delawareliberal--2019-06-16--There is hard data that shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate

“There is hard data that shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate:  Economist Thomas Piketty wrote a paper about this in 2018, though the Democrats paid no attention. The Republican Party has earned a reputation as the anti-science, anti-fact party — understandably, perhaps, given the GOP’s policy of ignoring the evidence for global climate change and insisting on the efficacy of supply-side economics, despite all the research to the contrary.  Yet ironically, it is now the Democratic Party that is wantonly ignoring mounds of social science data that suggests that promoting centrist candidates is a bad, losing strategy when it comes to winning elections.  As the Democratic establishment and its pundit class starts to line up behind the centrist nominees for president — mainly, Joe Biden, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris — the party’s head-in-the-sand attitude is especially troubling. […] Piketty’s paper is an inconvenient truth for the Democratic Party. The party’s leaders see themselves as the left wing of capital — supporting social policies that liberal rich people can get behind, never daring to enact economic reforms that might step on rich donors’ toes. Hence, the establishment seems intent on anointing the centrist Democrats of capital, who push liberal social policies and neoliberal economic policies.“. – Via Salon


democracynow--2019-10-08--This Is Not a Drill: 700+ Arrested as Extinction Rebellion Fights Climate Crisis with Direct Action

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.  JUAN GONZÁLEZ: “This is not a drill.” That’s the message of thousands of activists who took to the streets of major cities across the globe Monday to raise the alarm about the climate crisis, gluing themselves to buildings, blocking roads, occupying public landmarks and being arrested by the hundreds in the first day of a two-week protest led by Extinction Rebellion. The group reports more than 700 activists, from Brisbane to New York City, have been arrested in just the first day and a half of protests.  Nearly 300 were arrested in London after shutting down major streets and taking over 11 sites in Westminster. One group superglued themselves to a parked hearse in Trafalgar Square as hundreds occupied the area. Other demonstrators shut down Westminster Bridge long enough for a couple to get married before the crowd. This is protester Jake Lynch speaking from the streets of London.  JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Extinction Rebellion launched in London last year and has since grown into a global movement. Prime Minister Boris Johnson attacked the group’s protesters Monday night, calling them “uncooperative crusties.” Climate activist George Monbiot responded, tweeting, quote, “I’m proud to be an #UncooperativeCrusty. #ExtinctionRebellion continues. Come and see why Boris Johnson hates it so much, and how it challenges the life-destroying system he defends.”  AMY GOODMAN: In New York City, nearly 90 activists were arrested after staging a die-in on Wall Street, pouring fake blood on the iconic bull statue outside the New York Stock Exchange. Dozens were also arrested in Amsterdam, Vienna and Madrid. In Brisbane, Australia, an activist hung from Story Bridge in a hammock for six hours. Activists also took to the streets in Chile, Colombia and Mexico. Brazilian protesters held a die-in on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro. Protesters shut down the street in central Paris near the Notre-Dame, and hundreds flooded the streets of Berlin to demand action to combat global warming. This is German climate activist and migrant rescue ship captain Carola Rackete speaking from Berlin.  AMY GOODMAN: Protests continue today in cities around the world. In London, Extinction Rebellion plans to plant at least 800 trees outside of Parliament.  For more, we go to London to speak with Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook.  Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the scope of the protests? And once again, remind us how Extinction Rebellion was founded and got its name.  GAIL BRADBROOK: Yeah. Good afternoon, Amy. And I just wanted to say what an honor it is to be on Democracy Now! You asked how this started. I think the first thing to say is this movement stands on the shoulders of our elders across the world who have been protesting about the environment for many years. In many countries, that means death. I mean, 200 environmental activists die each year across the world. And I would include Democracy Now! as one of our elders. You have many fans in the U.K., so thank you for your broadcasts over these years. You’ve kept us going, actually, with your truth and ability to forward the voice of ordinary people and of activists across the world.  We got going because we did quite a lot of research, actually, into social movements. We looked at social science. We also looked into our hearts about how we were feeling. And we said that a movement would need to be driven both by some techniques called momentum-driven organizing, and we had some training by a fantastic organizer based in the States called Carlos Saavedra from the Ayni Institute. And we also did a lot of research into people like Gene Sharp, the father of civil resistance.  And we welcomed people to feel how these times are for them. And I think the fuel of grief is important to our movement, and the fuel of fear, in all honesty, because what that means is that people are willing to open their hearts up and feel the love for life on Earth and say, “Actually, I am not willing to put up with this anymore.”  I guess the thing to add to that, in a way, is, especially for Westerners like myself that sit in a degree of — quite a degree of privilege, is that there’s something about consumer capitalism that both traumatizes us and then offers us a lot of comforts to stay quiet and silent and to just keep our heads down and keep sort of slightly stressing about keeping our jobs going and so on. And somehow, I think this movement has helped break through that mold by welcoming grief and feeling, and then encouraging people to get on the streets and take risks with the possibility of getting arrested.  JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Gail Bradbrook, what are the immediate demands of the Extinction Rebellion movement?  GAIL BRADBROOK: So, we have three demands. The first one is for government and other institutions to tell the truth. And also, in that way, it is not just a lip service by declaring emergencies and then carrying on with business as usual. That also means reversing policies inconsistent with that truth, so stopping immediate harms that are happening. In the U.K., what that means, for example, is that we have fracking happening in this country. We’re opening up new coal mines. We have the planned expansion of the railway system, but through what’s basically an aviation shuttle service called HS2, that’s going to deforest Britain bigger than has happened since World War I. So, tell the truth and reverse inconsistent policies.  The second demand is for net zero carbon emissions by 2025 and halt in biodiversity loss. And the reason we have such a tight target there is that this is definitely and absolutely an emergency. And what we need is for governments to act like it’s an emergency. If Britain — again, I know the U.K. situation more — carries on as it’s doing with very, very minor reductions in its emissions, it will have run out of its so-called carbon budget — I don’t believe there are any carbon budgets myself, actually — within a few years’ time. And they keep missing targets. So this idea we can have a 2050 target is nonsense.  The third thing is, then, how do you go about seeing these changes. What policies should we have? Should we have carbon budgeting or carbon taxes? Should we put pressure on people to stop flying or go vegan or whatever? Should we look at the farming community and how they could farm differently? Well, within all of that are loads of great ideas and loads of debate, and Extinction Rebellion is very clear it’s not up to us to have a position on any of that. Within the movement, there have been lots of opinions and so on and lots of debates.  We want a citizens’ assembly. It’s a form of democracy that comes from the older times, from Greece, from Athens, and it was actually how democracy used to be. It wasn’t all about voting, by a long way. Most things were done by citizens’ juries. So, you select, through a lottery system, like a jury, a demographically representative sample of your citizens, and they’re given critical thinking skills. And they are given lots of information by experts and well facilitated. And they tend to come up with really good policy solutions. And it’s a really good way to handle these kinds of issues, that, frankly, our current democracies are just not able to deal with.  JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One of the things you mentioned earlier, consumer capitalism and its ability to basically disarm the population in dealing with the climate crisis. You’ve talked about the relationship between the mushrooming debt in the world and the climate crisis. Could you expand on that?  GAIL BRADBROOK: So, yeah. What I would say is that in its first iteration, Extinction Rebellion is really about democracy, by calling in for these new democratic forms for people to have their power. And frankly, in many countries of the world, democracy is in just absolute shambles. It certainly is in the U.K. As people understand that there’s an emergency, there’s — this democracy is not working. There’s going to be two directions of travel. One is in the direction of more democracy, and so that means people’s assemblies and really understanding how we can work together. And the other is in the direction of less democracy, which is the very great risk of ecofascism. So that’s the focus on democracy.  What some of us are looking at, and it’s an early focus, and as a movement we will write papers and share ideas for feedback, but we’re talking about how we’re going to take on the finance system. So, we have an economic system that essentially is killing life on Earth. Let’s put it that way. It’s very simple. As one economist once said — Kenneth Boulding, he said that to expect that you can have exponential growth on a finite planet, you either have to be a madman or an economist.  And I think, increasingly — and I’ve spoken to members of the elite really recently, to investment bankers and so on — people are frightened. And actually, their children are putting a lot of pressure on them. And they know some kind of change has to come.  And in Extinction Rebellion, we are generally not — well, I’m not speaking for everybody personally, but as a movement, we’re not ideological. We’re not taking a position against one kind of economic system or for another. We’re saying, basically, this is not working. We need to have a grown-up conversation about what kind of system do we need, both politically and legally and culturally and economically, that will stop this ridiculous, outrageous harming that we’re doing to ourselves and the planet. And obviously, there’s some people absolutely on the frontline of the crisis. And it’s an intergenerational injustice. And how do we then move into a situation where we can repair the harm that we’ve done?  So, what I think we’re going to need to move into is a mass debt refusal, where we say we’re not going to pay the debts that we have, and some of us with some privilege might take on some debts and actually give the money to people at the frontline of the crisis. That’s the kind of direction I’d like to see us move into.  AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Bradbrook, we played the clip of the German climate activist, the migrant rescue ship captain, Carola Rackete, who makes that link between immigration and climate. Since this is such a key issue all over the world, the issue of migrants and the industrial, polluting countries blocking migrants from coming in, can you talk about that link, climate refugees?  GAIL BRADBROOK: Yeah, and I think this is this issue of ecofascism. Up to one in 10 people will be on the move, without wanting to be, due to mass drought, due to places becoming too hot, due to flooding. And the idea that we can sit in our racism and close our borders is simply not going to work for us. Obviously, it’s a moral issue. Also, there will be mass migration within countries. So, in the U.K., 10% of the population will be on the move by 2050. That’s the predictions. Actually, the recent IPCC report, which was about the cryosphere and the ocean sea level rising, yet again said that things were worse than thought and that flooding events that were once every hundred years are going to move into being every single year in many locations. So there’s going to be mass migration, and that’s already happening. We’ve already seen some of that. And what we need to do is have a very compassionate approach to how we tackle that issue and how we look after a planet that is destroying places so that they become uninhabitable. And obviously, the people on that frontline, as well, who are doing the migration, tend to be the people that did the least to create this damage. And so we have a moral responsibility to take care of people.  I’m very in favor of, and I’d like to see it actually placed in some international demands — again, the movement needs a conversation about that — with the law of ecocide, which is a law that the lawyer Polly Higgins was working on, and she has a team taking it forward — she died, unfortunately, earlier this year — which would put a fifth crime against peace in at the Rome Statutes level, at the U.N. level. And what that would do would be to criminalize mass damage and destruction of the environment, so many of these damaging actions that are happening in indigenous lands and elsewhere, created by corporations, would literally be criminal.  And then, secondly, what that law also does is it bakes in the insistence that there’s a repair of the harm that happens, which includes compensating people, finding homes for people. And actually, in order to do this repairing of the harm, that needs to happen, you’ve got Sir David King, the former chief scientist of the U.K., who’s setting up a climate repair center and saying that, actually, we can’t even go to one-and-a-half degrees C. You know, the ice is already melting. We’re already over 410 parts per million. What really needs to happen is we have to go into drawdown. We have to be bringing carbon out of the atmosphere, and we can’t wait for these magical technologies that are somehow going to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere in the future and mean we can do business as usual. And so, what we have to do, what we’re going to need to do, is really work with nature to repair the climate. And that’s also going to tackle this evil twin or evil triplet, you know, of biodiversity loss. We’ve got the evil twin of ocean acidification and how we’re wrecking our oceans. All of this has got to be cleaned up.  And what that means is we need, like, a lot of human labor. So, humanity has to rise up in a really beautiful way and tend to the damage that we’ve done. And that needs all of us, and it needs all of us together in the places of the Earth that’s going to sustain life, working together to rewild areas, to restore ecosystems, to clean up the rivers, to plant trees, you know, to basically sort the plastic out in the ocean and so on. And I actually think that there’s so many beautiful innovations out there, and humanity could do that together. And it needs all of us. And, for me, this is part of reweaving a human family back together again. It’s part of dealing with systemic racism, white supremacy and the wounds of patriarchy that want to separate us, make us feel powerless and, you know, destroy our togetherness and make us think that the whole planet is kind of scarce, when actually nature is abundant and it replenishes itself.  JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to ask you about those who — your response to those critics who agree with the goals of Extinction Rebellion but oppose your tactics. For instance, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she supports the right to protest, but, quote, “Blocking people from being able to go and do their day-to-day job doesn’t necessarily take us any closer to the climate action they are calling for.” London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan has said something similar. Your response?  GAIL BRADBROOK: Well, when you look at the results of the protests, if you look at the graphs of how much people are talking about the ecological crisis, it absolutely spikes when the protests happen. So, there’s like two data points here. One is how many people are active in our social movement. And we know from the research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan that you need between 1 and 3.4% of the population to come together and to be willing to support people to get on the streets and be on the streets themselves. And that, by the way, means that people can be part of Extinction Rebellion without being willing to get arrested, because it’s not right for everybody, for many people. They might have caring duties. We can’t guarantee that black people will be treated in the same way as white people and so on. So, this is a movement for everybody. There is a space for everybody.  Now, that doesn’t mean that everybody likes our tactics. And people don’t have to like us in order to start talking about the crisis. What happens if you stand passively by the side of the road with a placard saying, you know, “Stop climate change” is you just get ignored. When you get on the street and block it, people start to have a conversation about this existential situation that we’re in. When we say “existential threat,” what we mean is we’re in an apocalyptic situation. You have to use biblical language to talk about what it means to be in a sixth mass extinction event. And that’s the only way to get that information over to people — that I understand, anyway — is to be disruptive.  And when people say, “Well, we agree with your message, but we don’t like how you’re doing it,” my my general answer is, like, “If you’ve got a better plan, tell us.” Because, literally, we’ve tried all the other stuff — writing to our MPs and our politicians and doing petitions and going on marches. I don’t see what else there is, other than getting on the streets.  And frankly, as this crisis worsens and we face things like food shortages — you know, the academic term actually is “multi-breadbasket failure,” when across the planet either droughts or floods mean that the farms can no longer produce enough food. When we’re facing that, and, literally, people are fighting over tins of beans in the supermarket, people are going to wonder why more of us weren’t on these streets in these times, when there was still the possibility of two things. One is making the harm less. The other is, you know, starting to repair the harm.  And the other thing that we have to do is professor Jem Bendell’s agenda, which is to start to adapt to the conditions that are going to meet us and are going to meet our children in the future. We have to start planning for, for example, the flooding of nuclear power stations and what that means, planning for localizing food systems and food crises and that kind of thing.  AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Bradbrook, we just have 10 seconds. Your response to your prime minister, Boris Johnson, calling you “uncooperative crusties”?  GAIL BRADBROOK: I’m sending him a lot of love. He actually met some Extinction Rebellion people recently, who sang to him a Taizé song about listen to your heart, let love lead the way. And he actually started to cry and to shake. So, I don’t think anyone is beyond redemption. His father is interested in ecological crises, as well. So, we have to reach out to everybody and say, “Join us, because you know this is real. Stop messing about, Boris, and get on the streets with us.” Thank you.  AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Gail Bradbrook, we want to thank you for being with us, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, speaking to us from London, England.  When we come back, workers at General Motors have entered their fourth week on strike, the longest national strike at GM by the United Auto Workers in almost a half a century. Stay with us.  AMY GOODMAN: “Your Capricious Soul,” a new song by Michael Stipe, his first solo recording since the breakup of REM eight years ago. Michael Stipe is donating proceeds from the song to Extinction Rebellion.


drudgereport--2019-03-23--Alarms sound after 6 suicides by Chicago cops over 8 months

Alarms sound after 6 suicides by Chicago cops over 8 months...

A dozen or so police officers gather once every month in the basement of an office building and talk — about handling holidays with families, about nightmares so bad they are reluctant to share a bed at night.  Most of the officers were involved in a shooting while on duty, and here they share stories of what that has meant. Sometimes they cry.  “This is what trauma looks like,” says Carrie Steiner, a former Chicago cop turned therapist who runs the counseling center. “This is what PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) looks like.”  Responding to that trauma is now a top challenge for the Chicago Police Department, where alarms are sounding after six officers killed themselves over the last eight months.  Last week, after the most recent suicide, Superintendent Eddie Johnson convened a small meeting of command staff and told them officer wellness was now his priority. To keep neighborhoods safe, his officers need to be healthy, he told the group.  Johnson formed a task force to examine the department’s mental health services, according to his spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, who was at the meeting.  And in a sign of changing attitudes, Johnson also sent his officers a note about the latest death, saying, “we must do everything we can to ensure that our fellow officers have the support needed to get through the challenges of this very difficult job.”  Such acknowledgment of suicide among the ranks — even in private messages to his officers — is something Johnson has started doing only recently, Guglielmi said.  All this comes two years after the U.S. Justice Department warned the department that its care of officers was severely lacking.  Now, with the loss of six officers by suicide since last summer, national experts are calling for immediate action to understand what is going on and what needs to be done.  “It’s definitely worrying and suggestive of a problem I think really demands attention,” said Florida State University professor Thomas Joiner, a leading researcher on suicide who will be in Chicago this week for a forum on suicide in law enforcement.  Since 2011, the number of Chicago police officers who have died by suicide each year has fluctuated between two and four. But the pace quickened last summer, and the department has experienced nearly a suicide a month since July.  Two detectives, three officers, a sergeant. They were assigned to the mass transit unit and technical services, they were assigned to districts and worked as investigators.  Five were men, and the average age was 43. All but one died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. One died by carbon monoxide poisoning inside a car. Three either were in their squad car or parked outside their district station.  While suicide in general is on the rise in the United States, research suggests there is an elevated risk for suicide among law enforcement. One 2013 analysis found the risk for officers was as much as 69 percent higher, though experts caution more research is needed.  Nowhere is that risk more apparent than in Chicago.  “Chicago is kind of like ground zero with the number of suicides that are happening on a monthly basis now at this point,” said Daniel Hollar, who chairs the department of behavior and social science studies at Bethune-Cookman University in Florida. “These are people who are answering calls of duty to protect lives. We (need to) do our job to make their jobs safer.”  Hollar is organizing the forum in Chicago. Among the issues up for discussion is what role Chicago’s relentless violence problem plays in officer suicide. Hollar said they will also talk about other factors, including whether familiarity with death makes suicidal officers more likely to follow through with their plans.  The urgency to understand what is happening — nationally, not just in Chicago — is supported by national figures showing more officers die by suicide than in the line of duty.  In 2016, 171 officers across the country were killed in the line of duty, while 140 committed suicide. In 2018, 163 died by suicide and 150 in the line of duty, according to Blue HELP, an organization launched four years ago to raise awareness about officers’ mental health.  “I think it’s a call to action, a wake-up call, telling our administrators (and) command staff: ‘Isn’t it time you do something?’ ” said Nicholas Greco, who serves on the organization’s board and trains departments and officers on wellness.  The most recent suicide to hit the department occurred March 10 when an off-duty Chicago police detective was found dead from a gunshot wound at his Near West Side home.  But this time was different.  In the days that followed, Superintendent Johnson met with a small group that included Robert Sobo, head of the department’s employee assistance program, and Chief Barbara West, in charge of the Bureau of Organizational Development. He told those gathered that the most important thing now facing him as superintendent is officer wellness and suicide, Guglielmi said.  “If they are not well,” Johnson said, “I can’t expect them to safeguard our neighborhoods.”  Johnson, who had been briefed by detectives about the suicides, shared a few details from the investigations. The last several cases had “domestic and family triggers,” which will be a focus as the department hires more clinicians, Guglielmi said.  At the same time, Alexa James, executive director of National Alliance on Mental Illness in Chicago, made an impassioned public plea to officers.  “This is to the brave souls who keep us safe,” she said in a commentary published in the Tribune on March 11. “Stay. We need you. If you are feeling alone and unsure, if you can’t feel the ground beneath your feet or see any light in the darkness, know that you are loved and important in the world.”  This wasn’t the first time the department has been put on notice about the well-being of its officers.  In January 2017, the U.S. Justice Department concluded the Chicago police force did not have have an “overarching officer wellness plan that includes robust counseling programs, comprehensive training, functioning equipment and other tools to ensure officers are successful and healthy.”


drudgereport--2019-06-30--PENTAGON Moscow outgunning USA in race for global influence

PENTAGON: Moscow outgunning USA in race for global influence...

The U.S. is ill-equipped to counter the increasingly brazen political warfare Russia is waging to undermine democracies, the Pentagon and independent strategists warn in a detailed assessment that happens to echo much bipartisan criticism of President Donald Trump's approach to Moscow.  The more than 150-page white paper, prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and shared with POLITICO, says the U.S. is still underestimating the scope of Russia's aggression, which includes the use of propaganda and disinformation to sway public opinion across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. The study also points to the dangers of a growing alignment between Russia and China, which share a fear of the United States' international alliances and an affinity for "authoritarian stability."  Its authors contend that disarray at home is hampering U.S. efforts to respond — saying America lacks the kind of compelling “story” it used to win the Cold War.  The study doesn't offer any criticisms of Trump, but it comes amid continued chaffing by security hawks in both parties who have objected to the president's repeated slights at U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia, public affection for authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, and his habit of scoffing at the evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. A grinning Trump added to that pattern Friday in Osaka, Japan, where he got a chuckle out of Putin by admonishing him, "Don't meddle in the election, president."  In interviews with POLITICO, other Russia watchers supported the report's warnings that the U.S. needs to up its game.  "Russia is attacking Western institutions in ways more shrewd and strategically discreet than many realize,” said Natalia Arno, president of the Free Russia Foundation, an anti-Putin Washington think tank that recently completed its own study of Russian efforts to undermine the West. “The attacks may seem more subtle and craftier, but they are every bit as destructive as governments are influenced, laws are changed, legal decisions are undermined, law enforcement is thwarted and military intervention is disguised."  The unclassified “Strategic Multilayer Assessment” marks a clear warning from the military establishment to civilian leaders about a national security threat that strategists fear, if left unchecked, could ultimately lead to armed conflict.  "In this environment, economic competition, influence campaigns, paramilitary actions, cyber intrusions, and political warfare will likely become more prevalent," writes Navy Rear Adm. Jeffrey Czerewko, the Joint Chiefs' deputy director for global operations, in the preface to the report. "Such confrontations increase the risk of misperception and miscalculation, between powers with significant military strength, which may then increase the risk of armed conflict."  The Pentagon paper, which has not been widely disseminated, assesses Russia's intentions in an attempt to understand what drives its strategy, outlines a range of malign activities attributed to Russia in regions as diverse as Africa and the Arctic and lays out ways the United States could strengthen its response. Among other steps, it recommends that the State Department spearhead more aggressive "influence operations," including sowing divisions between Russia and China.  The study addresses what it refers to as Moscow's "gray zone" activities — the emboldened attempts by Putin's regime to undermine democratic nations, particularly on Russia's periphery, using means short of direct military conflict.  "These activities include threatening other states militarily, or compromising their societies, economies, and governments by employing a range of means and methods to include propaganda, disinformation, and cultural, religious, and energy coercion," writes Jason Werchan, who works in the strategy division of the U.S. European Command, the military headquarters responsible for deterring the Russian military, in one chapter.  Yet the report laments the lack of a unified message within the United States, in turn due to a lack of coordination or agreement among executive branch agencies and Congress.  Belinda Bragg, a research scientist for NSI, a government consulting firm that specializes in social science research, adds in the study that "we need to better articulate U.S. interests and strategy to both ourselves and others."  But that requires coming to an agreement about what the U.S. message should be, said Anna Borshchevskaya, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who wrote a chapter about Russian efforts to win over both governments and opposition forces in Africa.  “We still have a story to tell but because we are so polarized and are doubting ourselves we have a narrative problem,” Borshchevskaya said in an interview. “Russia does not.”  Another crucial step, Bragg recommends, is to develop a better understanding of how much target populations trust the United States "and have in place strategies to bolster that trust when it is low."  The paper also raises alarm about what the authors view as a burgeoning anti-American alliance by Russia and communist China, who have traditionally been fierce competitors despite being on the same side of the Cold War's ideological divide. Steps to counter that could include sowing Russian distrust of China's expanding power on Russia's eastern periphery, as well as Beijing's economic and infrastructure projects on multiple continents.  “The world system, and America’s influence in it, would be completed upended if Moscow and Beijing aligned more closely,” warns Werchan.  On the other hand, the assessment sees an urgent need for cooperation with Russia in key areas — especially in the realm of nuclear weapons.  "It is clear that a fresh round of arms racing threatens," writes another of the study's Pentagon contributors, John Arquilla, a director at the Naval Postgraduate School. "The United States can either embrace this, hoping to outpace the Russians, or try to head off such a costly competition with a rededicated arms control/reduction policy."  Such an approach should also seek to "corral" other nuclear weapons states such as North Korea, China, Iran, India and Pakistan, Arquilla wrote. "Revisiting Ronald Reagan's offer to Russia, made back in the '80s, to share research on ballistic missile defense, would be an adroit move as well."  Arquilla acknowledged that former President Barack Obama failed in his attempted "reset" with Russia failed, and that "Trump wanted to do this but he was derailed by the electioneering apparently orchestrated by Moscow."  "Still it is not too late for such a move," he wrote. "After all the United States works closely with Russia on space operations. Is it a bridge too far to hope for more cooperation at the terrestrial level?"  The greatest check on Putin's ambitions could be the Russian people, said the study, which pointed to evidence of deep public wariness about Moscow's foreign policy, including the 2014 invasion of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, military support for Russian separatists and "the Kremlin's assertions that the US is a looming external danger."  Survey data compiled for the study by Thomas Sherlock, a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, suggests "relatively weak approval among the [Russian] public for a forceful external posture, including intervention in the 'near abroad' to check American power or protect Russian-speakers from perceived discrimination."  Even Russian elites seem skeptical of Putin's strategy, the paper contends. "While both elites and members of the mass public are supportive of restoring Russia's great power status, they often define a great power and its priorities more in terms of socio-economic development than in the production and demonstration of hard power," it says. "These perspectives increasingly come into conflict with those of the Kremlin."


eveningstandard--2019-01-22--Learning from the past can help us plan a better future

We've not lacked historical references amid the Brexit debate. People have compared what’s happening now to the Suez Crisis, the Second World War and even the Norman Conquest. But history must be more than a passing reference — we need to understand it and make use of it in public life.  I argued recently that the Government should think more systematically about how history can help inform the present and the future. As chief executive of the British Academy — which promotes the humanities and the social sciences — I believe history can help our politicians make better policies and avoid the potential pitfalls of the past.  As a former civil servant I have seen first-hand how knowledge of what has gone before can prepare us for the challenges of the future. In the early 2000s, clear and robust measures were put in place to prepare London in case of a terror attack, learning from New York’s bitter experience of 9/11.  But governments do not always learn from history. In 2001 the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease devastated our economy and large parts of the social fabric of rural Britain.  The nation seemed totally unprepared about how to respond — despite the fact that more than a quarter of a century earlier, in 1967, there had been an equally bad outbreak followed by a clear “lessons learned” report. It was just that nobody thought to reopen that report in 2001.  Financial crises, international disputes, terrorism, human and animal epidemics: we have seen them all before. That is why the British Academy looks to work with government to improve the way in which policies are shaped, using the lessons of history to produce new ideas.  As the Government seeks to address the challenges of industrial strategy for the 2020s and beyond, we have much to learn from past industrial strategies dating back some half a century, for example.  And as we prepare to leave the EU — a measure some argue is harking back to a mythical past — we must, of course, acknowledge that looking at history is not a tidy guarantee that policymakers will avoid previous mistakes. Studying the Reformation, the Suez Crisis or the turbulent politics of the Seventies will not shield us from the challenges of the future.  But it can help us to be better prepared. At its best history can show us what works well and what has failed. It can show us how people behave under pressure and how leadership can triumph — or fail. In doing so, governments should be better able to shape policies that are more fit for purpose in the volatile and unpredictable world we face.  For while you can never predict the future, history can always help you understand better the lessons from the past — and, hopefully, help our politicians avoid making the same mistakes again.


eveningstandard--2019-06-21--Lets hear it for the humanities knowledge for our future

Lets hear it for the humanities — knowledge for our future

Perhaps this would ring true for everyone who has ever lived, but the world today feels chaotic, contradictory and confusing. Brexit, cryptocurrencies, artificially intelligent political bots, self-driving cars: modern life is replete with complex geopolitical events, curious trends and mind-boggling inventions — to the point where watching the news can be utterly bewildering.  But, as China’s Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “in the midst of chaos there is also opportunity”, and that is as true now as it was 2,500 years ago. For the next decade and beyond will overflow with opportunities and, with London and several of the globe’s best universities leading the way, the UK is brilliantly placed to make the most of them.  Britain is, and always has been, a world leader in the humanities and social sciences, and we must exploit their vast potential. Subjects such as English literature, history, languages, law, psychology, anthropology and economics, are essential if we are to make sense of the world. They are about big ideas, evidence-based research, relentless inquiry and rigorous debate.  From free speech and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations to Keynesian economics, the welfare state and the internet, groundbreaking ideas have transformed the UK and the world. With the 21st-century stock-in-trade being ideas — not gadgets and gizmos —we’ll gain enormously if we play to our strengths. Look no further than yesterday’s announcement that Oxford University’s humanities faculties will receive a record-breaking £150 million to tackle the ethical questions surrounding artificial intelligence. The gift, from one of America’s richest philanthropists, is a show of faith in the value of the humanities and social sciences.  The good news is the UK already loves these subjects. According to a British Academy poll, almost a third of us would choose a humanities or social science course if given the chance at university, making these the most popular subjects. Not only are they enjoyable and rewarding in their own right, analysis shows graduates with these degrees are as employable and redundancy-proof as their counterparts in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and have more varied careers.  To gratify the nation’s hunger to know more about humanity, about where we are from and where we are headed, The British Academy is throwing open its doors for its Summer Showcase this weekend. With 15 fascinating exhibits exploring the research we fund, pop-up talks and live music, visitors can meet some of the finest minds in the humanities and social sciences. As universities minister Chris Skidmore has said, these subjects enrich our lives, boost employment opportunities and make us competitive on the international stage. Whether it is Brexit or Bitcoin, the future of democracy or fake news, the insights these subjects provide are essential.


eveningstandard--2019-10-10--Shaking hands for more than three seconds can trigger anxiety and affect relationships, study finds

Handshakes that last more than three seconds can trigger anxiety, negatively impact business meetings and affect the state of our relationships, a study has found.  Participants in the research were interviewed by masters students at the University of Dundee's school of social sciences about their work and career prospects.  They were then introduced to a second researcher, who would either shake their hand as "normal" (less than three seconds), "prolonged" (longer than three seconds), or not at all.  The participants were unaware of the significance of the handshake throughout the study period, with their subsequent reactions analysed.  Researchers found that shaking hands for longer than “may appear to be a warm gesture” was met with negative behaviour.  The study comes after Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, on their first meeting in 2017, made headlines around to world for their longer-than-normal handshake.  US President Trump gripped Mr Macron’s right hand so firmly that their knuckles turned white.  Dr Emese Nagy, a reader in psychology who led the study, said the findings highlight the importance of introducing ourselves appropriately. She added: "Handshakes are a particularly important greeting and can have long-lasting consequences for the relationships that we form.  "There has been evidence to suggest that many behaviours, such as hugs, fall within a window of approximately three seconds and this study has confirmed that handshakes that occur in this time frame feel more natural to those who participate in the greeting.  "While shaking hands for longer may appear to be a warm gesture on the surface, we found that they negatively affected the behaviour of the recipient, even after the handshake was finished.  "Politicians are particularly keen on prolonged handshakes, which are often used an expression of warmth but also as a means of demonstrating authority.  "However, our findings suggest that while doing so might look impressive for the cameras, this behaviour could potentially jeopardise the quality of their working and personal relationships from the beginning, which could have repercussions for millions of people."  The team found participants showed less interactional enjoyment after the longer handshake, laughing less and showing increased anxiety.  Handshakes lasting less than three seconds resulted in less subsequent smiling, but did feel more natural to those who participated.  No behavioural changes were associated with the no-handshake control experiment.  The results can be found in the Perceptual And Motor Skills journal, Effects Of Handshake Duration On Other Nonverbal Behaviour.  Previously in 2011 Dr Nagy analysed hugs and what they say about shared experiences.  New: Daily podcast from the Evening Standard  Listen and subscribe to The Leader on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Acast or your chosen podcast provider. New episodes every weekday from 4pm.


fivethirtyeight--2019-03-25--Conspiracy Theories Cant Be Stopped

Conspiracy Theories Can’t Be Stopped

Shortly before killing 50 people at two New Zealand mosques, the man arrested for the Christchurch massacre posted an online manifesto that alluded to the “Great Replacement” — a racist demographic theory that stokes fears of white people becoming, effectively, extinct. Within hours of the shootings, this act of terrorism inspired by a conspiracy theory had already gone on to birth conspiracy theories about itself. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh speculated that the shooter was a secret leftist hoping to use the attack to smear the reputation of the political right.  That a single tragedy could be so tangled in conspiracy mongering should be no surprise at this point. We’ve all watched conspiracies grow from myriad soils: the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, the political passions of George Soros, vaccines, climate change, even the football secrets of the New England Patriots. Conspiracy theories appear to have become a major part of how we, as a society, process the news. It might be harder to think of an emotionally tinged event that didn’t provoke a conspiracy theory than it is to rattle off a list of the ones that did.  The ubiquity — and risks — of all these conspiracies has caught the attention of scientists. For years, the potentially dangerous consequences of conspiracy led many researchers to approach belief in conspiracies as a pathology in need of a cure. But that train of thought tended to awkwardly clash against some of the facts. The more we learn about conspiracy beliefs, the more normal they look — and the more some scientists worry that trying to prevent them could present its own dangers.  The experts I spoke with all said that the internet had changed the way conspiracies spread, but conspiracies, both dangerous and petty, have always been with us. Nobody knows, really, how popular conspiracy beliefs used to be, because it wasn’t a thing surveys regularly tracked until recently, said Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist at VU Amsterdam. But he and Michael Wood, professor of psychology at the UK’s University of Winchester, both pointed to a study that suggests conspiracies have consistently peered out of the pages of American newspapers for at least a century.  Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, cataloged and coded more than 100,000 letters to the editor published in The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and found the number of letters alleging and discussing conspiracy theories to have been pretty consistent over the last 120 years. This study isn’t perfect — the newspapers are still gatekeepers to what conspiracies were deemed fit to publish — but because it encompasses two different papers over a wide swath of time and many editorial leadership changes, Uscinski told me that it’s reasonable to assume we’re looking at something that reflects what interests readers, more so than what interests editors.  That research is significant to understanding conspiracy belief as a societal norm. “There was some crazy stuff that they were more than happy to publish,” Uscinski said. “The CIA is creating lesbianism. We found alien planets. … Jimmy Carter is a communist agent. Secret baby farms where they’re growing organs for people. It all wound up in there.”  And, it turns out, most of us believe in some strange goings-on behind the curtains. More than half of Americans think there was more than one person involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for example. A 2014 study found that more than half of Americans believe in at least one medical conspiracy — a list that includes things like doctors giving children vaccines they know to be dangerous or the idea that the Food and Drug Administration intentionally suppresses natural cancer cures because of pressure from the pharmaceutical industry. The more specific conspiracies you ask about in polls, the higher the percentage of Americans that believe in at least one, Uscinski said. He thinks it’s likely everyone has a pet conspiracy to call their own.  What’s more, conspiracy beliefs aren’t necessarily all that special, said Carrie Leonard, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. Leonard studies broader categories of what are known as “erroneous beliefs” — paranormal experiences, gambling fallacies, that sort of thing. The more we learn about conspiracy beliefs, the more they seem to have in common with these other kinds of wrong ideas, she said. Feeling a lack of control over various aspects of life, a tendency toward paranoid thinking, failure to understand and use statistics and probabilistic reasoning — all those things correlate with belief in ghosts and slot-machine prowess as much as with belief in the Illuminati. In fact, Leonard said, if you believe in the paranormal, you’re more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, and vice versa. (A finding that is probably completely unsurprising to the editors of The Fortean Times.)  At the same time, though, conspiracy theories have a sociopolitical aspect that makes them stand out. Leonard, and other researchers, think of belief in conspiracy as an interaction between individual tendencies and social circumstances. So, for instance, if you’re part of a group that is marginalized by society or lacks power in important ways you’re more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. That means being a member of a racial minority is a predictor of conspiracy belief — and so is unemployment, low economic status, or even just being a member of a cultural group that’s looked down on by people in positions of power.  Likewise, consider who is accusing whom of engaging in conspiracy. Uscinski’s study of newspaper letters to the editor tracked the social status of the letter writers. Consistently, he found conspiracies were punching up. Not only did average people write more than 70 percent of the conspiracy letters — as opposed to elite members of society — the conspiracies alleged were usually aimed at people in positions of power. There’s also no evidence to suggest that conspiracy belief is a phenomenon of the far right or the far left, Uscinski said. Americans broadly believe in a “them” pulling the strings and manipulating the country.  And this is where conspiracy beliefs start to get tangled up with truth. Because history does contain real examples of conspiracy. Pizzagate was a dangerous lie that led an armed man to walk into a family restaurant, convinced he was there to rescue children from pedophilic members of the Democratic Party. But that incident also exists in the same universe as the Tuskegee experiments, redlining and the Iran-Contra Affair. “I have this conspiracy that Western governments are involved in an international spying ring,” Wood said. “Before about 2014 that would have made you a conspiracy theorist. Now we know it’s true.”  Summoning — and demonizing — the belief in conspiracies can also have political consequences. “During the Bush Administration, the left was going fucking bonkers … about 9/11 and Halliburton and Cheney and Blackwater and all this stuff,” Uscinski said. “As soon as Obama won they didn’t give a shit about any of that stuff anymore. They did not care. It was politically and socially inert.” In turn, conspiracy theories about Obama flourished on the right. Uscinski said he is frustrated by this tendency for partisans to build up massive conspiracy infrastructures when they are out of power, only to develop a sudden amnesia and deep concern about the conspiracy mongering behavior of the other side once power is restored. It’s a cycle, he said that threatened to make social science a tool of partisan slapfights more than a standard of truth. And in a 2017 paper, he argued that conspiracy beliefs could even be useful parts of the democratic process, calling them “tools for dissent used by the weak to balance against power.”  These issues add up to more scientists beginning to have questions about what the goals of conspiracy belief research should actually be. Do we want an entire field of study aimed at preventing conspiracy theories from forming and dispelling the ones that do?  “I don’t think so,” Wood said. “I’m sure some people would disagree with me on that. But the objective shouldn’t be nobody speculates about people in power abusing power. That’s a terrible outcome for the world.”  He’s right — some scientists do disagree. Leonard, for instance, acknowledged that the world is complex, but viewed conspiracy theories as largely negative — erroneous beliefs, like gambling fallacies, but with the power to disrupt whole societies rather than just one person’s bank account.  Of course, all this debate assumes eliminating conspiracy theories is even possible. Van Prooijen told me that he’s currently working on a line of research to see whether a false conspiracy belief can be corrected by giving the people who believe in it something they’ve lacked — power and control over their own lives. In laboratory experiments, this seems to work, he said. Empower people, give them a sense of control, operate with transparency, and conspiracy theories seem to become less appealing.  Trouble is, in the real world, who has the ability to offer that kind of empowerment?  “If a group of people strongly distrusts a government or group of leaders, anything they do will raise suspicion,” van Prooijen said. Whether they want to get rid of conspiracies or not, scientists (and global leaders) are kind of stuck. Conspiracy beliefs are the norm, and difficult to shake because the people with the most interest in shaking them are, usually, the very people the conspiracy is meant to fight. As van Prooijen put it: “It’s not an easy task.”


fivethirtyeight--2019-04-10--How Will Democratic Voters Respond To The 2020 Fields Historic Diversity

How Will Democratic Voters Respond To The 2020 Field’s Historic Diversity?

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.  sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): In 2008, Democrats nominated the only black candidate in the primary field, and in 2016, they nominated the only woman. The 2020 Democratic primary has the potential for a number of firsts, including the first black woman nominee, the first openly gay nominee or the first Jewish nominee, among others. But a field that is more diverse than any we’ve seen before is also a challenge for candidates seeking to distinguish themselves, especially when many of their opponents can also lay claim to a historic nomination.  So what will it mean to run in a field both as large and diverse as the 2020 Democratic primary, both for those whose candidacies would and would not be historic?  Joining us are two first-time FiveThirtyEight contributors: Julian Wamble, a political science professor at Stony Brook University, and Carole Bell, a political communication scholar. Welcome!!!  julian.wamble: Thanks! Glad to be here. And as to your question, part of me wonders how much novelty making history has anymore for Democrats, considering that they made it in 2008 but then didn’t make it in 2016. I guess I wonder if that’s something voters still consider appealing?  meredithconroy (Meredith Conroy, political science professor at California State University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): That’s a good point. Hillary Clinton’s candidacies in 2008 and 2016 and Obama’s in 2008 were frequently described as “historic.” I haven’t seen that word thrown around as much this cycle, but it’s still early.  sarahf: Democrats also seem to be especially concerned with defeating President Trump, so perhaps that will overshadow other considerations.  carole.bell: Yes. Anxiety and energy are both high. Part of that is about making history as well as beating Trump, and it might be why so many candidates have jumped in. But a field of this size presents challenges for all involved: candidates, party officials, donors, the press and voters. It also means that the novelty of a candidate really seems to cut both ways. Democrats are excited about turning the page after 2016, and the social identity of the candidate is part of that. But they’re also running scared after losing to Trump, which is perhaps reflected in the fact that three of the four top candidates in the horse race, according to the polls, are straight white men.  julian.wamble: I think it may be people who don’t stand to make history if they win the nomination who actually carry a greater weight of trying to set themselves apart.  perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Right. Take someone like Beto O’Rourke. I think he is super aware that he is a straight white male candidate, so he is trying to emphasize in his campaign that he will represent the rest of the party. He basically promised to name a woman as his VP during his first week as a candidate. Arguably, that is also part of what Joe Biden was trying to do by floating Stacey Abrams as his VP pick.  julian.wamble: But I wonder whether suggesting women and women of color as VP picks comes across as genuine.  carole.bell: I think the “diverse VP” play has been too calculated and smacks of tokenism.  julian.wamble: It definitely raises the question of what these white male candidates can do to prove that they are not your “traditional” white male candidate — i.e., they understand issues of racial inequality or gender discrimination — while still being perceived as genuine.  perry: That genuine question is hard, and I’m not totally sure how a candidate tackles that. There’s definitely been a token-ish element in how Beto O’Rourke and Joe Biden have talked about their VP picks, but I also think they’re both trying to show that they respect different parts of the Democratic Party’s coalition and will respect them as president. And that is a good instinct.  sarahf: What type of coalition candidates will have to build to win the primary is one question we’re interested in at FiveThirtyEight. At this stage, what do you see as some of the challenges for candidates trying to build a solid bloc of support?  julian.wamble: Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are often depicted as the two front-runners among black voters, but I think they actually have a higher hill to climb than the white candidates who are also courting black supporters. And that’s because Booker and Harris not only have to win over black voters, but they also have to win over white voters. And social science research has shown us that can pose some challenges for non-white candidates, as white voters often perceive them as representing the interests of voters of color over white voters’ interests.  perry: One question I have when we talk about different constituencies in the Democratic Party is how we should factor in women voters. In that piece on all the different coalitions of the party, FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver didn’t include women as their own group. That’s because they make up nearly 60 percent of the Democratic primary electorate and would naturally make up an important part of any grouping within the party. But what do you think? Is appealing to women as a voting bloc something worth doing?  julian.wamble: I don’t know. I think appealing to women as one voting bloc assumes that gender is a prominent political identity for all women, and I’m not sure that is a safe assumption to make.  carole.bell: Right. Studies have shown that different aspects of identity often take priority over gender, especially for women of color or conservative women who identify as pro-life, for example.  julian.wamble: We’ve seen numerous elections in which women, particularly white women, have not voted collectively in ways that that many Democrats expected of them, which raises the question: Are women actually a cohesive identity-voting bloc?  meredithconroy: Julian makes an important point — the majority of white women voted for Trump in 2016. But I think Nate was right to not designate a “women constituency” within the Democratic primary electorate. After all, research has found that women and men who identify as Democrats are really similar to each other on most issues; gun control is one big exception.  carole.bell: Exactly. There’s also evidence that women aren’t a voting bloc when it comes to prioritizing race, which we’re already seeing discussed in 2020. For the vast majority of black women, in addition to things like health care, criminal justice/policing and racial justice were “very important” issues in the 2018 midterm elections. But one of the main critiques that black women have long had of mainstream (predominantly white) feminists and liberals is that they fail to recognize or prioritize the role that racial oppression plays in black women’s lives, whereas black women have always had to be conscious of it. However, that may be changing. More white liberals are acknowledging racial inequality, and many Democrats now seem to be trying to bridge the gap. Acknowledging Black Lives Matter and the Mothers of the Movement at the 2016 Democratic National Convention was one way to show that, and now 2020 presidential candidates like Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren are trying to step up by introducing policies aimed at racial justice. Both Warren and Harris have even said they support reparations for black Americans affected by slavery.  perry: Right now, I find the number of candidates running to be kind of overwhelming — and the voters I talk to do as well. But one thing I keep seeing is the sign of an age gap — that is, I think, if he runs, Biden will do better with older voters than younger ones. And we even have some polling that supports the idea that Biden is doing well with older Democrats (ages 50 and up) and not as well with younger voters.  “Over the age of 50” isn’t what we usually think of as an identity, but I wonder if age is a good proxy for liberalism, with older people being less “woke” (or not as focused on Biden’s role in the 1994 crime bill, the Anita Hill hearing or his touching women in ways that make some of them uncomfortable , etc.).  meredithconroy: A number of early primary polls have more clearly shown an age gap when it comes to candidate preferences than a gender gap. For instance, the Quinnipiac University poll that Perry linked to above shows a 4-point gap between men and women in their support for Biden (32 percent of men said they would vote for Biden vs. 28 percent of women), as well as a 5-point point gap in their support for Sanders (22 percent of men vs. 17 percent of women). But compare that with a 15-point gap between 18-to-49-year-olds and those 50 and over who support Biden (22 percent vs. 37 percent) and a 14-point gap in support for Sanders between these two age groups (26 percent vs. 12 percent).  carole.bell: Age could be a huge factor in terms of both the culture and priorities of Democratic voters. Older voters don’t seem to care as much about Biden’s history, and polling shows that they are more likely to say the #MeToo movement has gone too far. I think they may be frustrated and worried that the party is focusing too much on related issues like sexual harrasment or sexual assault. This also extends to issues of race or anything that could fall under the heading of “identity politics,” which some blamed for the loss to Trump.  julian.wamble: It’s a question of who voters want the party to be and who the party should represent, and the age gap speaks to the different mentalities that currently exist in the party.  For some Democrats, the big question is: Who can beat Trump? So maybe there’s less of a concern about whether the person who can do that is “woke” or without repute.  carole.bell: I think many Democrats and commentators have also been working on the assumption that the Democratic Party today is “no party for old white men.” But that seems false or at least way too early to claim. The reality is that two older white men in their 70s are the most popular candidates, at least at this stage.  sarahf: To Carole’s point, Biden and Sanders have led the polls for months now (even though Biden hasn’t yet said he’s running). But Harris and O’Rourke are in third and fourth place, respectively. And, of course, there’s been a lot of buzz around Pete Buttigieg.  So what do we make of the current horse race, and what will you be keeping an eye on as candidates try to distinguish themselves?  perry: Buttigieg is, to me, the most interesting person in the race right now.  He is casting himself as Mr. Midwest and seems able to reach swing voters, but he’s also an openly gay candidate (plus, he’d be the youngest president ever if elected).  carole.bell: Perry, I’m a little obsessed with the Buttigieg factor. He bridges both buckets of candidates we’re discussing here. He’s running as an openly gay man, which is historic. And while his race and gender do not trump his sexual identity, there are advantages of being a white man from the Midwest.  julian.wamble: The fact that Buttigieg is a gay married man is important. But I would argue that because he’s a white man, Buttigieg has less to prove than candidates who have to combat stereotypes about their inability to represent “the average American” by virtue of their racial and ethnic backgrounds, like, say, Julian Castro, Booker or Harris.  carole.bell: Yes, Buttigieg gets to be both the electable white male candidate and the historic candidate who represents progress and inclusion. There’s a lot in his candidacy that both moderate Democrats and liberals alike can embrace. That said, some of his rhetoric about Clinton, coastal Democrats and “social justice warriors” has given some Democrats second thoughts.  meredithconroy: It’s definitely possible that people who are uncomfortable with a gay person running for president might look at Buttigieg’s status as a white man and a veteran and be more comfortable with his candidacy. But as you can see in the table below, running as an openly gay candidate is still a considerable hurdle.  The last time Gallup asked Americans whether they would be willing to vote for a “generally well-qualified” gay or lesbian candidate for president was in 2015, but at the time, 14 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of Americans overall said they would not be willing to vote for a such a candidate.  perry: What do we make of Booker’s and Castro’s candidacies and how they fit into the field?  It feels like Harris has broken out — she’s doing really well both with fundraising and in the polls. But Booker and Castro are not. Why?  sarahf: Booker’s underperformance in the polls I find harder to explain than Castro’s. Castro arguably disappeared from the national spotlight after his tenure as Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development ended. Booker, meanwhile, has the most endorsements out of any candidate in the field!! And he’s doing well with early state activists. But maybe the party really doesn’t decide anymore.  perry: It’s a real challenge for Booker that the media can’t discover him and find him fresh like Mayor Pete. Booker has been on the scene for a long time. He was a cool, interesting young mayor in … 2006.  meredithconroy: Perry, I thought either Booker’s CNN town hall or his “Pod Save America” appearance would help him be rediscovered. But you’re right that it’s not happening, and that hurts him.  carole.bell: Booker’s evolution is interesting. More than other candidates, he seems stalled. And what’s most concerning is that he has good name recognition, but he is still polling at only around 4 percent, on average.  I’m not really sure that he commands any particular constituency. He has been a leader on criminal justice reform, but he’s not that popular on the left, for instance.  meredithconroy: Which constituencies could he command?  perry: Part of his theory of the case is he’d appeal to both party loyalists and black voters.  julian.wamble: But not being “rediscovered” hasn’t hurt some of the other candidates, so I’m perplexed and not really sure what Booker can do to bring himself back into the fray. Or what he can do to set himself apart from the other contenders in the race.  sarahf: But, OK, say there is a path for Democratic contenders to build a winning coalition of primary voters by running on a platform that tackles identity politics head-on. How does that factor into this current field of candidates, and what will building that coalition take? And do some of the candidates that could be historic-firsts have an advantage here?  perry: Broadly, I think you could split the field up like this — candidates like Harris or Warren running on fairly liberal stances when it comes to issues of race, equality and other identity-based issues. And then someone like Amy Klobuchar aiming clearly at Obama-Trump voters.  But in the end, I think most candidates, regardless of what side they fall on, will talk about health care and racial equality to win both the Obama-Trump voters and the black voters who didn’t turn out in 2016.  Also, and I need to get better at saying this, expanding health care and racial equality go hand in hand. It’s not like there is some clean divide when it comes to economic or racial issues.  julian.wamble: Building a campaign message around the idea of equality to show an understanding of how different groups of voters struggle is, in my opinion, an effective way to use identity politics in a way that doesn’t isolate other groups of voters.  carole.bell: I agree. And I actually think Warren, in particular, does a great job speaking to issues Democrats really care about including health care, racial equality, gender equality and more general economic issues.  But with Warren, there’s a gap between her strength on policy and her political skill, on the one hand, and her standing in the race, on the other. It’s still early, but I think Warren is like Booker in that regard. Both in Warren’s CNN town hall and on the campaign trail, voters respond positively, but that doesn’t seem to translate to her polling numbers, or at least not yet.  meredithconroy: For Booker, Harris, Castro, Warren, Klobuchar and Gillibrand, they build a coalition by making the primary about the issues where their identity gives them an edge — health care, criminal justice, child care, immigration. I think they can (and are) directing the agenda in a way where their expertise and credibility won’t be denied.  carole.bell: I definitely agree with that point, Meredith. We already know that “running as a woman” can work in a candidate’s favor when issues and attributes associated with women are valued by the public. And I think that could apply to other identity-based issues in 2020. Right now, health care is a top issue, as it was in 2018. I think racial equality could be a big focus in 2020, and candidates who are able to speak to that directly and authentically have the potential to stand out.

Perry Bacon Jr. (perry.bacon@fivethirtyeight.com)


fivethirtyeight--2019-04-23--How The Citizenship Question Could Break The Census

This is the Trump Docket, where we track some of the most important legal cases of the Trump presidency and how their results could shape presidential power. Questions, comments or thoughts about cases to cover? Email us here.  Every 10 years, the Constitution requires the government to count all the millions of people living in the United States. The decennial census is a massive, painstaking undertaking that results in a national portrait in numbers. It tells us how many people live here, where people have moved and how our country’s racial and ethnic makeup has changed. And today the Supreme Court will weigh whether asking respondents whether they are U.S. citizens would undermine the census’s mandate to count every person.  A lot is determined by the data from each census, which is why adding or subtracting survey questions can be contentious. In addition to determining how many seats in the U.S. House each state has, census data touches almost every corner of American life, including business, education and polling, to name a few. “These numbers are the gold standard body of statistics that make the country run,” said Thomas Wolf, counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Critics of the proposal to add a citizenship question to the census are concerned that if a large number of immigrants don’t respond or respond incorrectly, the results will be inaccurate, and as a result, certain areas of the country will lose funding or political representation. Both parties could be affected, since an undercount of immigrants would likely hurt red states like Texas and blue states like California.  Questions related to a person’s citizenship did once appear on the census, but historians say the phrasing and intent of those earlier questions were different — and, in any case, they were removed from the main head count after 1950 in a bid to improve the census’s accuracy. Meanwhile, social science methods have evolved to the point that high-quality citizenship data can be — and already is — collected via other Census Bureau surveys and administrative records. So the Trump administration is facing an important question: Why add a question to the census that could harm the quality and credibility of the data — and also may not be necessary?  The case before the Supreme Court is about the legality of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census; it has been challenged by an array of states and civil rights organizations. Ross says the question was added in response to a request from the Justice Department for more detailed citizenship data to help enforce the Voting Rights Act, but three lower court judges have all concluded that the evidence shows he had already decided to add the question and used the Justice Department as a pretext. The judges concluded, too, that the administration violated standards of transparency and accountability required of executive agencies by failing to test the question and ignoring expert advice against adding it. Two also ruled that the question would violate the Constitution because it seems likely to result in an undercount.  But the Trump administration maintains that the question isn’t even all that revolutionary. In the government’s telling, the citizenship question is being “reinstated” — a claim that was echoed by Justice Neil Gorsuch in a dissent last fall on the Supreme Court order that allowed a trial in one of the citizenship question cases. “Most censuses in our history have asked about citizenship,” Gorsuch wrote. This argument certainly makes Ross’s decision look more reasonable, both from a procedural perspective and a constitutional perspective. But historians say it overstates the extent to which citizenship-related questions have been a fixture on past censuses.  Margo Anderson, who is a retired professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and studies the demographic history of the U.S., signed onto an amicus brief outlining the history of the census in support of the administration’s challengers. She told me that even though questions about immigration status have previously appeared on the census, a question directly asking every household whether every resident is a citizen has not. When questions about citizenship status were included in the past, Anderson said, they were sporadic and asked only of certain groups and were sometimes accompanied by additional questions about whether people were trying to become citizens. The 1890 census, for instance, specified that only “males of foreign birth” who are 21 years or older be asked whether they were naturalized and whether they had “taken out papers” to become naturalized. In 1950, the census asked whether people who were “foreign born” were “naturalized.”  Often the purpose was to determine how immigrants were being assimilated and whether they had started the naturalization process. The difference now, Anderson said, is that “the question that’s being proposed by the Trump administration has an exclusionary function — are you a citizen, yes or no.”  Wolf, who co-authored a recent paper about the history of citizenship questions on the census, said that in the mid-20th century, large numbers of demographic questions, including one related to citizenship, were removed from the full survey received by everyone and added to a longer supplement that only went to a subset of households, because new statistical methods showed researchers that a single, more cumbersome survey was causing an undercount. Anderson echoed Wolf’s findings and said that although it’s hard to say for sure because the question hasn’t been tested, there’s evidence that the addition could cause respondents to skip the citizenship question, decline to fill out the form or leave relatives off the form, or inaccurately claim citizenship. Statisticians and social science researchers have expressed concerns that immigrants and their families, in particular, may be less likely to respond to the census or may respond inaccurately out of fear that the data could be used for immigration enforcement.  One of the main criticisms of the Trump administration by the states and organizations challenging the question is that it hasn’t made the case for why citizenship data needs to be gathered on the census and doesn’t seem sufficiently concerned about how the addition of the question will affect the accuracy of the count. Kenneth Prewitt, a professor at Columbia University and a former Census Bureau director, told me that high-quality citizenship data is available from other census surveys and administrative records. Indeed, there already is a citizenship question on a separate, longer Census Bureau survey that is sent to a small share of households on a monthly basis. “Adding this question to the decennial census is not necessary,” Prewitt said.  And Justin Levitt, who is a law professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles and worked in the Justice Department’s civil rights division in the Obama administration, said there are few situations where the census’s highly granular data is necessary to determine whether a minority group is protected under the Voting Rights Act. Instead, Levitt said, the reverse could be true: Inflated or otherwise inaccurate citizenship numbers in a particular area could result in a minority group not getting protections.  Regardless of how the case turns out, some damage to the census’s credibility as a nonpartisan, scientific tally may already have been done. “It’s like an election — we have to agree that the results are fair,” Anderson said. And by drawing the census into the broader debate about immigration, the Trump administration may have already helped stoke mistrust in the final result — even if the citizenship question never ends up on a census form.  Trump and his businesses filed a lawsuit against House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, in response to a congressional subpoena for Trump’s personal financial information. The lawsuit argues that the subpoena is invalid and unenforceable because it has no “legitimate legislative purpose.”


fivethirtyeight--2019-09-18--The Christian Right Is Helping Drive Liberals Away From Religion

A few weeks ago, the Democratic National Committee formally acknowledged what has been evident for quite some time: Nonreligious voters are a critical part of the party’s base. In a one-page resolution passed at its annual summer meeting, the DNC called on Democratic politicians to recognize and celebrate the contributions of nonreligious Americans, who make up one-third of Democrats. In response, Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor with close ties to Trump, appeared on Fox News, saying the Democrats were finally admitting they are a “godless party.”  This was hardly a new argument. Conservative Christian leaders have been repeating some version of this claim for years, and have often called on religious conservatives and Republican politicians to defend the country against a growing wave of liberal secularism. And it’s true that liberals have been leaving organized religion in high numbers over the past few decades. But blaming the Democrats, as Jeffress and others are wont to do, doesn’t capture the profound role that conservative Christian activists have played in transforming the country’s religious landscape, and the role they appear to have played in liberals’ rejection of organized religion.  Researchers haven’t found a comprehensive explanation for why the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans has increased over the past few years — the shift is too large and too complex. But a recent swell of social science research suggests that even if politics wasn’t the sole culprit, it was an important contributor. “Politics can drive whether you identify with a faith, how strongly you identify with that faith, and how religious you are,” said Michele Margolis, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity.” “And some people on the left are falling away from religion because they see it as so wrapped up with Republican politics.”  Over the course of a single generation, the country has gotten a lot less religious. As recently as the early 1990s, less than 10 percent of Americans lacked a formal religious affiliation, and liberals weren’t all that much likelier to be nonreligious than the public overall. Today, however, nearly one in four Americans are religiously unaffiliated. That includes almost 40 percent of liberals — up from 12 percent in 1990, according to the 2018 General Social Survey. The share of conservatives and moderates who have no religion, meanwhile, has risen less dramatically.  The result is that today, most people’s political ideology is more tightly tethered to their religious identity. The overlap is far from complete — there are still some secular conservatives and even more religious liberals. In fact, the majority of Democratic voters are religiously affiliated. But the more liberal you are, the less likely you are to belong to a faith; whereas if you’re conservative, you’re more likely to say you’re religious.  To be sure, religious belief and practice can still exist without a label. Many people who are religiously unaffiliated still believe in God, or slip back into the pews a few times a year. But liberals are also cutting ties with religious institutions — since 1990, the share of liberals who never attend religious services has tripled. And they’re less likely to believe in God: The percentage of liberals who say they know God exists fell from 53 percent in 1991 to 36 percent in 2018.  At first, it wasn’t clear why so many Americans were losing their faith — and of the available explanations, politics wasn’t high on the list. After all, there are lots of reasons why any individual person would stop attending church that have nothing to do with politics. A church scandal might spark a crisis of faith. You might begin to view a religion’s hierarchies or rules as antiquated, restrictive or irrelevant to your life. You might not have been that religious to begin with.  Social scientists were initially reluctant to entertain the idea that a political backlash was somehow responsible, because it challenged long-standing assumptions about how flexible our religious identities really are. Even now, the idea that partisanship could shape something as personal and profound as our relationship with God might seem radical, or maybe even a little offensive.  But when two sociologists, Michael Hout and Claude Fischer, began to look at possible explanations for why so many Americans were suddenly becoming secular, those conventional reasons couldn’t explain why religious affiliation started to fall in the mid-1990s. Demographic and generational shifts also couldn’t fully account for why liberals and moderates were leaving in larger numbers than conservatives. In a paper published in 2002, they offered a new theory: Distaste for the Christian right’s involvement with politics was prompting some left-leaning Americans to walk away from religion.  It was a simple but compelling explanation. For one thing, the timing made sense. In the 1990s, white evangelical Protestants were becoming more politically powerful and visible within conservative politics. As white evangelical Protestants became an increasingly important constituency for the GOP, the Christian conservative political agenda — focused primarily on issues of sexual morality, including opposition to gay marriage and abortion — became an integral part of the the party’s pitch to voters, but it was still framed as part of an existential struggle to protect the country’s religious foundation from incursions by the secular left. Hout and Fischer argued that the Christian right hadn’t just roused religious voters from their political slumber — left-leaning people with weaker religious ties also started opting out of religion because they disliked Christian conservatives’ social agenda.  At the time, Hout and Fischer’s argument was mostly just a theory. But within the past few years, Margolis and several other prominent political scientists have concluded that politics is a driving factor behind the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. For one thing, several studies that followed respondents over time showed that it wasn’t that people were generally becoming more secular, and then gravitating toward liberal politics because it fit with their new religious identity. People’s political identities remained constant as their religious affiliation shifted.  Other research showed that the blend of religious activism and Republican politics likely played a significant role in increasing the number of religiously unaffiliated people. One study, for instance, found that something as simple as reading a news story about a Republican who spoke in a church could actually prompt some Democrats to say they were nonreligious. “It’s like an allergic reaction to the mixture of Republican politics and religion,” said David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame and one of the study’s co-authors.  Granted, the people who were leaving weren’t necessarily at the center of their religious community — they didn’t attend religious services often, perhaps dropping in once or twice a year. But the numbers began to add up, opening a rift between conservatives and liberals. According to Margolis’s research, while young people across the political spectrum tend to drift away from religion, liberals are increasingly unlikely to return.  As a result, views about religion and its role in American society have become increasingly polarized. According to surveys by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of liberals who believe that churches and religious organizations positively contribute to society dropped from nearly half (49 percent) in 2010 to only one-third (33 percent) today. And according to 2016 data from the Voter Study Group, only 11 percent of people who are very liberal say that being Christian is at least fairly important to what it means to be American — compared to 69 percent of people who identify as very conservative.  And although the people who have left religion could return, it seems more and more unlikely. For one thing, conservative Christians are still a key part of the Republican coalition, where their agenda on issues like abortion and religious exemptions remains a high political priority within the party. This means liberals’ views of the association between conservative politics and religion could be hard to shake.  These patterns are self-reinforcing in other ways, too. Recent surveys show that secular liberals are more likely than moderates or conservatives to have spouses who aren’t religious. That’s critical because these couples are then often less likely to pray or send their children to Sunday school, and research shows that formative religious experiences as a child play a crucial role in structuring an adult’s religious beliefs and identity. It’s no coincidence then that the youngest liberals — who never lived in a political world before the Christian right — are also the most secular. “It’s very, very unlikely that a kid raised in a nonreligious liberal household would suddenly consider going to church,” Margolis said.  The political implications of this shift are already evident. As more liberals become nonreligious, the Democratic Party’s base is growing more secular, complicating the party’s efforts at reaching more religious voters. But what it means for religion is less clear. Paul Djupe, a political scientist at Denison College, said that the impact might be blunted by the fact that the people who are becoming nonreligious mostly weren’t that involved in religion to begin with.  But Campbell warned that this shift is already reducing churches’ ability to bring a diverse array of people together and break down partisan barriers. That, in his view, threatens to further undermine trust in religious groups and make our politics more and more divisive. “We have very few institutions left in the country where people who have different political views come together,” he said. “Worship was one of those — and without it, the list is smaller and smaller.”


fivethirtyeight--2019-12-05--Does Knowing Whom Others Might Vote For Change Whom You’ll Vote For?

When a presidential race that was supposed to be won by a mainstream moderate instead ends being captured by a far-right gadfly, you better believe pollsters are gonna get some scrutiny. But when this situation took place in the first round of French elections in 2002, bumping the incumbent prime minister from the final round, it wasn’t just the failure of prediction that led to a polling protest. Instead, people were concerned that opinion polling, itself, had caused the outcome.  Twenty-four years earlier, France had muzzled opinion polling, banning the publication of poll results for a week before any election out of fear that voters were following the polls, rather than the other way around. That changed in 2001, and the 2002 election was the first time since the 1970s that French voters had been able to make their choice knowing what their neighbors were likely planning to do.  As hard as it may be for some of us to imagine (especially readers of this website), laws limiting when opinion polls can be published before an election are pretty common. Of the 216 countries whose election rules are tracked by the United Nations-backed Electoral Knowledge Network, 92 have some kind of regulated blackout period where polls cannot be published. Even after its 2002 rule change, France still has a 24-hour blackout period before the vote. Experts say most of these laws are based around the same premise: Polls can influence votes. If you know that most of your fellow citizens are planning to pick a specific candidate, you might decide to be part of the winning team. If you know the person you’d pick is so far ahead that there’s no chance of them losing, maybe you’ll chill out and stay home on election day.  But despite the power this fear has to shape law and fuel media narratives, the evidence supporting it is complex. Polls probably do influence how people vote in some situations, experts say. But it’s not anything like a universal, definitive effect. What’s more, some of them told me they aren’t sure that would be a bad thing. The question isn’t just whether polls determine outcomes, it’s also a debate over how people should decide their vote.  Looking through the published research on how polling might influence elections, the first thing you find is that the risk has a name — “the bandwagon effect.” The second thing you find is that paper after paper seeks to figure out if the bandwagon effect is real. How could a thing have a name but still need proof of its existence? “It’s very difficult to get at and isolate this effect,” said Tom van der Meer, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.  Like many social science questions where the outcome is often determined by interactions between more than one factor, this is not an easy effect to study. Laboratory settings tend to show a bandwagon effect in action, van der Meer said. But these are spaces where research subjects look at pretend poll results and place hypothetical votes, which may not reflect the real world. Observational studies — looking at the outcomes of real elections — are thickets of potential causal factors, nearly impossible to hack your way through. How do you determine whether it was the polls themselves that shifted the vote, or the polls that shaped media coverage that, in turn, shifted the vote? You can see the problem.  But, on the whole, experts say the bandwagon is real. How real, though, depends on the context. “Are we talking about turnout, voting for a particular candidate, support for an issue …?” said Todd Hartman, a professor of quantitative social science at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. “Depending on what area you’re talking about, the effects are stronger or weaker.”  For example, in 2013, researchers used a change in French law to get an idea of the potential impact of polls on voter turnout. Prior to 2005, citizens of France who lived in territories west of the country didn’t get to vote until after the mainland election had ended. Thus, they had the chance to see exit polls before they even went to cast their ballots. That changed after 2005, so researchers could compare several years worth of elections and see how knowledge of the presumed winner changed voter behavior. The result: After 2005, there was a nearly 12 percentage point increase in voter turnout. Far more people in those overseas territories voted when they didn’t already know who the winner was — a finding that has big implications for countries like the United States, where time zone differences mean voters in one part of the country can see the completed exit polls from earlier in the day.  But the effects aren’t always that distinct. A different paper, published in 2016, involved a series of experiments that sorted more than 20,000 Dutch voters into groups that were then exposed to different kinds of polling data. Surveys showed that the people given just poll numbers didn’t change their vote intention at all — they looked no different than the group that received no polling information. But a third group, which was presented with a narrative-style interpretation of the polls showing one party gaining ground over time, did change their intended vote, becoming 2 percentage points more likely than the control group to vote for the party that was surging. That’s a small effect, but it could matter in a tight race.  Another study showed that American voters with strong partisan preferences alter their votes to conform to opinion poll results that show what their preferred party likes or doesn’t like — but won’t do the same to match overall American opinion. Likewise, while polls won’t affect every voter, they can, in aggregate, become self-fulfilling prophecies that heighten how people feel about a given issue.  But while the experts I spoke to generally agreed that bandwagon effects exist under certain conditions, they weren’t as certain about the implications of those effects and what, if anything, we should do about it. They even disagreed with themselves at times. “It’s a hard question,” said Neil Malhotra, professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  On the one hand, he told me, you don’t want people making choices in elections based on the kind of herding behavior that leads to a mediocre restaurant having a line down the block for no reason other than that there’s always a line there. Sometimes, popularity isn’t actually a proxy for quality. On the other hand, polls can provide voters with valuable information that allows them to vote strategically, especially in primaries where you’re less likely to know a lot about the candidates. Say you’re a Democratic primary voter who likes both Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg. A poll can help you decide which of those two candidates is most likely to benefit from your vote.  Hartman was also conflicted. “People will use whatever information is available to them,” he said. “In an ideal democracy, we’d like to see people making decisions based on the issue platforms. But we also know that many voters are low-information voters, and they’re going to use whatever cues they can to sort out which candidate to vote for.” Those might be endorsements. It might be party affiliation. They might be poll results. In that sense, bandwagons aren’t exactly good or bad. They just exist.  Which means the media has a large role to play in how voters hear about which bandwagons to jump on. Van der Meer’s research on those Dutch voters suggests that raw information doesn’t seem to shift votes, but narratives about the information do. In that case, he said, the media needs to be extra careful how it presents polling data.  Which, of course, brings FiveThirtyEight into the mix. As a publication that presents a lot of polling data to the public, we’re as much a part of this story as we are reporters of it. Nate Silver, our editor in chief, certainly thinks about bandwagons. But he doesn’t consider them to be that big of a deal, he told me. That’s because Silver doesn’t really see the choice as being between poll-informed voting and policy-informed voting. “Without polling, there’s a vacuum filled by punditry and media assumptions,” he said. Banning polls doesn’t necessarily mean people vote smarter. In fact, from Silver’s perspective, it means they’re likely to vote even dumber — basing a choice on speculation instead of data.  In the end, the question of whether polls influence voters might be less important than the question of whether voters have a right to access information they want. Consider, again, the 2002 French election. Analysis after the fact suggests that polling results did make a difference in that upset — leading voters to assume a mainstream runoff was so certain that it was safe to cast a ballot for a more extremist candidate, just to send a message to the winners. If enough people do that, their assumptions about who the winners will be won’t be accurate.  But that outcome didn’t make the French switch back to a longer poll blackout. They couldn’t. That’s because the whole reason the blackout was shortened was that the country’s highest court found it to be an infringement of an article of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prevents public authorities from interfering with people sharing their opinions. Polls may well have changed the outcome of an election in France. But that was a choice the voters had the right to make.