Say It Ain’t So, Nate

-by Doug Kahn

Nate Silver wrote this on December 23rd (2009's Most Valuable Democrat Is...): “What makes a congressman valuable to his party? One fairly intuitive answer is that it’s someone who votes with his party on key pieces of legislation more often than a typical congressman from his district would.”

I have, therefore, compiled roll call votes on ten key pieces of legislation -- in my opinion, the ten most important pieces of legislation -- that came before the House of Representatives this year. What I then did was to run a logistic regression for each vote, comparing each representative's vote to his predicted vote based on his district's PVI. For example, a congressman in a district with a PVI of R+6 had a .37 likelihood (37% chance) of voting for the stimulus package. A congressman from such a district who voted for the stimulus package would be rated positively for his vote: specifically he'd receive a score of 1 less .37, or +.63. If the congressman voted against the stimulus package, on the other hand, he'd receive a score of -.37. I then added up each representative's score across all 10 votes.

 
Nate is describing a fantasy situation. The premise is wrong in so many ways that it would take a book length essay to explain why. This seems intuitive to him? Then Nate doesn’t understand what it means to be a Democrat, especially a progressive Democrat.
 
There’s no such thing as a typical congressperson, in the way there might be a typical baseball player. There’s no such thing as a typical district. A district’s PVI is not a real measure of how politically progressive a district is. ‘Key legislation’ itself is an arguable concept. And the Democratic Party exists for principled reasons, not to rack up ‘wins’ on pieces of legislation.
 
Nate is using an inside baseball analysis; how well does a particular player perform compared to the presumed performance of that player’s generic replacement. That’s useful in baseball, which is a business based upon judging and then hiring people who will help your business succeed, that is, help your team win, therefore fill seats, make your ‘brand’ more valuable.
 
Nate Silver is, arguably, the person most responsible for reforming the analysis of baseball prospects. You could say he helped make the business of baseball more scientific, using statistics and statistical analysis in innovative ways in order to better judge the relative ‘value’ of young baseball players.
 
His methods have changed the game of baseball. (That is, the way it’s played.) Winning the World Series is an accomplishment built upon discrete steps: to win games you have to score runs and prevent the scoring of runs. Baseball is a fantastically complex team sport; but what if you could properly judge each player’s individual contribution to a run scored or prevented, and then to a game won or lost? Then you’ve created a model for young players to emulate, and fundamentally changed the game. Nate did that.
 
Nate’s intelligence and success make him an influence on the opinions of many people. That could make his analytical tool worse than useless, it could make it anti-progressive. (Nate is not a progressive, of course, not by his own description.)
 
If Nate continues to publish this particular analysis, it may have a pernicious effect on Democratic politics. Nate’s ‘picks’ for most valuable Democrat will be quoting him in their efforts to raise money and get reelected, and that should make him be more circumspect in tossing off a mathematically compromised analysis like this. Look at it this way: if even I can figure out how bad it is, it must lack competence.
 
Nate’s analysis is limited to one year, but more important it’s limited to only ten votes. It’s limited to votes that Nate says are the most important ones. It’s limited to final votes (except in the case of Stupak), when often it’s a vote on the rules governing House debate that is the crucial factor, similar to a cloture vote in the Senate.
 
But besides that, there are many ways to manipulate the statistics involved here, and you can come up with any number of mutually contradictory results. This analysis has been done before, and done better, by people who are themselves progressives. It’s called ProgressivePunch, and they come up with rankings which contradict Nate.

This is pretty simple, really. Note that the method does not account directly for a congressman’s party. This is deliberate. It's not proper, for instance, to compare Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin, the moderate congresswoman from South Dakota, to a typical Democrat, or even a typical Democrat in a conservative district, because if she were to retire, we can't take for granted that a Democrat would replace her. In fact, in South Dakota, she would probably be replaced by a Republican. Is Herseth-Sandlin -- even though she breaks with her party somewhat frequently -- more valuable to the Democrats than a typical congressman from South Dakota would be? That's what we're trying to get at.

Not really. What we’re trying to get at, we progressives that is, is how valuable to the cause of equality, social equity, humanity is a particular Congressperson. In baseball each win is as valuable as any other win. In politics, in governance, each issue is unique, not comparable to any other. Politics is not a game. Human lives are at stake.
 
When someone like Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin is in the pocket of corporations, and actively campaigns to drag the Democratic Party to the right, she deserves to be defeated. I think she has to go.

Nate’s most valuable Democrat is Bart Gordon of Tennessee. 12 of the 25 most valuable, according to Nate, are Blue Dogs, including Frank Kratovil (MD-1). I won’t bore you with an exposition of the essential uselessness of these two. ProgressivePunch scores Frank as 248th out of 258 Democratic House members.

Although 12 of the 25 most valuable Democrats are Blue Dogs, so are 8 of the 21 least valuable ones. It’s short-sighted to lump the Blue Dogs together; they disagree on as much as they agree, and although some of them are among the most counterproductive Democrats, others are among the most worthwhile.

So Nate would say that I’m short-sighted because I ‘lump the Blue Dogs together.’ I don’t lump the Blue Dogs together, Nate, they do that themselves. Go look at their website. They join a caucus that espouses regressive views on social issues, and posit ‘fiscal discipline’ (which is so overbroad and undefined it means exactly nothing) as an ethical and moral compass, while supporting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
 
What we really need to do is to deliberately defeat some Blue Dogs in November. So long as Democrats retain a majority in the House, this makes the caucus more progressive, and more important, it helps get more progressive legislation out of committee. The Blue Dogs think they control the Democratic agenda in the House. They need to be taught a lesson, one that all their members will think about when real Democrats propose legislation.
 
You Could Look It Up
 
A crucial point: Nate is scoring people who have ‘fixed the game’. The Blue Dog Caucus developed and publicized its own strategy on how to come up with a Health Care bill, and it included voting in a bloc in Henry Waxman’s committee to prevent the inclusion of a strong public option. They won, and the bill that came out was a shadow of what it could have and should have been. So what if they then voted ‘aye’.
 
Let’s strip down Nate’s analysis to its simplest iteration, one crucial vote and one Senator. The most important vote in the Senate last year was on Health Care. Nebraska, PVI -14, is the most Republican state with a Democratic Senator. Ergo: Ben Nelson is the most valuable Democrat in the Senate.
 
Nate: He’s not.
 
In the 2006 book called Baseball: Between the Numbers, Nate wrote a chapter that mathematically analyzed this question: was Babe Ruth the most valuable baseball player ever? It’s a mind-numbing statistical analysis. Utilizing math similar to his analysis here, Nate proved that the most valuable baseball player of all time was Barry Bonds. The numbers lie.