Perhaps only to me, seems like a natural. However, given the risk of annoying people I don’t intend to annoy, I’ll not make a “quarry” out of it. The prospect of the Gentle Reader googling “shoebat” to reel away in shock, horror, and dismay has an appeal.
I admit I’m being extreme because I hate the way the system is set up. Months of attention and visits and money is spent on two totally unrepresentative states, overwhelmingly white, with no large urban areas and tiny populations. Iowa doesn’t even have a primary, and the caucuses are circuses. And that’s not mentioning the Iowa Straw Poll, put out of business this year, a place where “organization” was tested by buying votes.
How different the final results would be in another system is hard to say, since most elections have a small set of non-laughable candidates and the winner is often predictable in advance, as Romney was in 2012. The issues in the campaign might be significantly altered. Promises to keep the ethanol subsidies wouldn’t be the deciding factor. The proposal for cutting the country into quarters with four regional primaries, e.g., would cut down on localisms. The Republicans would have to make some small attempt to reach out to African-Americans and Asians and Hispanics and that alone would move the rhetoric.
That makes the current system not meaningful. I continue to say that the two states are not truly predictive. Yes, you can go back and mine data from them, but we have no control to see whether any other two states might be more predictive. Were there any years in which three candidates realistically had equal chances of winning the nomination? If not, then getting one of two right in two tries isn’t that impressive.
Trump is a real risk, and we keep underestimating him. Trump has managed to do what the vast majority of politicians try to do and fail at: he is pandering to a segment of the voting public but not making it look like he is pandering. Trumps positions have changed more than Mitt Romney’s, but he isn’t suffering the crisis of character that Romney suffered.
Underestimating Trump would be a bad idea. I am in no way saying he would be good at governance (he would likely be terrible at it based on what I’ve seen) but he is an excellent politician and excellent at getting voters on his side.
There does seem to be a number of people who just don’t want to live in a world where whatever Trump is doing he’s doing on purpose and succesfully. He must be stupidly stumbling into something that will eventually make him crash and burn, because… I dunno, because God can’t hate us that much?
Trump is openly declaring that the government should throw the First Amendment out the window and screen entrants on the basis of their religion, and your objection is that “the pundits” are being inaccurate about how long he wants the unconstitutional religious discrimination to take place for?
Your contention is plausible. Trump could match the GOP base via coincidence. But when Trump deals with businessmen, he is somewhat less vapid. You perceive idiocy when Trump makes idiotic arguments. I perceive a shtick.
My theory could be buttressed if he wins the nomination. Then expect a pronounced pivot to center both in positioning and to some extent in the quality of argumentation. Now Trump isn’t a details guy, so I doubt whether he will ever be in Hillary’s league. But I’d expect him to occasionally recite something with a passing resemblance to intelligence, which would give the media a frisson, though it shouldn’t.
Anyway here’s a counterexample. When Trump is speaking to Republicans, he makes ludicrous factually vacuous promises. When he’s discussing film with Errol Morris he looks like this. Much smarter, though not exactly brilliant. My hypothesis is that he will be selling a lot of luxury goods/discretionary items aimed at the middle class in 2017 and now he basically preparing the groundwork.
I get my news mostly from the New York Times and was well-aware of the crowd size disparity.
Rather than putting it in upper-case, you could have quoted the actual attention-getting press release:
As for doing a better job of screening, the screeners today, of course, don’t know who is a Muslim. So the Trump policy first requires our screeners learning religious identification skills. Here’s how it is practiced by some of our adversaries:
http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2013/Terrorists-used-new-tactic-to-spare-some-Muslims
But what’s in my last link isn’t going to work for us, since Muslims can just lie and say they don’t know the verses, or, since there is no exception for permanent residents in the donaldjtrump.com press release, take the fifth. I guess we’ll need another way. Do you have any suggestions?
After figuring out how to identify Muslims, the screeners have to master the harder job of classifying the political views of the identified Muslims.
And then comes what could be the hardest job – teaching “our country’s representatives” so they can “figure out what is going on.”
How many years do you figure all this to take?
Personally, I think it would take zero, since Trump isn’t serious and the courts would block him if he was. The real effect of the Trump policy would be to make the US look bigoted and Trump look ineffectual.
A free hamburger for every refugee?
Well, I’m not crazy about it either. But that doesn’t negate the question: given the system we’ve got, what does it do?
Sure, we have no way of testing whether any other two states might be more predictive. But that doesn’t say the least thing about the extent to which the two states currently up front predict/determine the nominee.
We had one pretty good test back in 2004, when there really was no favorite going in. Then Kerry’s poll numbers started rising in, what, the last 10 days before Iowa, and he took that state and NH, and that was the ballgame.
Anyhow, you tell me: do you know who the Republican nominee will be this year? Neither do I. I think Trump’s become the odds-on favorite, but we’re far from a guaranteed result. But I would bet that the nominee will have won either Iowa or New Hampshire or both.
So let’s see: Iowa and New Hampshire don’t predict or determine anything because one of their winners is bound to be the nominee, and because another couple of states might predict better, and because the fact that there’s usually a clear favorite for the nomination means their predictive/determinative powers haven’t been adequately tested, and really, WTF?
I confess that your implication that my claim is meaningless particularly bothers me. There’s an army of pundits, including people like Nate Silver, a guy who is every bit as smart as you and me, who will tell you that, for instance, Rubio doesn’t need to win one of those two states in order to remain in contention. So saying that no, he needs to outright win one of those two if he wants to be the nominee, is a controversial position, with a lot of big names taking the other side. If it’s such a nothingburger of a claim, one would think that a lot more people would not just accept it, but take it for granted. And they don’t. Maybe among people like you and me whose smarts are stratospheric, this should be a nothingburger. But in the larger world, it’s not.
First of all, Grumman, the Trump Muslim test isn’t just for refugees. It was originally for everyone entering the country, and still is in the written text, although Donald did later make a verbal statement exempting American citizens.
As for the free hamburger, were you thinking of a hamburger with a bit of ham in it? Or are you just thinking that a random hamburger won’t be halal?
A ham test sounds good, but there are some other ways.
If we just want to admit Christians, the customs guys at JFK could ask them to read a card printed as follows:
2 Corinthians
If they pronounce it the way the Donald does, they’re on the next plane out 
Since Trump’s Canadian friends (say, Donald’s buddy Conrad Black with his Jewish wife) might fail that one, here’s another idea. Hold them for 48 hours or so, until famished. Then put in front of them a piece of bacon, and a shrimp. Eat the shrimp and not the bacon, and you’re on the next plane out.
Now, this is far from foolproof, what with shellfish-eating Jews like, um, me, and with some of the 9/11 perps having been non-observant. But I’ll bet every hijacker was circumcised. All factors must be carefully considered. This needs a presidential commission!
Could you use this test to determine if Cruz is a natural-born citizen? 
Ref IA & NH as predictors.
IMO that’s essentially a self-fulfilling tautology. Because we have two states that go early compared to the bulk of the primaries, they are inevitably over-prepared for by the candidates, over-hyped by the media, and are over-powerful in the voters’ & donors’ minds in defining the all-powerful success drug called “momentum”.
It really doesn’t mater which two states go first. We could have a rotating system where every 4 years two different states vote a month earlier than all the rest and IMO we’d still observe a long term rule of thumb that in almost all cases the eventual candidate came first on one or the other. IOW, it’s the *firstness *which causes the predictive value, not the *IA-ness *& NH-ness.
I share Exapno’s chagrin that the two states that actually are fixed as first-to-vote are so woefully unrepresentative of the national electorate at large. IMO that is a large part of the cause for so many people of both parties to be disillusioned with their eventual nominee as well as horrified by the opposition nominee.
Yes, that is a good question. It’s a good question because it’s a hard question. You’ve presented an answer and backed it up with data. That puts you way ahead of most of the people who throw out stuff on this board.
All I can say is that I feel that your case is weak. I can’t actively refute your claim without alternate data, but I can question whether the predictiveness you show is meaningful or inevitable. I think LSLGuy captured what I was trying to say when he called it the firstness as the determiner.
I would be surprised if the eventual nominee didn’t win one or the other this year. But I also wouldn’t be astonished if he didn’t. However, I would be extremely impressed if you told me which *one *he would win. It’s the inability to do that that IMO lessens the force of the claim.
This. Which is why I called it a self-fulfilling tautology. IOW: it’s true, it’s trivially true, but we’re no smarter for having observed its truth. Personally I’m more of a physical scientist than a social scientist. As such I like my causes to have discernable mechanisms. But I admit that’s an intellectual preference, not itself a matter of physics.
This race, especially on the R side, is sui generis. We have candidate dynamics in play we haven’t seen for a couple decades if not more. Against the backdrop of a very different polity than the last similar occasion. As such conventional wisdom, honed as it is by conventional cases, seems particularly weak as a predictive tool.
At the risk of trivializing the discussion, correlation is not causation. At the same time, correlation can certainly provide useful advice when placing bets.
Well, that’s certainly the (way) larger part of it. Sure, if in 2020, the calendar was rejiggered so that Iowa and NH had their caucus and primary, respectively, in April and May, they’d tell you nothing. (In most years, what you learn from who won a late primary is who’s already wrapped it up.)
But they ARE first. And here’s what they do with their firstness: they have a 40-year track record of narrowing down the field to one or two people - the winners of those two primaries.
Is it inevitable? Of course not. Like any pattern that isn’t based on direct causation, sometime it will be broken.
But is it meaningful? Hell, yes. Like I keep saying: a lot of people out there, including genuinely smart cookies like Nate Silver, are saying that failing to win one of the first two primaries won’t hurt Rubio as long as he manages a solid second to Trump. If the pattern holds, Silver and the others are wrong. That’s meaningful. The pattern says that Iowa and New Hampshire are more effective at shedding the also-rans than the pundits and analysts give them credit for, that they not only knock out the candidates polling in the single digits, but also all the way up to the #3 candidate, no matter how well that candidate seems to be positioned. That’s meaningful.
If everybody already accepted this, then yeah, you’d have every reason to say this isn’t meaningful. But here I am, pointing out a nontrivial fact about the effect of these first two voting opportunities that the larger political world seems to be oblivious to, and you’re saying ‘oh sure, what’s the big deal.’ The big deal is that a hell of a lot of political commentary is based on an assumption that this pattern doesn’t exist, since nobody even bothers to explain why this year is different.
As Earl Weaver used to say, he was more interested in what a ballplayer could do than what he couldn’t.
The first two caucus/primaries have more predictive power than most people give them credit for, and that’s what I’m pointing out. If your problem with that is that they don’t predict even more than I’m pointing out they do, then AFAIAC, that’s a pretty silly way of looking at things.
Agreed. It has practical predictive power and it takes a strong stomach to bet against the rule. All good thinking, right up to your last sentence; then I think you overstate the case a smidgen. So what follows here is more of a quibble than a disagreement.
I don’t think the punditocracy is quite as silent on why (or at least how) this year is different than you seem to think. In some cases the argument is a simple statement of the seemingly obvious without much stated rationale. In other places they’re simply assuming you’ve already heard and absorbed the disclaimers from the rest of the pundit chorus.
The thinking of most of the pundits (e.g. Silver, a man with more political *nous *in his big toe than I’ve got in all my brain and body) seems to be that there’s room to make an exception in the pattern this time for Trump and for Trump alone precisely because Trump is such an odd beast. He’s not a third party candidate like Perot or Wallace. He’s not simply a far extremist like Goldwater was. And beyond the oddity of the candidates we’ve got the oddities in the electorate. And in the economic story of the last 20 years.
These oddities don’t flat invalidate the rule. But they do give thoughtful commentators room to say in effect: "Ignoring Trump’s place in the finish, the usual rule applies: The leading non-Trump candidate in each of IA & NH will be the finalist(s) for the nomination. Then post-NH, add Trump back into the contest, perhaps a little battle-damaged, perhaps not. *That *two/threesome will be the whole race to the finish. Everybody else will be scraped off sooner or later, just like every four years for the past 40. IOW: ex-Trump the Rule works just fine.
Said another way, saying Rubio can still win the nomination if he comes in second to Trump isn’t making an exception *for *Rubio. It’s making an exception *about *Trump’s impact on the primary.
I’m not sure I believe they’re correct in their thinking. Though I lean that way. But I do believe I’m correct in explaining their thinking. For what little that may be worth to anyone.
Lots of smart posts in this thread, especially RTFirefly and LSLGuy. I think I am actually between the two camps. I think that IA and NH’s “firstness” is the most important part, but I also think that especially on the GOP side, the states are different enough that they measure something other than just firstness. Most years, if you can’t appeal to either of these states, you’re not a very viable GOP nominee. (On the Dem side, that argument is much weaker because of the sheer rural whiteness.)
Visitors and immigrants are already being screened. That’s not a First Amendment issue. Depending on their country of origin (or current passport if not their original state of birth), some visitors/immigrants are screened more thoroughly than others. Again, not a First Amendment issue. Trump didn’t say that all Muslims should be banned forever. Only until there is better screening in place.
The screening process could be improved before there is ever an attempt to ban all Muslims UNTIL there is a better, more thorough, method of screening visitors and immigrants. Problem solved and no one group would have been banned.
The pundits are being inaccurate in their reporting. I believe the pundits are trying to influence the election by twisting and spinning the candidates statements. Is that fair? No it isn’t. Are elections fair? No they aren’t. It’s a run what you brung contest and the person with the most votes wins.
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Thanks for the tip. 