John shoots down David Brooks’s claim that “If you look at the fundamentals, the president should be getting crushed right now.” John points out (as does Ezra Klein) that if you look at the fundamentals, you’d expect a close election. OK, there are lots of ways of looking at politics, elections, and the economy, and I’m sure that some forecasts give Obama a bit lead. But that’s hardly a consensus reading of the fundamentals. The more parsimonious reading here is that Brooks was (a) misinformed and (b) didn’t know with whom to talk to get informed.

With the continuing debate regarding the electoral implications of Obama’s announcement regarding his support for gay marriage, we are very pleased to welcome the following guest post from Gregory B. Lewis of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University:

Since all 31 states that have voted on constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage (SSM) have passed them, typically by overwhelming popular votes, should we be skeptical that half of Americans really support same-sex marriage?  Probably not.  Most bans passed when opposition to SSM was much stronger, and SSM opponents have targeted constitutional amendments for votes in states where support for SSM is weakest.

Opposition to SSM was quite strong and reasonably stable until 2004.  Since 2004, the rise in support has been remarkable.  My estimate is 16 percentage points.  Nate Silver estimates perhaps two or three percentage points a year and, according to a leaked memo, Republican pollster Jan van Lohuizen finds support rising one point a year until 2009 and 5 points a year since.  Seventeen states passed constitutional amendments by the end of 2004, and 27 did so by 2006.  Even in 2008, when next three states passed amendments, support for SSM nationally was probably 8+ percentage points lower than it is today.

Opposition to SSM varies widely by state.  Seong Soo Oh and I concluded that support was 30 points higher in Massachusetts than in Mississippi in 2006.   Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips found a 40 point split between Massachusetts and Utah in 2009.  My most current estimates find nearly a 50 point division between Massachusetts and Mississippi.

This previous Monkey cage guest post reported on new research from Fredrik Sjoberg suggesting that when Azerbaijani authorities installed webcams in some precincts in a recent election, it likely reduced overt forms of electoral fraud such as ballot stuffing while simultaneously increasing more subtle fraud such as falsification of precinct level results.

This result turns out to overlap very well with a speculation I made here at The Monkey Cage regarding Putin’s incentives for installing webcams in all of Russia’s polling places for the 2012 Russian presidential election. At the time I wrote:

An alternative explanation, however, might be that the Kremlin was seeking to avoid the mechanism by which fraud was revealed following the parliamentary elections, that is the use of individual of cell phones to capture visible fraud in polling places by polling workers who believed they were not being observed. If we assume that the motivation for local level officials to manipulate vote totals (e.g., to win the favor of the Kremlin) had not changed, then the webcams would provide a very powerful incentive for local officials to find other ways of manipulating results than the blatant forms of ballot stuffing that appeared online following the December parliamentary election.

This is a guest post from Eric M. Patashnik and Jeffery Jenkins.  Patashnik is professor of public policy and politics in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia.  Jenkins is associate professor of politics and a faculty associate of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.  They are the coeditors of Living Legislation: Durability, Change and the Politics of American Lawmaking.

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I tackle that question in a new post at 538.  The analysis involves constructing a model of presidential approval from 1948-2008 and forecasting values for Obama.  On average he is about nine points more popular than the model would predict.  Out-of-sample predictions for Obama and past presidents are here (click to enlarge):

Andrew Sullivan asks whether California will be the next state to abandon the death penalty. This reminds me of something I noticed a few years ago: capital punishment remains popular—-a clear majority of American support the death penalty for people convicted of murder—-its supporters are on the defensive. Death-penalty opponents, while in the minority, seem to have the upper hand in debates on the issue.

My larger perspective on the death penalty, informed by my research with Jim Liebman several years ago, is that you can only accept capital punishment if you’re willing to have innocent people executed every now and then. And, the more effective you want the death penalty to be, the more innocents you have to execute.

The occasional execution of innocent people might be deemed ok in some settings—-they shoot deserters in wartime, and if a country is in the midst of a big enough crime wave, I could see people accepting the need for the occasional lethal mistake of the judicial process. My point here is just that if you want to execute people on a regular basis, you’re gonna make some mistakes. We saw this in our research on death-sentencing reversals, which were not merely the actions of a few liberal court panels.

Here’s what I wrote a few years ago in my discussion of an excellent paper by Donohue and Wolfers:

Policy questions about the death penalty have sometimes been expressed in terms of the number of lives lost or saved by a given sentencing policy. But I think this direction of thinking might be a dead end. First off, as discussed by Donohue and Wolfers, it may very well be essentially impossible to statistically estimate the net deterrent effect of death sentencing—-what seem like the “hard numbers” (in Richard Posner’s hopeful words, “careful econometric analysis”) aren’t so clear at all.

More generally, though, I’m not sure how you balance out the chance of deterring murders with the chance of executing an innocent person. What if each death sentence deterred 0.1 murder, and 5% of people executed were actually innocent? That’s still a 2:1 ratio (assuming that it’s OK to execute the guilty people). Then again, maybe these innocent people who were executed weren’t so innocent after all. But then again, not every murder victim is innocent either. Conversely, suppose that executing an innocent person were to deter 2 murders (or, conversely, that freeing an innocently-convicted man were to un-deter 2 murders). Then the utility calculus would suggest that it’s actually OK to do it. In general I’m a big fan of probabilistic cost-benefit analyses (see, for example, chapter 22 of Bayesian Data Analysis), but here I don’t see it working out. The main concerns—-on the one hand, worry about out-of-control crime, and on the other hand, worry about executing innocents—-just seem difficult to put on the same scale.

Finally, regarding decision analysis, incentives, and so forth: much of the discussion (not in the Donohoe and Wolfers paper, but elsewhere) seems to go to the incentives of potential murderers. But the death penalty also affects the incentives of judges, juries, prosecutors, and so forth. One of the arguments in favor of the death penalty is that it sends a message that the justice system is serious about prosecuting murders. This message is sent to the population at large, I think, not just to deter potential murderers but to make clear that the system works. Conversely, one argument against the death penalty is that it motivates prosecutors to go after innocent people, and to hide or deny exculpatory evidence. Lots of incentives out there.

Nicholas Lemann recently published a judicious review of several books on inequality in The New Yorker. Along these lines, I wanted to point out two links: