Veni Quid Veniat

Originally published at The Five Pilgrims blog.

The popular vote is still being tallied. Clinton leads by a million votes — just under one percentage point — and seems likely to retain that lead when the final tallies come in. That fact does nothing to help her, however, because Trump has already locked up (not accounting for possible defections, which will be rare) at least 290 electoral votes, and will likely win 306 when Michigan’s final results come in at the end of November. Does this, as some of his supporters claim, constitute an electoral college “landslide”?

It depends how you define a “landslide win,” but I suggest that an examination of historical data strongly suggests otherwise. Of course, it doesn’t take much digging to recognize that Trump’s Electoral College victory was far more convincing than George W. Bush’s 2000 271-267 margin or his 2004 286-251 win. On the other hand, Trump’s win falls well short of Obama’s 2008 365-173 win, which more than doubles Trump’s margin of victory, as well as Obama’s 2012 332-206 win. Of those, the last four presidential elections, the winning candidate took an average of just over 311 electoral votes, or 57.9% of the Electoral College, thus of the last five presidential elections Trump’s win in the Electoral College is the median, and slightly below the mean.

You could keep walking that four election window back in time, to Clinton in 1996 (379-159, 70.4%) and 1992 (370-168, 68.8%), George H.W. Bush in 1988 (426-111, 79.2%), or Reagan in 1984 (525-13, 97.6%) and 1980 (489-49, 90.9%). By this time, the winner’s average share of the electoral vote has risen to 70% (with a standard deviation for the sample, which measures how close together the results are, of 16 percentage points). You might be tempted to argue that Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Reagan were all among the most decisive victories in US history, thus that average isn’t an accurate representation of what margin should be considered ordinary. Something interesting starts to happen when you back farther, though. If you go back to 1964, the first election in which the Electoral College had 538 members, neither the overall average nor the standard deviation change much, both rising by one point to 71% and 17%, respectively (the average and deviation for that period alone, from 1964 to 1980, are 75% and 22%). You can go even farther back, to the turn of the last century, and the overall average remains quietly at 73% while the deviation drifts down to 15% (75% and 13% for the period 1900-1964 alone). In fact, if you go all the way back to the founding, the average winner in US presidential elections takes 71% of the electoral college with a standard deviation of 16%.

Now, it’s debatable how much the election of 1796, for example, should inform our expectations for 2016, but it is certainly interesting to see how constant the average victory has been through time. The last five elections have actually been singularly close in the Electoral College compared to what had been the norm in US presidential elections. One way of seeing this is to plot the percentage of the electoral vote earned by the winner against the relative cumulative frequency (or percentile) — that is, the percentage of the results less than the one being considered (this is the same way test scores are often reported — someone in the 50th percentile, for example, has a score higher than 50% of those who took the test).

Originally posted at The Five Pilgrims.

In C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when Father Christmas gives gifts to the Pevensie children, he gives both Susan and Lucy weapons. He cautions them, however, only to use them for self-defense in great need; he did not intend for them to use them in battle. This was no comment on their bravery, however: as Father Christmas explained, “battles are ugly when women fight.”


Battles are ugly when anyone fights, and Lewis, a survivor of the First World War, knew that. He was, through Father Christmas, getting at something deeper: that battles were particularly ugly when women were drawn in. It’s a position drawn from the Christian idea that men and women are fundamentally different, and that when God created male and female He didn’t simply toss together a collection of disparate traits. Men and women were created with distinct roles. Men were to provide first, women to nurture first. The difference in roles was reflected in the traits given to each gender: men, generally speaking, are physically larger and stronger, while women are able to give birth, and even slight differences in brain form and function suited men and women for their different roles. For millenia this difference in roles was also understood to mean that men had a duty to be the first to face danger in defense of their family, to sacrifice themselves if necessary, to allow women to be the caregivers they were designed to be.


This is what Lewis is referring to, and he’s right that it is particularly abominable when, in addition to the inherent ugliness of war, those designed to to give life and nurture it must take life or lose their own.


It was surprising, then, to hear three Republican presidential candidates at the New Hampshire debate speak in favor of expanding registration for the draft to women. Both already favored allowing women in combat roles, but this was something else entirely: opening combat roles to women applied only to women who chose to join the military, whereas the position advocated by Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio would, if the draft were ever reinstated, fundamentally change the distinction between men and women in American society. There would be no place for women who chose to live their lives in accordance with the longstanding normative gender role, while men who rejected their duty as guardians could cower at home while their sisters or daughters were forced to fight. It is the natural conclusion of a view of humankind that denies any functional difference between men and women, but it is no less wrong.


A country that forces women into danger when there is a man left alive is not a country worth fighting for. Unlikely as it is that the draft would ever be reinstated, Bush and Rubio’s position should be rejected. It is not pro-woman for those men to ask that women, designed to nurture, be forced into battle ahead of them, it is cowardly, and any man who would ask that is no man at all.

Originally posted on The Five Pilgrims

One day before the Iowa caucuses, Emerson College released the final Iowa poll. Its results were a little narrower than most of its immediate predecessors, but it showed the same thing they did: Donald Trump, the blustery real estate magnate who was firmly ensconced as the Republican frontrunner despite his many departures from small-government conservatism, with a lead over Ted Cruz. Real Clear Politics, likely the best-known aggregator of polling data, had Trump with a 4.7-point lead over Cruz, and the renowned political statistics blog FiveThirtyEight’s most likely predicted outcome was a narrow Trump victory. A weighted average of the polls showed the same thing, and better still, pulled Trump outside the reported margin of error for the weighted estimate.
There was, perhaps, a little cause for alarm within Trump’s camp. Both of the most recent polls from Iowa showed Cruz narrowing the margin to within the poll’s error, but even so, neither predicted that Cruz would take the lead. Trump’s unconventional campaign focused on rallies and top-down momentum, rather than grassroots and legwork, appeared to have upset conventional wisdom and would notch up a victory before anyone else had a chance to go on the board. 

The polls were wrong. Cruz not only won, he won with a record number of votes and by more than 3% – a commanding margin in a race with ten other candidates. The margin between Cruz and Trump was actually wider than the margin between Trump and the third-place finisher, Marco Rubio. Every poll showed Trump with a lead, many with a lead greater than the margin of error, and every poll was wrong.

The total breakdown of polling isn’t necessarily a new thing – caucuses are hard to predict – but it is worse this year than in the past. In 2008 a weighted average would have predicted the actual winner, Mike Huckabee, and even in 2012, when Rick Santorum pulled off one of the more shocking come-from-behind victories in recent memory, polls showed the surge, and a plot of the pre-caucus trajectory would have predicted the eventual outcome. This year neither the actual numbers nor the trajectory would have predicted the winner. The polls were simply wrong.

There will undoubtedly be many post-mortems trying to explain why the pollsters failed today, but there’s a simple enough explanation: Trump’s support is the political equivalent of a rice cake – crunchy, usually very noisy, air. He presented a platform as schizophrenic as his campaign, a muddled, angry caricature of what a New York-liberal might imagine to be conservatism. Pushing an isolationist view on the borders and a nationalist, even bloodthirsty, foreign policy, at the same time that he advocated positively socialist positions on issues like healthcare and a fascist stance on religious expression, Trump simultaneously attempted to appeal to the Republican conservative base and emphatically rejected crucial elements of a conservative worldview. His campaign preparation showed the same inattention to detail, eschewing hard work in favor of exciting rallies and passing over a well-developed organization in favor of slip-shod tweet-storms. He targeted a particular subset of voters, those who had not thought out their positions clearly enough to recognize the caricature.

It turns out, people too lazy to think through a consistent, coherent philosophy of government aren’t likely to be diligent enough to spend three hours casting a vote. Trump’s no idiot, although he clearly thinks his supporters are, and he’ll adapt. Future states will be primaries, which appeal to Trump’s brand of voters more than more time-consuming caucuses, and Trump will undoubtedly work to solidify his organization in the future. Tonight, though, it doesn’t matter. Trump’s “yuge” lead in the polls was finally put to the test, and it collapsed under pressure. There’s a long road ahead – Iowa only controls a little more than 1% of the total delegates – but first blood and the confidence to forge ahead regardless of the polls goes to the underestimated senator from Texas.

Originally posted on The Five Pilgrims.

As Ben Carson’s campaign crumbles and Donald Trump’s oft-predicted collapse draws closer, the race for the Republican nomination has begun to boil down to two men: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Superficially, they share many traits: both of Cuban ancestry, both young, both first-term senators, yet their status as rivals has brought them into conflict on the few points where they differ — on immigration policy most stridently. Rubio argues for legalization and a path to citizenship for illegal aliens, while Cruz favors enforcement of the law. Both sides came prepared for the skirmish, and why not? After all, they’ve done it before.

In 2013, three years into Rubio’s term in the Senate, he was already being eyed as a presidential candidate. His conservative positions gave him inroads with the Republican base, while his charm made him attractive to moderates. Perhaps searching for a way to differentiate himself in preparation for a run, Rubio accepted Chuck Schumer’s invitation to join the so-called “Gang of Eight” to advance “immigration reform” (S.744). It provided legal status and citizenship to illegal aliens who paid a fine and jumped through a metaphorical hoop or two. It also made a hodgepodge of modifications to the immigration system, engineered to ensure passage.

Rubio’s role was envisioned as that of a salesman. He had earned the respect of conservatives, so he was the natural choice to try to win them over. He did more than that, though, and Schumer would later say that Rubio was the architect of the path to citizenship. A gifted and experienced legislator, Rubio crafted the greatest challenge to conservative’s rule-of-law opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens. With John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Schumer and Dick Durbin combined with Rubio’s Tea Party support, the bill was a political juggernaut.

Combining Democrats and Republicans who chose to vote with the Democrats, the bill had filibuster-proof support in the Senate, and amnesty supporters would only need to win over 17 of 233 House Republicans to ensure final passage. Presented as a compromise measure and a necessary reform, given weight by Rubio’s conservative credentials, the bill was unstoppable. The stage was set for Rubio, the face of the Gang of Eight, to overwhelm conservative respect for the rule of law, notch a major bipartisan legislative accomplishment, and pave a path to the presidency for himself.

The year before, in a hotly contested primary fight, the little-known Solicitor General of Texas had already pulled off the impossible and beaten the most powerful elected official in Texas, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, in the race for Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s Senate seat. Ted Cruz won on a promise of doing as he promised, and he’d promised to fight for enforcement of Texas and US law on immigration. With less than a year of legislative experience, facing an overwhelming coalition, he faced a daunting task if he intended to keep his promise.

Joined by longtime hardliner Jeff Sessions and fellow first-term senator Mike Lee, Cruz kept his promise and stood on the frontlines of the opposition to Rubio’s bill. All three held positions on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the committee tasked with hearing the bill, where they were badly outnumbered.

Faced with long odds, the conservatives on the committee took a long view. Cruz set out to destroy the bill, not in the Senate, where its passage was a foregone conclusion, but in the House, where the Republican establishment’s electoral disaster in 2012 had done less damage, and where Cruz’s connections could help catalyze opposition. If the credibility that Rubio’s conservative credentials lent the bill could be destroyed, House Republicans’ own constituents would force them into opposition. The lynchpin of the effort was Cruz’s amendment stripping the path to citizenship. Rubio and the rest of the Gang of Eight claimed that the crux of the bill was merely a reform to the immigration system. They used the clearly broken system as a club to bring Republican opponents into the fold. If that was the goal, argued Cruz, then wouldn’t it be wiser to remove the path to citizenship while keeping the rest of the bill? His amendment was the “compromise that could pass,” so why not support it?

The answer was obvious and fatal to the bill: removing the path to citizenship could only make the bill more likely to pass, so the only reason to oppose it was that the purpose of the bill was not immigration reform, but a path to citizenship. When Cruz proposed his amendment, it gave conservatives in the House and Senate the ammunition they needed to fight it. The Senate was already a foregone conclusion, but the battle with the junior senator from Texas left S.744 crippled. House Republicans had to stand for reelection in little more than a year, and few Representatives found it appealing to have to explain a vote for a bill whose entire purpose was not just amnesty, but a path to citizenship. A companion bill was never considered by the House, and Rubio’s four-lane highway to the presidency died just past the Senate chambers.

It is, perhaps, fitting that it was a Texan who forced amnesty’s moneyed and powerful supporters into a Pyrrhic victory over the hopelessly outnumbered opposition in the Senate. After all, after a victory in Texas many years before, one of Santa Anna’s officers was said to remark that “another such victory will ruin us.” Ted Cruz and his cadre of Senate conservatives couldn’t stop Rubio’s bill, but in losing they defeated it.

More striking, though, is the symmetry on the two sides of the bill. Rubio, although allied with more senior colleagues, molded the bill and was to be the ramrod that forced it past any Republicans still loyal to the party platform. Cruz, also a first-term senator of Cuban ancestry elected with Tea Party support and also allied with more senior colleagues, provided irreplaceable contributions to the masterful strategy that ensured the bill’s failure. Without Rubio, the bill wouldn’t have been the juggernaut that it was, and without Cruz, according to Senator Sessions, Rubio’s bill would have been signed into law.

Two years later, Cruz and Rubio are once again matching wits. This time Cruz is far from the unknown senator he was in 2013, and has a campaign behind him every bit the equal of Rubio’s. Whether Rubio can better his performance and finally defeat his doppelganger or whether the Texan will once again lead a conservative coalition to victory remains to be seen, but voters should remember the two senators’ previous battle. Marco Rubio stood up as amnesty’s champion, leading the apparently unstoppable push for a path to citizenship, and Ted Cruz stopped him.