God I Can't Wait for NBA Jam

I'm going to bed in five minutes, but I thought I'd indulge my impatience for the new NBA Jam (Oct. 5 can't come soon enough). The two best things about this version of Jam are 1) you get to play as guys like Lebron, Nash, etc. and 2) you also get to play as legends like Bird & Magic (but sadly not Jordan).

Anyway, here are the Top Ten pairs of players I can't wait to play with:

1. Heat - Lebron James & Dwyane Wade
2. Sixers - Julius Erving & Allen Iverson
   
3. Celtics - Larry Bird & Rajon Rondo
4. Jazz - John Stockton & Karl Malone
5. Magic - Shaquille O'Neal & Dwight Howard
   
6. Knicks - Patrick Ewing & Amare Stoudamire
   
7. Blazers - Clyde Drexler & Greg Oden
8. Lakers - Magic Johnson & Kobe Bryant
9. Bulls - Scottie Pippen & Carlos Boozer
10. Suns - Steve Nash & Kevin Johnson

So yeah, my law school career will be in serious jeopardy in a few weeks.

How Elections Work, Pt. 1

I realize that I never got around to writing a post about "how elections work," but this Kevin Drum post on Mother Jones gets at my main point. Click through to see the poll numbers but the point is that:

Americans trust Democrats more to handle the country's problems, they think Democrats represent their values better, they think Democrats are more concerned with the needs of people like them, and they think Democrats deserve to be reelected at a higher rate than Republicans. They also think (though I didn't show it below) that George Bush is substantially more to blame for our economic woes than Barack Obama.

And the result of all this? They say they plan to vote for Republicans by landslide numbers. It's the economy, stupid.

I'll write more on this kind of thing at some point. For now, all I'll say is "it's the economy, stupid" indeed.

Update on FIBA Suns

Goran Dragic and Hedo Turkoglu both led their countries into the quarterfinals at FIBA today. Dragic had 10 points and 8 assists against Australia, while Turkoglu's 20 points led Turkey over France. They'll meet on Wednesday as Slovenia & Turkey play for a semifinal spot. The other quarterfinal match-up for Wednesday is Spain vs. Serbia (the Spaniards are heavy favorites).

Team USA plays Angola tomorrow in what should be a cake-walk to the quarterfinals.

FIBA Suns

FIBA 2010 kicked off today. The US beat the crap out of Croatia, 106-78, as expected.

Both Suns players in the tournament got into the action today. Goran Dragic had 16 points and 8 assists in 26 minutes of Slovenia's romp over Tunisia. Hedo Turkoglu had only 6 points, but 7 assists as host Turkey embarrassed the Ivory Coast. Former Sun (now Raptor) Leandro Barbosa scored 13 points in Brazil's win over Iran.

The Seniors Problem

As wait for primary results tonight, here are some thoughts on the nature of the electorate. As we know, primaries tend to be senior-dominated contests. Here's the 2008 primary voters by age (from the VAN), along with approximate shares of the 18+ population (based on some rough math from census.gov):

	Population	2008 Prim.
18-24	9%	1%
25-34	20%	4%
35-54	37%	25%
55-64	15%	23%
65+	18%	47%

It seems like a problem to me that people under 55 (66% of the 18-and-over population), are such a small share of the primary electorate (30%). And its not just primaries, of course. Midterm generals are senior-dominated, albeit to a lesser extent:

	Population	2006 Gen.
18-24	9%	1%
25-34	20%	7%
35-54	37%	33%
55-64	15%	24%
65+	18%	35%

We already knew that seniors vote at higher rates than everyone else. That's no surprise for a number of reasons. Nor is it seniors' fault that everyone else votes at lower rates. What's striking, however is that we can improve the representativeness of the electorate simply by raising the profile of the races involved. The 2008 general electorate, for example was much closer to a representative sample:

	Population	2008 Gen.
18-24	9%	5%
25-34	20%	12%
35-54	37%	35%
55-64	15%	30%
65+	18%	18%

Yet another reason why we should have fewer elections.

International Sports Notes

1) I wrote the other day about Team USA's embarrassing performances in international basketball. The good news for our national sports dignity is that we're at least the defending champions in the World Cups of baseball and football (yes, there is a World Cup of American football).

The record on baseball is somewhat mixed. While we won the 2009 World Cup (with an amateur team) with a record of 14-1, our amateur teams at the Olympics haven't won since 2000 (won bronze in 2008, no medal in 2004). Turns out that Cuba is the real power in amateur baseball. The 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classics, organized by Major League Baseball (and featuring major league players) were both won by Japan, with the best U.S. finish being 4th place in 2009.

I'm not sure who decided we needed a World Cup of American football, but there have been three of them beginning in 1999. Japan beat Mexico in the finals of the first two, neither of which included an American team. In 2007, we decided to show up and kick some ass. A bunch of former college players, our team beat South Korea 77-0 and Germany 33-7 on its way to a 23-20 double overtime win over Japan. Everything about that last sentence still feels strange.

2) The European Champions League (we're talking soccer here) is almost down to the final 32 teams, at which point the format is basically the same as the World Cup (eight groups of four teams, top two advance from each group) but with twice the matches and stretched out between September and next May, since it overlaps with the regular European league seasons.

At least two Americans will play in the group stage. Maurice Edu's Rangers squad qualified by winning the Scottish league last year, and German 2nd-place team Schalke 04 features up-and-coming star Jermaine Jones. Another rising star, Sacha Kljestan will have to help Belgian side R.S.C. Anderlecht beat Serbia's FK Partizan on Tuesday to advance. None of their teams will be expected to advance very far, but each of these young midfielders will gain valuable experience against top-flight squads.

Incentives and Republican "Rejectionism"

There has been a lot of chatter on the Poli Sci-friendly blogs lately about the Senate Republicans' strategy of uniformly filibustering virtually all of the administration's efforts. I think the strategy - which I like to think of as operating like a parliamentary party trapped in a Madisonian system - is super-interesting and wanted to write about it. Read all four links if you like, but here's a quick summary of the original ideas in each:

Jonathan Sides is right that "elections writ large depend more on performance than on policy," so the Republicans strategy would be effective only if it actually hampered performance. He also critiques the "Party of No" messaging from Democrats, since "the people who will agree with that are the people already likely to vote Democratic."

Ezra Klein mostly just wanted to highlight Sides' post, but he does point out that "if President Romney had proposed ObamaCare before a mostly Republican Congress, it would've gotten an easy majority of Republicans" because partisans take cues from their leaders.

Matthew Yglesias corrected Klein's assertion - properly, in my view - that Democrats would have voted against RomneyCare en masse. "Had that happened," he says, "the resulting legislation would be substantially more popular with Republicans and Independents than the current legislation is." That seems right to me. Elite consensus usually leads to strong voter support (think Iraq debate, circa 2002-2003).

Jonathan Bernstein is really who I'm getting around to here:

"I've read quite a few liberal observers lately who believe that Republican behavior is strictly rational and reveals a real problem with the political system: Republicans obstruct, the government doesn't work well, voters punish the Democratic incumbents. But that formula, while it may work with the stimulus or unemployment benefits or perhaps Fed appointments, really doesn't apply across the board."

That's true. It's hard to argue that Republican opposition to, say, immigration reform really hurt voters' perceptions of Democratic performance (by damaging the short run economy). Instead, he argues that Republicans have "learned" from their success in the 1994 midterms after opposing essentially every Clinton initiative (principally the 1993 budget, which passed the Senate with Gore's tie-breaking vote). As he says, "the subsequent drop in Barack Obama's approval ratings in spring 2009 just seemed to confirm they were on the right track" in re-running the same strategy. Note that he doesn't actually believe that they're right about 1994.

I buy that Republicans are responding to both the "hey, it worked in '94" and the "maybe we can damage their performance" incentives. But it seems to me that what we're primarily seeing here is a party who's primary voters have shifted dramatically to the right. Officeholders have extraordinarily strong incentives not to cooperate with Democrats, in order to avoid primary challenges. Also, as GOP loses its moderates, the Senate caucus should logically be dominated by Senators who simply want to oppose all Democratic initiatives on principal.

Here's a fun tidbit: only Brown, Collins, and Snowe are from states Kerry won in 2004. In the 1993-1994 Senate, Slade Gorton (WA), Mark Hatwood (OR), Bob Packwood (OR), David Durenberger (MN), Chuck Grassley (IA), Alfonse D'Amato (NY) and John Chafee (RI) were all Republicans from states that Dukakis had won in 1988. And Dukakis only won ten states!