democrats is turn out voters. Some Democrats have also learned winning models from his campaigns, including Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.

Michigan Democrats want to do the same, but so far the polls aren’t agreeing with them.

The question always asked about third parties is: did they steal the election? It gets very easy to assume that Libertarians would vote Republican, Greens would vote Democrat, and so third parties flip the results.

Turnout suggests that may not be the case for Robert Sarvis in Virginia.

For a long time, I was placing myself in the fringe for coming out and questioning Public Policy Polling. Having picked Obama when Obama managed to win was supposed to make them untouchable, no matter how many red flags I saw.

But as with Zogby in 1992, coincidentally being right does not make bad polling fundamentally sound. So I guess it’s now become acceptable, in the post-Obama political age, to begin questioning PPP.

According to Public Policy Polling, their polling predicted the recall of Angela Giron in Colorado Senate District 3. They then chose not to release the results.

Whether we believe them or not, this doesn’t speak well of the firm.

New York Magazine was trying to be sympathetic to the popular polling figures on its own side of the political, but let out a secret in the process: Public Policy Polling cooked the books all along.

Obi-Wan: Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil.

Anakin Skywalker: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.

Obi-Wan: Well, then you are lost.

Hey look, a post!

While I’m sure everyone involved is so proud of Vanderbilt’s data filtering app for its recent poll of Tennessee showing Barack Obama still losing in one of the two states he ran behind John Kerry in, but the problem is that the details are made less transparent.

What a shame.

For those who doubt or may have forgotten the difference between Registered Voter and Likely Voter polling for some polls, here’s a chart of every CNN/Opinion Research Generic Ballot poll from 2010, showing Republican lead or deficit per poll, with the RV and LV polls separated.

Clear difference, I’d say.