Classifying congressional districts by density, then plotting percent voting for Donald J. Trump. (more…)
Category: Politics
Presidential Data Explorer Updated
Explore the economic record of presidents, starting with Harry S Truman. Updated with recent data. (more…)
Election Deniers in Kansas
Some candidates for high office in Kansas believe in the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. (more…)
Kansas jobs since pandemic
Examining the effect of the pandemic on Kansas jobs using industry groups.
These charts show data from January 2019 through January 2021. Data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the United States Department of Labor. The industry groupings are as defined by BLS. This data is adjusted for seasonality.
The first chart shows the count of jobs in each industry. The vertical axis is different for each industry. This is useful for seeing how many jobs are in each category. For the interactive versions of the chart, click here. Click charts for larger versions.
The second chart expresses the same data as percent change since January 2019. The vertical scale is the same for each industry. This chart lets us see the relative change in jobs. We can observe the large drop in Leisure and Hospitality followed by a rebound, but not up to the pre-pandemic level. This is an example of the “inverted square root” recovery, named after the shape of the math symbol. Some industries experienced a drop, and then stayed at or near the lower level. Information shows this trend, as well as manufacturing. For the interactive versions of the chart, click here.
The final chart shows the percent change from the previous month, with the same vertical scale for each industry. For the interactive versions of the chart, click here.
Visualization: Kansas 2020 presidential election
An interactive visualization of the 2020 general election for president in Kansas, at the precinct level.
Fake news: How it happened
When politicians condemn fake or phony news, it may be of their own making.
A favorite topic of President Donald J. Trump is “fake news.” In this passage by Jonathan Karl, who is ABC News Chief White House Correspondent, a Trump administration official briefed reporters on background, meaning the information may be used, but the official may not be named. A newspaper then reported what the official said, respecting the rules by not naming the source. Then, President Trump criticized the newspaper for using phony sources.
Here’s how it happened, as described by Karl:
The next day, May 25, the White House made a senior National Security Council official available to answer questions from reporters about all things related to North Korea. This was a so-called background briefing, which means reporters could quote what the official said but we could not use his name. It took place in the White House briefing room. Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah explained the ground rules:
“This briefing’s going to be on background. It’s off camera, not for broadcast,” Shah said, adding that the briefer could “be referred to as a senior White House official.”
This is a common practice that I have witnessed in every White House I have covered — the press office making top officials available but demanding they not be quoted by name. The practice often annoys reporters, who would prefer to name the officials we talk to, but Barack Obama’s press office did this all the time. So did George W. Bush’s. And Donald Trump’s office was only continuing the practice.
I asked the official, who had been directly involved in the effort to set up the summit meeting, if it could still happen as scheduled. He chuckled and said, “We’ve lost quite a bit of time that we would need,” adding, “June twelve is in ten minutes.” The tone of his response was unmistakable: It would be virtually impossible to pull the summit off as planned.
But in another case of Trump whiplash, the president announced a few hours later that his administration was back in touch with the North Koreans and the summit could possibly happen as planned after all. In reporting the president’s sudden reversal of his reversal, The New York Times quoted the senior administration official who had just suggested it would be virtually impossible to get the meeting back on track.
That prompted this remarkable tweet from the president.
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
The Failing @nytimes quotes “a senior White House official,” who doesn’t exist, as saying “even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12 would be impossible, given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed.” WRONG AGAIN! Use real people, not phony sources.
5/26/18, 11:21 PMUse real people? This “senior administration official” was a true flesh-and-blood Trump administration official. The only reason he was not named by The New York Times or any other news organization that attended the briefing is because Trump’s own press office insisted he not be named. It was a bizarre episode and a perfect illustration of one central fact about the president’s attacks on the news media: Much of the news he derides as fake news comes right out of his own White House. And when it comes to North Korea, the episode revealed another immutable fact: The president himself was driving the policy. If the president had been following the advice of his own top advisors, the summit meeting simply would not have happened.
Excerpted from Karl, Jonathan. Front Row at the Trump Show (p. 224). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Karl added this note:
Footnote: The anonymous official’s name is Matthew Pottinger, the senior director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council. If the president is going to accuse reporters of using “phony sources” when they abide by White House ground rules, then I believe those ground rules no longer apply.
Partisan Conflict Index
Have you suspected that the country has become more partisan? An index supports that.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia produces a monthly index that measures one aspect of political partisanship. The authors explain:
The Partisan Conflict Index tracks the degree of political disagreement among U.S. politicians at the federal level by measuring the frequency of newspaper articles reporting disagreement in a given month. Higher index values indicate greater conflict among political parties, Congress, and the President.
The index is an outgrowth of recent Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia research that finds that the index tends to increase near elections and during debates over such contentious policies as the debt ceiling and health-care reform. Research suggests that increased partisan conflict increases uncertainty among firms and households. Such uncertainty has been shown to slow economic activity by delaying business investment and consumer spending.
The source of the data that comprises the index is “the frequency of newspaper articles that report lawmakers’ disagreement about policy,” according to a research paper by the author. (See Azzimonti, Marina (2014), “Partisan Conflict,” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper 14-19.” Available at link below.)
Here is a graph of its index from its inception in 1981 to its most recent value in August 2020. As you can see, for nearly three decades the index hovered around or below the value of 100.
Then, in 2009, after the election of Barack Obama, the index started rising, indicating greater political disagreement. It meandered in an upward direction, reaching a local peak in October 2013 at the time of a 16-day federal government shutdown.
After that, the index returned to its previous range but rising sharply in November 2016, where there was a presidential election. It continued to rise, reaching its all-time high in March 2017, two months after Donald Trump took office.
From there, it mostly meandered downward, except for a peak in January 2019. The index reached its all-time lowest value in April 2020 as the nation grappled with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the nation was not at war (except for Afghanistan), the national mood was similar to wartime. As the author of the index has noted: “The lower-than-average values observed during wars suggest a ‘rally around the flag’ effect.”
In May and June, however, the index rose, perhaps as controversies surrounding the pandemic and the federal government’s response arose.
For more information on the index and to use an interactive version of the chart examples shown here, see Partisan Conflict Index.
Libertarian campaign visits Wichita
In Wichita Story, Tim O’Bryhim reports on the visit of the Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate to Wichita:
“It is another hot August day in Kansas; a good day to be inside. But a crowd gathers in the (sadly only proverbial) shadow of the Keeper of the Plains to welcome Spike Cohen, the vice-presidential candidate of the third largest political party in the United States of America. If elections were the Olympics, the Libertarian Party would proudly climb on the medals stand every four years with a bronze medal around its neck. But in American politics, third place is almost always a distant finish.”
Click on Libertarian VP Candidate Spike Cohen Rallies Wichita Supporters Amidst a Hostile Electoral System.
