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The Seattle PI’s David Horsey waded into the debate on California’s Proposition 19 this week. He looked to parallels with alcohol prohibition to understand our current predicament, but he missed the mark on a few of the details:

My mentor at the start of my journalism career was a man named William F. Asbury. He was a fine newsman and a recovering alcoholic. After he left the newspaper business, he began writing and lecturing about alcoholism prevention and developed a take on Prohibition that went against the conventional wisdom that it was an experiment in social control that did not work.

Apparently, not everyone was sneaking off to a speakeasy during the 1920s. According to Asbury, the ban on booze actually kept a lot of people away from alcohol, lowered the number of broken families and reduced the alcoholism rate.

That’s partially true, but it doesn’t tell the entire story. Once alcohol prohibition officially became the law of the land in 1920, alcohol consumption certainly decreased significantly. Since it was illegal, accurate statistics were hard to come by, but by looking at related statistics like alcohol-related deaths and arrests for public drunkenness, it’s believed that alcohol use quickly returned to about 60-70% of pre-prohibition levels. And in some cities, the number of speakeasies far surpassed the previous number of legal bars.

The gains that Asbury spoke of were a temporary one-time phenomenon that came from the shifting of alcohol production from legal distributors to organized crime syndicates. Once that transition ended, we saw the return of all the problems related to alcohol – with a grisly bonus in the form of significantly higher rates of crime from the organized crimes groups that were making obscene profits from the trade.

It’s likely true that a certain percentage of people who drank before prohibition refrained from breaking the law once it became illegal. But those were primarily folks who aren’t going to have a problem with alcohol ruining their lives in the first place. The barrier that prohibition put up only deterred the people least motivated to have a drink – moderate drinkers who aren’t going to wreck their lives on the stuff.

But there was one other particularly nasty aspect of alcohol prohibition that Horsey doesn’t discuss:

Amid this debate, one question sticks in my mind: What will this do to kids?

Like anyone who has raised children, coached a youth sports team or spent time in schools, I have seen how teenagers – especially boys – can be thrown off track by marijuana. The more they smoke, the less interested they become in school, in sports, in homework or in friends who don’t share their preoccupation with getting high.

Solid medical research has proven that human brains do not fully develop until a person is well into his twenties and that, the earlier a teenager starts using marijuana, the greater the risk of permanent impairment to the parts of the brain that govern rational behavior and mature judgment. The risk is exacerbated by the hugely increased potency of today’s drug, compared with the pot of the 1960s and ’70s. An early marijuana habit may enhance a kid’s prospects for winning a bit part in a Seth Rogen stoner movie, but cuts chances for achievement in most other endeavors.

I completely share Horsey’s concern here, and it’s one of the biggest reasons why we should be supporting Proposition 19 and an end to marijuana prohibition everywhere. While alcohol prohibition did manage to lower overall rates of alcohol consumption, that wasn’t necessarily true for younger people:

Drinking at an earlier age was also noted, particularly during the first few years of Prohibition. The superintendents of eight state mental hospitals reported a larger percentage of young patients during Prohibition (1919-1926) than formerly. One of the hospitals noted: “During the past year (1926), an unusually large group of patients who are of high school age were admitted for alcoholic psychosis” (Brown, 1932:176).

In determining the age at which an alcoholic forms his drinking habit, it was noted: “The 1920-1923 group were younger than the other groups when the drink habit was formed” (Pollock, 1942: 113).

Even worse, since there was a strong incentive to avoid getting caught with alcohol, drinking smaller quantities of more powerful forms of alcohol became more common. People carried flasks of homemade liquors as opposed to drinking less potent beers. When it came to preventing younger people from developing bad habits with alcohol, prohibition was a serious step back from the pre-prohibition era. And it’s very likely that if prohibition had continued for another generation that the end result would have been much worse than the problems of alcoholism before prohibition.

This is similarly true for marijuana prohibition today, as high school students continually report that it’s easier for them to obtain marijuana than alcohol. And compared to Holland, where marijuana sales have been tolerated for over 30 years, American teenagers use marijuana at a much higher rate. If Horsey is concerned about teenage drug use, his worries seem to be misplaced. It’s our current policies that put more young people at risk, not the policies that would exist with the passage of Proposition 19.

I’m on a deadline today, so please fling poo amongst yourselves.

My trolls tell me that President Obama’s upcoming rally in Seattle is an act of desperation, and that nobody is more unpopular around here these days than the president, except, perhaps, Gov. Chris Gregoire.

Maybe. But I’m just not feeling the gloom and doom right now, especially with the latest SurveyUSA tracking poll showing Obama’s approval rating jumping 12 points in Washington state last month, rising from 40% to a comfortable 52%. That’s Obama best showing since January, and represents a 24-point swing in the margin, from 16 points under to 8 points over.

Add to that the new CNN/Time poll that has Sen. Patty Murray up 51-43% over Dino Rossi, plus the Elway Poll that showed Washington Dems holding a 46-37% advantage in the generic congressional, not to mention the sudden tightening in WA-08, and you gotta wonder if the tide is shifting, at least in this corner of the country.

Or, perhaps, there’s something to Elway’s effort to distinguish between automated polls like Rasmussen and SurveyUSA, and live interviewer polls like his. As Darryl suggested the other night at Drinking Liberally, what if the enthusiasm gap we’ve all been hearing about is largely manifested in who is or is not willing to give up ten minutes to interact with an automated poll? I know I’ve hung up on a couple robo-polls this year, but find it harder to do so with a real live person. Interesting hypothesis.

I know there have been some polls that show Democratic seats at risk in WA-03 and WA-02 (and allegedly even WA-09), and we’ll certainly give back some of our recent legislative gains, but apart from that, there really isn’t very much hard evidence to suggest that Washington Dems should brace themselves for a red tsunami of the likes that swept them from office in 1994. At least, there’s not much evidence from this momentary vantage point some three weeks out.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sSWLuPJac0&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

So I got an email blast from Markos today, showing Sestak finally pulling ahead of Toomey, and cheered by the news and feeling my Pennsylvania roots, I clicked through the link to the Orange to Blue page, and chipped in my ten bucks, as requested.

Understand, that I almost never give money to political candidates — I give more than enough at the office — so this was a very unusual impulse donation for me.

A few minutes later, Darryl called to talk about the new CNN/Time poll (Murray 51%, Rossi 43%), and he mentioned that he was sensing a shift in mood amongst Democrats nationally. And as evidence of that intuition he mentioned that he had received an email from Markos, and uncharacteristically clicked through to drop some money into Sestak’s coffers and a couple other races.

Coincidence? Perhaps, but apparently we weren’t the only ones. Markos’ email said he was looking for 500 contributors, but while I clicked through almost the minute I got it, he’d already surpassed his goal. In fact, he’s had to raise the target twice since then, with the campaign now sitting just 200 contributions short of its new 1,500 contribution goal.

Compared to the last two cycles, it’s been a tough year to raise money online, but this… well, it’s got that wistfully familiar 2008 air to it. Like a fresh ocean breeze. Or possibly even a shifting tide.

Yesterday we had a new Elway poll in the senatorial race between Sen. Patty Murray (D) and real estate opportunist Dino Rossi (R).

Today there is a new CNN/Time/Opinion Research poll weighing in on the race. The poll of 850 likely voters, taken from October 8 through 10, has Murray leading Rossi 51% to 43%. The margin of error is 3.5%. This result is pretty similar to yesterday’s Elway poll.

A Monte Carlo analysis consisting of a million simulated elections at the observed preferences in this new poll has Murray winning 954,664 times and Rossi winning 42,982 times. The evidence from this latest poll suggests that, in an election held today, Murray would win with a 95.7% probability; Rossi with a 4.3% probability. Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulated elections:

But I missed another poll that was released on Monday or Tuesday. A FOX News poll taken on 9 Oct on a sample of 1000 individuals found Murray with a 47% to 46% lead over Rossi (3% margin of error). Thus, there have been a total of four polls published in October and Murray has led in the last three—Rossi last led in a 6 Oct Rasmussen poll.

Given that all four of these polls were taken either consecutively or over overlapping days, we can combine them for a better picture of how this race is shaping up over the the second week of October. The four October polls give a total of 3,050 responses, of which 2,842 went to either Murray or Rossi. Murray got 1,478 ( 48.5%) and Rossi got 1364 ( 44.7%). A Monte Carlo analysis gives Murray 934,835 wins to Rossi’s 63,503 wins.

Thus, the four polls combined provide evidence that an election held over the past week would go Murray’s way with a 93.6% probability, and would go Rossi’s way with a 6.4% probability:

A look at the polling to date suggests that Murray’s September slump has ended; she has clearly retaken the lead and it seems to be her strongest lead to date.

This is definitely a good position for Murray to be in during the week that ballots drop. The next couple of polls will be telling, and I think we’ll have new polls from Survey USA and the Washington Poll within a few days, so stay tuned….

(Cross posted at Hominid Views.)

When Dino Rossi was asked about his stance on abortion during his first gubernatorial campaign back in 2004, he blithely quipped that “I’m not running for Supreme Court,” and everybody laughed and gave him a pass.

In 2008, during his second shot at Chris Gregoire, he pretty much offered the same non-denial denial in response to charges he was anti-choice, and once again reporters and editorialists pretty much shrugged.

And in 2010, sensing the Republican primary electorate shifting even further to the far right, Rossi grudgingly acknowledged that he opposes legal abortion except “maybe” in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at stake… but repeatedly emphasized that he’s “not running on that issue” in refusing to discuss it further.

So the question is, with the election only weeks away, and Rossi this time running for the U.S. Senate at a time when the Supreme Court is a mere pubic-hair-on-a-coke-can away from overturning Roe v. Wade, will our local media call Rossi on his obfuscation, and finally explain in detail where he stands on abortion and other women’s health care issues?

We may find out today at 3PM, when Gov. Gregoire and Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards hold a joint press at the Women’s University Club of Seattle to “highlight what’s at stake for women’s health care this election, including where the candidates stand.” If the cameras and reporters show up, and feature their comments on the evening news and in tomorrow’s papers, then we’ll know that the local news media is finally taking women’s issues seriously. But if they don’t, well, it’s another free ride for Dino Rossi on a position I’m sure he holds genuinely, but which separates him from a large majority of Washington voters.

To be clear, this isn’t just another press conference. This is the governor, for chrissakes, taking time out of her day to take questions from reporters. And since she’s not running for anything, likely every again, you just know this press conference is mostly about Rossi.

That’s news. But only if, you know, the press decides to report it.

The record is clear. Rossi opposes abortion, opposes funding to reduce teen pregnancy and opposes access to emergency contraception. He’s voted to oppose requiring insurance prescription plans to include contraception, and twice voted to deny family planning services through Medicaid. In 1992, he even spoke in favor of re-instituting “homes for unwed mothers” as an alternative to abortion. Most reporters know that.

But the fact that the latest SurveyUSA poll shows Rossi still earning 29% support from self-described pro-choice voters, is clear evidence that the public isn’t nearly as well informed.

This is an opportunity for our media to make up for six years of looking the other way. I’ll be interested to see if they take advantage of it.

Fear of flying?

Federal regulators on Wednesday proposed fining a feeder airline, Corporate Air, $455,000 for allowing a small airliner to carry passengers on 80 flights despite an engine that needed repair.

You know what’s destroying our nation’s competitiveness? Too much government regulation. If we just got off of corporate America’s back, the magical powers of the free market would sort everything out for the best. Because that’s what markets do. Always.

Or so I’m constantly told.

Just posted a longish piece on Slog, about how our state’s Catholic run hospices, which are the sole hospice providers in many parts of the state, not only refuse to participate in our Death With Dignity Act, but refuse to even answer patients’ questions about it: “Don’t Tell When Asked”: How Catholic Hospices Are Denying Patients’ Rights to Death With Dignity.

In fact it’s part of a much larger, and very sensitive issue that has so far escaped much public scrutiny. For all the immense amount of good our state’s Catholic hospitals and health systems do by providing quality medical care, often in otherwise under-served regions, recent expansions, mergers and affiliations have given these systems virtual monopolies throughout much of the state. And due to their requirement that doctors, nurses, counselors and other care givers adhere to Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives, this expansion has also served to restrict access to many legal medical services, including abortion and birth control, as well as end of life directives.

Anyway, this post is a good start on a complicated issue that I hope to come back to in greater detail. Read the whole thing, and let me know what you think.

No surprise after the primary endorsement, but the Seattle Times officially endorsed Democrat Suzan DelBene today:

The Seattle Times endorses Democrat Suzan DelBene. The technology entrepreneur from Medina is politically untested but offers tremendous promise.

And on that we agree: DelBene has tremendous upside. She’s smart, she’s energetic, she’s thoughtful. She’s probably not as progressive as me on some issues, but then neither is her district, so I can live with that.

Reichert, on the other hand, no upside at all. What you see is what you get: a back-bencher warming the seat for Republicans until heir-apparent Reagan Dunn outgrows his political peach fuzz.

So here’s hoping the Seattle Times editorial board is more influential with voters than I give them credit for.

As is our custom, Tuesday brings us together for an evening of politics under the influence. Please join us at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by earlier for dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 249 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

A new Elway poll has just been released for Washington state. Included in the poll is a head-to-head match-up in the Washington state senatorial race between Sen. Patty Murray and real estate salesman Dino Rossi. The poll was conducted using live interviews between October 7 and October 11 on a sample of 450 likely voters. The margin of error is 4.6%.

The results have Murray leading Rossi by 51% to 38% with “leaners” excluded. Murray does even better (55% to 40%) if “leaners” are included. I’ll stick with the former numbers in what follows. Here is the polling in this race to date (excluding polls released by the campaigns):

This new poll reverses a not-so-good trend for Murray over the past month. Her lead had the appearance of slipping away (although really the recent polls have all been a statistical tie).

You may also notice that all four of the Elway polls are more favorable for Murray than nearly all other polls. As Goldy mentions, Elway goes to some effort to explain this discrepancy. Elway shows that there are distinctly different trends for polls done using automated questions compared to live interviews. The robopolls showed Rossi with a slight lead early in the year with the trend lines converging to a tie right now. The live polls showed Rossi and Murray tied early on, with Rossi staying relatively flat and Murray pulling away by about 7 points. No explanation is offered, but the implication is that Elway’s live polls are more accurate.

We can, to some extent, evaluate Elway’s hypothesis. Here is a graph I published on Nov 3, 2008, when Dino Rossi was running against Gov. Christine Gregoire in the Washington state Gubernatorial race:

Here again, Elway seemed to favor Rossi’s opponent relative to other polls, suggesting Murray would win 51% to 39%. The Washington Poll, another live interview poll, was also on the high side relative to other polls earlier (51.4% to 45%) and close later (50% to 48%). In the last month most pollsters had the race within two points: Strategic Vision (50% to 48% and 49% to 47% earlier), Rasmussen (50% to 48%), and SurveyUSA (50% to 48% and 48% to 47% earlier). The day after this graph was made, SurveyUSA released their final poll (52% to 46%).

The final tally in the Gregoire–Rossi race was 53.2% to 46.8% (+6.4). SurveyUSA’s last poll nailed it (+6), and the Washington Poll got the spread right (+6) in their earlier poll. Elway underestimated both candidates’ percentages and had a high spread (+12). This suggests that most of the recent polls underestimate Murray’s performance, even if the Elway poll probably overestimates it.

Back to the Elway poll…As usual, I’ll analyze it using simulated elections of 450 likely voters voting at the observed percentages in order to make a probability statement about who would win in a hypothetical election held now. From a million such simulated elections, we find that Murray wins 979,930 times and a Senator Rossi happens 18,537 times. In other words, this poll gives Murray 98.1% chance of winning an election right now. Rossi’s probability is 1.9%. Here is the distribution of outcomes from the simulated elections:

Compare today’s picture to that from last Friday’s Rasmussen poll. In fact, since the Rasmussen poll was conducted on October 6 on a sample of 750 likely voters. It showed Rossi leading Murray 49% to 46%. Given that the Rasmussen poll was taken the day before the Elway poll started, it seems reasonable to combine ’em.

The combined Elway-Rasmussen poll sampled 1,200 likely voters of which 1113 chose one or the other candidate. Murray got 574 votes (47.8%), and Rossi got 538 (44.8%). A Monte Carlo analysis using a million simulated elections gave Murray 772,311 wins to Rossi’s 221,338 wins. In other words, these two polls combined suggests that Murray would have a 77.7% of beating Rossi if the election was held now.

To summarize, in combining the only two October polls to date—one done with live calls one by robocalls—Murray still comes out ahead, albeit not with a statistically significant lead.

Respected local pollster Stuart Elway just released a new survey of the Washington Senate race, and it’s a bit of a shocker for those plying the too-close-call meme: 51-38 percent in Sen. Patty Murray’s favor, and a yawning 55-40 percent gap when “leaners” are factored in. That’s a far cry from the spate of surveys from national polling firms that have recently shown the lead bouncing back an forth, near or within the margin of error.

Elway of course is painfully aware that such a dramatic departure from the national narrative might “come as a surprise to many and as unbelievable to some,” so he goes on at some length explaining why these results should not be dismissed as an outlier. This survey only interviewed “likely voters,” defined as those who have voted in at least two of the past four elections, or who have registered since 2008. The demographic profile of this sample matches the samples all year, and the expected profile of likely voters. And, Elway’s results are actually in line with the trend from other, non-automated surveys.

But in the end, one of the big differences between Elway’s results and those of other pollsters comes down to “philosophy.”

One of the challenges of election polling is determining what to do with respondents who are undecided. The philosophy here has always been to let them be undecided. After all, it is still 3 weeks until election day and the purpose of a survey is to describe the campaign situation today—not to predict the outcome. As a consequence, The Elway Poll routinely indicates more “undecided” voters than other surveys—a position that fails to satisfy the partisans, often resulting in charges of incompetence and/or bias from partisans on the short end of data.

And not only doesn’t Elway push the undecideds, he also doesn’t statistically weight the data the way many national pollsters do, using some “secret sauce formula” to estimate how the undecideds will break based on party identification. But if he did weight the data, here’s how the results might look:

51 to 49 percent… that’s right in line with Rasmussen. But as Elway points out, the Party ID model assumes that all of the remaining undecideds would break for Rossi, ignoring the fact that leaners in this survey actually broke 2 to 1 for Murray.

According to Elway, these results illustrate the difficult challenge for Rossi, as “there are simply not enough undecided voters left” to sway.

One path for Rossi is to bring new voters into the electorate—people who were not in the “likely voter” sample. This is where Tea Party voters may help, assuming that there are a significant number who are not “likely voters.” Sufficient help from that quarter seems problematic for two reasons. First, it is not clear that Tea Partiers are disproportionally less likely voters. Second, Rossi has consciously not courted the Tea Party constituency.

This means Rossi must take votes away from Murray. He must convince enough Murray supporters to switch sides, which puts a premium on the two debates and on making an effective “closing argument” in the final three weeks of the campaign.

Good luck with that. Murray has been in the U.S. Senate for 18 years, and this is Rossi’s third appearance on a statewide ballot in six years, so a lot of voters came into this election with their minds already made up. And it doesn’t help Rossi that, according to Elway, Washington seems to be bucking the national generic trend, with a plurality of voters preferring Democrats maintain control of Congress by a 46 to 37 percent margin.

All in all, pretty good news for Patty Murray.

Several readers have now emailed or commented about my “Dino Rossi Did Not Write the 2003-2005 Budget” Slog post, suggesting that I submit Rossi’s false budget-writing claim to the Seattle Times Truth Needle for further fact-checking. But that would be immodest.

That said, I wouldn’t be opposed to other folks submitting it themselves.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV37LrNG7KI&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

In case you haven’t been following this truly bizarre/disturbing story, Ohio GOP Congressional candidate Rich Iott has not only been exposed as an avid Nazi SS re-enactor, he’s even gone so far as to defend the Nazis as merely wanting to protect their homeland from the greater threat of Bolshevism.

And when asked last night by CNN’s Anderson Cooper whether he thought the members of the 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division he portrays were “valiant men,” Iott refused to pass judgement:

Iott defended the members of the unit, who he said “wanted to fight what they saw as a bigger threat to them than Germany,” so they joined up with the Nazis to fight the eastern front of the war against Soviet forces. “I don’t think we can sit here and judge that today. We weren’t there the time they made those decisions…”

“I don’t think we can sit here and judge that today.” Huh. Tell that to all my murdered and never-born relatives.

There are cynical folks who like to claim that there isn’t much difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, but I’m pretty damn sure my party isn’t running a self-avowed Nazi sympathizers this cycle.