John Hinderaker looks at some poll results and writes,

Democrats lead Republicans in the generic Congressional preference poll by 40%-37%. It’s a paradox: voters prefer Republicans on the issues, but still lean toward voting for Democrats. One could speculate about why that is true; I think it is obvious that the press’s ceaseless attacks on Republicans are part of the explanation.

The Gamble, a new book by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, warns against any attempt to over-interpret polls or elections. (if you search for “The Gamble Vavreck” the book has many different subtitles, which strikes me as weird. Is PUpress micro-targeting?) They argue that the press is an opinion follower rather than an opinion leader.

Their view is that many voters are partisan and unpersuadable. Swing voters tend to move with the state of the economy.

I am a bit skeptical of the economic variable. They say that economic conditions in 2012 were good enough to re-elect Obama. They look at GDP growth in the first half of the year, which looks fair. But other measures, such as the employment to population ratio, look pretty terrible. Why should voters focus on the one but not the other? My hypothesis is that, given that we have only about a dozen observations (Presidential elections) to go by, with sufficient specification searching and information from prior research, you can get a good fit mostly on luck. The fact that the fit held in 2012 does relatively little to lead me to dismiss the luck factor.

Nonetheless, one of my take-aways from the book is that issues matter much less than pundits believe. The idea that voters are sending clear messages on issues is tempting to claim and rather difficult to defend.

Michelle Mayer writes about George Zimmerman’s phone calls to police.

Of the six incidents involving black males, one, recall, is the one in which GZ reports that he is concerned about the well being of a black male child who is wandering a busy street without adult supervision. So we’re talking about five incidents involving black males GZ found suspicious, and one involving a black male he wanted to help.

On the other hand, of the six incidents involving white males and Hispanic males, we may want to distinguish those incidents where GZ knew or at least had prior contact with the “suspect” (#11, the incident involving his ex-roommate, and #40, the one involving the food server he fired but had never met) from those where he reported total strangers (the remaining four). This leaves us with five reports involving black males GZ found suspicious and four reports involving white and/or Hispanic males.

I think it is possible to believe several somewhat paradoxical propositions.

1. George Zimmerman was not a harasser of blacks.

2. Martin would probably be alive today if he were not a black teenager. That is, I would guess that Zimmerman was less likely to be suspicious of a middle-aged black man or a white teenager. Also, someone other than a black teenager might have felt less threatened/insulted by Zimmerman.

3. The verdict in the case was correct, even if one believes (2).

4. President Obama gave a moving and heartfelt speech about the feeling of shopping while black or riding an elevator while black. He made a good case against a Washington-based response and for constructive thinking about race relations in this country.

5. The net result of the Zimmerman brouhaha will not be constructive for race relations in this country. People cannot handle paradox. They want simple, one-sided narratives, and these require falsehood and distortion.

The latest news in this slow 4th-of-July week is that the Obama Administration has announced that it will not enforce the law mandating that employers provide health insurance coverage. This is not the first time the Administration has nullified a law in this way.

I could make a case that Congress should insist that the President enforce the law, or else face impeachment. The fact that this suggestion seems absurd says something about the state of the health care law. However, it says even more about the state of our Republic.

UPDATE: Charles Murray has a similar take.

So writes Henry Olsen.

Post-Moderns like unions (50 percent favorable), Obamacare (only 16 percent think it will have mainly a bad effect), and the U.N. (60 percent favorable). They are much less likely than Libertarians to say government should be smaller (85 percent vs. 55 percent), and are significantly less likely to say that cutting major programs should be the main way to cut the deficit (47 percent vs. 8 percent). They much prefer expanding alternative energy (79 percent) to producing more fossil fuels (13 percent). And they are more likely than Libertarians to support gun control (54 percent vs. 18 percent) and government efforts to fight childhood obesity (62 percent vs. 24 percent).

His point is that this group, which he claims helps elect Republican governors in some states, is not really libertarian. However, I would point out that they are not really conservative, either.

What positions can Republican politicians take that add more voters than they turn off? Conservatives tend to say, “soften the economic libertarianism, keep the social conservatism.” Libertarians tend to say the opposite.

I keep thinking that the swing voters are what people call “low-information voters.” I picture them as responding to looks, personality and media characterizations. I don’t think ideas matter so much.

A few takes.

1. To me, the real story is the low status of the Tea Party. As others have pointed out, if the NAACP or the Sierra Club had complained about harassment, politicians and the press would have investigated the story from day one. But I think that it is wrong to think of this as an ideological double standard. If Code Pink or Greenpeace had complained about IRS harassment, nobody would have risen to their defense. My point is that, in the eyes of the establishment, the Tea Party is closer to Code Pink or Greenpeace than to a respectable organization. The low status of the Tea Party was brought home to me reading Moises Naim’s The End of Power, in which Naim was much kinder to Occupy Wall Street than to the Tea Party. I think he reflects establishment opinion.

2. I am surprised at how long the story has remained in the news, because I think of news as dominated by cable TV, which is ADD, ready to shift to a celebrity’s hijinks, a gruesome murder, or some other political event. If Watergate had taken place in today’s media environment, I don’t think the scandal would have stayed in the news long enough to jeopardize Nixon’s Presidency.

3. I was also surprised to see Jonathan Turley’s WAPO op-ed.

Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.

Suppose that there are two groups of people. One group thinks that the Tea Party is the problem with America and technocrats are the potential solution, while another group thinks it’s the other way around. The research I cited in The Three Languages of Politics predicts that this scandal will reinforce both groups’ thinking. So I would not be optimistic that Turley will persuade anyone to change their mind.

From Radio Free Europe in 2002,

The Chechens of Russia’s North Caucasus region are a tight-knit society based on extended families, or clans, guided by a council of elders. These clans, which traditionally lived together in a single village, are called “taips.” During Stalin’s infamous deportation of Chechens to Central Asia — and even now, as war and social unrest have forced thousands of Chechens to leave their home villages and scatter throughout the republic or abandon the region altogether — the links remain strong between members of a single taip.

…Chechnya’s younger people, Arutyunov continues, are disoriented, and are now looking for new authority figures — a search that in many instances leads them to the radical Wahhabi Islamic sect or leaders of criminal rings. The generation gap has gotten so severe, Arutyunov says, that there have been several reported cases of young Chechen men beating their fathers to death. Just a few years ago, this was the strictest taboo in the Chechen social code.

Pointer from Mark Weiner, who must have stumbled on my blog posts on his book and sent me an email.