Never before has a new speaker entered office on such a sour note as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Her vigorous and totally rejected campaign for Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) supports widespread cloakroom sentiment that she is not qualified for her high office and is there because of her gender and the support of the huge California delegation.

• "Never before..." Never? Not even once before in the entire history of the Republic? I guess I find that a little hard to believe, given the rough-and-tumble nature of American politics during some eras.
  
  What this is, is a statement made for rhetorical purposes, not a statement of fact or rational analysis.



• "...has a new speaker entered office..." Gee, Bob, haven't you noticed that Pelosi hasn't entered office yet? Damn, those little details are so darn hard to keep track of, aren't they?



• So we're supposed to believe that Pelosi was put in office by a bunch of men because she's a woman, and because the California delegation has a lot of clout, but not enough clout, apparently, to elect Murtha to a subsidiary position? Is there a shred of logic to this contention?
  
  Hey, Robert, sweetie, how about this, darling -- the Democrats elected Pelosi Speaker for the next Congress because she's done a good job as Minority Leader and there was no reason to make a change, and they elected Hoyer not as a rejection of Pelosi, but because more of them preferred Hoyer to Murtha. Whaca think of that, bubby?
  
  Too complicated, Bob, people voting for the candidate they prefer? We call it democracy, Bobbie, and it's no wonder you forgot what it is and how it works, considering that your people seem to be allergic to it and work their little tushies off trying to undercut and subvert it whenever possible.

Just so everyone recalls, Novak's prediction for the outcome of the election was:

House: Democrats 222 - Republicans 213
Senate: Democrats 47 - Republicans 53

Wooooo-eeee, that's some good predictin', Bobby boy. Congrats especially on that Senate, thing, hon.

Dear Ed,

I provide this link to a Kevin Drum posting from a few days ago because I think it's good common sense. But, more, it inspired an idea that -- were I even vaguely capable in mathematics and computer programming -- I'd be very inclined to put into action myself, just to see if it ultimately proved of value.

It seems to me that with some simple polling (or perhaps even just a close reading of the stated positions of all Democrats in the next Congress), combined with an application of Set Theory, you could pretty easily arrive at a priority list that would maximize the probability of successful passage of a vast range of Democratic policies while minimizing intra-Party friction ... _and_ minimizing the odds of the public turning against the Democrats in 2008.

I dunno, maybe this is nothing new. Maybe one or more mathematicians have done this in the past. But if so, I've never heard of it. I've never, for example, seen an illustration of it in, say, the textbooks I used to have on political game theory, which are nothing but mathematics.

So, if I had the brain for it, here's what I'd do, stated here on the off-chance that someone else -- someone who _does_ have head for math and programming -- might be inspired to act.

Start with one of your elaborate compilations of public opinion surveys, only this one being of what the public broadly claims to believe about various issues. Which issues are most salient to the general public? Which are the highest in priority? There's a big difference between those two things. For example, a substantial majority favor tough gun control laws. But they favor it, most of them, the way we favor world peace and an end to the illicit drug trade: "Gee, wouldn't it be a good thing if ..." On the other hand, folks who oppose gun controls REALLY oppose them. They aren't a majority or even very close to one, but because they can quickly become single-issue voters, they wield a lot of power. In short, they have high salience on this issue; taking it on can consume a _lot_ of political capital, especially if it's something you're likely to alienate a lot of your own erstwhile supporters over.

So anyhow, you list every issue you might imagine -- the Iraq War, national health care, gun control, raising the minimum wage, corporate reforms, abortion rights, and so forth -- and to each, you assign a composite image of what the public, nationally, thinks about them ... along with a composite "salience" calculation. So, for example, I'd bet that the Iraq war will stay right at the top where, most of us on the left, believe it to be and believe it deserves to be; that's because a substantial majority of the public are fed up with the direction, and they feel pretty strongly about it. Gun control would probably fall pretty far on the list, very nearly to the bottom.

That's one set.

To build the second set, you examine the stated national issues of concern to each Democratic Senator or Congressman. How does each of these elected leaders stand on the issues? How high is the salience of the issue to each of these people (perhaps one of the hardest -- or at least most subjective -- values to determine)? How about his or her constituents -- where do they, overall, stand on it? (Perhaps this is two numbers: overall public opinion _and_ the opinion of Democratic voters in his or her state or district). So, Casey of Pennsylvania is anti-abortion, and it might be of high personal salience to him, but probably isn't a key issue or his state's voters (indeed, many probably voted for him despite rather than because of his views on this). Tester, on the other hand, is very pro-gun rights, has high salience on it, and would get his butt kicked out of office if he crossed that. So ... mix all of this information together, and you come up with your second set.

Finally, the most subjective consideration of all: what issues can realistically be dealt with, with or without nearly unified Democratic support. A national healthcare plan ought to be in the cards, for example -- God, I'd give anything for it -- but, realistically, it might have no chance at all with Bush in the White House and Republicans still very powerful in the Senate (hence able to kill legislation with
filibusters and / or by merely attracting a stray Democrat or two to their position). Election reform and a better energy plan, however, might be issues that Bush would have a harder time blocking.

Anyhow, this is your third set.

Now crunch them altogether, and a rational priority list should emerge. Not perfect, not something to completely substitute for the experienced judgment of Democratic political leaders, but a lot better than the black box they use to figure out these things now (e.g., every member of Congress dropping things into the hopper, and all the committee leaders mostly exercise their own biases with little outside guidance).

I'm not suggesting that Henry Waxman or Charles Rangel or anyone else up there is going to allow a computer program to dictate what they do. But if all or most of these leaders are convinced that this would maximize ultimate effectiveness -- and, thus, their re-election prospects -- then they might be very inclined to give heavy value to such a priority list.

In truth, people like Reid and Pelosi already try to do this anyhow. I'm just inclined to think that a way to let a computer generate such a priority list might be recognized as a useful -- powerful -- tool.

For the life of me I cannot understand why, when a political analyst produces a range for their prediction of election results, Ed Fitzgerald would arbitarily pick the lowest number of the range. Logic would suggest that if a fair-minded person were going to reduce a range to a single number, they would pick the mid-point in that range.

My predections were, 4-6 seat loss for Republicans in the Senate (the midpoint would be 5, the final result was 6), a GOP loss of 6-8 governorships (midpoint 7, final 6) and 20-35 in the House (midpoint 27.5, as of 11/19, it is 29).

Is someone wants to quibble about us being off by one seat in the Senate and governorships and 1.5 seats off in the House, fine, go ahead, but to pick the lowest number in a range is methodologically nonsense and grossly unfair.

Mr. Cook:

Thank you for your note.

I did not approach this election as a non-partisan analyst, I approached it as a very concerned Democrat (as I clear stated in my explanatory notes) with a vital interest in understanding what was likely to happen in the election. As such, and since I included prediction of both partisan and non-partisan analyists, I did not want to be lulled by perhaps overly optimistic predictions of a Democratic win, I wanted instead as conservative an estimate of what would occur as possible.

This is why I decided to use the lower number whenever an analyst provided a range of numbers except when the analyst specifically flagged a number in the middle of the range as the most likely result, in which case I used that number.

(In the penultimate report of my survey, I also ran the numbers using the highest number in the ranges and found that the resulting averages where not significantly different from those that resulted using the lower estimates. This was because only a few analysts -- 9 to be exact -- resorted to ranges instead of specific projections. [Correction: Although 9 analysts had ranges, only 4 of them, including Cook, did not indicate a preferred number for the House pick-ups.])

Larry Sabato, for instance, in his prediction for the House had a range of 25-33, but said that 29 was the most probable, so I used 29 for his line. If you thought that the most likely outcome within your range of 20-35 was something close to the midpoint of that range ( 27 or 28 ), perhaps you might have made that clear in your report.

I will concede this, however, that in my aftermath report, I did not make the conceptual leap to change from the conservative prediction model I had been using before the election to one designed to best represent the projection of each analyst, and so I simply re-used the same numbers I had used before. (The chart was, basically, simply a re-sort of the previous one.) I regert that error, and I will make an effort to correct in when I re-do the chart again -- which I plan to do once all the House races are decided.

As for the contention that the midpoint best represents your prediction, I'm not sure I totally agree with you. 27.5, after all, is the midpoint not only of your prediction (20-35), but also of an infinite number of other predictions: 19-36, 18-37, 17-38, 16-39 etc. If Joe Blogger had predicted a Democratic gain of 14-41 seats, would you believe that he should be credited with the same accuracy as you, simply because your projections both shared a midpoint of 27.5?

But, really, it seems to me that the best way to insure that your predictions aren't mispresented is to make them a little more specific and less broadly general. A 15 seat range, after all, is hardly the model of pinpoint accuracy.

I'm sorry, your reply assumes that I have misrepresented your figures, and I don't believe that is the case, for reasons that I think I've adequately explained. In any event, your figures are publicly available, and as long as they remain so, I will continue to use them in any way that I deem appropriate.

Since you have been kind enough to offer me advice, please allow me to reciprocate. My suggestion to you, is that you might consider working a bit harder to provide predictions that are more specific and less broad and general, since it opens you up to the suspicion that you are deliberately playing it safe and hedging your bets. That's understandable, I suppose, but you are a professional analyst (the dean, according to some) who supposedly understands the political process better than most, with inside information and insight drawn from experience, and yet your predictions were so broad as to be practically useless, and you didn't end up doing all that much better than many amateur analysts.

Finally, if you believe that the failings, whatever they may be, of journalism.com are the sine qua non of the criminal lack of journalistic excellence in our political media, I suggest you take a giant step backwards and reconsider the contemporary media landscape, which includes the preference for conventional wisdom over skeptical inquiry, the dissemination of partisan received ideas in the guise of neutral reporting, collusion with official leaking for obvious political purposes, the profusion of anonymous sourcing even by outlets that in theory disallow it, print journalists doubling as pundits on TV, and steganography masquerading as reporting. It's a cesspool that in no way serves the vital function that the fourth estate was intended to provide, of keeping the public informed and acting as a brake on the use and misuse of government power. That a minor website repeated the, perhaps, errant work of an even more insignificant blogger, just doesn't stack up against that, however annoyed you personally might be about it.

[click on the chart for a larger view]