October 24, 2020
The election, real life Robocop, algae, NYT's balance sheet, an AI-generated movie
Welcome to the Weekend Reccs. Today’s world is curious and cacophonous. This newsletter delivers an eclectic sample of some of the best things to read, watch, and ponder over your weekend. There’s a lot of economics and politics, but there is also so much more.
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Hi friends,
This is a long one. This issue is primarily focused on the election as we gear up for the last 10 days, but WOW it was a good week for interesting finds. For those feeling electioned-out, start at “Robocop” below for non-electoral items. If you find something below interesting please forward this to your friends!
The Weekend Reccs
Proud Partner Moment!!! Although neither she nor the book was mentioned by name (c’mon, folks!), The Atlantic published a long piece on the research Caroline and Professor Skocpol highlighted in chapter 13 of their book Upending American Politics.
Whoop-de-doo! What does it all mean, Basil? Imagine it is election night and the AP has called Rhode Island and Virginia for Biden very early in the night. How much should that change your expectations of the race? You can explore that scenario and play with your own with this tool from FiveThirtyEight.
I believe the most useful way to think about this tool is in the way I just presented it — in terms of a state (or set of states) being called. When you select, say, FL for Biden the model incorporates all the info that Biden winning FL brings to bear into the rest of the states (perhaps: no polling error, demographics in states similar to Florida going for Biden, etc.). And so it mimics if on election night Biden won FL but we knew nothing else about any other states. Thus you want to play with the model as though each state you’ve selected is revealed information.
An important public service announcement: we almost certainly won’t know who won on election night, and that is okay, and we need to be able to live with that. It could very well takes weeks to sort out the winner due to mail-in voting.
There are perhaps two scenarios where we may know who wins on election night: (1) there has been a decently-sized polling miss that goes in favor of Biden in FL or (2) Biden performs at his polls or better in AZ (≥D+4). In these two cases either state could be called November 3rd, and in those scenarios winning the electoral college remains mathematically possible for Trump, but the revealed information moves it into a realm where, statistically, one could feel compelled to call the race. There are few (if any) worlds that are feasibly possible where we could gain enough information on election night to call it for Trump statistically or mathematically.
The other battleground states fall into one of three buckets:
(1) will be too close to call in any probable world and we have to wait for mail-in votes to be counted (NC, OH)
(2) provide too little information when the expected candidate wins and/or would be too close to call in a situation where they would provide a lot of information (NV, MN, IA, TX, GA)
(3) do not start to process ballots until Election Day or the day before (PA, MI, WI).
There will be a lot of swings in the vote counts due to mail-in votes and in-person votes being tabulated at different paces. Don’t read too much into every little swing on election night.
Money Matters: I think most people think about campaign finances wrong. Most people seem to point at the amount of money a candidate raised over the whole campaign. This conveys a small important information about candidate quality and enthusiasm (if raised among candidates’ electorate).
Otherwise, it seems to me the level of information gained from total raised is completely swamped by the combined informational value of polling averages and cash on hand. Why? Because spent money has been spent. Maybe it went to setting up a strong ground game and this will take some time to see in the polls, sure. But most likely it went to ads, to cover baked-in fixed costs, to do stuff that affected the race in the past. Therefore if that doesn’t show up in the polling average in, say, a month, it probably will not have a large impact.
Now take my alternative of cash on hand and the polling average. The cash on hand is what you have to potential turn dollars into votes, and your polling average is where you stand.
So, if, say, you were behind by ~10 points nationally and your opponent had almost three times more cash on hand than you, you should be worried.
Less money, more problems: But wait! What if you also were a self-reported billionaire businessman who said he would fund his own campaign if needed?
Then you should start opening the pocketbook!
Has Trump done so? No. He has put in $8000 of a $600,000,000 campaign.
If a slew of high-quality pollsters (Siena/NYT, Marist, Monmouth, SurveyUSA, Fox News, etc.) have you down this far in battleground states and you had the money, you’d be spending it, not lagging in ad buys (if paywalled, see Charts of the Week below).
So we can conclude one of three things here (if we hadn’t already concluded these things a long time ago):
Donald Trump is so isolated from reality he doesn’t realize how bad of a position he is in (unlikely, he drops verbal hints at rallies and he has a campaign staff who project confidence on-air but are clearly worried)
Donald Trump is not as wealthy as he claims (to close the gap would cost him less than 4% of his purported wealth, similar to asking an average American to spend $27,000 for one’s own campaign to be President, not nothing, but really not a large lift given the payoff)
Donald Trump does not care about being President, and this has always been about building his brand and wealth through favorable regulations and selling influence and diverting taxpayer dollars to his own businesses.
Nothing new under the sun: Sports are not “becoming politicized” for the first time. They have been used as venues for political discourse since the early days of professional sports. Over 100 years ago, it was baseball and women’s suffrage.
A different type of election forecast: I wrote the following for this issue. After writing it, I think the real story here is that 10-day forecasts seem to be fake and all weather services just hedge their bets by saying 20% chance of rain.
The literature is not settled on the issue, but there is some evidence that turnout is dampened by adverse weather. Usually, Democrats are less likely to vote absentee, so bad weather in key areas is typically a boon for Republicans.
However, it is 2020, so nothing is normal. This year the roles are flipped and data from Secretaries of State across the country suggests Democrats to have banked a large share of their votes while Trump has largely been messaging in favor of Election Day voting.
This means that, while it will almost certainly be too small of a difference to tilt the election, it is at least interesting to look at the weather forecast in critical areas for the GOP. While many people think these are rural (and the majority of Trump’s votes in 2016 did come from rural areas), those that are probably consequential in terms of weather are urban (more votes are localized in one area). To underline this point, in 2016 10% of Donald Trump’s PA votes came from Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) by itself. Another 20% or so came from the 30 mile radius around Philadelphia.
Forecasts 11 days out (I am writing this on Friday) are not perfect but allegedly they’re decent. Here may be a weird corner case where I’d like weather forecasts to be more accurate, though I have to say that I stand behind my earlier claims that accurate forecasts would be mostly useless because I believe nobody should change their behavior based on this information—this is just for fun.
Without further ado, probability of rain in select cities in battleground states:
0% - Phoenix
20% - Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Tampa, Orlando, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Atlanta, Raleigh, Charlotte, Minneapolis
30% - Miami (FL)
The State of State Governments: State governments are incredibly important, especially in a Census year. Here’s what may come out of 2020.
Robocop: Atlanta police arrested a murder suspect with a drone and put the video on Facebook. It is exceptionally strange to watch. From where I sit:
Pros: No officers/SWAT with nervous trigger fingers (or put in a possibly dangerous situation, for that matter).
Cons: This is the first horseman of a very frightening dystopia.
I speak for the algae: A recurring theme in this newsletter is that digital publishing is still in its adolescence, and that’s exciting! We don’t really know what great digital publishing looks like, and there are many experiments playing out in real time. Parametric Press is one of the more interesting players trying to mature the field rapidly. Here is a great piece they wrote about why planting trees is not a sufficient response to climate change (see very good explanatory simulation ~1/3rd down).
Quick Links:
How the New York Times took a rotten balance sheet and transformed into a thriving media company
Papyri show that fighting with friends is timeless
As I’ve said before, school is a form of childcare and childcare is good for the economy
Carl Sagan explains an early attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life
How do you get cocaine across the Atlantic? In a submarine.
It’s not so bad that young adults are living with their parents.
Lagniappe
Among Us has taken the world by storm. If you’ve played or heard about it and thought it was neat, I recommend looking into social deduction board games. These include widely popular titles such as Secret Hitler and One Night Ultimate Werewolf as well as some less popular ones such as Avalon and Coup. For those not very in to board games, Skull (also called Skull & Roses) is a very accessible card game with rounds lasting mere minutes. It is more about bluffing than about social deduction, but I’d call it adjacent to the genre. You can buy a beautiful version such as this one or play it with the same rules but substituting a regular deck of cards (say, with Aces or Aces and Kings being roses). A good way to pass the sleepy early evening of Thanksgiving!
(Somewhat electoral) Graph(s) of the week
[New York Times] This is not a good pattern for a struggling campaign.
[Opportunity Insights via Brookings] It has been said many times but I’ll say it again: averages obscure heterogeneity
[Economist] Peaceful transfers of power have been on many folks’ minds. As it turns out, peaceful transfers of power are quite rare in recent history. (That doesn’t mean we should be less vigilant.)
And that’s a wrap for this week. I’d say 50/50 on whether I’ll be sending out an issue next week as I’ll be busy volunteering for the election. If you don’t hear from me — see you on the other side!
Your friend,
Harrison