Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Catherine Parks, 57. Why? Because she was in Bernie's, that's why. If that's not enough for you, she was on the Boat once...we really need someone to revive the Boat or something like it. On her episode? Bob Denver, Markie Post, Forrest Tucker, Lyle Waggoner...Eleanor Parker, who just died, who played the Baroness in Sound of Music, too. Back to Parks: if that's not enough, she was also in "Looker." Why should anyone care about that stinker? Because it's also Susan Dey's birthday. But she wasn't in Bernie's, so I'm less interested.

Sorry for getting lost there, but I do have a little good stuff:

1. Good Dan Larison post on intervention.

2. Elias Dinas on how electoral loyalties form.

3. And I didn't get around to doing a HOF old-timers (or whatever they're calling it) ballot post this year...maybe I'll deal with the players on Friday. I support Marvin Miller, and probably don't support Steinbrenner. As far as the managers, I've fallen hopelessly behind on the sabermetric literature on managers, but Scott Lemieux is up to date, and I see no reason to disagree with anything he says on this one. I'm not really sure what I think of Torre as a manager, but I'd vote for him as a player, so it's a moot point for me, and at worst he's a fringe HOFer as both a manager and a player. Cox is underrated; I always rooted against La Russa, but he's clearly deserving, too.

Does VA Gov Explain the 1992 Perot Vote?

One more time into the question about the VA-Gov polls and the election results.

I came up with a possible (and speculative) explanation based on the condition of two candidates who were not especially popular among their own parties, along with a sufficiently well-publicized third candidate. Perhaps Democrats trusted the polls, believing that the seven-point lead Terry McAuliffe held was real, and therefore believed it was safe to vote for the Libertarian; meanwhile, Republicans didn't trust the polls, believed it was close, and thus switched at the last minute back to the Republican.

It occurs to me there doesn't have to be a difference in partisan bias to get the results I speculated on. Suppose partisans on both sides read the polls with a 5 point bias in their own direction. Then, in a 7 point race with a third party candidate, the winning side party is going to perceive a 12 point landslide and vote their true preference, while the losing side party will perceive a 2 point barnburner and reluctantly return home. After all, a heavily-polled election with a 7 point spread will surely have some 12 point and some 2 point polls, and in fact this one did.

It further occurs to me that if true, this should be a pattern we see in other elections. The main conditions, I would think, would have to be a polling lead in the 5-10 point range...that's small enough that the losing side can plausibly believe that it's very close, but large enough for the winning side to feel safe -- again, if both sides interpret the polling with about the same bias.

All of which gets to that 1992 Perot vote. The research on that was pretty clear: Perot took equally away from both candidates. However, if this (speculated! hypothesized!) effect was operating, then it would have cost Perot Republican votes while leaving Democrats parked with him at the end. If that was the case, then the "real" Perot vote (that is, those who would have voted for him all else equal) would have been more Republican the observed Perot vote.

Note, of course, that it still wouldn't be the case that Perot cost Republicans the 1992 election; no third party candidate, and all those votes come back home, half to Clinton and half to Bush.

At any rate: I suspect this should be testable. The basic idea should be that an effect kicks in when there's a 5-10 point lead and a plausible third party candidate...say, one getting better than 5% of pre-election polls. Under those circumstances, the final result should be more favorable to the losing candidate than the polls predicted. It's also possible, if detailed polls are out there, to compare the third party supporters before election day and in the final vote.

It should also be an effect, if real, that may stronger when the party-aligned press has a larger share of the overall press, since presumably that would produce stronger cues for interpreting the polls with a bias.

Not sure if anyone wants to bother doing the work on this (I don't), but I think there's a fairly good chance that it's real -- both for VA-Gov and for Perot.

Today's Lesson in Why One Shouldn't Trust Self-Identified "Independents"

Sean Hannity: "I'm not a Republican, though people often mistake me for one."

(From Political Wire, quoted from a Playboy interview I'm not going to click through to read).

Or, to quote John Sides:

The three myths [about independents] are:

1) Independents are the largest partisan group.

2) Independents are actually independent.

3) Change in the opinions of independents is always consequential.

Sean Hannity is perfectly free to call himself whatever he wants. But he is obviously a functional Republican.

Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you about how independents are a huge group of voters. For whatever reason, our political culture values calling oneself "independent," and discourages people from identifying themselves as party regulars -- if you ask people whether they vote the candidate or the party, an overwhelming majority will go with "candidate."

Our political behavior, on the other hand, demonstrates considerably partisan behavior -- most of us, most of the time, do in fact for party, not candidate.

All of which is not only very familiar to anyone who has studied the evidence, but should be obvious to anyone who listens to political actors talk.

A reminder of my good-enough way of thinking about how the actual electorate breaks down: it's one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, one-third independent...but that final one third is itself really one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, and one-third (and thus one-ninth overall) true independent. And what's more, those true independents are overwhelmingly the least informed and least attentive to politics; the stereotyped careful independent who carefully reads up on the issues and the candidates in order to make up her mind does exist, but she's a tiny, tiny, party of the electorate (I've never seen numbers, but I'm guessing some fraction of one percent).

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Candice Bergen, 67.

Some good stuff:

1. If you care about turnout, you obviously don't want to miss Michael McDonald on the demographics of the 2012 electorate.

2. Much more on 2012 and campaign effects from John Sides and Lynn Vavreck. 

3. And Marc Ambinder on Benghazi.

Sunday Question for Everyone (2)

What should the minimum age for voting be? Why?

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Rachel Maddow, 40.

No shortage of good stuff today:

1. Really, just stop saying "weapons of mass destruction." Spencer Ackerman explains.

2. How will the GOP fight against ACA in the states play out -- if it succeeds? Ezra Klein with a good column on it.

3. Matt Yglesias points out some basics of politics and economics.

4. Excellent column by John Sides about ideology and 2012 (and the future). My position on this: Republicans don't need an ideological adjustment to win the presidency, but they do need reform if they're going to be able to govern successfully.

5. But see also: Eric Schickler responds to John, and then John responds back to Eric. Quick point: John says that "Republicans had no problem winning presidential elections even when the Democratic advantage in party identification was much larger than now." Yes and no...there is that long stretch (9 elections) in which Democrats win unless Ike is on the ballot. Overall, I think it's possible that Democrats have taken a small but real edge, but also possible that the parties are still even and there's just some sorting around among what people call themselves...I haven't seen anything that convinces me one way or another.

6. And I don't know if anyone cares, but: my brother: not a moron.

Q Day 6: Midterms

It's still question day around here. Why not? Several good ones I wanted to get to. Such as this...

Bajsa asks:

Off year elections are as important as years with Presidential elections. What can Obama do to get his coalition to vote in a mid-term election?

It's a great question, so I wanted to highlight it, but I'm not sure I have much of an answer. So instead I'll give four answers.

One answer is: not much. It's just a basic truth that different demographic groups vote at different rates, and that midterms are lower-interest elections than presidential contests. So you're going to get fewer voters, which in practice means that you'll still get the every-time voters but far fewer of the sometimes voters.

The next answer is: electioneering probably can't do very much, but it almost certainly can make small differences on the margins. Which could be important! So, sure, run the best campaign that they can; the president can probably help the most by involving himself (carefully) in candidate recruitment and, yes, fundraising.

The third answer is: it may be less important than you think. Yes, it's true that midterm electorates are likely to lean more Republican, but we only have to go back to 2006 to find a Democratic landslide in a midterm. The biggest problem for Democrats in 2014 isn't that midterms are bad for Democrats; it's that midterms are bad for the party in the White House.

And the fourth answer is: the biggest thing that Obama can do to help Democrats in the midterms is to be a very popular president. Worked for Bill Clinton in 1998, and George W. Bush in 2002; failure to be a popular president had a lot to do with midterm disasters for Bush's party in 2006, Clinton's in 1994, and Ronald Reagan's in 1982. I suppose that's just obvious, but sometimes obvious is the truth.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Martha Plimpton, 42

And straight to a bit of good stuff:

1. Where are the statewide black politicians? Jamelle Bouie is looking for them.

2. Team Obama's use of social networks and other fancy stuff, by Seth Masket.

3. Doug Mataconis on whether the GOP actually gets anything out of Fox News, Rush, and the rest of it (answer: probably not).

4. Ross Douthat on where Republicans should retreat. Interesting. There's an analogy available here in the way that Democrats retreated on the death penalty and on gun control, without many of their politicians actually changing their positions. Could that be a model for how Republicans retreat on marriage?

5. Patterns in voting: white women. By Lynn Sanders, Carah Ong, and Adam Hughes.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Willie McGee, 54.

Quickly to the good stuff:

1. Mark Blumenthal on whether the polls could be wrong, and a good roundup.

2. E.J. Graff has been looking at the marriage ballot questions.

3. And: interested in undecided voters? Then you definitely want to read what Lynn Vavreck has to say about them.

All I Do Sometimes Is Write "A Little Perspective" Posts

I might want to get back into the discussion of whether and how twitter changed debate coverage, but one thing in Richard Just's column on it caught my eye:

[I]f the new polls are accurate, a not insignificant percentage of Americans have switched their votes since last Wednesday—meaning that they, like many journalists, have apparently decided that a few too many “uhs” by Obama on national television should override all the substantive issues facing the country.

I don't know what "not insignificant percentage" means to him, but it's worth pointing out just how few people we're talking about. Okay...it's a little hard to do, because the nature of polling makes it really hard to  figure out what changes were a result of the debate and which were not; as of now the HuffPollster polling average has Obama's peak lead back on September 21 at 4.1 points and dropping to 2.3 points by October 1 before the October 3 debate. Perhaps that's an artifact of the way they handle the data; perhaps it shows a real pre-debate change (and part of it is the Gallup shift from registered to likely voters, which has nothing to do with anyone changing their mind). But even using the maximum shift (that is, September 21 to now) and ignoring everything else, what it shows is that Barack Obama's support has slipped 1.6 percentage points while Mitt Romney's has improved 2.6 points.

That's a relatively small group! And even there, it's unlikely that very many people "switched their votes." What we're probably seeing is one of two things. Some of it may be people moving from a candidate to undecided or vice-versa (the current Romney plus Obama total adds to just under 93%, with undecided presumably eating up almost all of the rest). The rest? People slipping in and out of likely voter screens.

(Yes, it's possible that there are much larger migrations between the candidates which cancel each other out. Everything we know about voters, and all the evidence from the polls, says that hardly any of that is happening).

I'm not saying that any of that is unimportant -- if it holds, a 4 point shift is big stuff, and if it's all from the debate, it certainly would be a large debate effect. Although note that as of now we have no idea whether it will hold, and very little idea as to how much of it is from the debate -- and even the portion which is from the "debate" may be not because of the debate per se but because of press coverage of the debate.

But hardly anyone is doing what we would think of as changing their mind. Just not happening. Almost everyone who had already decided is staying put. Some people who were on the margins between a candidate and undecided are jumping back and forth over that line depending on when you happen to ask them and what's the last piece of information they heard; many of them are low-interest voters who usually wait until the last few days to start thinking about the election. And some of them are just more or less enthusiastic about voting, which seems entirely reasonable as a reaction to either the debate or the news coverage of the debate.

Nobody, or at least practically nobody, has actually changed their mind because the candidates' demeanor overrides substantive policy positions. Just isn't happening.

Q Day 5: Labor Day and the Campaigns

Rich Beckman asks:

It seems like all my life I have heard that voters do not pay attention to the presidential election until after Labor Day. I did not hear that once this summer and it seems like (from the polls) they had all made up their minds long before Labor Day.

I've been hearing this a bunch this year, and I think it somewhat conflates a couple of things.

There was an old tradition that the campaign didn't start until Labor Day. I'm not sure how true that ever was (as long as I can remember, it was mentioned only as an old tradition now violated), but remember that there's a history to these things. In the very old days, candidates didn't do much in-person barnstorming. Then, as that norm broke down, recall that until the nomination process reformed most parties didn't know who the nominee would be until the convention. So while conventions were somewhat earlier than they are now, the winner would have to begin organizing a campaign, often from scratch for those who didn't run in primaries, after the convention was over. And given that August is never a great month for getting people to pay attention to politics, it makes sense that the Labor Day tradition -- or at least the belief that there was a Labor Day tradition -- got started.

Now, it's probably still true that a lot of people don't pay attention until something cues them that it's time. That might be the conventions; it might be TV news gradually shifting to make the campaigns a focus of their coverage; it might be the debates. But thanks to partisanship a lot of people either make up their mind before they start paying attention, or think of themselves as undecided but whatever it is that cues them to start paying attention also activates their partisan preferences.

So the upshot of all this is that both things are true: most people don't pay a lot of attention before Labor Day or so, but there are also relatively few undecided voters by the time we get to Labor Day.

A Much Better Defense of "Dumb" Poll Questions

The last Washington Post/ABC poll asked a couple questions that have been ridiculed (well, at least on twitter) all week. For example, “On a ship in a storm, who would you rather have as the captain?” WaPo's Chris Cillizza today attempted a defense of these questions, and only made things worse.

We’ve long maintained that the vote for president, more so than any other vote, is a feel vote.  That is, the up-for-grabs voters don’t simply go to the websites of the two candidates, make a check next to every issue they agree with Obama or Romney on and then add up the columns — voting for whichever of the two men had more checks to his  name.  If they did, George Bush wouldn’t likely have beaten either Al Gore or John Kerry.

The problem is that they can maintain that all that they like, but there's just no evidence that this sort of thing is real. Or, more to the point, the odds are very good that the relationship runs the other way: first voters figure out who they will vote for, and then they go back and make up justifications for it, later mistaking those explanations with the real reasons. Those justifications might be issues-based, or they might be classic retrospective ones (such as the "better off" question), or they might be these personal attribute questions. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve everything if we directly ask people why they decided. For better or worse, we're just not very good at all at understanding the reasons for our candidate preferences.

So of course voters don't vote based on a careful comparison of issue positions, but these kinds of questions don't get at how they do vote -- by party, by group, and yes, by retrospective evaluation.

But that doesn't make "dumb" questions a bad idea! If properly devised (and that's tricky to be sure), they may be able to get at the stories we tell ourselves about why we're supporting one candidate or another. That has to be done carefully, I think; it would be easy to imagine questions which essentially invent those stories, rather than reflect pre-existing ones. But in principle, it should be possible, and while that might not tell us why a candidate was winning, it might tell us something about what was in voters' minds, and that's not a bad thing at all.

Somewhat less seriously, such questions can be fun, and there's nothing at all wrong with having some fun with electoral politics. Just because we might realize that "who would you rather have a beer with?" might not be a question that really illuminates why swing voters went a particular way doesn't mean that it isn't any fun to think about.

In general, I'd say that too much political coverage is based on the idea that it's news if it predicts who will win or if it explains why a candidate is winning. Nothing at all wrong with coverage of how it's happening, even if it doesn't answer that "why?" question. And I'm really not convinced that this is viewer or reader driven; I think it's just a norm that doesn't make sense.

So, pollsters: go ahead and ask "dumb" questions; reporters, have fun talking about them. Just don't think they're explaining stuff that they can't explain, and you'll be fine.

(UPDATED Note: I didn't save the links, but Brendan Nyhan on twitter has been really good about silly polling questions. Also, John Sides had a really good post about knowing our reasons for political choices, but I couldn't find it. [Link added above, but it was a Lee Sigelman post, not John] My apologies for the laziness. I have no idea how either of them would feel about my defense of these questions, however).

Watching the Conventions

I just wanted to talk a little about the impossibility of getting a sense of the conventions.

What I did was: opening a tab to CSPAN when they gaveled the things in each day, so I was basically listening to it for the first couple of hours...then I would switch over to TV, but still with CSPAN, taking a short break for dinner (on the Tuesdays and Thursdays) and a longer one for my pickup basketball game (on both Wednesdays). Every once in a while I'd flip around to see what the cable nets were showing, but mostly I just stuck to CSPAN. But not just CSPAN: I also had my twitter feed open throughout, so I was seeing what various reporters and pundits were saying, too.

But of course that's not how very many people at all experience the conventions.

A lot of reporters -- a whole lot of them -- were in the convention cities themselves. Those reporters were, mostly talking to people and looking for people to talk to. They weren't watching very many of the speeches, except for the headliners (presumably). Their convention was very different from anyone else's.

Then there's the typical high-interest voter -- not insane, top 1% interest, but normal high-interest. She's turning on one of the cable nets when she gets home from work...well, except for dinner, and dealing with the kids and the household. Eventually, however, she'll turn on MSNBC if she's a Democrat, or Fox if she's a Republican. And then get distracted by the kids or household stuff or a call from her mom or her husband needing to discuss something, and so she'll have seen ten minutes of pundits pontificating and maybe five of a speech. If she's lucky, she'll wind up seeing maybe one and a half of the big speeches -- most of he party's nominee and good-sized chunks, say, of Clinton and Michelle Obama. She might download one of the speeches later that she missed, if she's really into it. That's our high-interest voter.

Low interest voters? They'll notice that it's convention week at some point, probably if they happen to be looking for something to watch during the broadcast hour. They'll hear a few sound bites on the radio news in the car, see some headlines when there's a TV set to Fox News at the gym or a restaurant, get some clip forwarded to them. If they turn on a morning show on the TV in the background while they get ready for work, they'll half-hear an interview with convention speakers; if they watch Leno or Conan, they'll hear an uptick in campaign jokes.

The problem is: how can you simultaneously get a sense of all of this? Well, you really can't. Just can't. And that's before trying to sort out exactly who all those voters are, and what they make of the various things that are being thrown at them...which depends on what's in their own heads. Which in turn is not only very different from the typical person commenting on the convention, but is very different across all those voters, even if we're most interested in the swing voters.

For the effects of the convention, there's really no substitute, that is, for waiting for the polls.

So in the meantime, what one can do is pick a slice of it and assess it for what it is. For me, this time around, it was the convention from the podium. Not from the broadcast anchor booth, or the cable nets, or how delegates experience it, but just from the podium. And I've tried, for the last couple of weeks, to be as careful as possible not to imply anything more than is appropriate from the vantage point that I'm using.

But I'm not confident I've stuck to that; it's actually very difficult to do. And so this post, as a reminder of just how limited any one perspective is on these events.

(Typos fixed)

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Cindy Williams, 65.  C'mon: is there anyone who was in American Graffiti who you don't like? Okay, I guess I don't especially have any fondness for Richard Dreyfuss. Hey, I didn't know that Candy Clark played Buffy's mom in the Buffy movie. I suppose I should sit through all of it at some point.

Back on topic; the good stuff:


1. Marc Tracy on Adeslon-bashing and anti-Semitism. Reading this one is Good for the Jews.

2. Jared Bernstein on big vs. small government.

3. WaPo/Kaiser polling on independents. I'm sticking with my rule of thumb, which isn't perfectly accurate but is good enough for most purposes: Americans are evenly split between Democrats, Republicans, and independents, but those independents are almost evenly split between Democrats, Republicans, and true independents.

4. The Romney tax "plan" gets sillier and sillier; as Suzy Khimm reports, he's rallying to the defense of the mortgage interest tax deduction, which of course is a pretty large chunk of the kinds of things he would be closing if he really was putting together a revenue-neutral tax reform. Seriously; by November, isn't it likely that he'll make the whole TPC analysis moot by explicitly excluding so many tax expenditures that it's no longer possible to get to revenue-neutral no matter what?

5. And I'm not entirely certain, but I do believe that this is Brad DeLong apologizing.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to J.K. Rowling, 47.

Straight to the good stuff:


1. Larrry Bartels and Lynn Vavreck have a comprehensive look at the remaining undecided voters in the presidential race.

2. Scott Bland has today's House runoffs in Texas.

3. Great quote about party hacks, mined from a John Reynolds book that I really would like to read at some point by Seth Masket.

4, Excellent takedown of a terrible Newsweek cover (I haven't read the Newsweek story, which sounds bad too, but the cover is awful) from Jonathan Chait. Yes, the George H.W. Bush one was awful, too.

5. And a nice Jamelle Bouie piece about deficits, public opinion, and more.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Alex Rodriguez, 37. Well, he's at 644 HRs and holding, for now. He surely won't get to Mays this year, but surely will in 2013 barring catastrophe. But then? Well, he needs 70 for Ruth, 111 for Aaron, and another 7 for Bonds. Say he ends this year at 650: at 25 per year (more than he's managed last year or presumably this), he would get it early in his age 41 season. That still seems more likely than not -- players as good as him should be able to play at 41 -- but he's lost most of his enormous leeway, hasn't he? Granted, it wouldn't surprise me at all if he has a 40 HR comeback year in 2013 and winds up as a regular at age 43, in which case he'll smash through it, but if 2011-2012 is really his true level now, then it may wind up turning on how much he really wants the record.

Ah, for the good stuff.

1. Brendan Nyhan on how the press keeps botching the basics of how income taxes work. Related botched point that we can get ready for if tax reform is an issue going forward: as Matt Yglesias has pointed out many times, the idea that fewer rates equal simplification for taxpayers is entirely without merit (people either consult tax tables or use software to figure out tax owed and would do so pretty much however the system works; it's entirely irrelevant how the numbers are generated in the first place.

2. Alan Abramowitz tackles the question of enthusiasm.

3. Larry Bartels dives into the question of partisan effects on perceptions of the economy. Really interesting topic, in part because perceptions of the economy not only may affect voice choice, but can also affect the action economy. I'd love to know whether partisan-based perceptions of the economy bleed over to choices voters make in business or as consumers.

4. E. J. Graff argues for diversity, including diversity of political involvement, on behalf of Sally Ride's choices, in response to Andrew Sullivan's comments. The topic of choosing a life in politics is, it seems to me, both a very interesting one and also one that does not have clear answers, whatever the context might be. I'd probably refer people to Hannah Arendt's Men in Dark Times; I don't think she has answers, but does help think things through.

5. And a reminder from Stan Collender of (yet another) reason why cramming most of the year's business into a lame duck session is a bad idea: the strong possibility of sloppy writing in the resulting laws.

Elsewhere: EC, Pronoun Trouble

At Greg's place today, I returned to the idea of lazy mendacity, in particular the latest ripped-out-of-context conservative talking point. It also works, however, as an excuse for a reference to the classic "pronoun trouble" riff in "Rabbit Seasoning." It does raise the more complex question of whether "that" counts as a pronoun, but I think it does in this context, doesn't it?

Anyway, the one I want you to read is over at PP, where I talk about the idea that only a handful of people in a handful of states determine the presidential election. My argument is that you can see it that way -- and I see why campaign operatives do -- but it's more of a myth, albeit a clever myth, than some sort of great truth about the electoral college. I can add something else: if there was simple national plurality vote presidential election, you would still have only a (relative) handful of swing voters. So it's really not, when you think about it closely, really an electoral college thing. It's not even a first-past-the-post thing; a p.r. system would of course make someone's choice between, say, the Republican Party and an actual Tea Party candidate meaningful (in a sense) because it would be more likely to have a marginal effect on the number of seats those two parties would hold, but it still would have for all practical purposes the same chance of actually deciding the election.

Oy, Westen

Yeah, Drew Westen had another piece in the NYT Sunday paper yesterday. Yeah, it was the usual nonsense.

This time, it's Westen arguing two things: that nothing is worth doing unless campaign finance reform happens because without campaign finance reform our elected officials will be hopelessly corrupt; and, fortunately, this is an easily solvable problem because if Democrats say a few magic words the electorate will rise up as one and demand campaign finance reform.

It's all fantasy, of course. Every bit of it. The idea that there was some golden age of Democrats who were ideal liberals (and therefore, in this story, indifferent to the views of large corporation and other business interests) is just nuts. So is the idea that if it's only presented to them correctly, everyone would love -- and vote on the basis of -- campaign finance reform. And that's ignoring the fairly obvious and central problems of getting anything through the Senate (or will Westen's magic words produce more than 60 Democratic Senators?) or through the Supreme Court. As I said, it's just fantasy.

You would hope, however, that Westen and his supporters would at least notice the fundamental logical flaw in the whole thing. Westen believes that campaign finance is easily accomplished by just wording the pitch for it correctly. But surely it's possible to find wording that "works"  -- moves his dials -- for other issues also, no? Indeed: Westen himself surely doesn't believe that campaign finance is uniquely potentially popular if only Democrats apply his magic words. No; even in this column, he begins with a substantive example of malfeasance, presumably because he believes that everyone reading it will agree that it's an outrage and something should be done. And if that's all it takes to win elections, then why wouldn't Democrats (who surely, and Westen agrees, want to win elections) simply support whatever policies Westen wants, supplied properly with Westen-supplied magic words to convince everyone to support those policies?

See, Westen's logic in this piece is that Democrats won't enact the policies he wants because campaign money corrupts them, and they need campaign money in order to win elections. But if that's true, it's a Catch-22; they won't enact supposedly wildly popular campaign finance reform because they're corrupt, right? Why would the interests that prevent them from passing substantive legislation be fine with campaign finance laws that would (according to Westen) result eventually in substantive legislation that they don't like?

Back here in the real world, of course, magic words won't really make much of a difference (if any) because elections don't work like that -- both sides get to use their own magic words, so that part tends to cancel out in any campaigns where resources are roughly even. Campaigns matter most when resources are massively unequal; otherwise non-campaign factors such as the president's performance, the economy, and other real events are going to matter more. And...oh, forget it. That's enough time spent on fantasy.

On Voter Behavior, Action, Veepstakes, and Civil Rights

I'll warn you going in: this is going to be one of those meandering posts that sort of wanders around a bit to get where it's going. I think there are some really important issues here about politics and political science, but I'm going to get to them in a less direct way than I might.

To begin with: Molly Ball has a mostly excellent post arguing for the importance of Veepstakes. She points out that how a nominee goes about selecting a running mate really does tell us something about both the party and the person. Those are fair points!

I'd say that the danger of Veepstakes for the press is that there's a temptation to speculate endlessly about it. But, sure, reporting on any real news is a legitimate thing to do. And I absolutely agree that reporting on the campaign should not be restricted only to things that will likely affect the outcome. Overall, it's a good post, one that I solidly recommend.

However, I can't agree with one part of her argument:

Can we all declare a moratorium on the trope of pundits deciding what voters do and don't care about? It's condescending -- who are they to say what voters, the vast majority of whom they have never met, care about? It's based on a political-science fallacy -- just because voters are smart enough to base their final judgments on policy fundamentals rather than relative trivia doesn't mean they don't welcome a wide range of information. 

This is going to lead me into two topics, both difficult (well, three if you include the notion that there's a "political-science fallacy" about basing votes on important things...that's not exactly what political scientists say about individual voters).

The first is, basically, about the validity of survey research and other methods for studying voters. No, no one has met any more than a very tiny portion of the electorate. But that simply doesn't mean that we can learn a whole lot about how the electorate, in the aggregate, behaves. There's nothing condescending about drawing conclusions about aggregate populations from previous research, whether it's old election results or polling or other useful data. Just as there's nothing condescending about saying that traffic will pick up around 7 in the morning and then again at around 5 in the evening (or whatever rush hour is), or about saying that more people are going to go see the new Batman movie than the new Woody Allen. Nor is it condescending to say that people will do that regardless of the quality of those movies (not that I'm saying that the Woody Allen will be better than the Dark Knight conclusion!), and it's only slightly problematic to interpret that by saying that people don't care about movie quality in their choice about which movie to go see. Note, too, that it's really tricky to actually get some of this stuff right; note too that people can't be trusted to correctly report their own reasoning on these things (that is, people might say that they care mostly about movie quality, but in fact can be observed to go to whatever is playing at the closest theater, or always choose big franchise movies).

So that's the first problem.

The other isn't really a problem with Ball's item, but with something of a paradox that we need to acknowledge and deal with properly. This came up recently in the kerfuffle over conservatives and civil rights. When I said that Kevin Williamson's argument was "pernicious (because it attacks motives, and because it assumes a lack of agency on the part of most voters)," Williamson replied:

Jonathan Bernstein is closer to the truth when he writes that my argument “assumes a lack of agency on the part of most voters,” which is true — I think, in fact I know, that voters are in the aggregate ignorant and prone to making bad decisions.

That's a non-sequitur.


It is true that "voters are in the aggregate ignorant." But that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they have the ability to make choices and act on them, regardless of and separately from the larger influences that are acting on them. Or, perhaps, I should write that in the singular: no matter what larger influences can be used to explain any individual voter's choices, he or she is still free to act.

This turns to be a fairly important point. It's a subject that Hannah Arendt wrote about long ago when she presented the contrast between "behavior" and action, in which behavior is defined as conforming to larger historical laws or trends (see The Human Condition, especially 41-45).

When we talk about politics, we need to somehow keep both things in mind, simultaneously. On the one hand, people do "behave" all the time, in theoretically perfectly predictable ways. I know that an overwhelming percentage of African American voters will support Barack Obama this November, and that an overwhelming percentage of LDS voters will back Mitt Romney, and there's nothing wrong with me "predicting" that, just as there's nothing wrong with predicting that Veepstakes isn't likely to affect voter choices. Just to emphasize (given what Williamson said), that has nothing at all to do with how well-informed or ignorant voters might be -- well-informed voters, overall, are somewhat more predictable than ignorant voters (because they're more likely to be solid partisans).

And yet. Action is always possible. Choice is always possible. Action, as Arendt argues, is as unpredictable as behavior is predictable. Of course it is not without influences, but it involves deliberate choice.

The trick is that we have to think about these things both ways, at once. Hubert Humphrey may have given his 1948 convention speech because he was a northern politician, and because of Cold War pressures, and because of the general sweep of the way that the Democrats emerged in Minnesota from the confused party structure that preceded their success. But he also made the choice to do it. He didn't have to. He might have chosen otherwise, and if so things could have developed differently. Strom Thurmond might, you know, have chosen to reconcile himself with civil rights then and there, but he didn't; yes, we can think of that decision in terms of his political situation or his upbringing, but it's also an individual choice he (and other Dixiecrats that year and later) made to walk out.

We can similarly examine the choices of other leaders, whether it's Martin Luther King or Thurgood Marshall or whoever. We can even extend this kind of of thinking to larger groups of people acting as individuals, such as those who chose to fight for or against civil rights. And, yes, if you step back far enough a lot of that is going to look like behavior, but it's important not to forget what else is or could be going on.

That is, we need a vocabulary which simultaneously speaks the truth about "behavior," about the way that large numbers of us can be described -- accurately! -- using statistical laws, while also allowing for action: the possibility that each of us, at all times, actually retains the capability of purposefully and deliberately doing what we wish. We are part of a large populations; we are individuals with choice; and we are also members of groups, with the capacity to affect and be affected by others within the group through action.

This is difficult to get right! I have said, and will continue to say, for example, something basically like: third parties have no chance in US politics and are therefore a huge mistake in most circumstances. Because, really, they don't have any chance. Except that there should always be an "if normal patterns hold" caveat on any such claims, because we're still talking about humans, and humans have the capacity for acting outside of their normal patterns. Individually, and through the influence of individuals, in groups, and eventually in large populations.

I'm not sure how to bring this to a close...perhaps this is a situation where it's hard to describe what would constitute getting things right or wrong. I guess what I'd say is that when we're talking about mass behavior -- large populations, to be sure made up of individuals, who nevertheless are behaving as masses -- then it's okay to use the language of mass behavior, but we should be careful not to overdo it. So in the case that Ball cites, I guess technically I'd agree that it's wrong to say that voters "don't care" about running mates, at least without specific polling to back that up...but perfectly reasonable to say that they won't vote based on the VP, even if we leave off the necessary caveat that they might after all. In the case of Williamson, what bothered me (and perhaps some of the others who raised the point) wasn't so much his comments about African American voters in bulk, but that he omitted from his narrative anything about action taken by African Americans, both by top-level elites or even by those who took part in demonstrations and protests and voter drives and the rest of it. It was what they did, as much or more than what white political leaders did, that eventually resulted in party realignment. They made choices; they did not simply behave. They acted, and action, as Arendt says, is "to set something in motion" (177): "The new always happens against he overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty" (178).

What I do strongly believe is that there's a lot at stake in whether our polity preserves the possibility of action, not just for presidents and others at the top of the system, but for as many people as possible. Even, audaciously, for every individual person. No one before the modern age believed such a thing was possible; the Greeks and Romans never imagined that everyone, and not just a select few, could be citizens and entitled to the possibility of political action (one might say no one before 1865, or 1920, or 1965, even in the US, but I think that's wrong; the principle if not the practice was there in my view from the start). More than that: I tend to believe that preserving, or more properly creating, the opportunity for action is the best justification for democracy...even if you know that most of the time, most of us are just going to be sheep. And from that, I think you can derive federalism, separate institutions sharing powers, strong, but permeable and not hierarchical parties, a relatively weak bureaucracy, and more.

Which I guess is the final point of why I found Williamson's original article so awful, outside of botching the history: the civil rights movement is one of the great instances of people breaking out of mass behavior to really begin something anew -- and Williamson didn't see it, either within the Democratic Party or in the civil rights movement. It is absolutely critical to recognize agency and action when they happen. Without that, democracy itself is, I'd say, hard to justify.

Q Day 4: Independents, the Economy, and Elections?

Via email, Dan Rice asks:

From your writing and that of other political scientists I've absorbed two main messages about presidential elections.  1) There are few true independents; most people have a clear partisan voting record, including many who identify as "independent." 2) A dominant factor in determining the outcome of a presidential election is the state of the economy.  My question is, in a political system marked by strongly partisan voting behavior, where does the flexibility to respond to the economy come from?  Do the few "true independents" vote almost purely in the direction of the fundamentals and swing the election by themselves?  Do the partisans of the party facing bad fundamentals not show up to vote?  Is the action mostly with a large number of "weak partisans?" Something else?  All of the above?

That's a good question. I'll take a shot at it, but if anyone is lurking around here who is more expert about voters than I am, I welcome additions/corrections/better explanations.

First, the quick tour of the numbers. The rule of thumb here is that the electorate is equally split three ways between Democrats, Republicans, and those who say that they are independents, and that the latter group is split three ways between functional Democrats, functional Republicans, and real independents. I just like to repeat that formulation whenever I get a chance.

Okay, on to the question. The way to think about it, I think, is in terms of multivariate probability at the individual level. Suppose we think of a voter, and assume to begin with that she has a 50/50 chance of voting for either candidate. If she has a partisan attachment, that's going to make her far more likely to vote in the direction of her partisanship (with that number being bigger for strong partisans than for weak partisans). Then there's her evaluation of the economy and, more generally, of the in-party's record; that's also going to have a good-sized push on her vote decision. And then there's everything else: to the extent that we can separate them from party and retrospective judgement, there's her feelings about the candidates, and specific issues, and her reactions to campaign materials, and whatever else. Those things may have real, but very small, affects. Add up each of those effects, and you wind up with her vote. You can also separate out the "retrospective effect," if you like, at least conceptually -- the biggest part of it will usually be the economy, but there might be real if small bits for evaluation of  foreign policy, or allowing major US cities to drown, or whatever.

So, yeah, a lot of what's happening is going to be among true independents and weak partisans, because they're closer to 50/50 after factoring that in. And, then, it's certainly possible that turnout could play a part, too -- but generally remember that the hardest partisans are also generally going to be the ones most likely to vote.