The election keeps getting better

Alaskans apparently have a sense of humor, at least according to the NY Times:

“Our governor is going to be vice president, and we still don’t have an Olive Garden,” said Keri Baranou, 30, who sells sewing machines.

My other favorite quote:

“I don’t care what the image of Alaska is to anyone else,” said Sharon Rooth, a longtime resident. “If I cared what America thought, I’d live there.”

Luckovich

I'm still giggling over this one:

Palin

I'm just on my way back from the APSA conference. Needless to say, Sarah Palin was all anyone was talking about between panels, and often during them. I talked with a lot of political scientists about it. There is no consensus on whether this was a smart or dumb move by McCain.

Probably the modal reaction was that McCain looked as his internal polling numbers and figured he was screwed, so he needed a game-changing roll of the dice. Sort of like Mondale's decisions to pick Geraldine Ferraro and to promise to raise taxes. In the Palin case, maybe it helps McCain pick off a few disaffected female voters who otherwise liked Hillary and really, really don't care about policy. If not, he still loses, but the GOP looks more impressive in the long run for the effort.

Personally, I think this was kinda stupid. Not that she's a bad candidate (although it's hard to imagine she's ready for the media exposure she's now getting). She may be very good. The main problem is that she undercuts McCain's main rationale for running against Obama: experience. That was probably McCain's strongest issue. Now the two tickets probably average about the same level of experience.

The speech

I haven't posted much on Obama's acceptance speech, either here or at my companion blog. I imagine I'll have something to say soon. But here's a rather nice reflection from Princeton's Melissa Harris-Lacewell:

As I stood in a sea of black, brown and white faces I waved a flag for the first time in my life. And I really meant it. I felt truly patriotic. I felt keenly the DuBoisian double consciousness that is such an ordinary part of my life that I barely notice it. And then I felt the dualism close. I felt no distance at all between my blackness and my Americaness. It was an experience that I cannot describe. It is not one that I was seeking or that I even knew existed. But the moment I felt myself become a citizen a wept for the joy and exhilaration of it.

Running Female

I attended several APSA panels on race and gender this past weekend. I normally don't do that sort of thing. (That is, I rarely attend panels, and when I do, they're usually about state politics or parties or something.) Suddenly, race and gender seem salient to me. A lot of these panels featured interesting discussions about whether Hillary Clinton suffered more from sexism than Barack Obama suffered from racism during the recent primaries and caucuses.

Anyway, loyal readers may recall my analysis of African American candidates running for U.S. Senate or governor from 2002-06. I wanted to see if there was some kind of electoral "penalty" against black candidates in statewide contests. The results were somewhat inconclusive because there are simply so few cases. There were only four cases I could find in which an African American Democrat ran against a white Republican. In each of those, the African American ran about 1 to 2 points behind the "expected" vote (calculated by looking at the presidential vote, incumbency, the state's racial composition, etc.). This difference was not statistically significant, but again, it's only four cases.

So, this weekend, I was curious to see if there was any sort of female electoral penalty. I looked at the same set of races and found no consistent pattern. There are a lot more cases -- 45 in which a woman ran against a man (35 female Democrats, 10 female Republicans). However, the average penalty for women was almost precisely zero, a result that was identical across parties. Here's a histogram showing the difference between actual vote and expected vote for female candidates. Red shows Republican women, blue shows Democratic women.Most of the cases hover around zero, although there are a few outliers. On the low end was Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who ran 13 points behind the expected vote for a GOP senator in Alaska in 2004 but still managed to retain her seat. At the upper end was Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), who won nearly 80 percent of the two-party vote, running 22 points ahead of the expected vote for a GOP senator in Maine in 2006. Republican women, interestingly, do slightly better than Republican men in elections, but that difference disappears when other statistical controls are used.

It would probably help this analysis to expand it to House elections. I felt it was appropriate to limit it to U.S. Senate and governor races for the analysis of African American candidates, since those are high visibility contests with lots of television advertising in which nearly all voters could be expected to know the race of the candidates. Voters can usually detect gender, however, simply by reading a candidate's name.

At any rate, we have here a little empirical data on who is "winning" the oppression olympics. Although we still need more data, there does seem to be a modest electoral penalty against African American candidates. No such penalty exists for women candidates. Of course, there are selection effects at work here, so I can't make any hard claims about causality. But take it as you will.

Light posting here

All the action's over at Participant-Observer.

Obama's and McCain's tax plans

Here's a nice, nonpartisan analysis of Obama's and McCains tax plans from the Urban Institute and Brookings. The summary:

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have proposed tax plans that would substantially increase the national debt over the next ten years, according to a newly updated analysis by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. Compared to current law, TPC estimates the Obama plan would cut taxes by $2.9 trillion from 2009-2018. McCain would reduce taxes by nearly $4.2 trillion. Obama would give larger tax cuts to low- and moderate-income households and pay some of the cost by raising taxes on high-income taxpayers. In contrast, McCain would cut taxes across the board and give the biggest cuts to the highest-income households.

And the money shot:If you have trouble reading that, it just means that the wealthier you are, the better you'll do under McCain's plan. The poorer you are, the better you'll do under Obama's. It's pretty crystal clear, and quite consistent with how the parties have governed over the past half century.