The Monkey Cage

Scalia and O’Connor helped Reagan’s popularity as they seemed great at the time. The question is do fights over nominees help. It is clear that debates over Judges strengthen Republicans and not Democrats. Every time the issue comes up in a Senate or Presidential campaign the Democrat runs for conservative words. There is a reason for this. The cases most likely to be decided against the people’s views and the enabling legislation will be made by Democratic judges. See same-sex marriage which may have won Bush his second term because of Ohio.

I wouldn’t take Intrade so seriously. This is not a comment on the Sotomayor nomination in particular, just a remark that I think people take these Intrade odds way too seriously. For example, they also had McCain with a 4% chance of winning Washington, D.C., in the presidential election.

OK, so do we take from the McCain odds that prediction markets are bad at closing out the few remaining percentages on high probability events because there are always people willing to bet on long odds? If so, wouldn’t that still mean they could be quite useful for identifying high probability events, e.g., in this case sorting out a potentially contentious court nominee from one that was likely to get through?

I’m also asking this more theoretically than for this specific case, as it did look like the trading was pretty light when I looked up the odds this afternoon.

I’m afraid I don’t remember the specifics, but someone (possibly Nate Silver, but I really don’t remember for sure) did an analysis of Intrade odds on political events sometime last year and found precisely what Josh said: that Intrade tends to always leave very unlikely events with some small probability of occurrence.

Josh: I don’t think it’s a general problem with prediction markets—I doubt anyone was betting on McCain winning D.C., for example—I think it has to do with Intrade’s rules in particular. Really what I’m saying is that betting odds are fun but I wouldn’t take them too seriously.

Dimitri: the post is here.

Here’s the Nate Silver post on the effect of Supreme Court nominations on presidential approval.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/supreme-court-picks-little-peril-for.html.

Bottom line, presidential approval does vary all that much during the confirmation process.

My working thought is that Supreme Court battles are mostly an elite game. Masses tend to view most nominees as qualified, primarily because they view judges from a resume standpoint. Elites think of these judge candidates primarily from a policy standpoint.

But these views are suppositions, not based on political science evidence.

Race. Race. Race.

The long term effect of the GOP fighting this nomination will be further alienation of the Latino/a voting bloc. Sotomayor’s life story (empathy, whatever you want to call it) and moderate position were carefully chosen to force Republicans to make a stand based on race. This is a deadly trap for them, because a great part of what’s left of their base is terrified of the Latinization of this country. Two groups will remember this vote. Latino/as and the Tancredistas. The GOP is in circle the wagons mode and will side with the Tancredistas.