While most liberals were out celebrating the news that both Iowa and Vermont legalized same-sex marriages, political statitician extraordinaire Nate Silver did what he does best: the math.

Nate Silver is a University of Chicago economics student turned statistics renaissance man. Baseball fans know him for inventing the PECOTA forecasting system, and political junkies know him from his deadly accurate election predictions at FiveThirtyEight.com. With the election in the past and the PECOTA invention helping pay the bills, Silver has had plenty of time to tell the story of the political world through the wonderful world of math. A recent issues he tackled was the divisive gay marriage maelstorm.

One of the big stories of the recent weeks are the decisions in Iowa and Vermont supporting gay marriage. The rulings by the Iowa supreme court and the Vermont legislature came as a shock to many, with opponents of gay marriage enjoying heady times in recent years. President Bush was aided in his 2004 re-election bid by gay marriage ban referendums in eleven states; California recently passed Proposition 8, which made gay marriage unconstitutional; and our own state passed a gay marriage ban in 2006.

Despite gay marriage bans on the books in 29 states, recent polling has shown a trend more support for an expansion of the institution. (link: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/gay-marriage-by-numbers.html) Based on the polling data, support for gay marriage has gained about eight percentage points since 2003, and currently, the pro-ban position has been losing an average of two percentage points per year nationwide.

Motivated by the news from Iowa and Vermont, Silver decided to see if there is a way of using the liberalizing social trends to predict the future fate of gay marriage ban referendums in the United States. (link: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/will-iowans-uphold-gay-marriage.html)

He explains the method as follows:

I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes Hawaii, which voted to permit the legislature to ban gay marriage but did not actually alter the state's constitution. I then built a regression model that looked at a series of political and demographic variables in each of these states and attempted to predict the percentage of the vote that the marriage ban would receive. It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables: 1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon; 2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives; 3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state. 

Silver's analysis clearly shows that of the three identifiable factors, two are based on religion. It is not my intent for this post to devolve into an anti-religious screed, so the primacy of religion in influencing discrimination against gays is noted solely as an interesting, but not shocking, result of the study.

Looking at the results from a results-based standpoint is much more instructive for the current state of gay marriage in our state. Not surprisingly, his model predicts that states such as Vermont, Massachusetts and New York would vote against a gay marriage ban today, and that it is going to take until almost 2025 for support for gay marriage bans to drop below 50% in Alabama and Mississippi. Closer to home, the model predicts that the citizens of Wisconsin would vote against a gay marriage ban three years from now in 2012.

The issue of gay marriage in Wisconsin was not put to rest when the gay marriage ban passed in 2006 with the support of 59% of voters. The Badger Herald reported on Friday that the state's Supreme Court will be assessing the constitutional validity of how the gay marriage ban amendment was presented to voters in 2006. If the gay marriage ban is ruled unconstitutional under the current suit, Silver's regression model suggests that the window available for anti-gay activists to get the gay marriage ban on the ballot and passed a second time is quite narrow. It also means that if they want the ban to stay on the books in Wisconsin, they must do everything they can to make sure the Supreme Court upholds the ban.

For gay rights activists, the data presented on FiveThiryEight.com suggests that the tide of discrimination against gay marriage is turning in their favor. Even if the marriage ban is upheld by the state Supreme Court, the polling shows that the citizens of Wisconsin are becoming more accepting of gay marriage, and soon a majority of them should be opposed to a gay marriage ban. If the current trends hold and the gay rights groups organize effectively, favorable conditions for overturning the 2006 referendum should be present in the state in the near future.

Ten dollars, two hours, and one hastily drawn neighborhood map. The money was for admission and the two hours was the time to sit, wait, and watch and listen. The poorly executed piece of cartography was my guide home should Noam Chomsky (Noam fuckin’ Chomsky!) so thoroughly discombobulate my psyche I loose any fundamental sense of direction and become unable to find my way home after the lecture. I guess I had high hopes but this was supposed to be like going to see the Michael Jordan of intellectuals.

Someone different showed up. It wasn’t quiet Birmingham Barons Michael, but Noam Chomsky (Noam fuckin’ Chomsky!) just pretty much shot free throws for an hour and a half.

I guess it’s not really his fault. Perhaps I expected too much from the aging giant of American intellectualism. Regardless, I still expected more than what equated to some dude reiterating the litany of complaints against Israel and subsequently declaring each one a different variation of the word irrefutable. The argument had the intellectual appeal of listening to some freshman talk about how Ian’s is the best pizza ever “cuz it just is man.”

Maybe the problem was that everyone in the room already agreed that Ian’s kicks ass and just wanted a cheerleader to remind them all how great it truly was. I doubt many people went there to hear Noam Chomsky (Noam fuckin’ Chomsky!) critique the policy or tactics of their movement and I am fairly sure there were few in the audience who needed to be (or would have been) convinced by his lecture. Still, I was excited to glimpse the man who was supposed to be a pillar of enlightened discourse. But in the end, I wasn’t inspired, swayed, incensed, or even offended. I was hungry.

It seems that Noam has found himself in the endzone of intellectualism and is (at least for that Tuesday night in Madison) content to celebrate by dancing around with some pom-poms. That certainly isn’t how Michael Jordan did things, and if we’ve learned anything from a certain wide receiver, it’s that if you’re not careful, that type of behavior could land you in Buffalo.

Based on my colleagues’ sentiments on Kathleen Falk - “the lesser of two evils” or “I’ll be writing in my dad” - her re-election as Dane County Executive Tuesday night appears to be roughly the equivalent of choosing a kick to the groin over a punch to the stomach. In other words, the feeling among many UW students and Dane County residents is that even though someone won the race, we are all actually losers. In the spirit of being a Positive Patty about the Dane County Executive race, I’ll argue there was at least one winner Tuesday night: Mother Nature. One thing that Kathleen Falk has done very well during her tenure is enacting forward-thinking environmental policies and promote environmental conservation. Madison is looked upon as a leader in not only Wisconsin but the entire Midwest when it comes to being an environmentally-progressive city. This reputation has been earned largely through the implementation of policies such as the 2005 ban on lawn fertilizers containing phosphorus - a ban which was passed this year at the state level. Falk’s environmental work continues today, with the Land and Water Legacy Fund receiving funding to purchase wetlands and other important natural areas, and the “Cow Power” plan being implemented to build manure digesters that turn cow manure into renewable methane gas while reducing phosphorus output to the Yahara Lakes. And heck, although the current commuter rail plan between Sun Prairie and Middleton is not the best idea ever, and least she is willing to acknowledge that as an environmental leader in the Midwest, the greater City of Madison can do a whole lot better in terms of public transit. The progress that Madison is currently seeing on the environmental front would have definitely been at risk had Nancy Mistele had pulled off an electoral upset Tuesday night. I get the feeling that the significant commitment to water quality and flood prevention initiatives that Falk made in her 2009 County Executive budget would likely not fit under Mistele’s committed plan to “applaud municipalities that protect land within their jurisdiction.” Also of concern was Mistele’s transportation plan that roughly read “Build more roads. Build more roads. Yadda yadda yadda. Add more buses to the roads that I just said are congested.” Madison, and much of the rest of the country for that matter, is looking forward to a future where cars will be less prevalent, and mass transit will help reduce traffic congestion while reducing pollution. Again, the proposed commuter rail system may not be the best answer to Madison’s traffic woes, but building more roads is definitely the wrong one. At the risk of being pathetically poetic, I imagine that Mother Nature let the sun shine a little brighter on Madison on Wednesday morning after Kathleen Falk’s re-election as Dane County Executive. There is no doubt that she has a lot of work to do to get back in the good graces of many Dane County residents, but let us at least give credit where credit is due and acknowledge that when it comes to Dane County’s environment, the lesser of two evils is actually pretty solid.

Surprise surprise. Maniaci pwned (okay, not pwned, but still, holy shit!) Brenda Konkel in District 2. Apparently the vague promise of being able to WORK with people often appeals to voters. And for some reason, I don’t get the impression from Bridget that my vote is going to bring a yellow-colored sea of change (urine) into the equation, compliments of a somewhat rational approach to governance. That being said, Maniaci needs to stop freaking out at our columnists. Seriously, Bridget. If you’re going to respond to us, give it a trifling minimum of intelligence. If this is the modus operandi from now on, your district is in for some let-downs. Keep the diplomacy at the forefront, and respond to criticism like you respect your audience. That being said, there are a few larger issues at play here. As a commenter on CB noted, there is a sentiment that PD “is dead.” I’m not going to go that far, but the electoral ass-whooping the group has received at least indicates that its significance is waning in a profound way. Voters are sending a message: enough with the radicalism. We’d prefer you do your freaking jobs. And while SPD and its assorted accumulation of leftoids seem to be maintaining a solid grip on ASM via the FACES coalition, it should be interesting to see how the campus and city left develop with a large degree of their influence having evaporated into the cold, cold wind of political realism. Will they focus on radicalizing the student body via ASM? Will they moderate their image? After all, paradigms of a group matter more than what the group actually DOES, guys - The Szar and Co. should take a note from Obama on this one. Will they wallow in insignificance and die off? Either way, I’ll be holding my urine for now.