Don’t Hold Your Breath for that Housing Boom
By Neil Cavuto
Published October 23, 2014
Here’s why your housing ship still hasn’t come in -- too many homeowners are still underwater.
It’s true, and more than six years after the real estate and financial meltdown, it’s remarkable. Yet 15% of homeowners are in just that kind of pickle -- owing more on their mortgage than their home is worth. And we’re talking “a lot more” than their home is worth.
As the folks at RealtyTrac report, some 8.1 million properties have a market value that’s at least 25% “less” than the mortgage attached to them. Put another way -- the homeowner owes at least 25% “more” than that property is worth. Put still another way -- that’s not just underwater, that’s Titanic-on-the-ocean floor underwater!
Not surprisingly, most of these underwater homes were purchased right before the housing bubble burst. For example, 40% of homes bought back in 2006 are still worth less than the mortgages on them, 35% of purchases made in 2007.
Back then real estate was flying high. But as both new and existing home prices started declining, and then tumbling, the problems started spreading. And as Catey Hill details in MarketWatch, so too the broad swath of homeowners suddenly seriously upside down on their loans – owing substantially more than their homes were worth. And “are” worth.
Consider that fact that even now, RealtyTrac figures 55% of mortgaged properties valued at less than $50,000 are underwater; 34% of properties valued at $50,000-$100,000; 17% of those homes valued at $100,000-$200,000; all the way up the real estate food chain, to 6% of properties valued between $1 million and $2 million, and 9% of properties worth $2 million to $5 million.
Now, back to what all this means -- with so many still so upside down on their loans, they can do little more than continue to wait this out, and hope things even out and soon. After all, you can’t shop for a home if the one you’re in still has you in the red. And with so many, particularly in the lower-end in this predicament, move-up buyers are virtually non-existent. Remember as well, if those folks in the lower-end can’t get “out” of their homes, first-time buyers can’t get “in” to those homes.
That’s why supply is so tight on the lower end, and as a result, compounding troubles for all ends. Consider that nearly one in three mortgaged properties in Nevada are underwater, making for slim home-pickings there.
But again, not just there. In all the once hot real estate markets, it’s the same cold reality. Nearly one in four Florida homeowners face the same dilemma, as do one in four Michigan homeowners, and about one in three Illinois homeowners. As Catey Hill crunches for MarketWatch, that works out to eight U.S. states “in which one in five mortgaged properties is still seriously underwater.”
Short of just going bankrupt or forcing a short sale, those homeowners can’t go anywhere, and even with record low interest rates, they can’t really benefit refinancing the debt they have, because that damning ratio remains pretty much the same. So they sit tight -- and the housing industry just -- well -- sits.
So forget what realtors say about the housing environment never being better. Home prices remain attractive and those rates remain even more so. But you can’t buy when you can’t budge, and a lot of folks ain’t budging. So is it any wonder, a lot of folks…ain’t buying.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Friday, September 26, 2014
Iraq War Critic:Withdrwl was a Mistake
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE:
“Dexter Filkins has long been a
skeptic and critic of the Iraq war, from his tenure at the New York
Times to his current assignment at the New Yorker. Still, that hasn’t
kept Filkins from reporting honestly on developments in the theater;
in 2008, while at the NYT, he wrote extensively about the success of
the surge just a few months before the presidential election. A month
later, Filkins wrote again about the “literally unrecognizable”
and peaceful Iraq produced by the surge.
Six years later, Filkins was among the
skeptics reminding people that the Iraqis’ insistence on
negotiating the immunity clause for American troops was more of a
welcome excuse for Obama to choose total withdrawal — and claim
credit for it until this year — rather than the deal-breaker Obama
now declares that it was.
Yesterday, Filkins told Hugh Hewitt
that while one can argue whether the 2003 invasion was ill-advised,
the total withdrawal in 2011 was the worst strategic mistake made by
the US.”
Thursday, September 25, 2014
The Recovery That Left Out Almost Everybody
The Recovery That Left Out Almost Everybody
America's economy has not worked for average families since the Clinton administration ended
William A. Galston
Sept. 23, 2014
If they were judging the economy by the monthly jobs report, working Americans would be popping champagne corks. Total employment has risen every month for more than four years. According to the Current Population Survey, more than eight million jobs have been created since the trough, while the number of unemployed has been cut by nearly six million. The unemployment rate has declined to 6.1% from 10%, and the number of Americans enduring long-term unemployment (27 weeks or more) has fallen to three million from 4.3 million in the past 12 months.
Yet average Americans remain gloomy about the current economy and anxious about its future.
According to a Pew Research Center report released this month, only 21% rate current conditions as excellent or good, versus 79% fair or poor. Only 33% say that jobs are readily available in their communities; when asked about good jobs, that figure falls to 26%. Only 22% believe the economy will be better a year from now; 22% think it will be worse, while fully 54% think it will be the same.
More than five years after the official end of the recession, the Public Religion Research Institute finds, only 21% of Americans believe the recession has ended.
Two recent reports help explain the disconnect between the official jobs numbers and the economic experience of most Americans. Every fall, the U.S. Commerce Department issues a detailed analysis of trends in income, poverty and health insurance. Although economists have some technical quibbles with the Commerce data, the broad trends are unmistakable.
This year's report found that median household income was $51,939 in 2013, 8% lower than in 2007, the last year before the recession. Households in the middle of the income distribution earned about $4,500 less last year than they had six years earlier. No wonder 56% of Americans told the Pew Research Center that their incomes were falling behind the cost of living.
The Federal Reserve's triennial Survey of Consumer Finances confirms these findings. Between 2010 and 2013, the Fed reports, median family income fell by 5%, even though average family income rose by 4%. This is, note the authors, "consistent with increasing income concentration during this period."
Only families in the top 10%, with annual incomes averaging nearly $400,000, saw gains during these three years. Families headed by college graduates eked out a gain of 1%, while those with a high-school diploma or less saw declines of about 7%. Those in the middle—with some postsecondary education—did the worst: From 2010 to 2013, their annual incomes declined to less than $41,000 from $46,000—an 11% plunge. Families headed by workers under age 35 have done especially badly—even when the heads of those young families have college degrees. The economic struggles of the millennials are more than anecdotal.
What's going on? The Census report offers a clue. The median earnings for Americans working full-time year round haven't changed much since 2007. But more than five years into the recovery, there are fewer such workers than before the recession. In 2007, 108.6 million Americans were working full time, year-round; in 2013 only 105.9 million were doing so. Although jobs are being created, too many of them are part-time to maintain growth in household incomes.
This is not by choice. About the same number of Americans were employed last month as in December 2007. But during that period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of Americans working part time who wanted a full-time job jumped to 7.2 million from 4.6 million. Not only are hourly wages stagnating; America's families want more hours of work than the economy is providing.
Although the Great Recession was the most severe since World War II, in many ways it underscored trends that have been under way for decades. Adjusted for inflation, median earnings of men working full time, year-round are no higher than they were in 1980. Median household income is almost $5,000 lower than it was in 1999, and no higher than it was it 1989.
The modest income increases of the past two generations have occurred because women have surged into the paid workforce—and because their real wages have grown at a compound annual rate of 0.8%. But both these trends peaked in 2000. Not surprisingly, the years after the 2001 recession witnessed the only postwar recovery in which median incomes failed to regain their previous peak.
The American economy hasn't worked for average families since the end of the Clinton administration. A recovery that leaves them out is no recovery at all, and they know it. This simple fact goes a long way toward explaining the tone of our current politics and the temper of our society. It will not change for the better unless we can recreate an economy in which work is rewarded and family incomes rise.
That is the great task of the next decade—and must be the prime focus of the next presidential election.
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Money Is Pouring Into Tech Like It’s 1999—And That’s Not Good
Money Is Pouring Into Tech Like It’s 1999—And That’s Not Good
- 09.22.14
When respected venture capitalist Bill Gurley said tech startup investors are taking on a level of risk not seen since the dotcom bubble days, the reaction in Silicon Valley was a collective sigh of relief: Finally, someone was saying what everyone was thinking.
In a piece published last week, Gurley told The Wall Street Journal that the huge amount of capital pouring into startups—and the great expectations all that money represents—is forcing new companies to spend more, and faster, than they have in 15 years. So much spending sets companies up for a fall if the funding dries up and they still have big bills to pay.
‘Saying we’re not in a bubble because it’s not as high as 1999 is like saying that Kim-Jong-Un is not evil because he’s not Hitler.’
Despite Gurley’s warning, however, many companies and investors are in too deep to restrain themselves. If your competitors are spending, you must spend too. According to public data, the industry doesn’t appear to be as overextended now as it did at the height of the dotcom bubble. But Gurley isn’t reassured.
“Saying we’re not in a bubble because it’s not as high as 1999 is like saying … Kim-Jong-Un is not evil because he’s not Hitler,” Gurley, a partner with big-name VC firm Benchmark Capital, told WIRED during a recent sit-down at his San Francisco office. “It doesn’t have to match 1999 in order to be madness.”
The Dollars That Aren’t Counted
At the height of the bubble in 2000, according to the National Venture Capital Association, VCs poured more than $105 billion into startups—nearly double the amount of the previous year and almost 10 times the amount invested during the web’s earliest days. A year later, even after the dotcom downturn had already taken a firm grip, venture capital investments still topped $40 billion.
By comparison, funding over the past five years appears to have hummed along steadily in the modest $20 billion to $30 billion range. But this year could see a significant uptick. During the second quarter of 2014, venture capital funding hit its highest level since 2001—nearly $14 billion, according to venture capital research firm CB Insights. And there’s no reason to believe that pace is slipping.
Funding already has hit more than $23 billion for the first half of 2014. And Gurley believes those figures don’t reflect all the money sloshing around in Silicon Valley. “I would argue that a lot of this late-stage money isn’t being counted in those venture dollars,” he says. “If you look at the bigger rounds that are being raised, the majority of the dollars there aren’t being counted.”‘It’s a Rather Bizarre Situation’
He also feels the capital “burn rate” among startups is much higher than during the first dotcom bubble, though he’s not sure there’s a way to prove that. You could look at how frequently companies are raising money, but as he notes, many companies will take funding even when they still have money in the bank. “With the companies that have access to this type of capital, there’s a long list of people that will just hand it to them. It’s a rather bizarre situation,” he says. “They may not even be in the market for money and people are proactively trying to give it to them.”
An apparent irony in Gurly’s anxiety about burn rates is his firm’s stake in Uber, one of the most well-funded and highly valued tech startups since the 2008 crash. From its vast new San Francisco offices to its blistering expansion into hundreds of cities around the world, Uber is not shy about spending its billion-dollar war chest. Clearly, the Uber investment reflects that Benchmark motto: “Be the first venture investor in technology companies that seek to create new markets.” The question is how hard Uber will have to work—and how much it will have to keep spending—to maintain its hold on the markets it’s created.
As Gurley tells WIRED, there may not be a good way for Silicon Valley to get out of this situation. “You’re forced to play the game on the field,” he told us. “It becomes an arms race, and that’s the real problem…If you say ‘I’m going to be prudent and I’m not going to have a high burn rate’ and then the other guy hires four times the sales force you do, it might not work for you.”
Gurley says that the best you can do is remain “pragmatically aggressive.”
The El Niño Effect
In his interview with the Journal, Gurley recalled a recent trip to the Galapagos Islands and the book he read, Beak of the Finch, a study of evolution in action among birds of the islands. During El Niño years, Gurley said, floods bring massive food surpluses, allowing the finch population to explode. The problem, he said, is the excess resources mean individual finches needn’t be as hardy to survive. When food levels return to normal, many of them die.
In the same way, Gurley said, too much cash in the startup economy means weaker companies can survive without having to generate cash for themselves. In a post praising Gurley’s remarks, high-profile venture capitalist Fred Wilson said he too worries about his own portfolio companies, some of which are burning millions each month. He says he’s pushed back on excess spending, in effect trying to encourage fitter finches.
“At some point you have to build a real business, generate real profits, sustain the company without the largess of investor’s capital,” Wilson said, “and start producing value the old fashioned way.”
Additional reporting by Cade Metz.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
‘Hate Speech’: the Left’s Term for ‘Opposing Viewpoints’
‘Hate Speech’: the Left’s Term for ‘Opposing Viewpoints’
Posted By Spencer Klavan On September 19, 2014 s
Last week, a mass email went out at Yale University (my alma mater) protesting an upcoming visit from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a political activist and staunch critic of Islam. The subject line reads, “Dear Friends: More Speech, Not Hate Speech.” The email reveals that by “hate speech,” the writers mean what the Left usually means when they use that term: “opinions we don’t agree with.”
Thirty-two student organizations signed the email under the leadership of Yale’s Muslim Student Association (MSA). That’s a revised number after the MSA was forced to reveal that its original list of 36 organizations was falsified. So, not a good start.
The signees announced that they feel “highly disrespected” by the mere fact of the invitation, because Ali stands accused of “hate speech” against Islam. Her very presence on campus, they argue, would be “marginalizing” and “uncomfortable” for Muslim students and their allies.
Let’s get a few things straight.
At five years old, Ms. Ali suffered protracted genital mutilation at the instruction of her grandmother, who “circumcised” the defenseless child according to the traditional practices of her Islamic clan. The MSA refers to these events as “unfortunate circumstances.”
With unimaginable bravery and resourcefulness, Ali escaped a forced marriage in Africa and sought asylum in the Netherlands. She rose from desperation and obscurity to obtain a seat in the Dutch parliament. After painful introspection and extensive academic analysis, she began courageously speaking out against the institutionalized rape, mutilation, and murder of Muslim women and girls. She argued that those atrocities are supported by the principles of Islam.
In this, according to the MSA, she “overlooked the complexity of sociopolitical issues in Muslim-majority countries.” Presumably it was somewhere in between working as a translator for a Rotterdam refugee center and obtaining an advanced degree in political science that Ali allowed the finer points of intercultural analysis to slip her mind. Luckily, a clique of twenty-year-old undergraduates sheltered behind the walls of one of the world’s wealthiest institutions is here to remind her.
For the crime of daring to speak out against Islamic violence in the Netherlands, Ms. Ali was accused of “religious discrimination” and threatened with death by extremists. The intimidated Dutch authorities effectively abandoned her and chased her out of the country. They trumped up a technicality from her fourteen-year-old citizenship application, leading her to resign. Not to be deterred, Ali escaped to America to continue her heroic work. Perhaps she hoped that the U.S., at least, would protect her right to speak.
Except that Ms. Ali has been stonewalled once already this year from speaking at an American university. Last April, Brandeis cancelled its plans to award Ali an honorary degree after students petitioned in protest against her “hate speech.” A brazen move coming from the university that had already honored playwright Tony Kushner, who calls supporters of Israel “repulsive.
And now the MSA and its co-signees have proudly joined in the quest to silence Ali. To them, her life’s work of defending helpless young women against an ideology of systematic oppression constitutes “hate speech,” and it cannot be discussed. They offer a number of laughably inaccurate reasons why.
Perhaps the most egregious is the supremely arrogant assessment that a woman with Ms. Ali’s extensive experience and acclaimed erudition “does not hold the credentials” to discuss the religion in which she was raised and abused, and which she has studied throughout her life.
There’s also the assertion that Ali commits a “radical inaccuracy” by daring to suggest that the West is engaged in a “clash of civilizations” with Islam. Never mind that prominent clerics like Farook al-Mohammedi often publicly plan the total subjugation of America — don’t call it a “clash of civilizations.” That’s hate speech.
Finally, under the guise of an interest in “advancing freedom of speech on campus,” the MSA recommends that someone whom they deem to have “representative scholarly qualifications” speak in Ms. Ali’s place. In other words: Yale is allowed an open conversation on the subject of Islam, as long as all participants and their viewpoints are vetted and pre-approved by the MSA.
These are flimsy attempts to legitimize a naked demand for censorship. There is one reason to make the untenable claim that Ms. Ali is anything close to hateful, and that is to shut her up. The MSA and its fellows are using the term “hate speech” to describe opinions with which they disagree and which they hope to frighten into silence. They are not the first to do so.
Liberal arts institutions — and the nations that establish them — are meant to be bastions of open discourse. They have no responsibility to protect their students from viewpoints that make them “uncomfortable.” But all over the supposedly tolerant West, radical leftists have used their distaste for Ali’s viewpoints to justify silencing her under the flexible and slanderous accusation of “hate speech.” They succeeded in the Netherlands. They succeeded at Brandeis. I’m proud to say they didn’t succeed at Yale — not this time, anyway. Ali did speak on Monday, to a packed house and a standing ovation. Free expression — the bedrock of academic inquiry — won the day. To that, I say, Boola Boola: this kind of victory is becoming all too rare.
Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/hate-speech-the-lefts-term-for-opposing-viewpoints/
Posted By Spencer Klavan On September 19, 2014 s
Last week, a mass email went out at Yale University (my alma mater) protesting an upcoming visit from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a political activist and staunch critic of Islam. The subject line reads, “Dear Friends: More Speech, Not Hate Speech.” The email reveals that by “hate speech,” the writers mean what the Left usually means when they use that term: “opinions we don’t agree with.”
Thirty-two student organizations signed the email under the leadership of Yale’s Muslim Student Association (MSA). That’s a revised number after the MSA was forced to reveal that its original list of 36 organizations was falsified. So, not a good start.
The signees announced that they feel “highly disrespected” by the mere fact of the invitation, because Ali stands accused of “hate speech” against Islam. Her very presence on campus, they argue, would be “marginalizing” and “uncomfortable” for Muslim students and their allies.
Let’s get a few things straight.
At five years old, Ms. Ali suffered protracted genital mutilation at the instruction of her grandmother, who “circumcised” the defenseless child according to the traditional practices of her Islamic clan. The MSA refers to these events as “unfortunate circumstances.”
With unimaginable bravery and resourcefulness, Ali escaped a forced marriage in Africa and sought asylum in the Netherlands. She rose from desperation and obscurity to obtain a seat in the Dutch parliament. After painful introspection and extensive academic analysis, she began courageously speaking out against the institutionalized rape, mutilation, and murder of Muslim women and girls. She argued that those atrocities are supported by the principles of Islam.
In this, according to the MSA, she “overlooked the complexity of sociopolitical issues in Muslim-majority countries.” Presumably it was somewhere in between working as a translator for a Rotterdam refugee center and obtaining an advanced degree in political science that Ali allowed the finer points of intercultural analysis to slip her mind. Luckily, a clique of twenty-year-old undergraduates sheltered behind the walls of one of the world’s wealthiest institutions is here to remind her.
For the crime of daring to speak out against Islamic violence in the Netherlands, Ms. Ali was accused of “religious discrimination” and threatened with death by extremists. The intimidated Dutch authorities effectively abandoned her and chased her out of the country. They trumped up a technicality from her fourteen-year-old citizenship application, leading her to resign. Not to be deterred, Ali escaped to America to continue her heroic work. Perhaps she hoped that the U.S., at least, would protect her right to speak.
Except that Ms. Ali has been stonewalled once already this year from speaking at an American university. Last April, Brandeis cancelled its plans to award Ali an honorary degree after students petitioned in protest against her “hate speech.” A brazen move coming from the university that had already honored playwright Tony Kushner, who calls supporters of Israel “repulsive.
And now the MSA and its co-signees have proudly joined in the quest to silence Ali. To them, her life’s work of defending helpless young women against an ideology of systematic oppression constitutes “hate speech,” and it cannot be discussed. They offer a number of laughably inaccurate reasons why.
Perhaps the most egregious is the supremely arrogant assessment that a woman with Ms. Ali’s extensive experience and acclaimed erudition “does not hold the credentials” to discuss the religion in which she was raised and abused, and which she has studied throughout her life.
There’s also the assertion that Ali commits a “radical inaccuracy” by daring to suggest that the West is engaged in a “clash of civilizations” with Islam. Never mind that prominent clerics like Farook al-Mohammedi often publicly plan the total subjugation of America — don’t call it a “clash of civilizations.” That’s hate speech.
Finally, under the guise of an interest in “advancing freedom of speech on campus,” the MSA recommends that someone whom they deem to have “representative scholarly qualifications” speak in Ms. Ali’s place. In other words: Yale is allowed an open conversation on the subject of Islam, as long as all participants and their viewpoints are vetted and pre-approved by the MSA.
These are flimsy attempts to legitimize a naked demand for censorship. There is one reason to make the untenable claim that Ms. Ali is anything close to hateful, and that is to shut her up. The MSA and its fellows are using the term “hate speech” to describe opinions with which they disagree and which they hope to frighten into silence. They are not the first to do so.
Liberal arts institutions — and the nations that establish them — are meant to be bastions of open discourse. They have no responsibility to protect their students from viewpoints that make them “uncomfortable.” But all over the supposedly tolerant West, radical leftists have used their distaste for Ali’s viewpoints to justify silencing her under the flexible and slanderous accusation of “hate speech.” They succeeded in the Netherlands. They succeeded at Brandeis. I’m proud to say they didn’t succeed at Yale — not this time, anyway. Ali did speak on Monday, to a packed house and a standing ovation. Free expression — the bedrock of academic inquiry — won the day. To that, I say, Boola Boola: this kind of victory is becoming all too rare.
Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/hate-speech-the-lefts-term-for-opposing-viewpoints/
Democrats Take the Low Road
Democrats Take the Low Road
Going all-negative, all the time against Tom Cotton.
Fred Barnes
September 8, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 48
Conway, Ark.
"Tom Cotton voted against
preparing America for pandemics like Ebola,” a TV ad in Arkansas
declared last week. The ad came from Democrat Mark Pryor, who is running
for reelection to the Senate. Cotton, a House member, is his Republican
opponent in the November 4 election. The ad failed to mention that
after voting against an early version of the Pandemic and All-Hazards
Preparedness Reauthorization Act, Cotton voted for the bill once a provision he objected to was removed.
Last spring, Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s PAC said
in an ad: “Before Congress, Cotton got paid handsomely working for
insurance companies.” The claim was untrue, as was the ad’s insistence
that Cotton “wants to end Medicare’s guarantee, giving billions in
profits to insurance companies.” The Washington Post’s fact checker gave the ad “four Pinocchios,” calling it “as phony as a three-dollar bill.”
In June, a 30-second ad by the Arkansas Democratic party
said Cotton opposes disaster relief. It featured a scene of damage
caused by tornadoes in Arkansas on April 27, insinuating that Cotton was
against aiding the victims. He wasn’t. His votes were against the
pork-laden bills after Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in 2012.
In August, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee aired a
TV spot accusing Cotton of having voted against federal funding for
Arkansas Children’s Hospital. But Cotton’s opposition to the legislation
didn’t cost the hospital any funding. On the contrary, he voted in
favor of funding the two agencies that do aid the hospital.
By now, you should have gotten the drift: Democrats are
going to extreme lengths to protect Pryor and demonize Cotton, his
Republican challenger. And they’re taking nearly as combative an
approach to defend Democratic incumbents in three other red states—North
Carolina, Louisiana, and Alaska.
But there’s a special intensity to the attacks on Cotton,
along with a glaring disregard for the truth. This is probably because
Pryor, 51, has been viewed as the most vulnerable of the four
incumbents.
Cotton, given his background, appears to strike fear in
the heart of Democrats. He’s from Dardanelle, a small town an hour’s
drive from
Little Rock. And he not only is a graduate of Harvard and
Harvard Law, he joined the Army after 9/11, went to OCS, and served in
combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s a conservative with a uniquely
attractive set of skills and experience.
Six months ago, Cotton, 37, was the favorite in the race.
But the attack ads have taken a toll, causing Cotton to fall narrowly
behind Pryor in polls and briefly driving his approval rating into
negative territory. He’s recovered since then, and today the race is
essentially tied.
The truth-defying ads are only part of the TV assault on
Cotton. Other ads consist of generic, if stale, criticism of Cotton as
eager to slash Medicare and Social Security benefits. Cotton disputes
this, but he’s aired TV rebuttals only to the palpably false ads.
The most captivating of his rebuttals stars the burly
sheriff of Faulkner County, Andy Shock. When the tornado hit, “Tom
Cotton stood with us every step of the way,” Shock says. “Shame on
anyone who uses our tragedy for their own political gain. It’s just
wrong. Senator Pryor, start focusing on the real issues. Leave our
community and our tragedy out of your campaign.”
The Cotton campaign relies on a single theme: Pryor and
Obama are one and the same, politically and ideologically. “I look for
those elusive Arkansans who agree with President Obama 93 percent of the
time,” Cotton says facetiously. “I can’t find them. I never can find
them. I have to go to D.C. to find Mark Pryor, the only Arkansan who
agrees with Obama 93 percent of the time.”
Since winning an open House seat in 2012, Cotton has
improved as a candidate. His stump speech is a succinct 10 minutes,
followed by handshaking and picture-taking. He travels the state in a
van with his wife Anna—they were married in March—and their dog Cowboy.
Cotton won a contested primary two years ago, then defeated Democrat
Gene Jeffress, 60-37 percent. He was unopposed for the Senate nomination
this year after two House colleagues, Tim Griffin and Steve Womack,
declined to run.
Some Republicans are privately critical of Cotton for
going his own way on some House votes. He voted against the farm bill,
the
Violence Against Women Act, and Sandy relief. Arkansas is an
agricultural state, but Cotton thinks his opposition to the farm bill
won’t hurt against Pryor. He says many Arkansans don’t like the farm
bill.
John Goodson, a prominent Democrat from Texarkana, is a
friend of Pryor and his father, David Pryor, a one-term governor and
senator for 18 years. Goodson serves on the University of Arkansas board
of trustees with the elder Pryor. He says the Pryors are “fine men.”
But the “people of Arkansas have changed a little to the
Republican way of life,” he says. Obama has “hurt the Democratic party
. . . and that’s got to be tough to turn around.” Goodson supports
Cotton and thinks he’ll win. “What’s made the race as close as it is,”
he says, are the Democratic ads against Cotton.
Yet Mark Pryor is hardly a lightning rod. Several of his
TV commercials are personal. With his father at his side, he endorses
two health care provisions without mentioning that they’re part of
Obamacare. In another ad, he holds up a Bible.
“I’m not ashamed to say that I believe in God and I
believe in His word,” he says. “This is my compass, my North Star. It
gives me comfort and guidance to do what’s best for Arkansas. I’m Mark
Pryor and I approve this message because this is who I am and what I
believe.”
He hasn’t revealed if it was the Bible that led him to accuse Tom Cotton of leaving Arkansas vulnerable to the Ebola virus.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
‘CATALIST’: Obama’s Database For Fundamentally Transforming America
‘CATALIST’: Obama’s Database For Fundamentally Transforming America
Posted By J. Christian Adams On September 17, 2014
The Democrats and the institutional left have a new political tool that allows them virtually to ignore moderates yet still win elections.
This tool, the Catalist database, was employed in the 2012 election. That election defied conventional wisdom: Mitt Romney sought and won independent voters overwhelmingly, but still lost. If you wondered why the conventional wisdom about independents and moderates didn’t seem so wise in 2012, the answer is Catalist.
Beyond winning elections, Catalist also allows the Democrats to turn the policy narrative upside down and suffer no political consequence for implementing radical policies which appeal to their base. The Obama administration’s lurch to the far left without consequence can be understood by understanding Catalist. Obama thrives politically by satisfying his base. Simply, Catalist is a game changer not just for politics, but for policy. It is the left’s machinery for fundamentally transforming America.
And candidates, organizations, strategists, and consultants who do not understand what they are up against in Catalist risk being overrun.
I’ll explain how it works in a moment. I had the opportunity to explore the functionality and architecture of Catalist in a way few — if any — others on the opposite side of Catalist have had, and what I discovered sure explains a lot about the last six years.
No longer are Democrats anchored to the preferences of Americans in the middle. Bill Clinton’s triangulation is as obsolete as color film and bag phones. Obama has pushed policies far outside the mainstream, and even far outside popular will, but succeeded in wringing out an Electoral College majority in 2012 because of Catalist.
Unfortunately, Republicans have no functioning counterpart data tool to Catalist. They have multiple and competing shells of Catalist, but they have nothing on the collaborative scale as Catalist, largely due to the fact that Republicans won’t collaborate and are fiercely territorial of their competing data sets. Democrats and the institutional left, in contrast, have created a collaborative and fully integrated system that allows them to ignore the middle while extracting unprecedented turnout from a micro-targeted, ideologically far-left base.
Catalist is an example of the consultant, profit-driven culture of the GOP being beaten by the messianic crusader culture of the left.
Next: two examples demonstrate the power of the institutional left’s data tools.
During the 2012 election, a producer for a conservative news network received a knock at his door in a key swing state. Two neighbors were standing on his stoop campaigning for Obama. They weren’t there to talk to him — they were there to talk to his wife. They knew that she was employed in a profession which the Obama campaign had decided to microtarget: folks who deliver services to special needs children. The two neighbors were already armed with this personalized information. The Obama campaign didn’t just send a direct mail piece to the target or make a telephone call. Instead, the campaign matched a microtargeted demographic (special needs service providers) with a highly motivated Obama volunteer in close neighborly proximity to the target. Then they armed the neighbor/volunteer with data to visit the target.
The best the GOP has done to mimic this event is to give “walk and knock” lists to volunteers who are not from the neighborhood, and certainly not armed with particular messaging. Or, the GOP bothers the target with telephone calls or a direct mail campaign containing at best a whiff of microtargeting.
The second example involves a recent statewide election. In a state where one Democrat and one Republican must be appointed to run each precinct, an election official described for me a problem encountered with the Democratic party. It seems the Democrat she nominated to run the polls wasn’t sufficiently ideologically pure. What evidence did the party have to object to her bona fides? A response to a telephone survey many years earlier in which the nominated poll official wasn’t supporting the Democratic nominee for United States Senate.
Republicans don’t have anything even close to this sort of data, where answers to poll questions in years past could be employed in future fights.
The development and use of Catalist by the left has serious political consequences for Republicans in Congress, consequences I fear consultants, candidates, and strategists haven’t even begun to contemplate. Consider the course charted by some GOP leaders: while they have sought to steer a middle course between Democrats and the Tea Party, Catalist is rendering moderation obsolete.
Steering a moderate cautious course made perfect sense before Catalist. But now, failing to appeal to an activated and motivated political base spells doom, as the last two presidential elections have demonstrated.
———————-
Catalist grew out of the 2004 presidential election, where the Bush campaign enjoyed success in part because of a microtargeting strategy. Magazine subscription lists and church directories, for example, provided a way to identify and contact broad subsets of voters through direct mail or other generic contact. This success led Harold Ickes and other progressives to attempt to build a better mousetrap that helps progressives. It was first used by Obama in 2008, and was used with devastating effectiveness in his 2012 reelection.
To understand the power of Catalist, you must understand the complex Catalist architecture, and how it is different than anything used by the GOP or conservative causes.
Imagine the Borg in Star Trek. Every Borg unit can see what all the other units see. They share data and react in unison.
Similarly, the data feeding the central Catalist database is coming from a wide swath of sources. Public records, pollsters, campaigns, non-profits, activist groups, unions, parties, commercial data. Scores and scores of sources are feeding the central database data.
For example, when an environmental group does neighborhood door knocking for cash, the results of those contacts are fed into Catalist.
You have your own individual voter file in Catalist. Everyone does. Under that file might be a massive amount of information about you — more than probably exists in any other database in the world. Who you work for, what car you might drive, donations you have made, assumptions based on your neighborhood, anything in a public government database about you, consumer preferences, partisan preferences, what licenses you have, what you might have said to pollsters on the phone, memberships, how you treated the young left-wing activist knocking on your door a few years ago, and on and on and on.
Each group working with Catalist feeds the central database. Different groups have different types of data about you. Some data relate to economics. Other data relate to politics. Either way, the Borg all work in unison to fill the database with a massive amount of information about every American — and all of it is perfectly legal.
From the Catalist website
In the vast central database, these data are organized, structured and housed by Catalist, a limited liability company with offices in Washington, D.C. If you contribute data to the database, you can also be a customer of the database. And the customer list is vast — including the effort to reelect President Obama. Customers receive tailored information to suit their needs and microtarget voters.
Catalist provides much more sophisticated and much more granular data about subsets of Americans. The degree of granularity was never possible before Catalist, and Republicans have nothing to match it, for now.
The most important thing Catalist allows the left to do is drive deeper into the pool of extreme left wing Americans who are otherwise unmotivated to actually vote.
Catalist allows customers to identify potential voters on the far ideological fringe, but who are usually unmotivated to vote. Catalist allows the left to then identify issues, concerns, or other lifestyle facts which would permit a customer to motivate the usually unmotivated on that fringe to vote.
Obama won reelection because he drove deeper into his ideological base than any Democrat ever had. His campaign largely ignored the middle and instead used Catalist data to wring out nearly every possible far left vote he could.
Consider this graph below. The x axis represents the ideological spectrum. The y axis represents the likelihood of a particular voter on that spectrum actually registering and turning out to vote. You can see where each campaign in 2012 roughly placed emphasis.
While Romney pivoted to the middle after the primaries and tried to attract moderate and independent voters, Obama used Catalist to create a bigger base. Obama’s message was a leftist message, even during the debates. The idea was to drive turnout on the far left (x axis) and to identify Americans on the far left who would usually be unmotivated to vote.
Catalist gave the campaign the tools to identify them, to understand what matters to them, to find them, and to motivate them. The far left campaign messaging of Obama was not a mistake. It was part of the plan.
Catalist allowed the Obama campaign to send a familiar neighbor knocking on the door of a teacher of special needs kids in a swing state, even if her husband works for one of the largest conservative news outlets.
Catalist is also devastating to Republicans because it sends them on an expensive goose chase to spend gobs of money to target moderates and independents while Democrats turn out their base cheaper, and with more certainty. A “moderate” voter costs more to persuade than a far fringe ideological leftist. Even a usually politically unmotivated welfare recipient is cheaper to get to the polls than a “moderate” and “thoughtful” undecided moderate who speaks in terms of “voting for the candidate on issues and not the party.”
Looking at the graph atop the next page, you can see how targeting the base instead of targeting the middle produces economic efficiencies.
A moderate/independent who is fairly likely to vote might require $1 of campaign spending to produce a successful outcome. Moderates are by their nature harder to persuade to vote a certain way. Yet a leftist with the same propensity to turnout might cost a dime to motivate them to vote, as long as that same voter thinks you share the priorities of the base.
Hence, Mitt Romney spent time and money trying to capture the contemplative middle while Obama used Catalist data to wring out more votes from the far left base. Even worse, at the same time, Romney distanced himself from his easier-to-motivate (and cheaper to get) base.
Romney wouldn’t even go on conservative talk radio, for free.
The graphs above explain why the left is so keen to implement federal laws like Motor Voter which seeks to automatically register voters populating the upper left of the graphs – unmotivated ideological leftists. Motor Voter has a disproportionate reach into the upper left corner of the graphs as compared to the upper right. Automatic universal voter registration using government databases is the institutional left’s next agenda item.
The policy ramifications for Republicans should be obvious by now. Government policy is fully integrated into the Catalist-driven Obama politics. Instead of moderation, Obama pushes policies which appeal to his far left base. The era of big government and big deficits is back, deliberately.
Catalist gave Obama in 2012 the political tools to fundamentally transform America without electoral consequence. Obama’s opposition was stuck in the pre-Catalist era of less defined, less complete datasets. It was a prescription for political disaster, like horse-mounted soldiers facing tanks.
I came to learn intimately about Catalist through the course of election integrity litigation brought against the State of Indiana. Indiana has been characterized by having multiple counties with more voters on the rolls than people alive. Like Eric Holder before him, when Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller (R) needed an expert to fight against election integrity, he called on someone using Catalist data.
Enter Yale Political Science Professor Eitan D. Hersh. Hersh had been busy helping Eric Holder’s Justice Department attack voter ID in Texas and another state. But when the Indiana attorney general needed a left-leaning professor using the progressive movement’s top data tool to deflect our election integrity litigation, Hersh was the man. Never mind that the use of Catalist to attack Texas voter ID had become a laughingstock.
There is no telling what the taxpayers in Indiana paid Hersh to help keep voter rolls there dirty.
Eitan Hersh is a name every political strategist and GOP consultant should know — if for no other reason than to read his Harvard dissertation describing the internal functioning of Catalist. I did. Anyone can go read it.
If you don’t want to go to Harvard, you can access it online and buy a PDF version here, though I’d prefer Hersh not be enriched any further than Eric Holder and Indiana Attorney General Zoeller have already done.
Hersh was given unparalleled access to the Obama campaign operations and how Catalist was used. His dissertation abstract gives you a taste of what is inside the dissertation:
To understand the role of information in strategic decision-making, I investigate a database containing all registered voters in the United States that is used by actual campaigns for the purpose of voter contact. Three essays relay the findings from this database and from interviews with campaign operatives. The first essay explores strategies for identifying likely partisan supporters. … The second essay explores strategies for identifying persuadable voters. On account of data limitations, the voters that campaigns typically target with persuasion messages are a completely different set of individuals from those who would appear to be undecided, independent, or cross-pressured according to survey measures. The third essay explores the role of racial identifiers that are listed on the public record in eight southern states. When racial data is available, candidates sort the electorate by race, leading to the mobilization of voters whose races are identified and to racial polarization of voters into different parties. The role of information in guiding campaign strategy challenges extant models of political mobilization and identifies important political consequences of the recent and dramatic developments in data availability.
Simply put, Hersh’s deposition describes how to drive deeper into the left wing base, how to identify your unmotivated allies, sometimes with racial cues, and how to use new databases to fundamentally transform America.
Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, was also involved in the election integrity litigation against Indiana for corrupted voter rolls. He told me:
Catalist’s president is the notorious Harold Ickes who, while working at the Clinton White House, became known as Bill Clinton’s “garbage man” because of his involvement in the Clinton fundraising scandals. Nevertheless, he remains close to the Clinton machine and may be one of the most influential leftwing political operatives of the last 30 years. Given Catalist’s partisan and hard Left links, how could any Department of Justice — or, for that matter, Republicans officials in the state of Indiana — rely on it to attack election integrity efforts in federal court?
Fitton is right. Catalist will be fully deployed in the 2016 effort to keep the White House.
But why shouldn’t Republicans simply microtarget unmotivated independents in response? Why not push moderate policies to appeal to those moderate independents who don’t usually vote, and microtarget them?
Remember, getting those moderate voters to vote for you costs exponentially more than motivating ideologues. It will cost $10 to persuade an unmotivated independent while it might cost pennies to mobilize a cultural or ideological partisan.
Some of you reading this might think this is much ado about nothing, because the Republicans can match the power of Catalist. Think again.
When I first approached one political insider about how to dissect Hersh in his upcoming expert deposition some months ago, he understandably could not believe that the Obama campaign would have given an academic writing a dissertation insider access to their data tools and strategies to use them. And therein lies the central mind-block to why the GOP has not matched Catalist.
The power of Catalist is driven by left wing collaboration. All of the Borg-like groups work in unison to feed the database. Meanwhile, the Republicans don’t even have one single unified database. There are three or four separate conservative competitors, perhaps more if you count the RNC’s recent push to create yet another one.
Instead of unified data collaboration, the conservative response is competition between vendors to create their own marketable but inferior version of Catalist. Worse still, these vendors would never dream of consolidating their architecture or sharing their data. That would wreck their business model.
The strength and power of Catalist is based on the huge number of groups feeding it data. Leftist players sacrifice their egos for the larger messianic call of destroying Republicans, obliterating conservatives, and ultimately gutting the Constitution. Non-profit interest groups on the left gladly feed their internal data into Catalist because it helps progressives win, period. They don’t care about profit, glory, connections, or a new car.
As far as I can tell, conservative database models don’t capture anywhere near the level of inputs that Catalist does.
Catalist does not derive its power because it has the insiders imprimatur as the official party-sanctioned database. It derives its power because nobody feeding it data cares about who gets the glory. They have a country to transform.
So pay attention to whether or not the folks in Washington, D.C. understand Catalist, have read Hersh’s deposition, or figured out why Romney lost in 2012. Pay attention to whether Republican polices seemed designed to energize a base, or whether they sound like Democrat-lite. If Republicans and conservatives don’t come to understand Catalist and cooperate to create a credible competitor, we are likely to see more horsemen charging at tanks in the next few presidential elections.
Article printed from Rule of Law: http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams
Posted By J. Christian Adams On September 17, 2014
The Democrats and the institutional left have a new political tool that allows them virtually to ignore moderates yet still win elections.
This tool, the Catalist database, was employed in the 2012 election. That election defied conventional wisdom: Mitt Romney sought and won independent voters overwhelmingly, but still lost. If you wondered why the conventional wisdom about independents and moderates didn’t seem so wise in 2012, the answer is Catalist.
Beyond winning elections, Catalist also allows the Democrats to turn the policy narrative upside down and suffer no political consequence for implementing radical policies which appeal to their base. The Obama administration’s lurch to the far left without consequence can be understood by understanding Catalist. Obama thrives politically by satisfying his base. Simply, Catalist is a game changer not just for politics, but for policy. It is the left’s machinery for fundamentally transforming America.
And candidates, organizations, strategists, and consultants who do not understand what they are up against in Catalist risk being overrun.
I’ll explain how it works in a moment. I had the opportunity to explore the functionality and architecture of Catalist in a way few — if any — others on the opposite side of Catalist have had, and what I discovered sure explains a lot about the last six years.
No longer are Democrats anchored to the preferences of Americans in the middle. Bill Clinton’s triangulation is as obsolete as color film and bag phones. Obama has pushed policies far outside the mainstream, and even far outside popular will, but succeeded in wringing out an Electoral College majority in 2012 because of Catalist.
Unfortunately, Republicans have no functioning counterpart data tool to Catalist. They have multiple and competing shells of Catalist, but they have nothing on the collaborative scale as Catalist, largely due to the fact that Republicans won’t collaborate and are fiercely territorial of their competing data sets. Democrats and the institutional left, in contrast, have created a collaborative and fully integrated system that allows them to ignore the middle while extracting unprecedented turnout from a micro-targeted, ideologically far-left base.
Catalist is an example of the consultant, profit-driven culture of the GOP being beaten by the messianic crusader culture of the left.
Next: two examples demonstrate the power of the institutional left’s data tools.
During the 2012 election, a producer for a conservative news network received a knock at his door in a key swing state. Two neighbors were standing on his stoop campaigning for Obama. They weren’t there to talk to him — they were there to talk to his wife. They knew that she was employed in a profession which the Obama campaign had decided to microtarget: folks who deliver services to special needs children. The two neighbors were already armed with this personalized information. The Obama campaign didn’t just send a direct mail piece to the target or make a telephone call. Instead, the campaign matched a microtargeted demographic (special needs service providers) with a highly motivated Obama volunteer in close neighborly proximity to the target. Then they armed the neighbor/volunteer with data to visit the target.
The best the GOP has done to mimic this event is to give “walk and knock” lists to volunteers who are not from the neighborhood, and certainly not armed with particular messaging. Or, the GOP bothers the target with telephone calls or a direct mail campaign containing at best a whiff of microtargeting.
The second example involves a recent statewide election. In a state where one Democrat and one Republican must be appointed to run each precinct, an election official described for me a problem encountered with the Democratic party. It seems the Democrat she nominated to run the polls wasn’t sufficiently ideologically pure. What evidence did the party have to object to her bona fides? A response to a telephone survey many years earlier in which the nominated poll official wasn’t supporting the Democratic nominee for United States Senate.
Republicans don’t have anything even close to this sort of data, where answers to poll questions in years past could be employed in future fights.
The development and use of Catalist by the left has serious political consequences for Republicans in Congress, consequences I fear consultants, candidates, and strategists haven’t even begun to contemplate. Consider the course charted by some GOP leaders: while they have sought to steer a middle course between Democrats and the Tea Party, Catalist is rendering moderation obsolete.
Steering a moderate cautious course made perfect sense before Catalist. But now, failing to appeal to an activated and motivated political base spells doom, as the last two presidential elections have demonstrated.
———————-
Catalist grew out of the 2004 presidential election, where the Bush campaign enjoyed success in part because of a microtargeting strategy. Magazine subscription lists and church directories, for example, provided a way to identify and contact broad subsets of voters through direct mail or other generic contact. This success led Harold Ickes and other progressives to attempt to build a better mousetrap that helps progressives. It was first used by Obama in 2008, and was used with devastating effectiveness in his 2012 reelection.
To understand the power of Catalist, you must understand the complex Catalist architecture, and how it is different than anything used by the GOP or conservative causes.
Imagine the Borg in Star Trek. Every Borg unit can see what all the other units see. They share data and react in unison.
Similarly, the data feeding the central Catalist database is coming from a wide swath of sources. Public records, pollsters, campaigns, non-profits, activist groups, unions, parties, commercial data. Scores and scores of sources are feeding the central database data.
For example, when an environmental group does neighborhood door knocking for cash, the results of those contacts are fed into Catalist.
You have your own individual voter file in Catalist. Everyone does. Under that file might be a massive amount of information about you — more than probably exists in any other database in the world. Who you work for, what car you might drive, donations you have made, assumptions based on your neighborhood, anything in a public government database about you, consumer preferences, partisan preferences, what licenses you have, what you might have said to pollsters on the phone, memberships, how you treated the young left-wing activist knocking on your door a few years ago, and on and on and on.
Each group working with Catalist feeds the central database. Different groups have different types of data about you. Some data relate to economics. Other data relate to politics. Either way, the Borg all work in unison to fill the database with a massive amount of information about every American — and all of it is perfectly legal.
From the Catalist website
In the vast central database, these data are organized, structured and housed by Catalist, a limited liability company with offices in Washington, D.C. If you contribute data to the database, you can also be a customer of the database. And the customer list is vast — including the effort to reelect President Obama. Customers receive tailored information to suit their needs and microtarget voters.
Catalist provides much more sophisticated and much more granular data about subsets of Americans. The degree of granularity was never possible before Catalist, and Republicans have nothing to match it, for now.
The most important thing Catalist allows the left to do is drive deeper into the pool of extreme left wing Americans who are otherwise unmotivated to actually vote.
Catalist allows customers to identify potential voters on the far ideological fringe, but who are usually unmotivated to vote. Catalist allows the left to then identify issues, concerns, or other lifestyle facts which would permit a customer to motivate the usually unmotivated on that fringe to vote.
Obama won reelection because he drove deeper into his ideological base than any Democrat ever had. His campaign largely ignored the middle and instead used Catalist data to wring out nearly every possible far left vote he could.
Consider this graph below. The x axis represents the ideological spectrum. The y axis represents the likelihood of a particular voter on that spectrum actually registering and turning out to vote. You can see where each campaign in 2012 roughly placed emphasis.
While Romney pivoted to the middle after the primaries and tried to attract moderate and independent voters, Obama used Catalist to create a bigger base. Obama’s message was a leftist message, even during the debates. The idea was to drive turnout on the far left (x axis) and to identify Americans on the far left who would usually be unmotivated to vote.
Catalist gave the campaign the tools to identify them, to understand what matters to them, to find them, and to motivate them. The far left campaign messaging of Obama was not a mistake. It was part of the plan.
Catalist allowed the Obama campaign to send a familiar neighbor knocking on the door of a teacher of special needs kids in a swing state, even if her husband works for one of the largest conservative news outlets.
Catalist is also devastating to Republicans because it sends them on an expensive goose chase to spend gobs of money to target moderates and independents while Democrats turn out their base cheaper, and with more certainty. A “moderate” voter costs more to persuade than a far fringe ideological leftist. Even a usually politically unmotivated welfare recipient is cheaper to get to the polls than a “moderate” and “thoughtful” undecided moderate who speaks in terms of “voting for the candidate on issues and not the party.”
Looking at the graph atop the next page, you can see how targeting the base instead of targeting the middle produces economic efficiencies.
A moderate/independent who is fairly likely to vote might require $1 of campaign spending to produce a successful outcome. Moderates are by their nature harder to persuade to vote a certain way. Yet a leftist with the same propensity to turnout might cost a dime to motivate them to vote, as long as that same voter thinks you share the priorities of the base.
Hence, Mitt Romney spent time and money trying to capture the contemplative middle while Obama used Catalist data to wring out more votes from the far left base. Even worse, at the same time, Romney distanced himself from his easier-to-motivate (and cheaper to get) base.
Romney wouldn’t even go on conservative talk radio, for free.
The graphs above explain why the left is so keen to implement federal laws like Motor Voter which seeks to automatically register voters populating the upper left of the graphs – unmotivated ideological leftists. Motor Voter has a disproportionate reach into the upper left corner of the graphs as compared to the upper right. Automatic universal voter registration using government databases is the institutional left’s next agenda item.
The policy ramifications for Republicans should be obvious by now. Government policy is fully integrated into the Catalist-driven Obama politics. Instead of moderation, Obama pushes policies which appeal to his far left base. The era of big government and big deficits is back, deliberately.
Catalist gave Obama in 2012 the political tools to fundamentally transform America without electoral consequence. Obama’s opposition was stuck in the pre-Catalist era of less defined, less complete datasets. It was a prescription for political disaster, like horse-mounted soldiers facing tanks.
I came to learn intimately about Catalist through the course of election integrity litigation brought against the State of Indiana. Indiana has been characterized by having multiple counties with more voters on the rolls than people alive. Like Eric Holder before him, when Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller (R) needed an expert to fight against election integrity, he called on someone using Catalist data.
Enter Yale Political Science Professor Eitan D. Hersh. Hersh had been busy helping Eric Holder’s Justice Department attack voter ID in Texas and another state. But when the Indiana attorney general needed a left-leaning professor using the progressive movement’s top data tool to deflect our election integrity litigation, Hersh was the man. Never mind that the use of Catalist to attack Texas voter ID had become a laughingstock.
There is no telling what the taxpayers in Indiana paid Hersh to help keep voter rolls there dirty.
Eitan Hersh is a name every political strategist and GOP consultant should know — if for no other reason than to read his Harvard dissertation describing the internal functioning of Catalist. I did. Anyone can go read it.
If you don’t want to go to Harvard, you can access it online and buy a PDF version here, though I’d prefer Hersh not be enriched any further than Eric Holder and Indiana Attorney General Zoeller have already done.
Hersh was given unparalleled access to the Obama campaign operations and how Catalist was used. His dissertation abstract gives you a taste of what is inside the dissertation:
To understand the role of information in strategic decision-making, I investigate a database containing all registered voters in the United States that is used by actual campaigns for the purpose of voter contact. Three essays relay the findings from this database and from interviews with campaign operatives. The first essay explores strategies for identifying likely partisan supporters. … The second essay explores strategies for identifying persuadable voters. On account of data limitations, the voters that campaigns typically target with persuasion messages are a completely different set of individuals from those who would appear to be undecided, independent, or cross-pressured according to survey measures. The third essay explores the role of racial identifiers that are listed on the public record in eight southern states. When racial data is available, candidates sort the electorate by race, leading to the mobilization of voters whose races are identified and to racial polarization of voters into different parties. The role of information in guiding campaign strategy challenges extant models of political mobilization and identifies important political consequences of the recent and dramatic developments in data availability.
Simply put, Hersh’s deposition describes how to drive deeper into the left wing base, how to identify your unmotivated allies, sometimes with racial cues, and how to use new databases to fundamentally transform America.
Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, was also involved in the election integrity litigation against Indiana for corrupted voter rolls. He told me:
Catalist’s president is the notorious Harold Ickes who, while working at the Clinton White House, became known as Bill Clinton’s “garbage man” because of his involvement in the Clinton fundraising scandals. Nevertheless, he remains close to the Clinton machine and may be one of the most influential leftwing political operatives of the last 30 years. Given Catalist’s partisan and hard Left links, how could any Department of Justice — or, for that matter, Republicans officials in the state of Indiana — rely on it to attack election integrity efforts in federal court?
Fitton is right. Catalist will be fully deployed in the 2016 effort to keep the White House.
But why shouldn’t Republicans simply microtarget unmotivated independents in response? Why not push moderate policies to appeal to those moderate independents who don’t usually vote, and microtarget them?
Remember, getting those moderate voters to vote for you costs exponentially more than motivating ideologues. It will cost $10 to persuade an unmotivated independent while it might cost pennies to mobilize a cultural or ideological partisan.
Some of you reading this might think this is much ado about nothing, because the Republicans can match the power of Catalist. Think again.
When I first approached one political insider about how to dissect Hersh in his upcoming expert deposition some months ago, he understandably could not believe that the Obama campaign would have given an academic writing a dissertation insider access to their data tools and strategies to use them. And therein lies the central mind-block to why the GOP has not matched Catalist.
The power of Catalist is driven by left wing collaboration. All of the Borg-like groups work in unison to feed the database. Meanwhile, the Republicans don’t even have one single unified database. There are three or four separate conservative competitors, perhaps more if you count the RNC’s recent push to create yet another one.
Instead of unified data collaboration, the conservative response is competition between vendors to create their own marketable but inferior version of Catalist. Worse still, these vendors would never dream of consolidating their architecture or sharing their data. That would wreck their business model.
The strength and power of Catalist is based on the huge number of groups feeding it data. Leftist players sacrifice their egos for the larger messianic call of destroying Republicans, obliterating conservatives, and ultimately gutting the Constitution. Non-profit interest groups on the left gladly feed their internal data into Catalist because it helps progressives win, period. They don’t care about profit, glory, connections, or a new car.
As far as I can tell, conservative database models don’t capture anywhere near the level of inputs that Catalist does.
Catalist does not derive its power because it has the insiders imprimatur as the official party-sanctioned database. It derives its power because nobody feeding it data cares about who gets the glory. They have a country to transform.
So pay attention to whether or not the folks in Washington, D.C. understand Catalist, have read Hersh’s deposition, or figured out why Romney lost in 2012. Pay attention to whether Republican polices seemed designed to energize a base, or whether they sound like Democrat-lite. If Republicans and conservatives don’t come to understand Catalist and cooperate to create a credible competitor, we are likely to see more horsemen charging at tanks in the next few presidential elections.
Article printed from Rule of Law: http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams
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