Go to Keeth Poole’s Voteview and scroll down to the link for “recent politics.”
The short story is that the predicted vote is 56-44. And, yes, alas, that is in favor, but note that it would be a closer vote than many of the early reported whip counts implied (60+ in favor). And, as one of the contributors to the project said to me in private communication, the closer the vote is to party-line, the less interesting is the enterprise of predicting the ultimate vote based on early announcements and knowledge of senators’ spatial-voting record! For Roberts, the model predicted 69 votes. He got 78. Eleven senators were wrongly predicted, which is not bad. The prediction for Alito is likely to be even more accurate, I suspect.
They also have a prediction for Monday’s cloture vote: 67-33.
My previous plantings and rantings can be found at my page of excerpts and links to posts on the three recent Supreme Court justice nominations.
Indeed, party line votes are definitely less interesting though there are a few things we might note.
Ignoring the ‘forecast’ for a moment, the vote really had three errors from the 2D spatial-voting prediction since Chafee’s vote does not deviate from that model. In fact this would have been true even in only one dimension, had the basis for the prediction been the rank ordering of the 109th Senate as opposed to the temporally deeper DW-NOMINATE scores (Chafee is ranked to the left of Nelson in the 109th, but not in the 108th).
With that exception, it remains the case that the 2D cutting line based only on Jan 20 announcements has no more Democrat errors than the alternatives (which was also true for Roberts). So there was a certain consistency, albeit limited, in the final vote.
Also all the “errors” here are in the range we would expect, unlike the Roberts vote where several votes were likely cast in the shadow of the O’Conner seat nomination. Nevertheless, the Democrat ‘errors’ mean that, if consistency with past behavior were a stronger predictor of this sort of vote, there should have been either fewer Democrats voting YES left of Nelson or a larger contiguous group Democrats voting YES.
Seed planted by RAC — 01 February 2006 @ 12:26