So on the "Who is writing Brnovich" Kremlinology, SCOTUS tries to keep the opinion writing even over time, with each Justice getting an opinion every sitting (or so). Given that, we can start to determine who has which outstanding opinions (it's like an LSAT logic puzzle!) 1/

Brnovich concerns the standard for a Voting Rights Act claim, so it has the potential for a blockbuster. And there are three justices who haven't had an opinion that month: Breyer, Kavanaugh and Alito. 2/

Needless to say, those three are likely to produce very different opinions. Breyer would write an opinion that is narrow, perhaps decided on standing grounds, or very fact specific (sort of like what happened in Fulton, the Philly adoption agency case). 3/

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Sean T at RCP

@SeanTrende

23 Jun

Whoops, deleted an earlier tweet about Supreme Court bingo and Brnovich. Alito writing Collins in inconsequential b/c it is from December and Brnovich is February. 1/

Sorry about that. Derpity derpity derp. Kagan writing Lange doesn't really change things, as she and Breyer were basically a unit for the type of opinion being written. So the rough possibilities are basically: 2/

(a) Breyer writing a narrow VRA opinion, possibly based on standing; (b) Kavanaugh who could possibly be writing a broad opinion but probably not, or (c) Alito writing a Katie-bar-the-door opinion.

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Sean T at RCP

@SeanTrende

17 Jun

This has been floating around my FB and twitter TL. As with most revisionist histories, if you read it in conjunction with the dominant narrative you might start to get something approaching a good take. 1/

time.com/6072141/alamo-…

Like if your takeaway about Santa Anna is that he was an abolitionist, and not, say, (also) a war criminal and dictator who unilaterally revoked the Mexican constitution and imposed a new, centralized one, you're probably not getting the full picture of him. 2/

If you're examining the Texas revolution, but not taking account of the fact that a large portion of Mexico also tried to secede in response to SA's revocation of the constitution . . . ehhhhhh . . . 3/

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Sean T at RCP

@SeanTrende

5 Apr

@ForecasterEnten

The reaction to @ForecasterEnten's column on the midterms is absolutely insane. Like yeah I can tell a story on why Democrats gain House seats and certainly Senate seats, but there's approximately zero reason for that to be the *expectation* right now.

Years where I could tell a better story why the president's party gains seats in the midterm than the current one: 1945, when Truman had an 82% job approval and had just presided over victory in WWII.

1965, when LBJ had a 65% job approval in October and was presiding over an historic Congress and a massive economic expansion.

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Sean T at RCP

@SeanTrende

5 Mar

OK, dissertation-related question. I'm working with an OH precinct shapefile, and used poly2nb to build an adjacency matrix. I went back and plotted it by county and in some counties it works brilliantly and in others, well (click to see the adjacencies): 1/

As you can see when you click, there's a precinct in NW Ottawa County that has no detected adjacencies, despite there being several obvious ones, and the cluster in south-central Ottawa connects to itself, but nothing else. 2/

So, um, any idea what might be causing this? I can manually fill in the matrix for the handful of precincts in Ottawa County, but in a place like Mahoning that would be very time-intensive and I would prefer to avoid. 3/3

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