Beyond Red & Blue

Not all taxpayers are equal at town meeting

The US Court of Appeals has ruled that people who pay property taxes to a town but are not registered to vote there do not have a constitutional right to speak at town meeting. The lawsuit in question, reported on by B.J. Roche in the summer issue of CommonWealth, was filed by Miriam and Thomas Curnin against the town of Egremont after that western Mass. community gave its town meeting moderator "the discretion to determine whether non-voters who wish to speak may do so." The Curnins, who own 120 acres of land in Egremont but are registered to vote in Larchmont, New York, say they were prevented on three times from "speaking on issues important to them as taxpayers," including a sewer project, a zoning law change, and a $350,000 expenditure on a fire truck.

Yesterday the circuit court disagreed:

...the town meeting is a legislative body in deliberation. The Curnins are not registered to vote in Egremont and therefore are not town meeting legislators. The First Amendment does not give non-legislators the right to speak at meetings of deliberative legislative bodies, regardless of whether they own property or pay taxes.

The entire decision is here; thanks to the Web site How Appealing for pointing it out.

Hillary's gay "plant"

There's a kerfuffle over the fact that one of the just plain folks allowed to question the Republican candidates at last night's debate was actually connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign. As the Politico's Kenneth Vogel reports: "The retired general who asked about gays and lesbians serving in the military at the CNN/YouTube Republican debate on Wednesday is a co-chairman of Hillary Rodham Clinton's National Military Veterans group."

Well, why not have a debate in which representatives from each campaign ask the other candidates questions? People who volunteer for presidential candidates tend to be well-informed, and they can't possibly be more fixated on horse-race strategy and "gotcha!" questions than the mainstream press is. Is the press making a big deal over Hillary's "plant" in the audience because they're protecting their turf?

By the way, Kerr asked a question that doesn't seem out of bounds: “Why [do] you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians?” And I really doubt that the Clinton campaign, which is trying not to seem too liberal to win in November, planted this particular question.

Jesse Jackson joins the (mapping) fun

More fun with past presidential primaries below. This map is a mash-up of the 1988 and 1992 Democratic primaries, showing the strongholds of Jesse Jackson in 1988 (where he won at least one-third of the vote, above his nationwide primary total of 29 percent) and of Bill Clinton in 1992 (where he won a majority of the vote).

Now, there are all kinds of caveats with the available data. There were different candidates running in different states in the same year, depending on how late it was in the season (for example, whether the election was before or after Paul Tsongas withdrew from the race). But I picked Jesse Jackson rather than nominee for the baseline in 1988 because Jackson's strength was relatively constant through the season, while Dukakis's share of the vote steadily rose as other candidates dropped out. Similarly, in 1992, the anti-Clinton vote generally went to Tsongas at the beginning of the season and Jerry Brown later own, but certain states including California refused to give Bubba a majority even after he had obviously nailed down the nomination. So I'm not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here. An accumulation of imperfect data (I'm hoping to factor in other years for still another map) does yield some idea of how the Democratic primary electorate has differed from state to state and from county to county.

My guess is that Hillary Clinton needs to do best in the blue counties -- those that gave few votes to Jackson but went strongly for Bill Clinton. And Barack Obama needs to do best in the orange counties -- those where Jackson ran strongly but where there was some doubt over Bill Clinton. The red counties, which tend to be inner cities or rural counties with a strong black population, will test whether Obama can get any traction with minority voters. The green counties tend to be socially liberal but wary of old-fashioned economic liberalism. They will show whether Hillary Clinton can make inroads among voters who were cool toward Bill.

(NOTE: Because county-by-county data is hard to find or nonexistent for caucus states, I used statewide totals to color all counties within. Jackson got more than a third of the vote in both Alaska and Hawaii; Clinton got a majority of the vote in Hawaii.)

Below is a close-up of the Northeast Corridor. Note that Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens are in "Obama orange"; he needs to be at least competitive there, even though this is Hillary's home turf. (Then again, downstate Illinois should be prime Clinton territory, and that's Obama's home turf.) The Bronx -- as well as Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and much of New Jersey -- may be a firewall for Hillary if she matches Bill's inner-city appeal.

Finally, here's a close-up of the Atlanta area, which is rather interesting. Fulton County, which includes Atlanta itself, went strongly for Jackson and Clinton. Next-door DeKalb County seems to like iconoclasts, giving relatively strong votes to both Jesse Jackson and Paul Tsongas (if Obama can't win here, I don't see how he can win anywhere). Cobb and Gwinnett counties, solidly Republican counties that extend a little farther from the city, are green, meaning they shrank from the "I feel your pain" rhetoric of Jackson and Clinton and preferred "cooler" candidates. And the exurbs are blue, meaning they liked Southern moderates (Al Gore in 1988, Clinton in 1992).

South Carolina data is sketchier, since it held caucuses in 1988, but Obama probably can't afford to lose the counties where Tsongas had credible showings in 1992: Beaufort (home of the Hilton Head resort), Marion, and Pickens (home of Clemson University).

If not for Michigan...

Massachusetts would be dead last in job creation from 2001 to 2006. In fact, the Bay State is still 100,000 jobs short of its 2001 level, which was the peak of the last business cycle. But not all is bleak: Massachusetts still has the country's best-educated workforce and scores near the top in productivity.

These are among the highlights of MassINC's latest study, Mass Jobs: Meeting the Challenges of a Shifting Economy. You can download the complete report here. Also check out the Boston Globe's editorial "A Niche Economy," and listen to WBUR's interview with MassINC director of research Dana Ansel.

Primary results for Clinton! (Bill, that is)

Expect a lot more data from past presidential primaries as we get closer to Iowa and New Hampshire, but here is a relatively simple map. It shows where Bill Clinton got a majority of the vote in 1992 against Jerry Brown, Paul Tsongas, and other contenders for the Democratic nomination. This isn't a totally level playing field, since Tsongas dropped out of the race before major primaries including California, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. But it is safe to say that he did best in the South and ran strongly in both rural areas and inner cities. The suburbs were shakier for him; he fell short of 50 percent in affluent and better-educated areas near Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, and Detroit, among other major cities. (NOTE: Because county-by-county data is hard to find or nonexistent for caucus states, I used statewide totals to color all counties within. Clinton got a majority of the vote in two caucus states, Hawaii and Virginia. He fell short in the others, including Alaska.)

Here is the "cleaner" version of the map:

  Here is the same map with county lines; click on it for a larger view.

 

The geography of cremation

This map is a little macabre, but the extent of the regional differences is surprising to me. In September, the Cremation Association of North America published a report in which it estimated that a record 33.53 percent of all deaths in the US "resulted" in cremation. (In 1990, the rate was only 17 percent.) But as seen on the map below, the state-level rates vary widely, from 10.9 percent in Mississippi (about where the US as a whole was in 1981) to 66.9 percent in Hawaii. Religious attitudes probably account for much of the difference; cremation rates are relatively low in the Southern Bible Belt (and in Mormon Utah, where the rate is 23 percent) and high in Western states where churchgoing is less frequent.

The CANA predicts continued growth, but there may be a ceiling to the popularity of cremation. According to a chart in the same report, the cremation rate hit 70 percent in Great Britain in 1992, but it's leveled off since then and is only at 72 percent now.

Bully for partisanship!

Matthew Yglesias summarizes the advantages of a highly partisan political atmosphere. Back in the days of Dixiecrats and Rockefeller Republicans, when many candidates completely disagreed with their own parties' platforms, you never knew what you were voting for:

So while pundits may not like it when the parties draw clear distinctions, it seems to me that it's clearly preferable for the voters to be put in a situation where they feel like they understand the stakes and there's a relationship between votes cast and policy outcomes.

This is a good point, and one that resonates in Massachusetts, where conservative Democrats often ran against liberal Republicans as late as the 1980s. But one problem that Ygelsias neglects to mention in his post is that clear party divisions can lead to more uncontested elections, as each party's label becomes toxic in different parts of the country. Here in the Bay State, it's possible that voters are happy with their all-Democratic congressional delegation and 80 percent Democratic legislature because their representatives vote in predictably liberal ways. But it's hard to be certain when the Republican Party concludes that it's futile to even offer an alternative in most elections.

Lott skips out

Republican Trent Lott has announced plans to leave the US Senate by January, only a year into the six-year term he successfully sought from voters in 2006. Lott has no health problems that have been made public, and aides have said only that he is seeking "other opportunities." The New York Times speculates on one reason for the early departure:

By resigning before the end of the year, Mr. Lott would beat the effective date for new ethics rules that double to two years the amount of time a former public official must wait before he can join a firm to lobby his former colleagues. The new rule applies to those who leave office “on or after” Dec. 31.

Lott's successor, who will be appointed early next year by Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, will have several months to enjoy the benefits of incumbency before facing voters in a special election in the fall. The new senator will join 10 11 others who assumed office through appointments or special elections: Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Dianne Feinstein of California, Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.

Another Republican congressional leader, Rep. Dennis Hastert, also recently announced that he's changed his mind about serving out the term he sought from voters. And in Massachusetts, several state legislators have discovered better things to do since winning election last fall.

The electability illusion

In Iowa, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are claiming to be the more "electable" Democrat in a general election. But a mash-up of polls at RealClearPolitics suggests that it makes little difference who gets nominated. RCP posts averages of the six most recent polls in each possible head-to-head contest (Clinton vs. Guiliani, Obama vs. Romney, etc.). As of today, Clinton beats Rudy Guiliani by 2.7 points, and Obama beats him by 2.0 points. If the nominee is Mitt Romney, then Clinton wins by 10.0 points and Obama wins by 10.5 points. Against Fred Thompson, it's Clinton by 7.2 points and Obama by 8.7 points. And against John McCain, Clinton is ahead by 2.0 points and Obama wins by 3.6 points.

In fact, none of the candidates (in either party) move up or down much when tested against different opponents. If Clinton and Obama seem to do better against Romney than other Republicans, it's only because the undecided vote goes up on those match-ups; neither Democrat cracks 50 percent against anyone. The only significant differences I can find among all 12 match-ups is that John Edwards seems more electable than Clinton if the opponent is Romney (beating him by 15 points rather than 10 points) and that Giuliani seems more electable than Romney if the opponent is Edwards (tying him rather than losing by 15 points).

The upshot is that party divisions in presidential politics may be so deep that the names on the ballot are of little consequence.

UPDATE: Zogby has released new polls today indicating that Obama and Edwards would beat the leading Republican candidates but that Clinton would lose to them. But these could be outlier polls, and the results may be skewed a bit by the unusually high numbers of undecided voters. (No candidate gets more than 47 percent in any of Zogby's 16 different match-ups.)

Catholic cities aren't liberal?

The New York Times' City Room blog is inviting readers to "Name America's Most Liberal City," in response to Rudy Giuliani's campaign commerical giving the title to the Big Apple. Boston gets a couple of shout-outs, but Cambridge is mentioned more often. I offer no answer, maybe because I was struck by this non sequitur in blogger Sewall Chan's argument that New York might not be on the far left:

But on social issues — including identity rights, gay rights and abortion rights — the city is less predictably liberal, Dr. Mollenkopf said. About 45 percent of the city’s residents are Roman Catholic, including about 15 percent of the black population. A large majority of the city’s Latino population is Catholic, at least nominally. Other segments of the population — like the large population of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn — are also socially conservative.

I don't see how the percentage of the city that's Catholic is relevant when every major poll that I've seen for years indicates that, on average, Catholics are no more conservative (or liberal) than the electorate as a whole. According to CNN, Catholics voted for George Bush over John Kerry by a 52-47 margin in 2004, which was statistically insignificant from the 51-48 margin by which he won the election (and far his 59-40 margin among Protestants). Also according to CNN, Al Gore beat Bush by a 50-47 margin among Catholics, which was slightly better than Gore's performance overall. And a 2003 CBS News poll indicated that Catholics have no particular slant on the issue of abortion:

Catholics and Protestants in the survey held roughly the same views on the issue. 36% of Catholics believe abortion should be generally available, and 34% of Protestants agree. 27% of Catholics think abortion should not be permitted, and 24% of Protestants believe this, as well.

I know that there's a compulsion to characterize every demographic group in America as a bloc that consistently leans one way or another, but right now Catholics don't fit that model, and it's meaningless to deduce anything politically from how Catholic a city is.

Obama and the long haul

We're not taking sides at Beyond Red & Blue, and I'm not cynical enough to hope for drawn-out presidential primary campaigns just to amuse us and give us data with which to make pretty maps. But I will say that it would be nice if the Massachusetts presidential primary (which will probably happen on February 5) had some influence on the nomination process. And that won't happen if Hillary Clinton and, less likely, Rudy Giuliani nail down their respective parties' nominations in January, after contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Over the past couple of weeks, Barack Obama has rallied a bit, increasing the probability that Clinton will face serious competition next year. One reason is that he's been criticizing Clinton more directly, as John Dickerson notes on Slate.com:

In midsummer, a peppery Obama comment was big news because it was so rare. Then three weeks ago, he told the New York Times he'd be drawing more distinctions between himself and Sen. Clinton. Since then, he hasn't stopped. Obama has gone on the offense in debates, on the stump, and in interviews on topics ranging from Social Security to Iran and Iraq to giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

As Dickerson notes, the success (so far) of this strategy is a surprise to those who warned that Obama couldn't play political hardball without looking like a hypocrite, not after promising a "new kind of politics" based on optimism and on engagement with one's opponents. But I think this particular hypocrisy charge has always been a bigger deal to political reporters than to voters, who are probably more concerned that Obama wouldn't pick enough fights as president. Since mainstream reporters do not feel comfortable saying that a candidate is wrong or misguided on issues, they tend to magnify any inconsistencies (or "flip-flops") in a candidate's rhetoric and record. The idea that Obama is reneging on what could be interpreted as a promise not to attack his Democratic rivals, even on policy matters, is a good hook for campaign stories, but I doubt that he'll suffer any backlash among actual voters for negative campaigning per se.

Of course, it's another question if he carries things too far and is seen to be distorting Clinton's record or getting too personal. For the time being, however, it seems premature to call the nomination race over before it officially begins.

Smith isn't finished yet

The New York Times has a searchable list of the 5000 most common surnames in the US, based on data from the 2000 US Census. Not surprisingly, the highest names that jumped more than 10 spaces from the previous decade's ranking were Hispanic: Garcia went from 18th to eighth; Rodriguez from 22nd to ninth; and Hernandez from 29th to 15th. Other big movers included Nguyen (229th to 57th) and, for some reason, Myers (from 101st to 85th). But Smith still seems to have a firm grasp on first place: There were 881 occurences of the name for every 100,000 people, well ahead of second-place Johnson (688 per 100,000).

Currently, the most-represented name on the roster of the US Congress is Davis (seven members), which ranked seventh among the general population. Among names worn at least three members of Congress, Bishop ranks the lowest (238th) on the Census list. Does that mean a clerical-sounding name is an advantage in American politics? The most common surnames that don't appear on the congressional roster are Williams, Garcia, and Rodriguez.

Copley is among the names that seem headed for an exit from the list; it dropped from 3670th to 4973th in a single decade.

The lay of the land in New Hampshire

For all the polling that's being done in New Hampshire, we rarely get any sense of the geographical divisions in the state. A few polling organizations break the state into three or four crude regions, but much more attention has been given to gender, age and income groups, etc. The map below gives some sense of town-by-town leanings, based on the results of the past three competitive Democratic primaries here (Republican results to be discussed later), in 1992, 2000, and 2004.

Three groups of cities and towns are highlighted. In dark blue, there are the bellwethers, or the places that voted for the winner in all three primaries (Paul Tsongas, Al Gore, and John Kerry). These include four of the five communities that cast the most votes in the Democratic primary general election of 2004: Manchester, Nashua, Dover, and Derry. The fifth-biggest town in this group is Merrimack. They are concentrated in the populous southeastern part of the state.

A second group, in yellow, could be called the centrist, or pro-establishment, group of towns. They all went for the closest thing to a front-runner for the Democratic nomination at the time of the New Hampshire primary, and all did go on to win the nomination: Bill Clinton, Gore, and Kerry. This would seem to be Hillary Clinton's base for 2008. It includes Concord, the only major city not in the bellwether category, plus Rochester, Claremont, Somersworth, and Berlin. According to the Boston Globe's New Hampshire Primary Tracker, Clinton has outdone Obama in the number of visits to Concord -- but her eight appearances there have been tied by Joe Biden, who could also be characterized as an establishment candidate

The third group, in green, are communities that have backed the more reformist candidates (socially, if not economically more liberal than their rivals): Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and Howard Dean. The largest of these are Hanover, Durham, Peterborough, Plymouth, and New London. Some are university towns, and most are closer to Vermont than Massachusetts. This is logically Barack Obama's base, and he has been making a lot of appearances here (but so have John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich). His most-frequently visited city, however, is Manchester, which makes sense given that it was a kind of Waterloo for Bradley and Dean.

NOTE: Places that have cast tie votes in at least one contest were discarded from this analysis, and there were a lot of them in the sparsely populated north. Other "white" towns didn't fit any of the three major patterns discussed above.

The auto industry goes flat

Things that transport other things still make up the biggest manufacturing sector in the US, but the number of people employed in the automotive, aerospace, and shipbuilding industries is on the decline. That's the bottom line from the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of Manufactures (yes, there's no second "r"), released today. The report includes state-level data on the number of workers in each sector, which brings us to the map below:

As you can see, the transportation industry dominates in 14 states. That means automobile manufacturing in the interior states from Michigan to Alabama; shipbuilding in Maine and Virginia; and aerospace in Washington. Food processing is tops in several Southern and Farm Belt states, and the computer/electronics sector is in the lead in much of the Northeast, the West, and Florida. The chemical industry is first in New Jersey and West Virginia, and wood products are king in Oregon.

Our second map shows the biggest manufacturing sector in each state that added jobs from 2005 to 2006. Transportation doesn't look so hot here, as it shed jobs in 11 of the 14 states in which it is the dominant sector. Michigan, for example, lost nearly 13,000 transportation manufacturing jobs in that single year. It's hardly compensation that the state gained nearly 300 jobs in the "other general purpose machinery" category, the biggest sector to show any kind of an uptick. Meanwhile, the computer/electronics sector seems to flit around a lot. It added jobs in only four states (Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Vermont) where it was already the top sector, but it's on the rise in Arizona and Washington, where aerospace is losing influence.

Nationally, "fabricated metal" was the biggest sector that added manufacturing jobs; that category includes a lot of hardware goods and home-building materials. Of course, manufacturing overall is continuing to shrink as a source of jobs. Employment was up last year in only 14 states: Alaska, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.

If you ever think of a joke, don't say it

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is in trouble for dissing an industry she might not have known was in her state, as the AP reported:

She was in Washington state Tuesday for a fund raiser for a fellow Democratic governor, Chris Gregoire, who made a point of praising her state's wines.

A Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist later reported Sebelius' reply, meant as a jest.

"You should be thankful we don't make wine in Kansas," Sebelius said. "If you ever see Kansas wine, don't drink it."

But Sebelius is now drinking the Kool-Aid from her state's vineyards:

"She ... made a poor attempt at humor but says she won't do that again," [spokeswoman Nicole] Corcoran said.

Gov. Patrick had better think twice before making any jokes about seemingly inconceivable Massachusetts products. (Is there caviar from Cape Cod? Does the town of Florida really grow oranges?) Surely he's already familiar with our blueberry and cranberry wines. And our vineyards don't have corny puns in their names.

 

Congressional privilege: Hastert ignores election calendar

Yesterday we noted the large number of special elections in Massachusetts prompted by departing state legislators. But most of those legislators left for other jobs. US Rep. Dennis Hastert, who lost his speakership position when the Democrats took control of the House after last year's elections, is more brazen. In a "farewell speech" yesterday afternoon, Hastert didn't give any real reason why he couldn't complete the two-year term he sought from voters in 2006. One of his aides helpfully told CNN.com that Hastert has no health problems and no plans to do anything when he leaves Congress.

Maybe Hastert really is retiring for health reasons: He's sick over having lost the perks of being Speaker and doesn't have the stomach to tough it out until the next regularly scheduled election. Or maybe he feels that poll watchers in Illinois don't get enough work. CQPolitics notes that Hastert's dawdling on the exact date of his resignation means the voters won't choose his successor on a date when they may be going to the polls anyway:

...he appears to be averting the tactical political error of allowing Blagojevich to schedule the special general election to coincide with the regular primary election on Feb. 5. A large Democratic turnout is likely that day, spawned by the presidential primary campaign of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama . That could also help the Democrats’ chances in a special general election in Illinois’ 14th.

Former Speaker Keverian ousted in Everett

Boston.com is reporting that George Keverian, once the Speaker of the state House of Representatives and thus one of the most powerful politicians in the state, has been fired from his job as director of assessors in Everett.

CommonWealth magazine ran a profile of Keverian, which emphasized his reformist credentials and also looked at his life after leaving Beacon Hill, in 2002. Read John McDonough's "The Speaker Who Believed in Democracy" here.

More "special" legislators on the way?

As noted in a previous post, Massachusetts state Rep. James Marzilli seems poised to move up to the state Senate seat vacated by Robert Havern earlier this year, which means Marzilli's House seat will also be filled via a special election. Also this week, state Rep. Douglas Petersen accepted Gov. Deval Patrick's offer to become the state's new agricultural commissioner, which means his seat will be taken over through a special election. That would make a new total of nine special elections in the 200-member Legislature since the last statewide election, and we're not even halfway through the two-year session.

I'm working on getting a tally of all state legislators who captured their seats through special elections (generally characterized by low turnout and a lack of time for first-time political candidates to make their names known), but it may be a long process. The General Court's official roster of legislators does not indicate exactly when or how they took office, and the Secretary of State's Web page on the results of special elections covers only the current year.

Admittedly, I've checked the legislative Web sites in about a dozen other states, and none of them indicate exactly when members were elected. It's almost as if special election victories weren't something to brag about.

Where "Democrat" isn't necessarily a dirty word

Last week the Democratic Party made gains in legislative races in Mississippi and Virginia, resulting in the map that you see above. (See the National Conference of State Legislatures for a review of the 2007 elections and a table of the current partisan makeup in all states.) Support for one party at the state legislative level does not necessarily transfer into voter support for that party in presidential elections. Still, outside of the South, where the Republicans have spent about four decades slowly chipping away at Democratic strength at the local level, the map isn't too different from the red vs. blue maps we all know from 2000 and 2004. And the Democratic nominee of 2008 might do well to concentrate on states where the party's label seems less toxic; for example, I would suggest that North Carolina is more promising than Georgia, even if both states have been solidly Republican in recent presidential elections.

The map above gives a very rough estimate of the difference between voters who support Democratic presidential candidates and those whose support Democratic legislative candidates. A few things jump out at me. First, the correlation between presidential vote and state legislative vote seems relatively strong in large Rust Belt states with a history of political machines (historically reformist Minnesota being a notable exception). Second, the Republican Party has some major building to do in the Northeast Corridor and the West Coast. In George W. Bush's three weakest states (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont), the Republicans are even weaker at the state legislative level. Finally, there are several states in which the GOP actually seems stronger at the local than at the presidential level. And two of them, Florida and Ohio, are swing states that produced nightmare results for Democrats in 2000 and 2004.

Our last map isolates states that went for one party in the last presidential election but another party in its most recent legislative elections. The blue states, which are mostly rural and away from the coasts, may be persuaded to go Democratic in 2008 -- if the party's nominee is not seen as captive to East Coast and California interests. (These states may be to the right of the national party on gun control and gay rights, but also more populist than Democratic leaders on NAFTA and other trade issues.) As for the Republicans, the industrial states of Michigan and Pennsylvania stick out as places they should be able to carry if their nominee can tap into the issues that work for the party at the local level.

For Marzilli, up and out of the House would be especially sweet

For state Rep. Jim Marzilli, yesterday's victory in the four-way special election Democratic primary for a vacant state Senate seat couldn't come a moment too soon.  Though he still must defeat Republican and Constitution Party opponents in a Dec. 11 final election, the longtime Arlington rep seems well on his way to a Senate seat in the heavily Democratic district.  Going from the 160-member House to the 40-member Senate is a well-worn path up the ladder for the politically ambitious.  But for Marzilli it would represent much more, opening the door for nothing less than a move back into political relevance. 

After filing a competing energy bill that appeared to be outflanking efforts by House Speaker Sal DiMasi to come up with an energy proposal of his own, Marzilli was stripped earlier this year of his post as vice chairman of the Health Care Financing Committee.  DiMasi's office said at the time that the decision had nothing to do with the Arlington Democrat's bill, something that Marzilli certainly wasn't buying. 

The last House member for whom a move up to the Senate carried a similar promise of return from poltical Siberia was Steve Tolman.  In 1998, after serving two terms in the House during which he was part of the small band of Democrats that regularly challenged the strong-armed rule of then-Speaker Tom Finneran, the Brighton Democrat won the Senate seat vacated by his brother, Warren.  Tolman immediately went from House backbencher to Senate player, and currently serves as vice chairman of the powerful budget-writing Senate Ways and Means Committee.

Shuffling into Buffalo

Edward Glaeser has a good rundown, from a government skeptic's perspective, on the urban train wreck called Buffalo (well, Boston could have suffered the same fate if not for Harvard and MIT) in the latest issue of City Journal. I was struck by one passage:

...declining areas also become magnets for poor people, attracted by cheap housing. This is exactly what happened to Buffalo, whose median home value is just $61,000, far below the state average of $260,000. More than 10 percent of Buffalo’s residents in 2000, it’s worth noting, had moved there since 1995. The influx of the poor reinforces a city’s downward spiral, since it drives up public expenditures while doing little to expand the local tax base.

It's easy to get a mental picture of a city with declining population (not only Buffalo, but St. Louis, Detroit, and Boston from the 1950s through the 1970s) that emphasizes people packing up and leaving, but Glaeser notes that even failing cities attract a lot of new residents. Indeed, the Census Bureau recorded 65,923 people moving into Buffalo's Erie County between 1995 and 2000 (the last years available) even as 107,038 people moved out. That's only 500 fewer people than the number who moved into Plymouth County, Massachusetts (considered a prosperous, growing suburban area), during the same period. I'm not familiar enough with Glaeser's data to confirm that Buffalo's newcomers are only making the city poorer, but it's daunting to think of a major city hit with a double whammy: the people who move out and the people who move in.

Massachusetts may, possibly, matter to some degree in 2008

The odds look good that Massachusetts will join the de facto national presidential primary on February 5. We were actually part of the biggest primary day in 2004, when we voted on the first Tuesday in March, but with states like California, New York, and Georgia moving their primaries up by a month, we would have lost what little influence we had on the nominating process by standing still. Of course, this is all moot if no more than one major candidate in each party survives the early contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

I was interviewed on this topic by WGBH's Greater Boston; a segment on the topic is scheduled for tonight's program.

Here's a Web site that can kill an afternoon

Hundreds of Top 101 lists of cities, counties, and zip codes ranked by demographic, economic, and even meteorological factors. Here are a few in which a Bay State community made the No. 1 slot:

Northampton: Top 101 cities with the largest percentage of likely lesbian couples (counted as self-reported female-female unmarried-partner households) (population 5,000+)

Middleton: Top 101 cities with the lowest number of burglaries in 2006 per 10,000 residents (population 5,000+)

Brockton: Top 101 cities with the highest average wind speeds (population 50,000+)

Cambridge: Top 101 cities with the biggest local government salary and wages expenses per resident in 2004 in $ (population 10,000+)

Bliss Corner (actually, part of Dartmouth): Top 101 cities with the most residents born in Portugal (population 500+)

Red steak vs. blue sushi

Via Andrew Sullivan, here is a report on the blog Urbanspoon that finds a correlation between sushi restaurants and Democratic votes in big cities. Of course, cities that have more sushi than steak (Iike Boston) tend to be ocean ports, so proximity to major bodies of water could still be more important than food preferences in determining partisan leanings.

Vintage voters

Senior citizens are often regarded as a prized voting bloc because of their reliability in heading to the polls for elections large and small.  Inveterate Cambridge politics watcher Robert Winters has plotted just how potent the older voter demographic is in a series of charts that shows the age distribution of Cambridge voters in various elections.  While the median age of registered voters in Cambridge is just under 40 (39.33), the median age of those voting in last November's gubernatorial election was 48.68, and it rose to 56.33 for those casting ballots in the 2005 city election. 

Many Massachusetts municipalities -- including Cambridge and Boston -- are holding what promise to be low turnout elections today under drizzly skies.  The Winters bar graphs illustrate why, especially for such elections, campaigns wisely spend a lot of time on Election Day ferrying coffee and donuts to senior citizen buildings in a bid to butter up the reliable voters therein.

Metro areas matter, says Brookings

Exactly one year before the presidential election, the Washington-based Brookings Institution this morning launched "Blueprint for American Prosperity," a "multi-year initiative to promote an economic agenda for the nation that builds on the assets—and centrality—of America’s metropolitan areas."  MassINC will serve as a partner in this effort to identify key federal roles in everything from transportation policy to higher education programs that can help build a strong and diverse middle class.  This map lets you click on a state to view a profile of its major metropolitan areas.

Harry Potter vs. Bruce Springsteen

The music database Gracenote has introduced an interactive "music map" showing which artists are the subject of the most searches in individual nations and in US states. The Beatles take the Number One spot in all but six states (see map below), and their worst showing is in Utah, where they're in third place.

Aside from the Fab Four, just about every artist has different levels of popularity (or maybe popular interest, since we're dealing with a search engine here) in different regions of the country, and the old red vs. blue pattern is often visible. Country singer Carrie Underwood, from Oklahoma, is strongest in conservative and Republican states, as seen below:

The popular "recording artist" J.K. Rowling is, indeed, the author of the Harry Potter books, and searches for information about the audio versions of her novels seem to be most frequent in more rural states -- with the exception of the Deep South, where some religious leaders have objected to the witchcraft-themed adventures. See below:

Finally, New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen, who has become more outspoken about his liberal politics over the years, provokes considerably more interest in Democratic states, including most of the Northeast:

Rudy and Hillary vs. their own parties?

Each of the two major political parties in the US actually consists of two factions that don't always have the same goals: the presidential party and the congressional party. This point is underscored by today's New York Times Web column by Carl Hulse ("Giuliani Seen as Sporting Strongest Coattails"). The reasoning here is that a Giuliani nomination would help the GOP reverse, or at least halt, the party's sharp decline in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, where voters are generally not as conservative as they are in the party's Southern base:

“There is no question that he helps us in New England and Pennsylvania and the Rust Belt,” said one senior Congressional Republican who did not want to be identified since he has to work with all the Republican contenders as well as the eventual nominee.

That official and others say Mr. Giuliani is a much easier sell than some of his rivals in states like Connecticut, where Republicans lost two House seats in 2006, and New Jersey, where Democrats have ideas about ousting a Republican incumbent or two.

What's interesting is that that off-the-record source does not go so far as to say that Giuliani would carry Connecticut and New Jersey against a Democrat, and recent polls suggest that he would have a tough time pulling such "blue" states away from Hillary Clinton. I could see a scenario in which Giuliani does help the Republican brand enough to save some congressional candidates in more culturally liberal areas but still loses the presidential race. Without George W. Bush as a punching bag, it's conceivable that the Democrats will lose control of the House of Representatives even as they take back the White House.

If that happens, we might end up with a second President Clinton practicing "triangulation," or pursuing a middle ground between Democratic activists on the left and a Republican-controlled House on the right. That worked out pretty well for the first President Clinton, so maybe Hillary doesn't view this prospect with much horror. She is, after all, trying to jump from the Democratic Congressional Party to the Democratic Presidential Party.

UFOs steer clear of New England

Strange Maps has a geographical plotting of UFO sightings per capita in US counties. Sightings are generally highest in the West and in sparsely populated areas. Check out the comments section for theories on why this is so.

New England ranks pretty low on this scale, though northern New Hampshire seems to have its fair share of hovering cigars. I can understand why city dwellers would report relatively few sightings. I suppose that I see what could technically be called UFOs on a regular basis, but I'm so accustomed to odd-shaped blimps heading toward Fenway Park or advertising Hood Milk that I don't think much of them. If anything looks really weird, I'll assume that MIT or the Cartoon Network is involved.

Going long for biotech

If anyone can explain to me what makes Robert and Jonathan Kraft's opinion on Gov. Deval Patrick's life sciences bill worth hearing, I'm all ears. The Krafts weighed in with an op-ed in yesterday's Boston Globe, offering a full-throated endorsement of the governor's $1 billion proposal to boost the life sciences in Massachusetts. Why don't we have a series. Next we could have Terry Francona holding forth on standards-based education. Or maybe Manny on the economic multiplier effect of resort casinos.

The Krafts mention their own significant investment in the Patriots in the 1990s at a time when there was talk of the team decamping for Connecticut, and try to segue from that to the need for the state to make a similar big investment in life sciences. Seems like a bad example to bring up, though, since the Patriots drama involved a push by some for state money to help the team build stadium to keep them here, something we can thank former House speaker Tom Finneran for holding the line against. As we all know, the billionaire Krafts managed to build the thing on their own and didn't move to Hartford after all. The only lesson one might draw from this is to let private business fund itself.

After you get the gist of their effort to draw parallels between their football business and stem cell research -- which is ham-handed, at best, and shoots their own argument in the foot, at worst -- the Krafts drop in this shocker:

Life sciences research and industry have a major economic impact on the region. It is growing significantly faster than other sectors, providing millions in tax revenues and thousands of high paying jobs. These jobs expand beyond research science and PhDs. The Kraft Group's core businesses are in paper and packaging manufacturing and distribution. These industries and many others, like information technology, software, advanced materials, and construction benefit significantly from the growth of life sciences companies and facilities.

So it turns out pouring state money into biotech will actually be a boon to their core, non-football businesses. Well, that's certainly a good reason support the biotech bill, isn't it? Maybe the biotech bill is a good thing, maybe it isn't. But let's hope the conversation gets elevated a little beyond cheerleading from football team owners with an eye on boosting their cardboard box business.