The Washington Post - USA (2022-01-19)

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE K A21

WEDNESDAY Opinion

W

hat, if anything, does the Repub-
lican Party stand for? The closest
thing Republicans have to a posi-
tive agenda is support for Donald
Trump — up to and including his false,
destabilizing claim that the last presidential
election was stolen from him. Candidates in
GOP primary elections for the 2022 mid-
terms contradict Trump at their peril.
To be sure, the party’s negative message is
clear enough. Republicans have even re-
duced it to the snarky catchphrase “Let’s go,
Brandon.”
And yet, after a year of unified Democratic
government in Washington, with President
Biden at its head, the deeply flawed GOP —
organized around little more than rejection
of the Democrats, to the point of downplay-
ing the pro-Trump attack on the U.S. Capitol
— is not losing adherents. It might, in fact, be
gaining them.
Amid the many downbeat reports on
Biden’s first year, the Republicans’ undimin-
ished popularity presents Democrats with
an especially sobering data point. More
sobering, there might not be much they can
do to counter it, at least not in the short term.
The latest Gallup findings on the two
parties’ support, released Monday, show
that Democrats and Democratic-leaning in-
dependents made up an average of 46 per-
cent of adults during 2021, vs. 43 percent for
the Republicans, a two-point pro-GOP shift
from the 48-to-43 Democratic edge in 2020.
(The margin of error is one percentage
point.)
Yet the average figures mask the ebb and
flow during 2021, which favored the GOP.
Gallup took soundings every month; in the
first quarter, Democrats held an average
49-to-40 edge, but in the fourth quarter of
the year, the GOP was ahead 47 to 42. That’s a
14-point swing.
Caveats apply. One, mentioned by Gallup
in its report, is that things don’t look quite as
bad for Democrats when the fourth-quarter
2021 data are disaggregated by month: In
December, the GOP edge was only 46 to 44.
Still, Gallup’s results are consistent with
Biden’s j ob approval rating, which is now in
the low 40s and began to plunge at around
the time of the U.S. military’s chaotic pullout
from Afghanistan, as well as with “generic
ballot” polls, which show Republicans with a
slight lead in voter preference for Congress
next fall.
Nor is it difficult to list reasons for this
situation, which range from Biden’s blun-
ders (failing to prepare the Afghanistan
pullout) to his bad luck (the omicron vari-
ant) to forces beyond his control (sheer
partisan polarization).
In differentiating between factors, Demo-
crats can be fairly blamed for and what they
cannot be, however, misjudging political
reality surely counts among the former.
Possessed of tiny majorities in the House
and Senate, they overestimated how much
the public wanted a transformational Great
Society 2.0 — as opposed to a restoration of
stability in the economy, education and
public health. They underestimated the re-
sistance Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III
(W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) would
mount to grand progressive plans, especially
after inflation began to take precedence
among voter concerns.
Biden and his advisers should heed the
warnings of political analysts who speak
from inside the Democratic camp — but
outside the Washington bubble.
Political scientist Ruy Teixeira has been
fairly screaming about signs that working-
class Latinos are deserting the Democratic
Party for the Republicans, as so many
w orking-class Whites have already done.
Data scientist and political consultant David
Shor argues that party preference increas-
ingly reflects a cultural divide. It runs be-
tween those with a college degree, who tend
to back a progressive Democratic agenda,
and those without a degree — including, in
small but significant numbers, non-
c ollege-educated people of color — who are
both less affluent and more moderate
i deologically.
“If we don’t listen to them,” Shor argued in
an Aug. 13 interview with Freddie Sayers of
UnHerd, “they’ll just become Republicans.
And that is what we are seeing.”
It’s easier to recommend tuning out activ-
ists and donors — such as those who are
threatening Sinema’s political future now
over her resistance to filibuster reform —
than actually do it.
There might not be a moral equivalence
between Democrats’ dependence on a pro-
gressive base and the GOP’s dependence on
a Trumpist one; but politically, they’re
s imilar.
Democratic defeat in the 2022 elections
could force Biden into a more sustainable
ideological position, much as President Bill
Clinton “triangulated” after Republicans
swept into control of the House in 1994.
The dif ficulty, however, is precisely how
far left the party has shifted in the nearly
three decades since then. You can ’t pivot to a
centrist strategy without personnel — do-
nors, activists and candidates — willing to
execute it.
There is still time for Democrats to recov-
er, especially if they get good breaks on
inflation and the coronavirus instead of bad
ones. Step one of their comeback, however,
should be a close reading of the Gallup study,
followed by brutally honest reflection about
why, awful as the Republicans are, some
swing voters seem to prefer them.

CHARLES LANE

The legacy

of Biden’s

first year: A

stronger GOP
BY JOHN R. BOLTON

R

ussia’s focus on Ukraine is certainly intense. The Kremlin has massed troops and equipment along their common border; launched major cyberattacks against Kyiv’s government com- puter systems; planted operatives in the eastern Donbas region who could stage false-flag operations as pretexts for Russian invasion; and escalated a long-standing insistence that Ukraine is not a legitimate sovereign state. In high-profile meetings with Western diplo- mats, Moscow has called for extensive revision of Europe’s post-Soviet political order and even beyond, threatening to deploy troops to Ven- ezuela and Cuba. The West’s consensus is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is readying to in vade Ukraine, finishing what he started in 2014 with Crimea, this time annexing all of Ukraine. To deter Moscow, the United States and other NATO members have threatened significant economic sanctions. Whether this will suffice is unclear. Russia has already violated European borders this century (Georgia, 2008, and Ukraine, 2014) and sustained “frozen con- flicts” across the former U.S.S.R. Even if Presi- dent Biden is serious, Putin might not believe it, based on past U.S. performance, including the United States’ recent Afghanistan withdrawal. The risks of miscalculation are high. But is Russia really planning an all-out attack on Ukraine? Putin himself might not know his final objective. His challenge to Biden might be a political “reconnaissance in force” across a front much broader than Ukraine, precisely to develop better cost-benefit analysis of his options. Will the West show a lack of resolve, and where? Will it start to fragment, with members attaching lower priority to some territories or issues than Russia does? Stakes this high are risky for Putin, but he might be willing to gamble out of a fear that Russia’s long-term prospects are weaker than today’s. He thus might be induced to act from relative weakness, not strength. Even so, that doesn’t make him any less dangerous in the here and now. Consider Russia’s options from its decision- makers’ perspective. Totally annexing Ukraine might not be what they want or need. Putin could order Russian columns to approach Kyiv, making its vulnerability obvious, as Russia did with Georgia in 2008, nearing Tbilisi before withdrawing on its own timetable to Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Toppling Ukrainian Presi- dent Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and hoping for (or assisting) a Moscow-aligned leader to appear are eminently feasible. Russia could seize and hold significant terri- tory in eastern and southern Ukraine, beyond Crimea and the Donbas, with only marginal fears of guerrilla war or anti-Russian terrorism later. Amid reports that the Biden administra- tion might support an insurgency, in addition to imposing massive sanctions, if Russia seizes Ukraine, would the White House take those steps if the seizure were “merely” partial? Would Europe? Or would the West breathe a collective sigh of relief, saying, “It could have been much worse,” and do next to nothing? Putin might bet on this scenario. Or maybe the pea is under a different walnut shell. Russia could suddenly proclaim an enhanced “union” with Belarus, binding the two far closer than at present. By strengthening Moscow’s hand in Minsk, Belarusian President Alexander Lu- kashenko, unhappily perhaps, but willingly enough, would effectively overmatch Belarus’s citizen-opposition. What would Europe and the United States do then? What if Moscow tried to reinforce its puppet Transnistria’s position in Moldova’s frozen conflict through bogus negotiations? What if Russia concocted a pretext for further aggression against Georgia? The United States and NATO must urgently develop strategies for “gray zone” countries caught between NATO’s eastern and Russia’s western borders, determining the alliance’s interests in each country and how to protect them. Simultaneously, on the fly, NATO must do better in deterring Russia from taking belligerent actions in the current Ukraine crisis, including below the level of full-on invasion. So far, NATO’s threatened responses all involve steps the West could take only after Russian troops cross the border. These threats are likely inadequate, largely because of alliance failures to make good on prior threats. Accordingly, the United States and its allies must quickly change Putin’s cost-benefit calculus before Russian troops begin hostilities. Germany and the European Union should be strongly pressed to state now that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia won’t oper- ate until Putin withdraws all troops from states objecting to their presence. The United States and NATO should surge shipment of lethal military assistance to Ukraine (and possibly Georgia and others) and redeploy substantial additional forces there — not to fight, but to train and exercise with Ukrainian counter- parts. Let Russian generals, looking through their field glasses, see American flags in Ukraine and wonder what it means. If we fail Kyiv (again), thereby endangering nearby NATO members, Putin will have per- fected a road map to further erode NATO’s deterrence and its entire collective defense rationale. He not only has a strategy, which the West doesn’t; he has also proved himself an adroit tactician. Today, he is still calling the shots. That needs to change.

John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald Tr ump and is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

Putin has a

larger strategy

for Ukraine.

The U.S. doesn’t.

BY RICHARD ZOGLIN

I

s there a more unlikely star in the TV metaverse than Steve Kor- nacki? The NBC stats guru be- came a cult hero with his hyper- kinetic performances on election night: sleeves rolled up, leaning in- tently into the big board, punching up the county-by-county vote totals like Mr. Wizard on steroids, turning dry election-night vote counting into edge-of-seat drama. More recently he’s tak en his act to NBC Sports’ “Sunday Night Football”: hovering over another big board, parsing the probability of each NFL contender making the playoffs. On the next-to-last weekend of the regu- lar season, for instance, he pegged the chances at 83 percent for the Indian- apolis Colts; a paltry 5 p ercent for the Pittsburgh Steelers. But did those numbers really offer any useful information, beyond what an ordinary NFL fan could have gleaned from examining the teams’ records and remaining games? In fact, Pittsburgh, despite its meager chances, made it into the playo ffs (before losing to the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday), and highly favored Indianapolis lost out. Go figure. But never mind the results; not just in sports but across th e culture, we’ve become obsessed with statistical probabilities — t rying to reduce un- certainty about the future with dubi- ously precise numbers. We depend on probabilities, of course, to guide much of our lives. With a 70 percent chance of rain forecast, we’ll probably grab an um- brella on the way out. Economic fore- casts help us decide what to do with our savings. Cancer patients look to projected survival rates when decid- ing what treatments to explore. But the exactitude of these p robabilities, typically based on com-

puter modeling or past results projected onto an uncertain future, con- veys an authority that they o ften don’t deserve. The ba ttle against the coronavirus pandemic, for example, has been a veritable pageant of probabilities. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines promise a 90 to 95 percent chance of protecting you against the coronavirus (so most people opt for them instead of the about 70 percent effective Johnson & J ohnson shot). Unvac- cinated people, the Centers for Dis- ease Control and Prevention reports, are six times more likely than the vaccinated to get sick with covid-19, nine times more likely to be hospital- ized and 14 times more likely to die from the disease. But the anti-vaxxers marshal their own stats: One British study, pic ked up by the right-wing press, found that triple-vaccinated people were 4.5 times more likely to test positive for the omicron variant than the un- vaccinated. Try sorting all th at out. And if the projections turn out to be a little off, they can simply be adjusted in real time. Followers of the political website FiveThirtyEight won’t soon forget the incredibly shrinking probabilities of a Hillary Clinton victor y on election night

She started the evening with a
comfortable 72 percent chance of
beating Donald Trump; the number
dropped to 55 percent at 10:10 p.m.
Eastern time (when Michigan was
called for Trump); went underwater,
to 44 percent, at 10:23 (when Ohio
was lost); and had plummeted to
6 percent after 2 a.m.
At lea st they got it right in the end.
The stats-crazy world of sports has
become parti cularly adept at these
rolling, real-time projections. Check
online for the score of any NBA or
Major League Baseball game in prog-
ress, and you’ll see the win probabili-

ties bouncing up and down with every three-point play or two-run hom- er. (The Golden State Warriors lead by 5 points in the first quarter of their Christmas Day game against the Phoenix Suns: Their chances of win- ning are 54.4 percent. The Suns take the lead by 6 in the second: Now they’re 73.1 percent favorites.) The NF L’s ultrasophisticated Next Gen Stats can even take big plays and calculate, in retrospect, their p robability of success — as in a 14.2 percent chance that Christian McCaffrey can elude four defenders and score on a r un from the 7-yard line. It makes the feats on the field seem more marvelous than ever: Look at the odds they beat! But these suspiciously precise projections should be regarded with caution. In politics, for instance, we’ve le arned to be skeptical of pre-election polls, given how wrong they’ve been in recent years. But when a lot of them are digested, weighted and converted into a precise probability figure, down to the 10th of a decimal point, they acquire a bogus air of certitude. Those early projections about vaccine effectiveness, moreover, might well have contributed to complacency about the pandemic — before the new variants emerged and essentially threw the numbers out the window. As for those rolling adjustments when the probabilities butt up against the real world — well, we can all play that game. According to my own projections (statistical method- ology available on request), anyone who started reading this article had a 38 percent chance of making it to the last paragraph. By no w, the probability is well up in the 90s. And if you ’ve made it this far, it’s 100 percent. Beat that, Kornacki.

Richard Zoglin is a New York-based writer and critic.

We’ve become obsessed

with statistical probabilities

ISTOCK

pacts so large and so far beyond the state’s borders. Suffice to say that both are dubious. The proposition was cooked up not by anyone with expertise in agriculture or food safety, but by people whose sole concern is animal rights. As the agriculture community’s Supreme Court brief says, “The law is based on a human health rationale so patently false that California has declined to defend it.” The extraterritorial reach and burden of the California rule might well lead to its being struck down. The state imports about 99 percent of its pork, so the entire burden of the new requirements will fall on producers elsewhere, especially small farmers, either to fork over an estimated total of $300 million to $350 million for building entirely new facilities, or to forgo selling in California, about 13 percent of the U.S. pork market. One extraordinary provision of Prop 12 declares that agents of the Califor- nia Department of Food and Agricul- ture are free to come on the property of producers to inspect for compliance. Visualizing a ponytailed, clipboard- toting coastal type marching onto a hog farm in Iowa or North Carolina suggests a new entry for one of those “world’s most dangerous jobs” lists. A state action more plainly burden- some to interstate commerce would be hard to imagine, and the 9th Cir cuit has over the years had the highest reversal rate of any federal appeals court. And yet, the nation could benefit from the ensuing spectacle should the law be allowed to stand. The first to feel the effects will be Californians themselves. Whatever the industry re- sponse to the new regime, they will quickly be paying much more for pork,

A

n intriguing feature of recent political life has been the sud- den discovery by much of the American left of the virtues of federalism. Oh, there has been no conversion to the principle of subsid- iarit y, that decisions ought to be made at the levels closest to daily life. The leftists’ credo still calls for overruling the choices of their benighted fellow citizens regarding labor laws, voting procedures — virtually anything where outcomes can be dictated c entrally. But, at least in cases where it has proved difficult to impose their will nationally, those of the statist persua- sion have decided to move ahead in places under their control, and that has some indirect value to us all. Consider the current case study of California’s Proposition 12, which in- cludes a p rovision whereby the state ’s voters were persuaded to ban the sale of pork from feeding operations unless they meet standards virtually nonexis- tent in the industry today. The proposition, approved in 2018 and effective as of Jan. 1, imposes criminal and civil penalties on anyone selling pork from a f acility where sows live in less than 24 square feet or might touch an enclosure when turning around. A trace percentage of the natio n’s livestock farms meet this test, and those that do serve almost entirely niche local markets. The Supreme Court is now weighing whether to take a case from the agriculture industry challenging the proposition. (The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit allowed it to stand.) Here is not the place, and the author is not the person, to argue either the scientific merits of California’s radical new requirements, or the legal prospects for a rule that would have im-

when they can find it at all. As you sow, so shall you reap. Sorry. The famous phrase “laboratories of democracy” is still the most apt de- scription of our federal system and, along with its protection of local liber- ties, its greatest advantage. For instance, the legalization of marijuana in many states is furnishing real-world evidence for others to study in making their own decisions. An activist governor or mayor is constantly watching for successful in- novations elsewhere to copy and adopt. Bu t the negative lessons are just as valuable. Most lab experiments fail, and science learns as much from those as from those that finally succeed. The accelerating out-migration from high-tax states (California promi- nent among them) is an instructive caution to governments elsewhere. The more extreme anti-law- e nforcement policies have already demonstrated their absurdity, sadly at a tragic cost in human life. Occasionally, actions work out so unfortunately that the jurisdiction re- verses field itself. Kansas chose to undo tax reductions that w ent too far, and a number of cities are now refund- ing the same police they so recently defunded. But even where some poor citizens remain stuck with the conse- quences, folly in one place serves as a valuable caution to all the rest. So, if California’s ham-handed approach to pig production takes effect, there will be a lot learned. One doubts the results will affirm its wisdom. This latest novelty from the once-Golden State almost certainly will fit in the “for heaven’s sake, don’t” category. But such mistakes, and the system that permits them and the teaching m oments they provide, serve us all very well.

MITCH DANIELS

California’s ham-fisted war on pork

offers some useful lessons

The Washington Post - USA (2022-01-19)

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