The Quantity of Candidates isn't nearly as Important as their Quality

Some candidates are thinking of running against Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper next year. Does that spell danger for him? Republicans seem to think so:

At least five candidates are officially challenging Gov. John Hickenlooper in 2014 and another three are mulling whether to jump in the race.

That so many are choosing to challenge the popular governor is, Republicans contend, a sign that a Democrat who once seemed invincible is vulnerable.

Well, that could be a sign that Hickenlooper is vulnerable, but only if the five candidates already in the race were remotely threatening to him. Yet as the Denver Post notes, they're really not a very impressive crew. Three of them are unaffiliated with a major party. No offense to independents and libertarians, but those folks tend to not do very well in statewide elections. One of them is a Republican described as "starting" a telecommunications business whose main credential is that he doesn't like Hickenlooper's stance on gun control.

The final candidate is Steve Laffey, the former mayor of Cranston, RI, whose last political claim to fame was losing the 2006 Rhode Island Republican Senate primary to Lincoln Chaffee. He moved to Fort Collins in 2010. Now, someone who has actually won a mayoral race -- twice -- should be taken seriously as a candidate, but the fact that he last won a race nine years ago, in a city of 80,000 people, in another state, suggests that he may not be keeping Hickenlooper up at night.

The other potential candidates mentioned in the article are more serious. State Sen. Greg Brophy and Secretary of State Scott Gessler could mount significant challenges to the Governor, and while Tom Tancredo couldn't defeat Hickenlooper on his own, his involvement in an election tends to bring chaos in its wake. But the fact that these candidates are potential candidates is significant. It means that they're more experienced politicians who think strategically about their careers, and they don't want to be humiliated in a landslide. (Hickenlooper has a 53% approval rating.)

So, yes, there are some people planning to run against Hickenlooper, but that's the case for basically anyone running for re-election as governor. Only when other ambitious politicians who have something to lose start running against him should he begin to worry.

The First Ever Electoral Map?

The good folks at Handsome Atlas have scanned the entirety of the 1880 Statistical Atlas of the United States, and look what's in there:

No, that's not from David Leip. That's a very detailed, county-level map of the 1880 presidential election results, published in 1889. (The abstract contains similar maps of earlier elections, as well.) Not only does it show which party won each county, but it also shows the intensity of the vote using gradient shading. This may just be the earliest geographic depiction of American election results -- please let me know if you know of earlier ones.

Why might people have suddenly become interested in geographic maps of election outcomes at this point in history? I was just speaking with Susan Schulten on this topic (she introduced me to the website and is a great curator of awesome political maps) -- here's her take on it. But one thing that I was thinking is that the 1880s was a period of rapid change in political campaigning styles. As chronicled by the likes of Daniel Klinghard and John Reynolds, this period saw a sharp increase in the number of candidates interested in running for office at all levels, and it also saw the rise of candidate-centered campaigning. For the first time, it was considered acceptable for candidates to aggressively seek office on their own, rather than just be spoken about in the third person by their backers and party leaders. A map like the one above would have been very useful for such ambitious candidates, helping them allocate their resources strategically.

Anyway, cool stuff.

Star Trek's Lesson for Graduate Students: Your Dissertation Topic Doesn't Matter

Pike's dissertation will be available
at your campus library in 2234.

I recently re-watched "Star Trek" (2009) with my kids. As many others have noted, one of the more clever plot devices in that film was having it begin with a futuristic Romulan vessel coming back through time to destroy an early Federation ship. This not only provided for a solid story but also created an alternate Trek reality, giving the new franchise a chance to build on old characters and plots without being bound by them.

The Federation ship that was destroyed turned out to be the USS Kelvin, of course, and one of its victims was First Officer George Kirk, who was about to become James Kirk's father. So we see the effects that the timeline shift had on young Jim, who is now growing up fatherless. This may make him angrier, a bit less disciplined, maybe even more of a womanizer (if that's possible), but he still has his aptitude for command, and he still becomes the Enterprise's captain -- earlier than he would have in the original timeline.

Here's another interesting twist: We learn that Christopher Pike, the Enterprise's captain prior to Kirk, wrote his dissertation at Starfleet Academy on the destruction of the Kelvin. I have no idea what his dissertation was about in the old timeline, but it was most assuredly on a different topic. And yet we still see him growing up to command Starfleet's flagship. All of which means that your dissertation topic doesn't matter. So don't worry about it.

Well, I guess it is an "opinion" piece

In Sunday's New York Times, Gail Collins has a fairly interesting examination of corruption levels in state governments. While her piece is hardly a comprehensive study, she does actually allude to some scholarly work on the topic, and her reflections on corruption in New York, Illinois, and surprisingly-clean New Jersey aren't bad.

But then comes the part when she assesses why some states have greater corruption than others do:

What does make a difference? I think it’s just that some states have a good political culture.

Well, okay, it's great that she thinks that. And she's not necessarily wrong. It's just that some political scientists have actually looked into this question and come up with some answers. Amanda Maxwell and Dick Winters, for example, found that states with informed and highly-participatory electorates tend to have less corruption, while states with greater ethnic and racial diversity tend to suffer greater corruption. James Alt and David Larson, meanwhile, found that states with divided partisan governments and elected supreme court justices tend to have fewer corrupt officials. These are hardly the only scholars investigating these questions.

Again, it's not that Collins' guesses are wrong, it's just that we don't really have to be guessing about stuff like this. Lots of scholars are looking into these sorts of questions and coming up with intriguing findings. It's okay to use them.

Elections and Parties in Pakistan

I wanted to provide a shout out and link to an excellent piece in the Christian Science Monitor about upcoming elections in Pakistan, written by my old friend Meg Rinker.  She opines that cricket-star Imran Khan (PTI party) offers hope for the future of Pakistan's democracy, despite a terribly violent election season.

Athar Hussain/Reuters

Three Chairs Unite

The political science department chairs from the University of Denver, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Colorado State University have come together to urge that Congress fully restore National Science Foundation funding for political science. Our op/ed in the Denver Post can be seen here.

Marijuana: Bipartisan agreement, partisan voting

The Colorado state legislature adjourned for the year yesterday after passing a series of bills setting regulations for the legal sale of marijuana within the state. It was a pretty amazing moment, really. And even in a pretty divided legislature, members worked together across party lines to come up with some sensible regulations concerning where pot can be sold, how it can be advertised, how it can be taxed, how to determine if a driver is high, etc. But note how the Denver Post's coverage ends:

The bills were written by a bipartisan committee and received support from both parties in the state Senate. 

But the final votes on the bills in the House on Wednesday split along party lines — Democrats voting for the measures and Republicans voting against. That division occurred even as Republicans grudgingly accepted that the last two bills needed to be passed. One of those bills, House Bill 1317, contained the most significant regulations for marijuana stores. The other, House Bill 1318, held the marijuana tax provisions.

"We do need to do something," Rep. Bob Gardner, R-Colorado Springs, said. "And that something is House Bill 1317."

But he joined his colleagues in voting against the bill's repassage.

Why did Republicans, who had worked on the legislation and had spoken in support of it, ultimately vote against it? As reporter John Ingold explained, this was partially their way of registering dissent with marijuana legalization, which Colorado's voters as a whole approved last fall but most Republicans opposed. Some were also protesting taxing provisions in the new laws. And some may have just wanted to stick it to Democrats after a session of feeling marginalized and steamrolled. 

But there's also a sense that these bills were going to pass the Democrat-controlled chambers anyway; why should Republicans help? As we learned in Frances Lee's excellent book Beyond Ideology, divisive legislative voting behavior has a way of bleeding from ideological issues to non-ideological ones. This seems like a perfect case for such voting. After all, as with any piece of consequential legislation, this one will have victims. Some business that had planned to sell marijuana will not be able to. Someone will be improperly detained for driving while high. Some parents will come home to find their kid smoking weed she obtained from a store on the way home from school. There may as well be a party that stands to benefit from this sort of outrage in the future, and for now, that would be the Republicans.