Graph of the week

Too bad no one wants to publish null results.

Death in space

A while back I noted that the Space Shuttle had something like a 1% failure rate -- roughly one out of every hundred launches resulted in catastrophic failure. Here's another way to think about it: Of the 355 astronauts who have flown on the Shuttle, 14 have not returned. That's a 4% mortality rate. In most election years, a House incumbent has roughly the same chance of being defeated as a Shuttle astronaut has of dying.

Forgive me if this is disrespectful to bring up on the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, the day after the anniversary of the Apollo 1 disaster, and three days before the anniversary of the Columbia disaster. (What is it about this time of year?) But this strikes me as a pretty good time to ask what exactly we're trying to accomplish with the manned space program and whether what we've been doing is the best way to accomplish it.

Are conservatives turning against manned spaceflight?

Tom Coburn:

The problem is we’ve had countless Sputnik moments in recent decades that have created little more than space junk.

Sarah Palin:

[Obama] needs to remember that, uh, what happened back then with the communist U.S.S.R. and their victory in that race to space.... Yeah, they won but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.

Okay, Coburn's comment may be more of a metaphor about government waste. But I'm surprised to hear him even metaphorically dismissing the space race as wasteful. And Palin is technically right that the Soviets were the first into space, although I don't think I've ever heard a politician -- no less an America-firster like Palin -- suggest that the Soviets "won" the space race or that too much investment in a space program can kill your country.

I'm not suggesting that these folks are wrong to question the value of a manned space program, but I'm surprised to read it. The manned space program has always enjoyed bipartisan support. Ike pushed it, JFK strongly identified himself with the moonshot, Nixon's signature (unlike Brezhnev's) is on the friggin' moon for the next five billion years or so, Reagan was closely tied with the Space Shuttle, etc. Are conservatives now giving up on this program? Even if it's a simple case of Obama's-fer-it-so-I'm-agin-it, it's kind of surprising.

The State of the Union: What we heard

NPR asked people to describe President Obama's State of the Union address in three words. Here's a word cloud of the results:

The definitive (or, at least, the first) academic book on the 2010 elections

Please forgive the shameless plug, but if you're teaching about the 2010 elections this spring, or if you'd just like to know more about them, please consider Pendulum Swing, edited by Larry Sabato. It contains fascinating studies about many key races by leading academics, analysts, and journalists. There's also a chapter by me. I wrote about Colorado's gubernatorial and senatorial contests. You can see cool polling graphs, like the one at left!

Misunderstanding Obama's rise

Yes, polls are showing a rise in Obama's approval rating of late -- a CNN poll has him as high as 55%, although the average is around 50 right now.  So why is this happening?  The Hill has an interesting spin:

The rebound comes as Obama has made a point of pivoting toward the center, and making more overtures toward Republicans in Congress.

Note how they never specifically say that Obama's pivot is causing the rise in approval ratings. Clever. Although they clearly imply it. Colorado Pols has another take:

We'd say this thaw in Obama's approval numbers has as much to do with hyperbole fatigue as anything else--after two years, Americans are finally realizing that Obama isn't actually Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and Osama all rolled into one. Tom Tancredo's Nazis-and-nuclear-war comparison is a perfect example of what we mean--the stuff just gets ridiculous after awhile, and people stop listening to you. 

Okay, a few quick points. Obama making overtures toward Republicans is not likely to affect a whole lot of voters. After all, he made plenty of overtures to them during the health care debate, and that didn't do much for his approval ratings. Also, I really doubt "hyperbole fatigue" is having any effect here. I feel safe in saying that anyone who was calling Obama a socialist or Hitler a year ago is still disapproving of his performance today.

The most likely explanation for Obama's rise in recent polls is that the economy is actually improving. There is also quite possibly a post-Tucson shooting rally effect going on, although much of the movement seems to predate that. We'll know more in the weeks and months to come as we see whether this is a temporary bump or a sustained resurgence.

Informal influences on legislators

Recently, I've been plugging my seating paper, in which I find that California legislators sitting next to each other can influence each others' votes.  Well, in their working paper "Friends in High Places," Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy take this a step or two further and find a similar effect in the U.S. Senate.  Senators sitting near each other, they find, tend to vote similarly.  (I'm not sure to what degree freshman senators get to pick their seats, so there may be some endogeneity issues there, but still an interesting finding.) They also find that college alumni networks help explain voting patterns among senators.