Welcome to the Weekend Reccs by Harrison Satcher. This newsletter delivers a lovingly-tailored collection of thought-provoking goodness for your Sunday. Inside you’ll find: (1) a weekly column on economics, politics, or something unexpected, (2) a curated list of links for your enjoyment, (3) a lagniappe (because everyone deserves lagniappe), and (4) a collection of interesting, relevant charts. Grab a coffee and enjoy your morning.
New here? Be sure to subscribe to join the community and never miss an issue. If you enjoy what you read, please forward it to your friends.
The links marked with asterisks (*) are the recommended reads.
The Long Read: Why every seat matters
Takeaway: We have little information about what will happen in Georgia on Tuesday but there is a real possibility of a Warnock/Perdue win. Being a big-tent party, this outcome still matters for Democrats and can provide critical flexibility compared to losing both seats.
The state of play
On Tuesday, Georgians will vote in two runoff Senate elections that will determine control of the chamber.
As of Saturday, 38.8% of Georgian voters have voted in the runoff election. We have received only these two recent, high-quality polls and they suggest the races are, in essence, tied.
In the absence of more robust polling data, we would usually rely on historical data and alternative data sources. However, since US Senate elections are administered by states, they are subject to fifty different sets of procedures, and only two states — Louisiana and Georgia — hold runoff elections if no candidate reaches a majority.†
Therefore, runoff election data are sparse. Additionally, this year is very different from runoffs of yesteryear. Unlike in other runoffs, control of the Senate is in play and we’ve just come off an incredibly contentious, high-turnout general election.
Yet, imprecise numbers are better than no numbers so long as we are careful not to read too far into them.
What the numbers show so far is that we have already achieved record-breaking turnout numbers before even taking into account Election Day (!), and that an unimaginably high number of registered voters (~75%) told SurveyUSA they are definitely going to vote or have voted. Among those not voting, Republicans said their top reason was that the election system is rigged, whereas Democrats said they did not have enough time.
It is hard to forecast how much Trump’s messaging and events in the next few days will play into those numbers, but I’d rather try to convince voters to make time to vote than to try to backtrack on basically the only thing I’ve been talking about for the last two months.
These signs are encouraging to Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who would not be considered favorites if these runoffs looked typical. Ossoff trailed Perdue by ~88,000 votes in November, and all Democrats (including Raphael Warnock) trailed all Republicans (including Kelly Loeffler) in the other race by ~48,000 votes. Democrats cannot just have a repeat of the coalition that delivered Biden his win in Georgia, they need to improve upon it.
Perhaps the only semi-regular trend we’ve seen in the polling is Warnock running ~1.5 points ahead of Ossoff. Given how close this race appears, this leads us to a very real possibility that Warnock could win and Ossoff could lose, an outcome that seems to be pretty absent in the popular imagination these days.
Of course this would be a terrible loss for Democrats and they should be focused on winning both seats. However we should be mindful that winning even one seat is much better than losing both, and we should not treat a loss of the majority as the only thing that matters.
The majority is powerful
These races are getting so much media attention because control of the majority is really important.
Perhaps the most useful power given to the majority party is the ability to determine when votes will occur on most legislation and nominations. This power rests on the precedent (not on a standing rule or Constitutional authority) of the majority leader receiving priority of recognition on the Senate floor. This power is why Merrick Garland did not get a vote despite being nominated 293 days before a new Senate was sworn in, whereas Amy Coney Barrett did get a vote.
Of course, the majority also enjoys other benefits, including the power to pass legislation, but this is not conferred upon the majority automatically and (practically) irrevocably the same way that priority of recognition is. Voting on legislation is an active process, requiring a half-plus-one threshold for each vote.
It is, of course, not given that this will happen on every vote.
Senators do break ranks
It is not a given because senators do in fact break with their party. In recent memory this perhaps this most prominently was demonstrated when John McCain stopped the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and when Mitt Romney found Donald Trump guilty of abuse of power.
But it happens quite often, typically on fairly banal motions and legislation. This can be seen perhaps most clearly using ideological scoring tools such as DW-Nominate scores. These scores, while imperfect measures, illustrate an important point: while Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are more conservative than Democrats on economic issues, they vote consistently enough with the liberal position to be wholly separate from the rest of the GOP. They each break with their party often.
The trouble with measures like these — apart from undertaking the difficult task of assigning nuanced policy issues positions on an ideological dichotomy — is that they take the infinitely-dimensioned space of policy preferences and reduce it to two (or one) dimensions.
What is worse is that the varied dimensions of this space matter more to Democrats because they are inherently a big tent party. Democratic voters span a wide range of demographics and ideological interests, and therefore have a wide range of policy preferences. This presents a unique difficulty in trying to appeal to the different factions within the party but it also allows Democrats to find wins with some supporters across many smaller issues.
As such, there are a wide number of issues where Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski overlap with segments of the Democratic Party. Yet Murkowski and Collins are different people with different views, and Alaska and Maine are different places with different types of voters. So while there may be some overlap with each, that is not to say that that area of overlap is the same.
To illustrate this, we could pretend the Democratic Party has eight bills (or nominees) it wishes to pass including: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H. It could be the case that Collins supports A, B, C while Murkowski supports C, D, and E. Neither support F, G, or H. For simplicity, all Democrats support all eight and hold the Vice Presidency.
In a world where each party has 50 seats all eight would pass with the Vice President breaking the tie.
In a 49-51 world, A, B, C, D, and E all are passed, as they get either Murkowski OR Collins to join them.
In a 48-52 world only C would be passed, as the 48 Democrats get both Murkowski AND Collins to join them.
In this world, going from 49 to 48 Democrats caused the number of passed bills to drop from five to just one. That’s a huge difference.
Is this over-stylized and over-simplified? 100%.
Is it the case that Murkowski and Collins probably have more overlap with each other than this example suggests? Of course.
Will it be almost impossible to get really big victories out of the Senate with 49-51? Yes; Democrats would still be in the minority.
But it is undeniable that a majority is not all that matters for practical policymaking, for nominations, and more. Forty-nine seats is much more than just one seat short of the majority both for the policy interests and long-term prospects of the Democratic Party.
—
†By 2022, two other states — Maine and Alaska (!) — will be using ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to rank their preferences and initiates automatic runoffs using those preferences if no candidate reaches a majority.
The Links
A matter of time* This article from April covers an opposing theory to the conception of a deterministic universe using intuitionism.
Taking stock ($)* A great writeup on why the market boomed this year despite the tragedy of the pandemic. It’s important to recognize that markets are amoral. We can bring our morals to how we function within them or wish to intervene in them, but they are purely mechanical processes on their own.
Hospital charges ($)* I was so distracted by TWO weird parts of this article that I could not even think about the substantive implications of the policy.
First, the penalty is $300 per day, per hospital? We’re talking about an industry that does $1,000,000,000,000 in revenues each year and the max fee if nobody complied ever would be just .0657% of that? I mean look, I don’t know anything about running a hospital but it seems to me that if this is such a contentious issue that will hurt my bottom-line it would be way easier to just pay the penalty and lose 0.07 cents out of every dollar I make?
Second:
Hospital groups say it will be costly for them to prepare the information required to comply with the new rules. Doing so, they said in their lawsuit, would necessitate spreadsheets with hundreds of thousands of columns, so large that they could crash most standard computer systems.
…we trust y’all with our medical information but you don’t know how to set up a database unless it is in Excel…still?
Hard-hitting investigative journalism on the bucatini shortage of 2020.* (s/o Jon Satcher)
Content content* Explore average happiness on Twitter each day. This past year was particularly bad, but at least the Christmas spirit wasn’t squashed?
Lagniappe
Something a bit different today — a cooking tip.
You can make incredible asparagus easily with a process J. Kenji López-Alt calls microsteaming.
After removing the asparagus’ bases, place on a microwave-safe plate and season with salt and pepper. Cover with three wet-to-the-point-of-almost-dripping paper towels (or substitute in a dish towel that retains water). Microwave on high for 1.5 to 3 minutes, depending on microwave strength and asparagus diameter. Be wary of the hot plate and towel. Enjoy.
Graph(s) of the week
[WSJ] Some personal finance advice — put money into index funds as soon as you can, add more regularly, stay the course. Do not try to time it — the market is very often at all-time highs. That is literally how things grow, by pushing past their all-time highs. Missing out on specific days can be surprisingly damaging.
[u/teddyterminal] A sharp move away from Fox News by redditors who are in the “Conservative” subreddit.
Your friend,
Harrison