Newshub reports:

Millions of bees have starved to death after COVID-19 checkpoints in and out of Auckland caused a delay in beekeepers accessing their hives.

Wetex Kang of Waitakaruru Honey Limited says around 2.5 million bees died after workers were unable to travel from Waikato to Auckland to feed the bees.

Kang, who is based in Auckland, says many of his business’ 2000 beehives are scattered across the North Island, as are the staff who care for them.

He says although his beekeepers, who are based in Waikato, managed to access the hives in the first few days after alert level 3 was declared in Auckland, that changed after checkpoints became stricter.

After trying unsuccessfully to get to their hives located near Helensville numerous times over the weekend they eventually got through on Monday morning, but by then it was too late.

“We finally got to the bees and they were all dead,” Kang told Newshub.

He said 47 hives – adding up to approximately 2.5 million bees – had starved to death.

That’s appalling. The Greens are normally a strong voice on animal welfare issues. Are they calling for changes so this doesn’t happen again.

More proof that the Government inflexibility is having dire and real consequences.

A guest post by Stephen Russell:

In my previous posts I described how the polls were wrong in 2016;  what can be said about the accuracy of polls in 2020; and whether polls are being distorted by a “shy Trumper” effect. 

There is of course, a lot more in the polls than just the headline numbers of how many are voting for who. There are other factors which may provide clues to deeper currents or to hidden truths. Two often-cited factors here are the related issues of relative enthusiasm and how many of the polls’ respondents will actually vote.

For example, a national survey, conducted in early June by SSRS for CNN, found that 7 in 10 Trump voters are voting to re-elect him primarily because they support him. But only 37% of Biden voters plan to cast a pro-Biden vote. Sixty percent are simply anti-Trump.

YouGov has similar results. They report 68% of Trump voters being “enthusiastic” about Trump. Only 31% say the same about Biden. That might result in more Trump voters being motivated to actually get out and vote than Biden voters.

The candidate who has led on enthusiasm (or a closely related question) has won every presidential election since 1988 (when Michael Dukakis had the more enthusiastic supporters, but lost to George H Bush).

But seizing on that as a predictive factor may be confusing cause and effect. Ultimately, a candidate is elected because he or she is more popular than their opponent. The very things which make them popular also make their supporters enthusiastic. And popularity creates enthusiasm: people like winners and will be less enthusiastic about their party’s candidate if it looks like they are going to lose.

What we see in 2020 is an unusual situation, where popularity and enthusiasm are out of sync.  But an enthusiasm gap is normal when an incumbent president is being challenged. Trump has had four years to unite his party behind him and fire up his base. Biden has barely had four months.  As the divisions of the primaries fade into the past and the general election looms, there is every chance that the “enthusiasm gap” will narrow.

It is also not clear that the huge enthusiasm among Biden’s supporters to eject Trump from his office is any less powerful than enthusiasm for Biden himself. There has probably never been an election in which so many voters were so powerfully fired up against one of the candidates.

Michael Tesler, at Fivethirtyeight, says the enthusiasm gap is mostly a myth. That’s because “while Biden voters may not be all that excited about voting for Biden, they’re very enthusiastic about voting against Trump. And that gives Biden a pretty strong edge, because Trump supporters don’t despise Biden the way they despised Hillary Clinton in 2016.” In fact, according to his research, when you combine the favourable ratings and the unfavourable for each candidate to get net ratings, it is Biden who has a huge advantage.

He goes on: “What’s especially notable here is that Biden’s net enthusiasm rating is near zero, which is similar to most major-party presidential candidates’ ratings from 1980 to 2012. Trump’s current score of around -20, on the other hand, has only one historical comparison other than his own campaign four years ago: Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

Research by Abramowitz and McCoy suggests (sadly) that hatred is a more powerful political motivator than liking.

To some extent, tepid enthusiasm can also be the flipside of broad support. Biden has the latter, because he does not polarise people as much as Trump, and doesn’t repel them. Bernie Sanders’ supports were very enthusiastic, but he still got trounced, because Biden was more broadly acceptable. Political columnist Ed Kilgore observes: “Any ‘enthusiasm’ beyond that which is necessary to get a voter to the polls is pretty much wasted … you don’t get extra votes for being psyched out of your skull about your candidate.”

The question of enthusiasm feeds directly into the issue of the general adult population vs registered voters vs likely voters. Historically, those who support Republicans have been more reliable in getting registered and then actually voting than those who support Democrats.

To capture that effect, a good pollster will want to focus on likely voters, since the support of those who don’t vote doesn’t count.  But even the potential voters themselves cannot reliably say how likely they are to vote when an election is far away. So while LV polls are best, they only develop that value as the polling day nears.

Fivethirtyeight elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich observes: “Likely-voter polls tend to be a few points better for Republicans than registered-voter polls, and … we don’t have a ton of these polls right now.”

Two of the factors underlying that trend are the higher voting rates of Americans who are older, and those who are wealthier. Historically, these have been Republican-leaning groups. But Trump has changed that: polls have shown that old voting allegiances are inverting. Low-education blue-collar workers have flocked to Trump. But wealthier white-collar suburbanites are flocking the other way. For the first time in twenty years the Democrat is beating the Republican among older voters, while youth support has weakened. That might make Biden’s present support less vulnerable to the shift in polling towards those most likely to vote.

The third big factor in voting likelihood is colour – and Trump’s support remains overwhelmingly white.  But recent events, and Trump’s reaction to them, could well reduce the turnout gap. It would not be at all surprising if Black Americans were to feel extra-motivated this year.

Curiously, however, CNN analyst Harry Enten reports  that recent events seem to have made no difference to the level of Black support for Trump. While that is small – Biden leads here 83-8, that is slightly smaller than Clinton’s lead in 2016 polls, and was unchanged from the position three months before.

This brings us to another point: turnout. In 2016 this was 55.7% – very low by New Zealand standards, but not by US ones. It was the second-highest turnout in 50 years.

In November 2018, the BBC reported: “Preliminary figures for nationwide turnout in the 2018 mid-term elections are in, and they’ve reached a mark not seen in more than a century. Across the US, 49.2% of the voting age public cast ballots. In 2014 that number was 37%, and the average over the last few decades has hovered around 40%.” Final figures put the turnout at 50.3%.

The Atlantic reports that “…strategists in both parties and academic experts are now bracing for what Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voting behavior, recently called a voter turnout storm of a century in 2020.’.”

That suggests (probably thanks to Trump himself) that the chances of people with an opinion simply staying home on November 3 might be a little less than it has been in the past. 

In summary, there are plenty of reasons to imagine that current polling might be underestimating support for Trump. But none of those reasons are certainties. The track record of polling in the US is actually very good: even in 2016 the polls were far closer to the results than they are given credit for and there has also been no consistent anti-Republican bias.

Polls in 2020 might be wrong. Indeed, mathematics alone predicts that they will be! But they are unlikely to be dramatically wrong. That means that Trump will almost certainly need to close the present gap in order to get re-elected.  The final post in this series will examine Trump’s potential advantage in the Electoral College – which could effectively reduce that gap.

Stuff reports:

A poster on a Christchurch shop depicting Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern alongside Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and another with her carrying a gun and have caused “outrage”.

One Christchurch resident, who declined to be named, called police on Wednesday morning after coming across two posters on the shop windows at Motorcycle Imports Direct on Tuam St.

In one of the posters seen by Stuff, Ardern’s face had been photoshopped onto an image of a police officer wearing a hijab holding a semi-automatic rifle. The words referred to New Zealand being a “police state”.

Another poster depicted Hitler, Ardern, Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler and Health Minister Chris Hipkins.

The posters, as described, are deeply offensive, puerile and even vile. Those responsible for them should bear the reputational consequences of making them or promoting them.

But the posters have nothing to do with the Police, and the person who complained to them about to the Police ironically makes the case for one of the posters – a Police state is one in which the Police decide on what type of political posters can be shown.

Just because people find something offensive doesn’t mean it is illegal. I find communism offensive, but I don’t think posters of Che Guevara should be banned and people arrested for having them.

Again the posters are offensive, puerile and vile. But the consequences for promoting them should be reputational not legal.

The number of dead in the US has now reached 176,000 and shows no sign of slowing down. This is very unlike other countries that have high death rates. In the last month the increase in the number of deaths has been:

• US 24.5%
• Sweden 3.0%
• Belgium 1.5%
• Italy 1.1%
• France 0.9%
• Spain 0.8%

Every other first world country has managed to slow the rate of infection and death. The US is in a league of its own.

I think it is inevitable the US will reach 250,000.

Newshub reports:

Health Minister Chris Hipkins admits he hasn’t read the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 testing strategy.

It comes after Newshub revealed on Wednesday the Government was told testing all border workers was “not thought to be viable” – advice sitting in plain sight in the Ministry of Health’s official testing strategy. 

Newshub asked Hipkins on Thursday if he had read the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 testing strategy and he admitted he hadn’t. 

He’s the Minister of Health during a pandemic and he hasn’t read his own Ministry’s testing strategy!

He said he had only read the Government’s testing strategy.

“I’ve read the Government’s testing strategy,” he said. “I haven’t seen the information that the Ministry of Health has prepared.” 

And now he says that the Ministry of Health’s testing strategy is somehow different to the Government’s testing strategy. A new level of Mickey Mouse. How can the Government have a different testing strategy to the Ministry of Health that implements it?

National has released its plans for secure borders in the fight against Covid-19. Their main points are:

• Establishing a dedicated NZ Border Protection Agency which would oversee the work done by Customs, Immigration, Av Sec, MPI and more
• Requiring inbound travellers to provide evidence of a negative Covid-19 test before arrival in NZ
• Pre-boarding thermal imaging and again at points of entry
• Compulsory contact tracing for border workers and other frontline staff
• Rapid deployment of a bluetooth contact tracing system
• A test on demand system with a maximum 60 minute wait

Some of this stuff should have occurred months ago such as thermal imaging at airports. People have a choice about voting for the status qup or voting for a more secure border.

A guest post by Stephen Russell:

In my previous posts I described how the polls were wrong in 2016; what can be said about the accuracy of polls in 2020. This post addresses the specific issue of “shy Trumpers”. 

As Biden’s reported polling lead grew in June, Trump enthusiasts suggested that Trump voters’ reluctance to declare their choice to someone in the face of the storm of criticism carried by the mainstream media is distorting the results. This is sometimes called a social desirability bias. It would typically take the form of Trump voters being more likely to decline participation in the poll, or equivocating about their real choice. Since the average response rate for polls in the US these days is only around 33%, clearly not all non-responders are Trump voters. But they might be over-represented.

A Monmouth University poll of Pennsylvania voters published on July 15 included a question on this issue. It found that, remarkably, “most voters (57%) believe there are a number of so-called secret voters in their communities who support Trump but won’t tell anyone about it.” And despite that poll giving Biden a 13-point lead in the state, most voters believed (by 46% to 45%) that Trump will win the state.

So the shy Trumper theory is not unreasonable. Anecdotal evidence certainly proves that such voters exist. And there are many historical examples of the effect worldwide – or at least cases where this effect is widely believed to account for a difference between polls and results.  It is, or course, hard to prove either way.

It is not a new theory either. Research Group Morning Consult found in December 2015 (the pre-primary period) that Trump polled six percent better in an internet poll than in a live caller poll. The post-election AAPOR analysis found evidence of this and cited it as a factor in the discrepancy between polls and the result. But the AAPOR also claimed that some tests for this effect failed to find evidence. 

Pollsters are not blind to the danger. Bradley Honan of Democratic pollster Honan Strategy Group addresses the issue directly here, and explains how pollsters can compensate for it. It is also addressed in a July 22 Fivethirtyeight podcast here – though the participants in that discussion largely dismiss the idea.

Philip Bump, of the Washington Post, wrote about the issue in mid-May, and observed that if the theory held water there would – as in the Morning Consult research – be a divergence between the results of live-calling polls and online polls. But, he claims, “There’s no significant difference between the two methodologies in general election polls conducted this year.”

Unfortunately for Bump, his own data (presented in a very revealing graph) partly undermines his claim.  At the start of the year, the online polls were actually more favourable to Biden. Since then, both methodologies have seen Biden grow his lead. But it has grown more in live-caller polls and at the time Bump wrote those were giving him results about two percent better than online polls. Growing shyness among Trump voters?

Trafalgar Group pollster Robert Cahaly rejects the idea that pollsters have learned their lesson, and says that he has noticed a significant upsurge in shy-Trumpers in his polling. Trafalgar Group is a Republican polling organisation and according to Fivethirtyeight, has a small pro-Republican bias (compared to actual election results). It gained big kudos for correctly picking Trump’s 2016 victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania (though by bigger margins than actually eventuated).

Cahaly insists that people are more hesitant to tell pollsters who they’re voting for today than they were in 2016 because we live in a society in which “people get penalized for their opinions.” Trafalgar has various mechanisms to tease out real preferences from the shy – although he is reluctant to give specifics.  “I can tell you looking internally I think there is a significant amount of people for Trump” in the undecided or third-party category, he said.

As a result, Trafalgar’s state polls are producing the most Trump-friendly results of any public pollster – about 5% better than the average. But even this is not enough to call the election for Trump. Trafalgar’s July 5 Pennsylvania poll for example, gave Biden a 5% lead, likewise in Minnesota on July 27. Trafalgar reported a tie in Florida on July 2 and a Trump lead of 1.4% in Arizona on August 10, the only poll to give Trump a lead there since June. But neither of those two states are must-wins for Biden. Cahally said on June 29 that the general election was “too close to call”.

Cahaly is not the only one to think the social desirability effect is in play: Politico reports a number of other pollsters thinking on similar lines.

“I would say that most, if not all, of the concerns that we expressed still hold — some to a lesser degree,” said Courtney Kennedy, director of research at the Pew Research Center and lead author of the polling industry’s post-2016 autopsy. “But I think some of the fundamental, structural challenges that came to a head in 2016 are still in place in 2020.”

With all that said, the fact is that the final 2016 poll averages were only 1 to 1.5% wrong in picking the national popular vote. That suggests that the pollsters did, for the most part, know what they were doing. And probably still do.

Also, it is hard to reconcile a large shy-Trump effect with results of congressional generic ballot polls and Senate polls. These have been giving results that are often  worse for Republicans than the presidential ballot polls, despite not involving Trump himself. 

Despite this, some Trump enthusiasts, reacting to polls showing Biden ahead, claim that many pollsters are in fact not trying to get an accurate read of voter sentiment and are manufacturing propaganda. Trump himself has insisted that he is not losing, and denounced the polls as “fake”. 

But all the polls have him behind Biden – even those conducted by Republican pollsters, and those with a consistent record of over-predicting the Republican vote. The last published poll to put him ahead nationally was in February. And unless this is an entirely new phenomenon, that does not jibe with the fact that – overall – there has been no consistent historical polling bias in favour of either party.

As recently as 2018, Gubernatorial and Senate polls in the three weeks before the vote significantly overestimated Republican support (House polls were a lot better); and in 2012 an average of polls in the week before the election had Barrack Obama winning by 1.2 percentage points. He actually beat Mitt Romney by 3.9 points – a much bigger error than 2016.

Some say that polls are growing less and less accurate and point to some high profile failures, but a study by Will Jennings, University of Southampton and Christopher Wlezien, University of Texas at Austin, of 26,000 polls from 338 elections in 45 countries since 1942 found “…recent performance of polls has not been outside the ordinary, and that if anything polling errors are getting smaller not bigger.”

NOTE: The next post in this series will consider the “enthusiasm gap”.

Tino Caer writes at Medium:

A couple of days ago, the city of Las Vegas gave Elon Musk’s Boring Company the green light to begin the expansion of their underground highway system called “The Loop.” Musk and his team have ambitious plans for The Loop. Not only does Musk see it as the future of urban commuting, but he also believes that it will serve as the stepping stone for his other project, Hyperloop. …

Vehicles will be able to travel at a maximum speed of 150mph. That is over double the current maximum speed of most train systems, which travel at a measly 65mph. So in an ideal world, you will be arriving at your destination in half the time of the subway.

More importantly, vehicles will not have to stop at each station. Since all passengers in one car will be heading to the same destination, it will not have to make unnecessary stops along the way. This helps make an already quicker commute even quicker. Subways that have to stop almost every couple of blocks will not be able to compete with such a system.

That will be amazing. A 240 km/hr trip with no stopping between pickup and destination.

Derek Cheng writes:

How can lightning strike twice over Government failures at the border?

Yesterday the value of mandatory testing of border-facing workers was underlined by the positive result of the maintenance worker at Rydges Hotel.

Who knows how many people he might have infected – and how many they might have infected – if he hadn’t been tested?

A narrow escape, by good luck rather than good management.

This all has a horrible sense of déjà vu.

Daily health checks were also not done properly on two Covid-infected sisters, one of whom had symptoms. A thorough check might have seen their application for early leave rejected. Instead they were allowed to drive to Wellington.

In all of these cases, communities were unnecessarily put at risk.

So why is there – still – a giant chasm between what the Government says is happening and what the ministry is doing?

I think people are understanding that one can be very skillful at certain things such as holding press conferences, but very bad at other things such as implementation.

PM Jacinda Ardern repeatedly gave the impression this was being done, including last Thursday when she said workers at the Jet Park Hotel were being tested once a week, while other workers were tested on “a slightly longer rotation”.

Those comments have since been exposed as completely untrue.

And in fact Ministers signed off on a strategy which said it was not possible to regularly test frontline workers, yet they announced they would be in contradiction of their own strategy.

If border-facing workers had been regularly tested, it may well have made a difference or even prevented the enormous price that the country, and Auckland in particular, is now paying.

The 1st lockdown was not really preventable, but the second one very likely was preventable.

Barry Soper writes:

Hats off to Andrew Borrowdale. Who is he, you may well ask? He’s a Wellington lawyer – in fact he used to write laws for Parliament.

He was so agitated about the lack of legal grunt behind the country being locked down on March 26 that he took a case to the High Court to challenge it – and today he won.

Borrowdale didn’t argue about the wisdom of people staying at home, but he did argue about the Government’s right to order them to do so.

His view was reinforced by a Crown Law Office opinion, that he didn’t see before mounting his challenge, circulated to interested parties. The police top brass saw it and warned its officers that if they arrested people for being out and about during the first nine days of the lockdown they could be skating on thin ice.

The court ruling has surely thawed the ice, and those who were arrested by the cops in the first nine days could now have a case for wrongful arrest.

The High Court bench of three justices found that for the first nine days of the lockdown the Government’s requirement that Kiwis stay at home was justified – but unlawful.

Yes the Government made a series of announcements that were illegal. Will any heads roll for this? Of course not.

The level of incompetence here is quite staggering because the Government had all the powers it needed to enforce a lockdown. The Court ruled that the law allowed the Government to implement a lockdown.

The problem is none of the geniuses in Government thought for the first nine days that they should do anything more than hold press conferences and make press releases about what they wanted New Zealanders to do. They didn’t even bother to get a legal order backing up their statements.

If what they did on Day 9, they had done on Day 1, then everything would have been fine. But somehow the Attorney-General and others never thought about the need to actually follow the law as set down under the Acts of Parliament that specifically existed for a situation like this.

When the legality was initially questioned by Newstalk ZB and the Herald, Attorney-General David Parker took to Facebook for the best part of an hour, telling us what they’d done had the full backing of Crown Law (an opinion that was never released).

Parker said there were plenty of commentators poring over every comment being made by the Prime Minister, the Director-General of Health and himself, but he insisted they were right. It turns out they were wrong.

Responding to the court’s decision today, Parker conceded the new law should have been written earlier.

Perhaps it would have helped if they actually knew what they were doing before they acted unlawfully.

Parker did a propaganda rant on Facebook rather than actually ensure the law was being followed.

A really interesting article at Politico on Obama and Biden. Basically it looks at how Obama was somewhat reluctant of a Biden candidacy, but also very much about how they have very different political styles.

There is a lot of focus on how Biden can be so, well, unfocused. But also about his ability to negotiate:

Aides recall that Obama and Biden took almost polar-opposite approaches to policymaking, Obama always seeking data forthe most logical or efficient outcome, while Biden told stories about how a bill would affect the working-class guy in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. When a deal was finally made, Obama would bemoan the compromises, while Biden would celebrate the points of agreement.

“Biden doesn’t come from the wonky angle of leadership,” said a senior Obama administration official. “It’s different than the last two Democratic presidents. Biden is from a different style. It’s an older style, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson of ‘Let’s meet, let’s negotiate, let’s talk, let’s have a deal.’”

Republicans who negotiated with the administration often came away finding Obama condescending and relying on Biden to understand their concerns.

“Negotiating with President Obama was all about the fact that he felt that he knew the world better than you,” said Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt that he thought about it so much, that he figured it all out, and no matter what conclusion you had come to with the same set of facts, his way was right.” Biden, he said, understood that “you’re gonna have to agree to disagree about some things.”

A former Republican leadership aide described Obama’s style as “mansplaining, basically.” The person added that Biden “may not be sitting down talking about Thucydides but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a high level of political intelligence.”

I’ve read many articles that have said much the same – Obama was too lecturing to the Republicans to get an agreement, but Biden could.

Things are even more polarised today, so if Biden does win and the GOP retain the Senate, will be fascinating to see what they can agree on.

A guest post by Stephen Russell:

In my previous post I described how the polls were wrong in 2016. What can we now say about the possibility they will be wrong in 2020?

Many polls in the last few months have reported Trump trailing Biden, often by large margins. But Trump himself rejects these: “I’m not losing, because those are fake polls. They were fake in 2016 and now they’re even more fake.”

 Fivethirtyeight.com reports that the average difference between a presidential election poll conducted in the final 21 days of the campaign, and the actual result is 4.8%. The previous four elections produced error rates of 4.4%, 3.2%, 3.2% and 3.6%.

However, if you average the results of multiple polls (which will include errors in both directions) you do get some increase in accuracy. The difference between the polling average and the actual result in 2016 was 3.1%. It was a smaller difference than in many previous elections such as 2012 (3.3%) and 2000 (3.9%) and less than all of the elections from 1980 to 1996 (1980 saw a whopping 8.9% error).

Note that this is looking at polls up to three weeks before the vote, and the gap between polls and results can be ascribed mainly to real shifts in voting intentions over that period. This was a big factor in 2016, as the polls did indeed tighten up in the last week.  This is the main (but not only) reason why the average of the polls over the last three weeks (3.1% different from the result) was much more than the average of the final polls (all within the last seven days) which was in the 1.0-1.5% range.

But while national polls actually proved reasonably accurate in 2016, state-level polls had (on average) larger errors. This is not surprising in general – there are fewer of them in any individual state than for the whole US, so averages are more likely to be distorted by a single rogue result. Also, state polls are more often conducted by small local outfits with fewer resources and less expertise. But that does not explain enough of the difference.

The AAPOR analysis also points at a failure of most polls to weight their samples to avoid over-representation of (mostly Clinton-voting) college-educated voters. That proved to be an especially critical error, because such voters made up a notably smaller portion of the electorate in several knife-edge states (eg Pennsylvania and Michigan) – creating larger errors.

Data from Fivethirtyeight shows that of polling averages in seventeen swing states, only two correctly anticipated the state’s actual deviation from the national popular vote. Five of the averages underestimated Clinton’s position. Ten (including all of the mid-West and New England averages) underestimated Trump.  (Note this is a measure different to the raw deviation of polls from results, measuring relative position on the partisan scale, rather than absolute.)

That education-weighting error at least, is unlikely to be repeated. Pollsters have made changes to compensate.

In May 2020 Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University, noted: “The recent 2020 polling results correlate much more strongly with the 2016 election results than with the final 2016 polling results.” He believes this “suggests that pollsters have adjusted their sampling and weighting procedures to correct for some of the problems that occurred in 2016 in light of the 2016 results.”

He is correct about the correlation. Analysis of a set of polling numbers from June shows that of 17 swing states, only two (Colorado and Ohio) were deviating by more than 2.5% from the relative pattern in the 2016 results.  Looking at the 2016 polls, that level of deviation from results showed up in nine states.  Furthermore, the 2020 deviations go in both directions – seven favouring Trump and nine favouring Biden.

Of course, the 2020 results will not match those of 2016 either in the absolute or relative sense. Every election sees at least some small shuffling of which states lean by how much in which direction.  That is driven by demographic change, by purely local conditions and by having a different matchup of candidates who will have slightly different appeal to different groups. Biden is not Clinton: for example, he appeals slightly more to older voters, slightly less to Black voters, and that will show up in states where those groups are larger or smaller.

In 2016 there was an unusually large reshuffle. That seems unlikely to be repeated. Trump is still Trump. It was his atypical pattern of appeal (relative to his Republican predecessors) that drove the realignment. It is not unreasonable to think that there might be some life in that pattern-shift yet, as Trump doubles down on his appeal to the same groups that swung to him in 2016 – and his increases his negatives with other groups. But revisions to polling methodology to account for the shift in 2016 should also capture any further shift on the same axis.

Pollsters may have corrected for their known 2016 errors, but perhaps they have found exciting new ways to err! Probably the best candidate for that is “shy Trumpers” –  addressed in the next post in this series. 

Newshub reports:

A senior quarantine official has blown the whistle on the border-testing botch-up.

He says claims that staff were reluctant to be tested are not correct – and that workers requested a regular testing programme “multiple times”, but their concerns were ignored.

“They haven’t taken our protection or the wider community’s protection seriously by not having a testing programme,” he tells Newshub.

The worker, who’s been at the airport ten years, says frontline staff requested a regular testing programme “multiple times”, but management declined this.

“Just [got] told it wasn’t available, or they didn’t have the resources to do it,” he says.

Health Minister Chris Hipkins says “they should not have been declined tests”.

And Biosecurity New Zealand Northern Regional Commissioner Mike Inglis says they’ve “made sure that we’ve encouraged staff to be tested”.

“At any point if a staff member feels ill they’ve been told to stay at home,” he adds.

And Newshub can reveal that in the past month, at least 18 Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) staff, who interacted with returnees, have been sent from the airport to work in other parts of Auckland and other cities – all without a COVID-19 test.

I can’t say I’m surprised but it illustrates the total disconnect between what Ministers are saying, and the reality on the front line.

Ministers have implied that the problem was some staff didn’t want to be tested, and making it mandatory was a heavy handed step. The reality was staff were pleading to be tested, and the Government was refusing.

Willi Huber has died aged 98. He from all accounts led an excellent life in NZ, and leaves behind many family members who loved him.

He is one of the pioneers of Mt Hutt skifield, and they have a run named after him. His contribution to New Zealand has been a good one.

However before he came to New Zealand he was a Nazi and a member of the Waffen-SS, which he volunteered for at age 17. There is no evidence he personally took part in war crimes, but the Waffen-SS was found to be a criminal organisation involved in numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Now as I said the other day, I think you judge people by the entirety of their life, not by the worst thing they did. But serving in the Waffen-SS is not quite the same as making a stupid phone call.

The Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation quotes the Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center:

As a historian, I can state unequivocally that serving in a Waffen-SS unit on the Eastern front, there is no way that Mr Huber could possibly not have been aware of the massive atrocities carried out by the SS and the Wehrmacht in the territories of the Soviet Union, where 1,500,000 “enemies of the Reich,” primarily Jews, were murdered individually during the years 1941-1943.

Huber’s statements ring incredibly hollow in the face of the historical record of the Holocaust on the Eastern front. If we add the fact that he volunteered for the SS, and his comments that Hitler was “very clever,” and that he “offered [Austrians] a way out”  of the hardships after World War I, it’s clear that Mr. Huber was an unrepentant Nazi, who doesn’t deserve any sympathy or recognition.

I’m still a bit conflicted. His statements about why he joined and that he never was aware of the atrocities do indicate a lack of repentance.

For my two cents what I would have looked for is did he ever try and atone after WWII. Did he denounced what happened? Did he ever visit a synagogue and ask forgiveness? Or did he not think he needed to? Maybe he did it in private, and never broadcast it.

In the end I think of his family who only knew a loving husband, father and grandfather, and hope they can realise his past doesn’t diminish what he was to them.

But to me, I do think there was either a minimisation or lack of repentance for his role in the Waffen-SS, that will mean he is somewhat defined by his past.

Stuff reports:

Cases of coronavirus in New Zealand have increased by 13.

Twelve of them are linked to a cluster in Auckland, director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield announced on Tuesday, while another is still under investigation.

Meanwhile, genome testing has shown another Auckland case of Covid-19 is not connected to the existing cluster.

The case that was not linked to the existing cluster was found after a possible connection between two cases was confirmed on Monday in Auckland and an outbreak in the community was under investigation.

They key thing here is the man with the infection not linked to the current cluster was only tested because of the Government’s belated catch up with testing frontline staff.

It makes you wonder how many cases over the last few weeks were missed because the Government wasn’t testing frontline staff, as they promised.

Let’s just hope there are no more clusters.

A guest post by Stephen Russell:

This is the first of a series of posts on polling and the United States’ 2020 presidential election.

In the days before the 2016 presidential election, almost all polls showed Hillary Clinton comfortably ahead of Donald Trump. Some pundits proclaimed that Clinton’s victory was a 99% surety. It is claimed that even Trump believed she would win. She didn’t. Ever since, supporters of Trump have brushed off poor poll results with the retort that the polls were wrong in 2016 and will be proved wrong again in 2020.

So just how badly did the pollsters do? And how likely is it that there will be a repeat?

First of all, it needs to be understood that almost all polls have been, and will be, wrong. Even if a poll is perfectly carried out, without bias, the mathematics mean that it is probably going to be inaccurate.

A poll consists of consulting a sample of a few hundred people out of 200-million-odd potential voters, and hoping that said sample is representative of the whole. It probably won’t be. But the laws of chance say that it will – probably – come close, and only occasionally land on the wrong planet. That is what the “margin of error” is all about.

Secondly, polls are an out-of-focus snapshot of the situation at a single point in time – some way ahead of the actual vote. The situation can change faster than polls can detect and report it. This is part of what happened in 2016: those who decided only in the final week broke strongly for Trump, an on-the-ground shift that polls could not entirely catch.

But on top of the limits to accuracy imposed by timing, and the laws of statistics, there is also the problem of polls being poorly conducted (to be fair, it is actually very hard – and expensive – to do a poll right); the problem of bias (which may be conscious or unconscious); and the deliberate production of outright rubbish, usually for political effect.

However, all those sources of error are double-edged. They can result in polls that overly favour Republicans as much as Democrats. Fivethiryeight.com reports that over the last 11 election cycles (including mid-terms) this happened almost as often as the reverse. Presidential polls significantly over-predicted for the Republican side in both 2000 and 2012. US Senate elections over this period saw over-prediction for Republicans more often than for Democrats, including in 2018.

In 2016 however, there is no dispute that the polls over-predicted for Hillary Clinton. There is some dispute over how badly – but that is mainly because the truth is actually quite complex.

The American Association for Public Opinion Research analysed the 2016 polls, and came to a very surprising conclusion: “National polls were generally correct and accurate by historical standards”.  

Their report explains that “Collectively, [the polls] indicated that Clinton had about a 3 percentage point lead, and they were basically correct; she ultimately won the popular vote by 2 percentage points.” The New York Times’ average of polls put Clinton’s lead at 3.1%. Fivethirtyeight.com put it at 3.6% (see here) and RealClearPolitics (see here) had Clinton ahead in the popular vote by 3.3% (though the median and mode were both 4%). RCP’s table shows that of the twelve public polls in conducted entirely in the few November days prior to the vote, nine gave Clinton a margin higher than she achieved. But only one put that margin greater than 4%. Ten out of twelve were within 2% of the actual result: a 2.1% margin.

The discrepancy between the polls and the outcome came from the fact that US presidential elections are decided not by the national popular vote, but by individual state results. And here, there were some major errors.

Of 17 swing states polled, seven had results within 1.5% of the polling averages published on fivethirtyeight. In three of those (Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada) Clinton actually did better than the polls projected.

But ten states produced results more than 1.5% better for Trump than the polls had projected and eight of those more than 4%. Three of those eight big errors came in Clinton’s top five “must win” swing states:  Pennsylvania (with a 4.2% error), Michigan (4.4%) and Wisconsin (6.1%). 

State polls were thus (mostly) less accurate than national ones, but even then the AAPOR explains that “Eight states with more than a third of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency had polls showing a lead of three points or less… The polls on average indicated that Trump was one state away from winning the election.” Fivethirtyeight warned at the time (Trump is just a normal polling error behind Clinton) that the outcome was finely poised, and that there was a substantive chance that Clinton would win the popular vote but lose the election.

Most (though not all) mainstream media pundits, being enthusiastic supporters of Clinton, simply failed to look closely enough at the data, got carried away on a tide of excitement, dismissed the evidence that the race was tightening in the final stretch, and predicted the result that they wanted to see. The polls did justify predictions that Clinton would win – but only marginally so – not the 99% level of certainty that some foolishly claimed. In reality, the contest was close enough that it took only a small error to change the outcome.

02Despite the caveats, experience has taught us that polls are still a better means of gauging the likely outcome of an election than consulting chicken entrails, taxi drivers, or what we think people ought to think. So the next post in this series will look at the 2020 situation.

Newshub reports:

The Health Minister has revealed that when the Government announced a new testing strategy for border workers two months ago, there was no system in place to keep track of how many workers had had a swab for COVID-19.

So they had no way of actually recording which staff had or had not been tested. This is pretty gross incompetence. It should not take too months to set up a database which can track staff and testing.

The Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, said he didn’t think there had been a failure or that the public had been misled. Hipkins also denied misleading the public.

That’s despite former Health Minister David Clark issuing a press statement on June 23, almost two months ago, announcing a “testing strategy to keep New Zealand safe”.

The strategy was to include “asymptomatic testing of all border-facing workers”.

So no one will take responsibility for the fact that what we were told never ever happened.

Hipkins and Dr Bloomfield continued to reassure the public they had a robust system in place on August 3, when Hipkins stated: “we do have a testing programme in place for all of those people”.

Dr Bloomfield supported the Minister’s claims, saying on August 3 the workers “are all part of a surveillance testing programme”.

And just last week Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stated testing of border workers was happening “all the way through”. 

They all misled us.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, clearly irritated by what had happened, spoke about the issue on Monday, saying it’s not good enough.

“When we ask as a Cabinet for something to happen, we expect it to happen. So of course, that has not met our expectations,” Ardern said.

“No one, of course, said to us at any point, that I recall, that what we asked for was not happening.”

But Dr Bloomfield says he was providing regular updates.

“There’s clearly a dissonance with what the Prime Minister thought was happening, and what was happening on the ground,” he said.

If regular updates were being provided yet Ministers were insisting testing was happening as promised, then the only conclusion I can draw is Ministers either didn’t read or didn’t understand the updates.

On my Patreon I have done my normal monthly post analysing the key indicators that indicate if a Government is on track or not for re-election.

As you can see above the indicators are all very good for the NZ Government. They are also positive for the Australian Government.

The UK and Canadian Governments have a range of positive and negative indicators are changes of Governments are quite possible there.

In the US Trump has all negative indicators, but they have improved from June, so he does have some momentum.

It was reported on Friday that Roger Bridge resigned from the National Party Board on Friday after the revelations that (presumably) he made a phone call to late night talkback pretending to be Merv from Manurewa, and was critical of one of the people seeking National’s nomination for Auckland Central.

Resigning from the Board is the appropriate thing to do. The phone call was intolerable from any party official, let alone a board member. It was a stupid thing to do, and also politically pointless. What is the chance that one of the 60 party delegates would be listening to Marcus Lush that evening and be influenced by that phone call?

And it was very unfair to the nominee in Auckland Central to have a board member acting in such a way. We need to support nominees.

So the resignation is necessary. But I don’t think people should judge Roger by what may have been one moment of madness. Roger has worked unpaid for National for around 15 years as both a Regional Chair and a Party Director. He has made an enormous voluntary contribution and has been a good friend and mentor to many party activists and candidates.

A US journalist John Dickerson often says we should not judge people for the worst thing they have done in their lives, but for their overall contribution. I strongly agree.

In this episode of Taxpayer Talk, Taxpayers’ Union Research Officer Islay Aitchison interviews economist Michael Reddell on monetary and fiscal policy. Michael Reddell’s blog, Croaking Cassandra, can be found here.

You can subscribe to Taxpayer Talk via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio and all good podcast apps.