Funny, Nate, I don’t see “leadership” anywhere in here…
I have wrestled with whether to write this post for about a month now. I am not in the election predicting business, which is a fool’s game, and this is tangential to ethics at best. On the other hand, leadership and American culture are among the subjects frequently explored here. Nate Silver’s analysis of the Presidential election on his New York Times blog has been at once fascinating and aggravating for me, though it has been a godsend to my nervous friends on the ideological left. Silver has insisted that his statistical analysis of the polls fortells an Obama victory with increasing certainty. Last I looked, his model was showing the election to be all but in the bag for the President, with, Silver calculates, an 86% chance that Romney goes down to defeat.
I don’t question Silver’s figures or formula. He’s a statistics whiz. His mistake is trying to use the tools he has used to great success on the poker table and in the world of sabermetrics to analyze the election of a President of the United States, without acknowledging or understanding the core of the process, or the culture and context in which it occurs. In many elections, most perhaps, his model would work perfectly. This time, it is going to fail. Silver won’t see his failure coming because as brilliant as he is in his chosen field, his demonstrated expertise is in economics and statistics. He really believes, apparently, that American history doesn’t matter, that what Americans think about when they choose a President is irrelevant, and that numbers purify the discussion and remove all the bias and static. He couldn’t be more wrong.
The reason is simple and straightforward, and it has nothing to do with job reports, health care or contraception policies. Americans want strong leaders, and virtually never vote for weak ones. This is why two term Presidents always get a higher percentage of the vote when they run for re-election. If they don’t, it means that they flunked their four year job probation, and the voters want to try someone else. Barack Obama is a weak leader. His supporters will deny it, to some extent because most people only sense what leadership is, and can’t define it; after all, most of us aren’t leaders. But Americans know leadership when they see it and experience it, especially Presidential leadership. They know.
This isn’t a “Vote for Romney” screed, so I’m not going to recount every instance where I think Obama has displayed his lack of leadership skills. I have expounded on some of them, but far from all, in previous posts. He came to the office with no demonstrated leadership experience, and only one outstanding leadership tool: his ability to deliver a prepared speech. A few inexperienced leaders who have moved into the White House developed impressive leadership skills over the course of their tenures—Lincoln and Truman are outstanding examples. Obama did not. Strong leaders are not heard blaming the conditions they inherited and their predecessors in office for failed policies and disappointing results; Obama has done this over the entire span of his term. Strong leaders do not stoop to personal quarrels with the media or impugn private citizens. Strong leaders do not abdicate leadership and delegate key policy initiatives to narrow agenda legislative ideologues like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Strong leaders surround themselves with competent advisors, and fire incompetent appointees like Eric Holder, no matter what color they are. Strong leaders don’t confess impotence by complaining that the other party wouldn’t cooperate; strong leaders have the persuasive skills and political ability to make them cooperate. Most of all, strong leaders do not “lead from behind.” That is a transparent euphemism for not leading at all.
In a normal scenario, the election wouldn’t be close; not with the economic mess, the gridlock on Capitol Hill, Obama’s spectacularly broken promises regarding transparency and avoiding divisiveness, and higher taxes looming. Many factors have insulated Obama from the reasonable consequences of all this. He has a large voting block that is motivated more by group loyalty than self-interest; his cynical divisiveness strategy has been partially successful as an election strategy, though it will have terrible consequences that will plague American society for years to come; the news media has distorted coverage of both the campaign and the issues to an obscene degree in order to boost the President over the goal line; and Americans are naturally reticent to admit that they made a mistake, especially when that mistake made them feel so good at the time. Most of us wanted Barack Obama to be the Jackie Robinson of Presidents, putting bigotry on the defensive by delivering a brilliant Presidency. It was always a vain hope, for unlike Robinson he had neither the training, nor the talent, nor the character to construct an iconic performance, and being President is even harder than playing second base for the Dodgers. Voting the first African-American President out of office is sad, and voters are reluctant to do it. They will, however.
They will because the American template of Presidential leadership has been forged over more than 200 years. George Washington set the standard, and it has changed very little. The President is honest, courageous,and serves at the will of the people and for their welfare, not his own desires. He is honorable and straightforward, takes responsibility for mistakes and failures and is generous with credit for success and victory. He projects power and wields it with skill, but doesn’t abuse it. And he knows how to delegate, compromise, and get others, even those who oppose him, to follow. Most of all, he leads.
The public will choose that essential quality over all others. Clinton and Nixon were dishonest; Lincoln and FDR neared dictatorship; Teddy Roosevelt and Jackson seemed unhinged; Reagan and Eisenhower infirm. Never mind: they were seen as strong leaders, and strong leaders will be re-elected unless a stronger one opposes them. That hasn’t happened very often; I could argue that it’s never happened. In 1976, one weak leader defeated another one, when Carter beat Ford. That was a freak, I think: Ford had never been elected, and after Watergate, Americans decided that it would be nice not to have a real President for a while.
All Mitt Romney had to do was project more leadership promise than Obama, and he does. If you just hate Mitt, you’ll want to argue this point. Don’t. He’s almost a stereotypical American Presidential type, and he has a record of successful executive leadership. I have no idea what he’ll be like as a national leader. The best case scenario is FDR, who was similarly non-ideological. The worst case? McKinley, I guess. Colbert King, the usually rational Washington Post columnist, actually suggested that Romney will emulate Andrew Johnson, which is pure hysteria. Andrew Johnson, born in poverty, a runaway indentured servant who didn’t learn to read until he was married, alcoholic and becoming President with no executive experience whatsoever, may be the worst single comp for the blue-blood, Harvard-educated, teetotaling Romney in the whole Presidential line. The election isn’t about Romney, anyway. It is a vote of confidence on Barack Obama’s leadership.
Silver’s analysis presumes that none of this matters, just as the fanatical stat-head swamp in the baseball analysis world that spawned him often comes to absurd conclusions about their specialty. For example, anyone who has ever played sports knows that hot streaks and slumps exist, just as clutch play is a genuine phenomenon. Sabermetrics, however (at least the last I looked), has not developed any statistical model to confirm this, and thus the field’s majority position is that it is all just an illusion. A player’s string of game-winning hits or home runs is merely the equivalent of having a coin come up heads ten times in a row. Because psychology, character, response to pressure, determination and other human factors can’t be reduced to numbers, statisticians like Nate Silver think they are meaningless.
Presidential elections are more than numbers. They are part of a continuum, a vital tradition in our democracy when Americans reaffirm what kind of nation they live in, and sometimes judge whether a President is the kind of leader who traditionally has strengthened, inspired and defined the United States for two centuries Nate Silver doesn’t know, respect or care about any of that, and as a result, he is wrong about what is going to happen on Tuesday.
I think.
I put the odds that I’m right at about 86%
[You can read some different analysis of why Silver is wrong here, and here.]
Ethics Alarms 
I’m disappointed in your analysis of why Nate Silver is wrong. And for the record, he isn’t. But we’ll all see in less than 36 hours. I think disagreeing with his analysis is fine. However, most on the right seem to think that his work is done to support Obama, and make those on the left feel good. Silver has garnered this much attention because he accurately predicted the 2008 and 2010 elections. His interest, and livelihood are tied to him being accurate. And Nate Silver has never said that Obama will absolutely win the election. He’s simply designed a model that assigns a percentage chance of each candidate winning. Your candidates chances are simply lower according to Silvers model.
You know from my previous posts that while I lean left, I always want to respectfully hear what the other side has to say. I’m attaching a conservative analysis of the polls, and what Nate Silver has to say about them. It’s smart, fair, uses math, and does so in a tone that fosters discussion and praise from all sides. Read it. http://bit.ly/TGhbnM. While your analysis was not a “Vote for Romney” Screed, it certainly reads like an “I have no respect for the President” screed. You’re entitled to this. I just wish you could have done so ( as you previously have) without linking it to Nate Silver….
You’ll note that I didn’t say his analysis was biased or slanted. I do think if he wasn’t from the Daily Kos ideological orbit, he might have thought a little bit about the leadership angle. I honestly don’t know how any objective observer can be satisfied with Obama as a leader, and I am talking purely technique, not policy. I thought Bush I was the worst I had ever seen, but Obama is arguably as bad or worse. The point is that math isn’t enough. I linked to Silver because I think it is misleading to reduce it to math. And I do think he has emboldened ultra-partisan creeps like Krugman, who wrote yesterday that it was impossible to argue that Obama wasn’t a lock. I could have used Krugman, I suppose, but even typing his name makes me sick.
My system is simpler than Silver’s , more grounded in the national culture, and works. Watch. And, and the spin is that the nation is racist, or that Romney had more money, or whatever they try, I think Occam’s Razor is the answer. He was a weak President, and they don’t get re-elected.
I have respect for President Obama as I have respect for almost all Presidents. I don’t doubt his good will, patriotism, hard work or motives. I think anyone who takes on that job is a great American by definition. I just don’t think he has the chops for the job
Longer post below, but…
1) There’s no reason for Silver to consider the leadership angle when building his model. As so far as leadership ability affects the election, it is reflected in the polling data.
2) You claim your model works. What model? Whoever you think is the better leader wins? Are you saying you have a detailed knowledge of all the challengers, and that no President has lost to a, in your opinion, better leader? Even if you do have that knowledge, is there any reason to believe that should take precedence over polling data, or are you just doing this: http://xkcd.com/1122/
3) Your second paragraph is about “who should win” not “who will win”. That’s irrelevant.
Jack: I think that was as masterful an analysis as I’ve yet heard from any number of other sources. Congratulations.
Thanks for that link, Urbanregor; that was a good post.
Is it fair to assign intent to Mr. Silver? Many of your assertions as to intent do not seem to be born out by what I have read on 538. He has covered that his numbers are not about certainty but about probability given both current polls and historical trends.
If anything I would guess that his position would be that everything you said about leadership would be inputs to the polls that he aggregates. Either the majority of Americans agree with you or not. But the polls generally only ask who you are voting for which is what Mr. Silver aggregates and analyzes.
538 covered the possibility that all of the polls this season have been innacurate in the same pro-Obama direction over the weekend. But for that we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.
Did I assign intent? I don’t think so, though all research is subject to confirmation bias.
You ignored the bigger issue brought up here, that the leadership issue is already inherent in the polls.
Intent may be the wrong word but there are many places where you assign beliefs, thoughts, etc to Mr. Silver.
“He really believes, apparently, that American history doesn’t matter…”
“…statisticians like Nate Silver think they are meaningless”
“…Nate Silver doesn’t know, respect or care about any of that…”
Without citation is it fair to Mr. Silver to do this?
Agree with urbanregor. Silver isn’t wrong, he isn’t making predictions as much as he is assessing probabilities. It would be like arguing with someone who tells you that in craps you are more likely to roll a seven than anything else. Even if you roll a five, they aren’t wrong, it was just less likely to happen than you rolling a seven. You may disagree with Silver’s probability models, but that would probably require a degree in mathematics, and doesn’t seem to be what you are disagreeing with in this post.
He’s ignoring the model because it doesn’t match his subjective opinion. Commenter zlionsfan at FootballOutsiders.com created a template for these kind of complaints about FootballOutsiders DVOA stat:
{team} is clearly ranked {too high/too low} because {reason unrelated to DVOA}. {subjective ranking system} is way better than this. {unrelated team-supporting or -denigrating comment, preferably with poor spelling and/or chat-acceptable spelling}
You realize that all the things you think Silver ignores are built in to the model, right? They’re all inherent in the polling numbers. If the election is about a lack of leadership from Obama and a lack of confidence of the electorate in him, then that will be reflected in the polls. The polls aren’t the meaning of the election, they are just representative of who people will vote for.
You’re looking at a baseball player’s height, bat speed, and stance and saying that those are more representative of what’s going to happen than the player’s batting average, on base percentage, contact percentage, home run percentage, and the like. Bat speed and stance are important to a hitter, but they are 2 of a million things that are also important. For example: Vision of the direction of the ball. Vision of the spin of the ball. Determination of the speed of the ball. Ability to automatically calculate all that information on the fly. Ability to adjust perception as more of that information becomes available. Ability to adjust to minor differences on the fly with partial information.
All of those latter things are obviously important, just like bat speed and stance, but they aren’t measurable. Whether the hitter can know to raise the bat a millimeter during their swing (and do it) can be the difference between a home run and high pop up to second. The presidential election is similar. Opinions of leadership quality are important and opinions on what people think of the incumbent are important. But there are many other interconnected things that are also important. A hitter can have a weird stance (see Youk, Stargell, and the million stances Ripken subjected me to) and still be a good hitter because they do enough of the other things well. The presidential election is similar. You may see a weak incumbent with leadership issues, but there were good talent scouts that thought Youk’s stance was unworkable. Youk’s BA, OBP, and slugging showed that he made up for his apparently bad stance elsewhere.
The hitting stats take into account both the measurable and the immeasurable. The polls do the same thing. You reject them because they don’t match what your eyes see, but your brain can’t process everything. Youk was a damn good hitter for a couple years and looked ridiculous the entire time. Should the Sox have never signed him? Should they have said, “I know his stats are great, but he doesn’t look like a hitter, so the stats are wrong”? That’s what you’re doing. Obama doesn’t look like a successful incumbent to you, so you’re denying the accurate tool that says he’s likely to win a second term.
This is a common error. Even when people know that their perceptions are worse than a given statistic in making certain predictions, they continue to trust their perceptions over that statistic. They know the statistic is better in general, but they think THIS CASE is special, no matter what the case is.
When there’s large amounts if information, we can’t trust our brains to handle it all. An automated system with an accurate track record is way better than our subjective attempts. The perceptions and situations of millions of people easily qualifies as too much information for us to handle internally.
All the evidence suggests this is going to be a close election. Do you really think you can judge that just over 50% or just under 50% of the population is going to think a certain way about Obama? I know you think a given way and that it’s obvious to you, but when you extrapolate into the 10s of millions of people, Do you really think you can judge one percent either way? Can you perform this judging separately and accurately in multiple different states?
You want this election to be about certain things, and you want it to go a certain way, but you can’t conceivably have all the variables. You just have to guess that a plurality of people in the appropriate states will agree with you. Silver’s polling data system doesn’t care what the election is about. Nor does it care who wins. It’s dispassionately looking at a known valid representation of the variables. Why should anyone (including you) trust your belief over Silver’s system? Your belief that Romney will win seems to be because you think it would be better if Romney won, and that’s not valid. The polling data actually says how many people agree with you.
Just trying to subscribe. I got SMP’s error about it not being able to activate. I actually got 2 emails notifying me, and neither link worked.
I just had that problem about the same time. Another “bump in the road” on WordPress!
I’ve also found a second error. There are 22 pending subscriptions in my wordpress queue going back to 2010 (and as recent as mid-October). If I click to confirm any of them, wordpress tells me I’m subscribed, but leaves them in the pending bucket.
This post is different, as it doesn’t show up in pending and when the email link is clicked, wordpress doesn’t even pretend it worked.
Stupid, stupid.
Christ, that was FOUR in three minutes. A record.
I do have a couple of questions for you, if you’re willing.
First, if American voters prefer strong leaders, and Obama is weak, why wouldn’t that preference already be reflected in the polls?
Second, if Obama wins re-election, will that cause you to rethink anything you say here?
Of course not. As Thomas Jefferson says in “1776,” the King is a tyrant whether we say so or not. Obama is a weak President, whether he’s re-elected of not.
And the chance of him being reelected is accurately predicted by the polls, whether he’s weak or not.
Ultimately, it depends on how representative the polls he’s looking at are of what’s going to happen tomorrow. But that’s a debate probably far from the scope of this blog.
P.S. What’s with you and Elizabeth lately?
Not true! Watch.
What is your reasoning that the polls are off? Why is the leadership issue not relfected in the polls?
The polls indicate a tie. Voting is materially different from talking about voting. For example (not proof), I voted for a candidate just now that I told a pollster I would vote against. When it came to vote, I just said, “Hell, I can’t vote for the other guy.” That’s where the weak leader factor cuts in. The GOP and other pundits are calling it “the enthusiasm factor,” but what it means is, nobody’s enthusiastic voting for a demonstrably weak leader, no matter how much they like his speeches and intentions.
By that reasoning, how would you explain the large number of incumbents that continue to get re-elected in Congress then? Or number of two-term President’s that we’ve seen over the last 30+ years. Changing the status quo requires much more than you’re acknowledging.
Krugman admitted that the polls in Ohio are tied. Note his use of the words, “Even Rasmussen…”
In 2008, Obama won Ohio with about a five point lead.
But if Obama is re-elected and he is (in your opinion) weak, why wouldn’t that cause you to rethink your belief that Americans would never re-elect a weak President? (Not to mention your belief that Silver’s methods are not applicable to Presidential elections.)
Well, you know I believe in ethics incompleteness, and that no rule works all the time. There are plenty of factors that could interfere with the normal trend, mainly that the media has effectively obscured just how weak Obama really is by fawning over him. Obama has been an exception before, you know. He’s exceptional, if nothing else.
This seems to implicitly admit that you’re NOT actually 100% certain about who will win the election, and that even if your prediction turns out to be wrong, that won’t be enough to convince you that you were mistaken.
Well, fair enough. After all, you could say the same thing about Nate Silver – no matter who wins, it doesn’t disprove his model. Honestly, in an election this close, I don’t trust anyone who can’t acknowledge that the other candidate might win.
(Although actually, I can think of things that would falsify Silver’s methods. If Romney wins in a close race, that’s within the bounds of Silver’s predictions – 16% is not a terribly unlikely occurrence. Less likely things happen every day. But if Romney wins in a blow-out, as some conservatives say they expect, that would be an enormous blow to Silver’s methods. For that matter, if there’s a huge blow-out for Obama, that would also effectively disprove Silver’s methods.)
Hey, I said 86%!
I know that there’s no such thing as a 100% certainty—hell, Bush became President because some Democratic volunteer couldn’t set up a coherent ballot.
I didn’t say this in the post, because it was irrelevant, but yes, I think Romney will win big–4 or more points, and over 300 electoral votes.
So, whoever is the better leader wins, and Romney is the better leader, so he will win, screw the polls.
Wait, the media might have whitewashed who’s a good leader, so the populace might not realize what’s right and vote for Obama anyway.
So, you’re left with, well, no reason to disagree with the polls.
I didn’t say Romney was a better leader. I didn’t say that at all. We have no idea if he’ll be a better leader, just as when I fire a house painter, I don’t have any guarantees that the next one will be better. The last one was inadequate, and absent conclusive evidence that the replacement WON’T be better (see: John Kerry), I’m firing him and hoping for the best.
Jack, you’re setting yourself up here to eat a whole flock of crows. This election could be another Dewey-Defeats-Truman – or a Chicago miracle sequel to JFK vs. Nixon. (God forbid it to be another 2000.)
Consequentialism. There are never any certainties, but the point about leadership stands and is 100% valid, no matter what happens. I considered waiting until after the eletion, but that struck me as cowardly. Nate has had the guts to put his analysis out there, and he’s a lot meore exposed than I am. For one thing, nobody pays ME to be a genius.
What was your point about leadership? That who you see as the better leader is always reelected? That Obama is not a good leader? The first would be obviously false and the latter standing still means your argument is kaput.
Which Presidents were strong and weak are hardly difficult to determine. There is pretty clear consensus on Adams I and 2, Van Buren, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Johnson, B. Harrison, Taft, Hoover, Ford, Carter, Bush I. You dispute any of those? Obama joins the list. Easy call. If he weren’t the first black President and people weren’t in denial, we wouldn’t be having the conversation. Weak leaders lose. Why is that so hard to accept? Nate wasted a lot of time and ink: I knew Obama was toast in July. You haven’t heard the usual blather from Doris Kearns and the other liberal historians this round, Can you guess why? They know.
As noted above, you’re being the scout who said that Youkilis can’t hit because his batting stance is idiotic.
Well, he can’t hit NOW. It just took a while to kick in…
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To be clear, would I say that Obama would be regrared as a stronger leader and have a better shot at re-election if he said, “I misread how bad things were,and some of the fixes we tried didn’t work, even made things worse. Well, I’m going to try something else, then., That’s my job, and you should hold me accountable..” Yes. Do I think he would have been seen as stronger leader if he kept calling in GOP leaders to meet in the White House, rather than just going around them? Yes. Do I think if he had fired Holder, and the heads of Energy and Homeland Security, and personally become involved in the work of the Super-Committee, he would have had a better chance? Yes, much better.
Meanwhile, I just this second heard a CNN second-stringer (but clrearly a product of their Soledad O’Brien factory) actually ask a Republican Congresswoman if she thought any Republicans were giving up! GIVING UP! If you don’t think the foundation of that idiotic question is rooted in 538.com, let me send you a prospectus for Florida swamp land.,
I’m off to do a leadership seminar (!) and then will be red-eying it back to Virginia to vote, so if you don’t hear from me, don’t take it personally..
What did Obama try that made things worse? You want him to admit to nonexistent bad behavior to show that he’s a leader? I don’t get it. He has pointed out where’s he made mistakes… mostly in trusting the republicans to care about the U.S. more than getting what they want (see debt deal and downgrading of the U.S. credit rating). He took up much more blame then he deserved there, and all it got him was a “they both screwed up” meme.
—
Also, that commentary is silly doesn’t mean the stats are wrong. A 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 chance isn’t good, but the Molina brothers still bat, and the election is much more important that 3 at-bats a game. No one blames the guy that figured out that particular Molina’s batting average when they say it’s unlikely he’s going to get a hit. They don’t say the statistician doesn’t care about leadership, doesn’t think baseball history matters, and doesn’t respect the tradition of the game. The Molina is unlikely to get a hit. The proper response is to hope this is the 1 in 5 chance and tell your doomsayer friend that we have to have hope. Pretending that the chance is 4 in 5 because Molina is a leader, the team he plays for and this situation have historical significance, and this closer with a .7 WHIP is a clubhouse cancer jackoff? That probably happens, but is clearly insane.
Stupid, stupid.
Three minute rule!
His ineffective, pork laden, interest-group pay-off “stimulous bill” made things worse, obviously, by spending money in the wrong places and adding to the debt without getting even barely sufficient results. The health care bill squandered a chance for real health care reform without dealing with rising costs at all, and undermined the democratic process. Obama’s divisive rhetoric and policies made public discourse worse, race relations worse,tax reform more difficult and created incentive for illegal immigrants. His inability to establish a long term tax and regulatory policy impeded economic expansion. His acceptance of an incompetent and politicized attorney general got people killed. And so on, ad infinitum.
The Republican intransigence excuse is just that. Effective Presidents don’t make that excuse, because they get their hands dirty. But I would say the same about the Republican equivalent, and in fact did. I would say, “it’s the weakness, stupid,” but I don’t want to get Elizabeth going.
His ineffective, pork laden, interest-group pay-off “stimulous bill” made things worse, obviously, by spending money in the wrong places and adding to the debt without getting even barely sufficient results.
Pretty much every economist says the stimulous worked, and that that it had a benefit of roughly $2 for every dollar spent on projects, whether they are interest group pay offs and pork laden or not is irrelevant to whether they worked.
Also, what would you suggest would be sufficient results?
The health care bill squandered a chance for real health care reform without dealing with rising costs at all, and undermined the democratic process.
Yea, the bill got rid of the chance of single payer, but it does deal with rising costs and it didn’t undermine the democratic process.
Obama’s divisive rhetoric and policies made public discourse worse, race relations worse,tax reform more difficult and created incentive for illegal immigrants.
Now you’re just being partisan.
His inability to establish a long term tax and regulatory policy impeded economic expansion.
I don’t see that this is something that Obama did.
His acceptance of an incompetent and politicized attorney general got people killed.
Granted. There’s 1, Though I don’t recall you saying that Bush should have apologized for his incompetent and politicized attorney general. While true, this is special pleading.
The Republican intransigence excuse is just that. Effective Presidents don’t make that excuse, because they get their hands dirty. But I would say the same about the Republican equivalent, and in fact did. I would say, “it’s the weakness, stupid,” but I don’t want to get Elizabeth going.
When you pretend externalities don’t exist, you end up with stupid results. You’re doing it again here.
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I assume from the lack of response to the latter part that you either agree or realize you can’t respond.
My post was not about what should happen, but about would would happen. I know you inexplicably regard an ineffective, incompetent President as a good one. I’m not going to try to change that. You misrepresent the position of economists on the “porculous”, and frankly, I don’t care what they say—the supposed counting of “jobs saved” was so dishonest and corrupt that they are basing their opinions on warped data.. I is not partisan in any way to call the “war on women” tactic, the race-based initiatives, the misrepresentations of the Arizona illegal immigration law and “he’s not one of us” divisive. It is fair and diagnostic.
As for the last part of your previous post, maybe it was jetlag or the lateness of the hour, but I honestly couldn’t follow it. I’ll try again when my head clears…I’ve been up for 36 hours.
“You misrepresent the position of economists on the “porculous”…”
This simply isn’t true. A panel of 40 leading economists deliberately chosen to be ideologically diverse (rather than left- or right-leaning) found that 80% thought the stimulus reduced unemployment, and virtually none thought it was harmful. Thirteen of fifteen peer-reviewed academic studies found that the stimulus reduced unemployment significantly. An entire series of CBO studies found the same thing.
Or if you don’t want to read a bunch of wordy essays, just go here and look at the graphs.
Smearing the experts as dishonest and corrupt is a rationalization for ignoring evidence. If you can only defend your views by alleging that everyone who disagrees with you is either ignorant, irrational or dishonest, then probably your views are the problem, not their honesty.
(Just to let you know, I have a comment held up in moderation. Probably because the software doesn’t like how many links I included! :-p )
Found it—sorry, I’m half asleep today. I wonder who I voted for…
Forgive me the digression, but there’s no need to say “sorry” for stuff like that. It wasn’t you, it was the wordpress software. And I totally understand that wordpress software does that now and then (especially to link-heavy comments), and that it’s not a case of you being unfair or not doing a good job. No worries!
1. 80% is not “virtually all”, which was tgt’s statement. 80% sound to me like a pretty accurate guess at the percentage of left-biased Keynesians in the economic establishment. 20% is a hardy dissenting minority. And I don’t see how that 20%, if they believed that the expense didn’t create jobs, could argue that it wasn’t harmful to jack up the already too large debt in exchange for dubious benefits.
2. Bias: I do not trust economists. I appreciate their intellectual discipline, but I think the field is so unreliable as to be next to useless.
3. The counting of jobs saved, like the labor department’s calculation that one single position counted as an additional job saved at each annual review that didn’t result in termination, was intellectually indefensible and designed to deceive–and that’s just the most blatant example. One job can only be one job saved.
4. If Obama had put that amount of money and more into pure, unquestionable physical infrastructure upgrades and repair, instead of in the hands of unions, teachers mad the likes of MSNBC, I would have no beef—and the economy would be better off. Obviously. Does anyone not acknowledge this?
5. All irrelevant to the post.
1. Fair enough, on 80% versus “virtually all.” But, please, remember your critique of “virtually all” next time I object to something you say and you respond “it was just hyperbole.” :-p
Most of the remaining 20% said that the results may or may not have been beneficial. And as I said, the economists on this panel were picked for ideological balance, so I don’t think your “left-biased” rationalization holds water.
2. As usual, when evidence disagrees with conservative ideology, conservatives elect to ignore the evidence.
3. I can’t respond to your “jobs saved” claim specifically unless you make the claim more specific (for instance, with a link to the particular evidence you’re referring to, or a detailed critique of the stat you object to). That said, even if we throw out every “jobs saved” claim ever made (and I doubt we should), that still leaves us with other statistics, such as unemployment statistics, and new unemployment claims, also indicating that the stimulus worked.
4. Physical infrastructure takes a lot of time to ramp up; some of the stimulus did go for infrastructure, but it would have been bad policy not to post most of the stimulus into faster-acting measures. A huge amount of the stimulus consisted of temporary tax cuts, for instance. Although in any bill that large there are particular programs that people will object to, as a whole the stimulus bill seems both unusually corruption-free and fairly well directed towards short-and-medium-term stimulus.
That said, I’d certainly favor another stimulus bill consisting entirely of infrastructure (our unemployment problem is long-term enough to justify it, plus it makes fiscal sense to borrow for infrastructure spending while interest rates are at historic lows). But I don’t believe for a moment that Republicans would let such a bill through the House. It’s a fact of our system that any bill passed has to contain spices from a variety of cooks.
It’s a genuine bias, and in the same class with the bias against short men, ugly men, women, and people with ethnic names. (Obama broke that one—with the exception of Eisenhower, no clearly ethnic-named President had ever been elected, and nobody thought of Ike as a German, so he was a special case.) Bald is weak, non-heroic. JQ Adams had his famous name to get around it. Van Buren was annointed by Jackson, and could have been a Pet Rock for all anyone cared. McKinley was pretty bald, and again, Ike, but that bias is traditional and strong.
Regarding the last—I couldn’t agree more, and getting genuine infrastructure repair and replacement through Congress will be an acid test for Romney. If you want to grow business, it really isn’t optional. The GOP is insane, not just irresponsible, to oppose it.
Had Obama and the dems gotten their way originally, more stimulus money would have gone directly to infrastructure. In an effort to compromise, and garner republican support that never materialized, tax cuts wound up being the preferred delivery method.
Beating a dead horse – two, actually – but
a. the leadership issue is already reflected in the polling data,
b. Silver is assigning probabilities, not certainties; how are you going to argue he was right, or wrong? I see no methodological critique, and the election results will do neither.
No, it really isn’t. It will be reflected in the actual votes and the final results. People don’t go to the polls to vote for weak leaders, but they often tell polsters that they WOULD vote for them. You don’t need a “method” to predict this one. Presidents like Obama never get re-elected. It’s history and culture, not math.
So the polls overestimate the performance of people you think are weak leaders? Do you have any numbers to back this up?
That would still be math.
I didn’t say anything like that. I said that the public rejects weak leaders. I’m not making judgments about polls. They are predictive, and predictions often fail.
Here’s why Silver might be wrong. Might — we’ll see tomorrow. It’s not his model. It’s the info being fed into the model. The most sophisticated model in the world will spew forth nonsense if a decimal point is out of place. Anyone following the discussions these days knows all about the supposedly exaggerated D turnout that many polls are coming up with. Critics rightly point out that this just doesn’t mesh with what we think we know about the current state of the electorate: a less enthusiastic Democratic base, a MUCH more energized GOP base, a much improved GOP GOTV organization, and a generally accepted swing in party ID that has brought Ds and Rs about even nationally, give or take a point or two. Early voting numbers, what little is available, seem to be validating this view. Meanwhile, yet another poll like today’s that shows them in a dead heat with a D+11 sample rightly raises some legitimate questions about sampling. D+11?! Come on!
Yes, the polls are what they are (I don’t think anyone is fudging on purpose), but that doesn’t make them right. It’s foolish to just say, “Well, shucks, I guess all that political wisdom is just plain wrong, since the polls say otherwise, and how they heck could they be wrong?”
Well, there are several ways, actually. The likely voter screens are often not what they should be, especially with state polls that are conducted for media outlets on a budget. We know that the tighter the likely voter screens, the better the numbers go for Romney, generally speaking. And a more extensive set of screening questions costs more money. That’s one issue. There’s another issue of landlines vs cell phones, and another in the fact that only a TINY percentage of people will respond to polls anymore. All pollsters are grappling with what this means for results, and there is not clear answer as yet.
I doubt these factors alter the polls very much, but they don’t have to. If they cause the numbers to skew just a point or two away from Romney, then Silver’s model can be wrong. But, you say, the polls can’t ALL be wrong, can they? No, but nobody’s saying they’re ALL wrong. Only few of them have to be wrong, and then the polling averages would say a very different thing.
Silver, who made his name with a 49 out of 50 prediction in 2008, impresses his readers too easily. You could count on one hand the number of states that were truly in question in 2008. If you threw out all the non-competitive states and flipped a coin on the rest, you could have easily gotten 45-47 states right in 2008. (Just as the RCP avg isn’t much better than a coin toss when the race is closer than 3 percent.) Meanwhile, the polls that the Left routinely discounts, Gallup and Rasmussen, are respectable outfits. They have had their misses, but so have all pollsters. And they have also made some very good calls.
We will see who’s right tomorrow. Seeing how so many polls are coalescing around the 49-49 mark today, I think it’s a nail biter.
To all those who offer the “they all can’t be wrong, can they?” argument, I offer this: They all can’t be right, either. It remains to be seen who is and who isn’t. Meanwhile, Silver and his defenders offer this nonsense about not predicting a win, only the probability of a win. True, but what you’re saying is, he can’t be wrong no matter what happens. Big Whoop.
Early voting has been overwhelmingly Democrat this year than any previous one. When I got to your misinformation about such, I stopped. It’s like you’re reading redstate’s silly comments about % of early votes by county, which makes a generalization error.
Wait, I read your last couple sentences. They’re stupid as well. You’re taking a tautology and making it into a negative. The big whoop is in the information in the model, not individual cases.
Garbage in, Garbage out or Good in, Good out– there’s the rub. All of Silver’s probabilities hang on how accurately the polls he chooses to use weighted the electorate. Unless he uses only polls which are a poll of every person who will actually vote then they are weighted/skewed wrongly or rightly. And even then, you are assuming that people honestly told you who they were voting for (see Bradley effect) and that they WILL actually vote.
The polls have been accurate in the past. Is there any reason to believe they aren’t accurate now?
What if I said smart smart several times? Would that cancel out Elizabeth I?
You have nailed Obama’s failure and I’ve also often lamented that Obama couldn’t be the Jackie Robinson of presidents. Obama’s presidency’s a profound and deep failure in leadership and the consequences will be felt for a long time. Not what I wanted to see, but there you have it, and no amount of wishing it otherwise will change it.
Your analysis of the possible outcomes today is plausible, though I’m more likely to agree with tgt et. al. who say that many of your arguments are included within the poll numbers. What makes your argument most plausible is the results from the WI special election where Gov. Walker was not recalled. Polls has that election being tied, but in the end it was a blowout in Gov. Walker’s favor.
I will take issue with your continued statements about every President facing roadblocks from the other party. As I mentioned before, no President has seen the number of filibusters as President Obama. This doesn’t even mention the number of bills that were never made it past committee because McConnell said, “Nope” even before the ink was dry. Even when Democrats had control of the house McConnell had the filibuster at the ready and used it with near record frequency. The obstruction of this President has been unprecedented by every measure and he STILL got things done.
Regarding the President’s leadership. President Obama’s leadership may look a little different but it’s still leadership none the less. He has gotten legislation through Congress, he’s shown leadership on the international stage, he’s navigated us out of one deepest recessions our country has experienced. If it weren’t for the Republican intransigence we would have seen a MUCH faster recovery on the job and economy front.
“But he’s not leading from the front, which means he’s not leading.” I will argue he’s had to lead a different way. He’s had lead in a way that minimizes direct conflict but still gets things done. He’s told Congress on many occasions, “Here are my parameters, the details are yours to negotiate” He was not the dictatorial, my way or the highway type leader President Bush (Bush II) was because he couldn’t be. To a great many people in this country, white men are “driven, accomplished, great leaders”, women with the same traits and accomplishments are, “pushy or bitchy”, and african-americans are “uppity.”
Here. Here. I continue to believe in the numbers. Silver simply filters tons of polls through his model and assigns a probability. The specifics of Obama’s leadership, obstacles, etc, are accounted for. I look at them as separate discussions though. This will all look a lot clearer in less than 12 hours!
Great post, and much needed. Thank you.
Although I agree with much of what you say, there is one critical point where you go astray, in my opinion. You describe the leader we need like this…
“The President is honest, courageous,and serves at the will of the people and for their welfare, not his own desires. He is honorable and straightforward, takes responsibility for mistakes and failures and is generous with credit for success and victory. He projects power and wields it with skill, but doesn’t abuse it. And he knows how to delegate, compromise, and get others, even those who oppose him, to follow. Most of all, he leads.”
All true, and whether President Obama meets this standard is, indeed, a debatable point. On the other hand, Governor Romney is clearly NOT this person. In this regard, he is, perhaps, more like Clinton, or worse, given his unbridled capacity to flip-flop. Governor Romney fails on every point of your standard; this is the established record. This is probably why the election is so close. A strong case can be made that, if elected, Governor Romney will make things much, much worse. Unfortunately, Americans are at a disadvantage here, because both candidates chose a strategy, early on, not to focus on the issues important to the country, but to run as simply “not the other guy.”
It’s really not about Nate Silver. He’s made a useful contribution, but the real questions we need to answer are… Why do we vote the way we do? What prevents so many of us from voting at all? Why don’t we have better candidates? Will things change if we get the money out of elections, and replace career politics with term limits for Congress? Why, in 35 years since the law was passed requiring Congress to pass a budget by Oct 1 each year, have they done so only 3 times?
No matter who wins the election today, these questions remain.
I think your assessment of Romney’s character and motives is almost certainly wrong, and more the product of the Obama campaign’s cartoonish portrayal of him. I say that as someone who has been very leery of Romney from the start, and have even compared him to John Edwards, as presenting a completely false facade. It doesn’t matter, however. The point is that Obama had proven what kind of leader he is as President, and Romney has not. The job is more like being Governor than being Senator, but it is really sui generis. The vote is about whether the current President is good enough, and a Presidential candidate who hold promise of being better—I think Romney does that simply by 1) existing and 2) not being an ideologue—will get a chance to surprise us, as many have, FDR being the best example of that.
Potential fallacy.
I love how you’ve made Romney’s lack of positions into a benefit and called Obama an idealogue when he’s slightly left of center.
The President doesn’t need an ideology; the country already has one. “If there’s a problem, I’ll do whatever is necessary to fix it, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll try something else.” is not only a position, but responsible and trustworthy one. It’s the “I’ll try something else” that ideologues like Obama have trouble with, and it can be crippling. He is only “slightly left of center” to those who are already well left of center. Talk about fallacies!
I wonder if he will claim a mandate, even though this election is far closer than 2008, and even if he only wins by a one-state margin with less than a two point lead in that state.
Of course, I doubt the media would call him in on it if he did that.
“he’s slightly left of center” come on now tgt you have to be kidding!
Say what you will about Nate Silver, but he’s a bona fide star. A bankable one at that. http://bit.ly/RSiyLV
1) So was Manny Ramirez.
2) So was Jean Dixon.
3) We’ll see how much the star is tarnished when his prognostication flames out.
I considered making this a separate post, but decided that Nate Silver isn’t worth it.
Silver raised the odds on an Obama victory to 95% today, proving to me, and I hope to his bosses at the Times, that he’s not a serious analyst, but a canny,publicity-seeking gambler. With the polls showing either a dead heat or Romney slightly ahead, with turnout unknown and with some other people who are not THAT much inferior to Silver in gray matter citing valid reasons why they think Romney will prevail, his latest gambit shows that he is simply gambling, going “all in” to reap maximum benefits, sheen and rep as a “genius” should Obama win. If he loses, I think Silver deserves to end up playing kids for pennies in the street, like Steve McQueen at the end of “The Cincinnati Kid.” The Times saw a glimpse of this side of Silver when he responded to Joe Scarborough’s criticism by offering to bet him $10,000 that Obama would win (The Times reprimanded Silver.). Silver’s smart, but at heart he’s a hustler, and I think he’s going down hard—tonight, in fact..
Can you provide a link? His 538 Blog maintains the same % chance of winning that was posted yesterday after the last poll came in. 90.9% not 95%.
Jack, can you see the tree trunk from where you are on the limb? Sure the national polls show a dead heat but that’s not how we elect a President. And especially not what Silver and others choose to analyze when building their probability models.
Jack,
Of course it’s inconceivable that Silver would be right, but humor me – in the remote case that Obama gets elected, as per Silver’s analysis, what would you consider that to imply about your argument?
Honest question – I really am not clear what you’re saying. Is it that Romney will win? That Silver’s methodology is way off?
And what do you think the results will prove? Since we’re dealing in probabilities, one result or another won’t really be dispositive, will it?
What’s your basic point?
How would we test Silver’s analysis? Regardless of the actual result, we can not exactly peer across the multiverse.
The fact is, though, that polls show the race tied in places where it was a near tie four years ago. It is going to be closer than it was in 2008.
I’m only saying that stats divorced from the culture and history of the nation and process they refer to isn’t a valid analysis process. Elections aren’t baseball stats. Of course Silver’s bet can pay off, but all it is is a bet, and his arrogance is breathtaking. He may luck out because enough Americans saw the canned Obama performance with Sandy as Presidential, and since that was recent, it dropped the leadership flag. I hadn’t considered that, because, frankly, it’s idiotic, but I’m hearing the argument raised tonight, and it makes sense.TYhere is precedent for such things. Symbols sometimes cancel out reality, and in a close race, that can be decisive.
If Obama wins, its because the majority of the public thinks he isn’t a weak leader. I’ll credit the press for that, as well as phony leadership creds like the death of Osama. And of course if Romney wins the popular vote, I was right. If Silver’s bet pays off due to a fluke like an electoral-popular vote split after a freak storm, nobody should be impressed.
How does the press get credit?
Kidding, right? The contrast between coverage of Staten Island’s disaster and New Orleans, the press-assisted cover-up on Benghazi, the shrugging off of Fast and Furious, on and on and on. If Bush flew off to a fundraiser after an ambassador had been killed, he would have been crucified.
How different the world would be if we had an honest nationwide broadcast and print network media.
So, did Silver “luck out,” as you suggested?
What do you make of his rather impressive, as in 50-for-50, results?
He explained it.
“If Obama wins, its because the majority of the public thinks he isn’t a weak leader. I’ll credit the press for that, as well as phony leadership creds like the death of Osama.”
“The contrast between coverage of Staten Island’s disaster and New Orleans, the press-assisted cover-up on Benghazi, the shrugging off of Fast and Furious, on and on and on. If Bush flew off to a fundraiser after an ambassador had been killed, he would have been crucified.”
Look here
The pattern is clear- Obama was doing worse in the polls in the final stretch than he did in 2008. No way he is going to carry any of the swing states by double digits, which happened in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan four years ago.
How ya like him now? Spot on projection is no fluke. http://bit.ly/RTZT2k I don’t intend to change your thoughts on Obama. But i really hope you acknowledge that Nate Silver is the real deal, and change your thoughts on him. It should never have been about him. Do the right thing Jack. Be as gracious as Romney was and congratulate Nate on a an award winning performance. He deserves it….
I absolute do not think he’s the real deal. He is a gambler, that’s all. He pushed all his chips on a calculated risk, and lucked out. He is exactly like a guy watching a baseball game with his team ahead (or behind) by one run or toed, who says, “we’re going to win.” And he gives all his reasons and bets you 10 bucks that he’s right. But the fact is that a million things can happen and do. Nate Silver didn’t know about Sandy. He couldn’t know whether the white vote would break for Romney 72.5%, which wasn’t enough, or 74%, which would have won it for him, or that enough Millenials would turn out to vote for the right to be sexually irresponsible. He certaainly couldn’t know that Obama would become the only President ever to be re-elected with less support than he was elected with.
He’s a talented statistician and a gutsy gambler, and I’ll give him credit for that. The fact that he lucked out, however, doesn’t change my analysis, any more than if Romney had pulled it out, I would have been “proven” right. I’m not going to get into post mortems. If I had to pick one factor that distorted the results, I’d say it was the left-biased media suppressing and manipulating news and criticism to bolster the illusion that Obama wasn’t as ineffective a leader as he is. But there were a thousand factors.
I’ll also say this: I’d rather see a clean victory of an inferior candidate than another brokered, disputed election with a popular=electoral vote split. I’m relieved that Obama has a clean win, especially seeing Florida knotted up again. We ducked a bullet there.
…or that enough Millenials would turn out to vote for the right to be sexually irresponsible.
Hey Jack, did you know some people younger than thirty do in fact read your site? As one of them, this comment is personally insulting to me.
At what point did you lose the ability to disagree with other opinions without impugning the character of the people who hold them?
I didn’t say all Millennials voted on that basis, Ed. You can read better than that: I know it for a fact. But anyone who voted for a President based on a belief that abortion on demand was the most important issue in the election—and the Democratic Party was actively encouraging such conduct—is irresponsible. And there were a lot of such voters. I have a 18 year-old son, and I suspect he was one of them. “or that enough Millenials would turn out to vote for the right to be sexually irresponsible” means what it says. It doesn’t apply to any Millennials who voted based on legitimate issues effecting their nation, rather than the expense of a damn condom.
Both abortion and birth control (which can cost a heck of a lot more than a condom) are legitimate issues. When it comes to abortion rights, it’s entirely rational to believe that abortion rights could hinge on who is nominating Supreme Court justices in the next four years.
An issue doesn’t have to be important to you, for it to be an issue with legitimate importance to voters other than you.
Also, there is no more effective way of reducing both abortion and teenage motherhood (with all its associated social problems) than making more expensive and effective birth control (like IUDs) available for free. Any step in that direction will, in the long term, reduce welfare costs, reduce crime, and improve many people’s lives. You may not consider that a legitimate issue, but I think voters can logically disagree with you.
Better than what? The problem here is not that I misread your comment, it’s your cocksure certainty that your demonstrations of vituperative bias aren’t biased at all. It’s possible to unfairly stereotype a group of people while believing that there are exceptions to the stereotype. People do it all the time. I didn’t think you were saying that all Millennials are incapable of making informed decisions. In fact, I knew you’d regard me as an exception. But I’m not interested in being the age-discrimination equivalent of a racist’s good black friend. You were definitely intimating something needlessly insulting about young(ish) people. I’ve been close to people of all ages throughout my life, and I’m pretty confident that young people who are concerned with reproductive rights are no more selfish on the whole than middle aged people who are concerned with low tax rates, or just about any other category of voter in the country.
But wanting lower tax rates doesn’t require insisting that you have a right to end a helpless life for your convenience, Ed. Sorry. I don’t respect that position, and I don’t respect the position that contraception should be anything but a matter of personal expense and responsibility. If a Millennial holds that position, a deem it irresponsible. If he or she doesn’t then it doesn’t apply. There is no definition of bigotry or bias that fits that assertion. Meanwhile, your logic, if I say, ” thirty-year olds who don’t pay child support disgust me,” I am expressing a bias against 30-year-olds.
If someone holds the position that abortion is the “ending of a helpless life,” but also holds the position that we should never provide free contraception even though it is proven to reduce the abortion rate, I deem that person irresponsible.
I’m sorry, Chris, I regard that as fatuous argument. If people want to have sex, they can protect themselves. It’s not my job to do it. I don’t even know where such a bizarre idea came from.
Yes, Jack, if you say that, then you probably are expressing bias against thirty year-olds. You’re implying that thirty year-olds are somehow more likely to not pay child support. Otherwise, why would you choose that phrasing? Why wouldn’t you simply say, “People who don’t pay child support disgust me”?
For my part, when I find myself aggravated by people using absurd straw men in an attempt to prove the righteousness of their politics, I don’t presuppose any particular characteristics in the person doing it. I just want him to stop.
Wanting lower tax rates doesn’t require insisting that you have a right to end a helpless life for your convenience. Indeed! And guess what? Neither does being pro-choice! Nobody’s asking you to respect that barely-existent position. I’m just asking you to show some common decency and respect to people who don’t share your views. Look, I know that there are people who think nothing of having an abortion and are happy to use it as a form of birth control. I also happen to think that these people are exceptionally rare, and that your average pro-choice voter, be they twenty or sixty, has a rather more nuanced and less villainous perspective on the issue than, “I feel like I should be able to murder whatever I want if it suits my whims.” This may be difficult for you to believe, but there are young, pro-choice individuals who believe that reproductive care is an element of health care, and who are also in monogamous relationships! There are even some who are celibate!
Is it really difficult for you to believe that people who don’t share your politics are not in fact demons in human form unleashed upon the Earth to destroy the greatest country on Earth, overturn the virtue of personal responsibility, and normalize vice and lack of ethics? Because that’s the impression you give, Jack.
You think Millennials hold irresponsible positions? Fine. But where the hell do you get off suggesting that the only reason they could hold those positions is because hedonism is the order of the day and they feel like doing a whole lot of consequence-free screwin’?
How about instead of focusing so much on what imaginary positions you do and do not respect, you simply point out that you don’t agree with certain policy perspectives, and you leave it up to your political opponents to explain why they believe what they do, instead of presuming to answer that question for them in the most disrespectful ways imaginable? That would be plenty helpful in raising the currently abysmal state of political dialogue in this country. As it is, you’re making things worse. This isn’t ethical behavior, Jack.
“Is it really difficult for you to believe that people who don’t share your politics are not in fact demons in human form unleashed upon the Earth to destroy the greatest country on Earth, overturn the virtue of personal responsibility, and normalize vice and lack of ethics? Because that’s the impression you give, Jack.” My response to this, Ed? Bullshit. Nothing I have written justifies that statement. Your whole argument is a tantrum, and I have no idea what caused it.
What does my opinion about policy issues have to do with politics? I have opinions, usually informed. There is some conduct that I do not acknowledge as legitimate or respectable. That isn’t politics, though some may choose to make it the object of politics. There is not a thing unfair about declaring conduct wrongful, or noting a group in which some or many or all members engage in such conduct. You seem to be having a fit over the grammatical choice to single out one segment of a group that engages in conduct I think is wrongful rather than making a more general statement. Well, that’s rhetorical choice—I’m sorry it doesn’t please you. But it doesn’t come close to carrying the weight you’re ascribing to it.
What caused it was your constant insistence upon making the grand leap from perceiving someone as having the wrong beliefs to claiming special insight into the character of the people holding those beliefs. I think I made that clear. It’s an absolutely poisonous tendency.
No, there is not a thing unfair about declaring conduct wrongful. But there is something enormously wrong about embracing the sort of confirmation bias that lets you regard a person’s contrary stance on policy issues as proof positive of their unethical character.
Again, that skips a big truth: certain policy beliefs do indicate character, just as conduct indicates character. The argument, which I have seen here before but wouldn’t expect from you, is that, hey, I believe this irresponsible conduct is great because it benefits me, and I don’t really give a damn how it will work out for society or anybody else, and in my view it’s good because my definition of good is that whatever benefits me is good, and how dare you accuse me of being irresponsible? Well, I reject that, and always have, just as I reject the disingenuous ‘hate the sin, but never the sinner’ line, and ethical relativism generally. I have never voted for an elected official based solely on how his or her positions will benefit me—my duty is to choose whose leadership will benefit the country. I will be clear: basing a Presidential vote on wanting free contraception that I have to pay for is no more excusable than basing their vote on getting free Gummibears. And more Millenials did that than any other group. If they think that’s responsible voting or good citizenship (those who did), they are wrong, and somebody should tell them. Clear?
NO, Jack, that isn’t the argument. And you’re right to not expect it from me because it’s damn sure not the one I’m making. That’s the way you construe your opponents policy beliefs, not because there’s any actually evidence that they’re concerned only with themselves, but because such construal benefits you by making your position seem like the only responsible or ethical one.
Let me emphasize something that Barry said above, because it’s not clear that you read it:
You may not agree with that position, but it is in fact a position that people hold, which is more nuanced than, “I personally wanna screw a whole bunch of people, free of worry, cost, or shame.” And your perception that that latter idea is what’s on the mind of a significant number of Millennials when they go to the polls simply doesn’t comport with anything I’ve witnessed about my fellow citizens. Honestly, I have remarkably little respect for many of them, and yet I can only regard your characterization as utterly cartoonish. Very, very few people are quite that ignorant and psychopathic.
Again, I know that its easier to comprehend the world if you assume that the only reason somebody could disagree with you is because they’re evil and selfish, but a belief being comforting to you doesn’t make that belief correct. Your demonization of your political opponents is socially irresponsible because it damages our national dialogue; it is irrational, and it is unethical.
Clear?
No. Because I didn’t say it wasn’t a legitimate issue. I said it was illegitimate and irresponsible to make it the only issue. Just as making prayer in the schools, or gun control, or flag-burning, or Big Bird or more money for teachers or yes, gay marriage THE only issue because it dovetails with a personal interest. Any of these things could be resolved to a given citizen’s desires and it wouldn’t do a thing to solve the fundamental crises facing the nation. Citizenship requires recognition and respect for the needs of others, and an over-arching recognition that the welfare of teh nation as a whole trumps single issues and interests. When Abraham Lincoln said that he would make the nation either all slave or all free to preserve the country, he was articulating this principle in its most extreme form. For decades, Mayor Dailey (Sr.) won elections because he sent poor people a ham (on the city’s tab). Do I think a voter who votes for a corrupt official just because it’s worth a ham is irresponsible and displays poor citizenship? Absolutely.
Yes. Everything that you just said is perfectly reasonable, and I am in complete agreement, as I have always been frustrated with people who vote on the basis of any single issue.
Yet my objection remains. Can you cite any actual evidence that large numbers of young people voted for President Obama solely on the basis of the contraceptive care issue? And if so, can you also prove that they voted for that single issue on the basis of personal interest alone, and not “recognition and respect for the needs of others” who are affected by the same issue?
He didn’t know how the white vote would break, but he did use a vast amount of data that was built on asking an enormous sample of Americans (many of whom would have been white) if and how they intended to vote. That same database was also built on asking an enormous sample of millennials about their voting plans, and included a large number of voters who were surveyed after Sandy hit. And it turns out that the polls were pretty accurate predictors of the vote.
I don’t think the objective evidence that exists supports the idea that the media was enormously biased in Obama’s favor.
My guess is that the failure of Romney to persuade voters that his economic and war policies would greatly differ from Bush’s, hurt Romney. It also appears that Obama’s ground game was probably stronger.
But mainly, Obama won because it turns out that his coalition of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, LGBs, college-educated whites, and single women voters is a little bit larger than Romney’s coalition of straight white men and married white women voters.
Here
Jack had previously chronicled the bias in the media.
And if Obama, until the age of 31, had belonged to a Church that said that white people, due to their race, could never be in leadership positions, how much coverage do you think that would have gotten? I think it would have been mentioned thousands of times in the MSM, until Obama would have been forced to make a major speech addressing the matter. (As happened when the Rev. Wright story broke in the media). Yet Romney’s choice to stay with an explicitly racist Church until age 31 got only one mention in the MSM, that I know of, presumably because the media was afraid of seeming to have an anti-Morman bias.
Both candidates got mostly negative coverage (consider the torrent of negative coverage Obama received for a solid ten days after the Denver debate – probably the worst debate coverage any candidate for President except Al Gore has ever received – which Jack argued was an example of pro-Obama bias, even though Jack didn’t think Obama debated that badly). Both candidates were frequently corrected by the fact-checkers, and both sides were certain that the fact-checkers were being unfair to their side. And as usual, the candidate who the polls showed was going to lose (in this case Romney) benefited a lot from pundits, whose livelihood depends on the race seeming exciting, insisting that it was neck-and-neck. (Romney could have won in a longshot, but it was not neck and neck.)
FEMA’s response to Katrina and Sandy weren’t at all the same, and expecting them to get the same coverage is an example of Jack’s bias, not the media’s.
I’m not arguing that there was an overall pro-Romney bias. I am arguing that what you and Jack describe as a simple case of universal pro-Obama bias, is in fact a complex system with thousands and thousands of individual stories, some of which broke Romney’s way and some of which broke Obama’s way.
Come on Jack. He’s more than a talented stats guy, and the fact that you, I suspect, honestly feel that he lucked out tells me that you’re not ready to take an honest look at what the election says about the republican party. Perhaps you just need a little more time to absorb all this. But blaming the outcome on irresponsible millenials, is failing to recognize that demographic shifts, bad policy as it relates to women, and economic policies that, while they might play a role in compromise, cannot currently lead are what brought you down. “The whole “Sandy altered the race because Chris Christie hung out with Obama” notion is just one more casualty in this year’s war between “pundit narrative nonsense” and “quantifiable political science,” won decisively by the scientists.” (re-quoted) Face it, Nate Silver kicked ass, and it wasn’t even the first time. When the people and the polling catch up to republican ideology, you’ll know because he’ll tell you….
urbanregor, The humorous aspect to this is that the Republicans weren’t bastardizing Silver’s name in 2010 when he predicted a net gain of 54 seats for the GOP in the House (actual was 63). That same election he correctly predicted 34/36 Senate seats and 36/37 gubernatorial races. It says a lot about Republicans when they’re focusing energies on pointing fingers and assigning blame rather than serious introspection. Castigating Silver as some statistical shaman only pushes them further backwards out of touch with reality.
Gregory, I seriously doubt that republicans knew his name in 2010. And it’s much harder to predict house and senate races because of less polling information. In my mind, he’s proven himself to be credible. I was worried a little when he linked up with the NY Times, but they’re obviously allowing him to do his thing unhindered.
To your broader point, I think it hurts us all when one side fails to acknowledge that the messenger is not the issue, and at least consider altering the message…..
First of all, the Republicans aren’t “me.” Second, a close election like this can turn on lots of random factors, and this one did. It is comforting to attribute the victory to the essential righteousness of the cause, but that is the purest confirmation bias. If true, the GOP majority in Congress would not have been confirmed virtually intact: the 2010 tea party onslaught would have been reversed. That is what has happened in the past, as in the 1976 elections. If true, the GOP wouldn’t have gotten to 30 state Governorships, a record.
I think the Obama campaign was the most dishonest and shameless I have observed since Nixon—from “he’s not one of us” to the Joe Soptic “Romney killed my wife” to Harry Reid calling Romney a tax cheat to the mind-boggling lie that this administration didn’t really increase the debt to the calumny that Romney wanted to take away a woman’s right to contraception. I gave voters more credit than they lived up to: I thought more of them would be repelled. Polls showed that 50% believed the mantra that the economic problems were all attributable to Bush, when the roots of the housing collapse were firmly entrenched in the Democratic Congresses and the Clinton Administration as well. I found the cynical and dangerous strategy of pitting young against old, single women against married women, Catholics against non-religious, gays against Evangelicals, black against white, Hispanics against Anglos shocking and sad, especially coming from a “post-partisan” President. I found the degree to which the media became a full-fledged ally of the Democratic re-election campaign a genuine threat to democracy, and even worse than in 2004—and I didn’t think that was possible. Without the media intentionally downplaying Benghazi, Solyndra, Fast and Furious and more, Obama would have lost. Without lucky interference from Candy Crowley when the President was spinning the truth, he would have lost. If the President were white, he would have lost….big, I think. I don’t know that Sandy was a clincher, but it was lucky. For Sandy to have been more important than a US ambassador being massacred defies logic. No matter how I may sound, most of this doesn’t make me angry. The press bias makes me angry, however. And the successful effort to portray the reasonable, Supreme Court sanctioned requirement of ID for voting as a racist plot disgusted me, and disgusts me still. Kudos to Axelrod, as a Machiavellian, for thinking of it, and Holder was a good, if disgraceful, soldier for carrying out the plan. The deftest playing of the race card from a crew that did it better than anyone.
It’s naive to think that Silver, who is essentially a stat-savvy gambler, is intrinsically more astute than all the other pollsters and political analysts is, honestly, ridiculous. He could have been wrong, even by his own inflated odds–what would you be saying then? He took a big risk and it paid off, like similar bets have paid off for smart gamblers before. My hat’s off to him. He’ll mess up. They always do. And I find the willingness of smart people to believe that all human decisions can be reduced to numbers and algorithms, as people like Silver believe, more than alarming. It’s not true in baseball, and its not true in politics.
Confirmation bias is arguably the most dangerous bias of all. This election is a big test of that for Democrats. I don’t expect them to pass it.
Jack, do the find the numbers and algorithms…more than alarming because you don’t understand them? Seriously, Silver does not fabricate information. All he has done is create a lens with which to observe the existing polls. His lens attempts to remove historical bias and inaccuracies from the polls. It does a pretty darn good job too. I think an ethicist would welcome a neutralized analysis of a race void of pundit interpretation.
1) That’s an insult, and I don’t appreciate it. I understand the math sufficiently. My education was pretty damned good.
2) If you really think statistical analysis is immune from bias, YOU don’t understand it.
Maybe we’re confusing the term bias here. What bias do you see in Silver’s model? I think statistical analysis is free from bias. Statisticians are not. But they work hard to remove their own feelings from the equations. That’s why models are not simple. The more complicated it is, the more factors it considers, the less likely personal bias is to creep in. Perhaps some still could. But assuming that’s the case with Silver, and I absolutely deny this, his model has now repeatedly been proven correct against the actual numbers.
“And I find the willingness of smart people to believe that all human decisions can be reduced to numbers and algorithms, as people like Silver believe, more than alarming. It’s not true in baseball, and its not true in politics.” Well we’re on the same page as it relates to baseball. But politics and polling are not sport. Silver takes all emotion out of it, and studies other peoples data. His genius is in interpreting that data in a manner that has proven to be correct over and over. The results are what they are, regardless of who wins. Your continued assault on this fact is honestly getting me tired. We’ll have to simply disagree on this.
I always find it interesting how white people view racism. They barely (and I’ll apologize for generalizing, but I think you’ll understand my point) want to acknowledge that racism exists if it’s blacks accusing whites of being racist. But seem to have no problem accusing the Obama campaign of divisive politics, pitting one group against another, and the one I hate most-“playing the race card”. This is not a f’ing card game, and to call it that tells me that the issue is not being taken seriously. Words are powerful, and this language as it relates to race should be stricken from our discussions. “As for the supreme court sanctioned voter ID laws”, if you can’t see and acknowledge that this was nothing more than a giant voter suppression scheme, an ugly RACIST one at that, we should not ever discuss it again. And that would be too bad honestly….
You are really saying that either my position regarding the simple act of requiring ID to vote comports with yours, or you won’t discuss it? That’s intellectual blackmail, don’t you think? Explain this, then: I would push for such laws (we have them in Virginia, and they are flexible and reasonable, and didn’t seem to suppress the African American vote here), and I would do so for one reason only: voting is important, it involves identity, votes can be stolen, and it makes no sense, none, to accept that ID is required to cash a $5 check or to get a hotel room, but to require none for the franchise. This makes me a vote suppressing racist?
Silver was correct in 2008, when it didn’t take a genius to predict most of the states. He under-estimated the GOP sweep in 2010. He was accurate in 2012. What is so impressive about this? Only that he concocted extreme odds proclaiming his own certainty. It’s a great hook.
Attributing racism to the tea party, critics of the President, and conservatives in general has been a consistent tactic—it is either a tactic or a delusion—for more than four years now. I consider it an effort to stifle discourse and legitimate criticism, and I believe it was effectively used as a scaremongering tactic in the election. Frankly, I do not comprehend how anyone could fail to see that. When Morgan Freeman says that the only thing that can explain opposition to the President is racism, do I think he’s sincere? Undoubtedly. Sincere, and over his head, and given a platform specifically to bolster that slander by people who know better, or who should.
Jack, do you not know?
The ATF requires photo ID to purchase a handgun from a dealer. all these gun rights groups cry that requiring photo ID to buy a gun violates the fundamental right to have a gun. And as Jim March and Clayton Cramer claimed, gun control laws are rooted in racism and white supremacism.
Why should not similar logic apply to voter ID?
Oh, I don’t know—because crazy voters don’t kill anybody with their votes?
A bank or a hotel is not a government; if a hotel owner decides it doesn’t want to do to business with anyone who doesn’t have ID, that’s a private decision. The government, in contrast, isn’t supposed to be picky about which enfranchised citizens can vote. Disenfranchising people because they’re felons is fair; disenfranchising them because they don’t have ID is not.
Virginia’s ID law is a waste of taxpayer time and money to solve a problem that basically doesn’t exist, and in this election led to ridiculously long lines that some people, especially older people, might have trouble doing physically. I don’t think that voting should be made needlessly difficult.
That said, Virginia’s law is one of the least stringent voter ID laws in the nation, and I wish it were a model for other states with voter ID laws. (For example, Virginia mailed acceptable ID to every registered voter, at no expense to the voter, and accepts utility bills as ID.) The voter ID laws that have gotten into trouble at the courts (like those in Wisconsin and Texas) are far stricter and would do a lot more to impede voting.
And you can’t seriously expect me to believe that the Republicans who wrote these laws are completely unaware that the voters most likely to be deterred by strict voter id laws are from Democratic-leaning demographics — poor people, people of color, and especially elderly people of color.
Virginia’s law is fair and flexible. I would agree that it would be a great model.
Do I think good and bad motives are involved in all public policy decisions? Yes, absolutely. But an unethical motive doesn’t make a good policy bad. Maybe Harry Truman wanted to drop the bomb to save American lives (good) and because he thought the Japanese deserved to fry (bad.) That doesn’t make the first justification invalid.
1. Okay, great. But if you agree with me that Virginia’s voter ID law is in fact superior to many other states’ voter ID laws, then I don’t think that you can use the relatively good experience in Virginia to defend voter ID laws in general. Sadly, voter ID laws in general are simply not as good as Virginia’s.
2. I agree that there are a mix of good motives and bad motives. But the good motives that exist shouldn’t prevent us from criticizing the bad motives that also exist. And if you agree that a bad motive that exists is to reduce voter turnout among people of color for partisan gain, then I don’t see how you can deny that racism is part of what’s going on here. (Note that I’m not saying that every supporter of voter ID is racist, nor am I saying that racism is ALL that’s going on. But it’s part of the mix.)
3. Motives aside, it’s bad policy to solve a non-existent problem by creating real problems. Voter ID laws cost taxpayer money to implement, and they can lead to problems like having to stand in line for three hours to vote (I don’t think my grandma would be capable of standing in line that long). Doing all that to solve a non-existent problem seems dubious at best.
1. Why? Bad laws are bad laws, but that doesn’t make them racist laws. And the rhetoric coming from Holder et al. is that ALL attempts to require ID are based in racism. And that’s just no true.
2. I don’t deny that its part of the motivation of some of the people pushing it, or at least voter suppression of groups expected to vote a certain way. But if every race-motivated supporter was taken out of the equation, the Democratic argument would still be that the policy is per se racist.
3. I am not convinced its a non-existent problem, I think its a seldom detected problem, but even if true, there is nothing wrong with locking the barn door before the horse escapes. Some would call that prudent.
1. You didn’t provide a link to the remarks of Holder’s you’re referring to, so I can’t really comment on that. Holder’s most famous remarks on voter ID (if google results are something to judge by) were his July 10 remarks to the NAACP, but he was clearly referring to the Texas law, not to all possible voter ID laws. In his remarks about voter ID laws in May, he said: “If a state passes a new voting law and meets its burden of showing that the law is not discriminatory, we will follow the law and will approve that change.” So Holder doesn’t seem to be the extremist you’re painting him as.
2. “….or at least voter suppression of groups expected to vote a certain way.” If the “groups” in question are racial, than intended voter suppression of those groups is racist.
And a policy that effectively and unjustly disenfranchises a far greater proportion of (say) Blacks than whites is per se racist.
(In other words, there are two possible routes for a law to be racist.)
3. It’s irrelevant what you “believe” about voter fraud occurring. Voter ID laws make it harder for people to vote even in the best-case scenario, and disenfranchises folks in many cases. Doing that should require actual evidence of a real problem being addressed with a narrowly tailored solution, not just unsubstantiated belief.
There is something wrong with locking the barn door before the horse escapes, when locking the barn door has the inadvertent (or intended) effect of disenfranchising folks like my grandmother.
1. I was mostly referring to his comments to Al Sharpton’s group, which I only heard in audio form, but were Sharpton-ish and infuriating. I can’t find the text.
2.”And a policy that effectively and unjustly disenfranchises a far greater proportion of (say) Blacks than whites is per se racist.” I fundamentally disagree with this logic, Barry. It’s the outcomes vs. intent version of racism, and it’s an excuse to call ‘racism” when the problem is elsewhere. The fact that white kids from the same socio-economic groups get better grades than black kids (and Asian kids get better grades than either argues that merit-based grading is “racist,’ by your logic. And many people buy that. It’s indefensible. Grading kids higher than blacks based on color is racist. That’s something else.
3. So why didn’t you drive your grandmother to the DMV so she could get an ID? There is less proof of genuine disenfranchisement ( as opposed to extra inconvenience) than there is of voter fraud. In every single case around the country, the complaining parties either had gotten ID, did so after the trial, or clearly could have with less time expenditure and expense than their litigation required.
1. We’ve gone through this in the past, Jack – human memory is not reliable. In the actual, on-the-record statements anyone can read for themselves, Holder has been much more reasonable than what you claim. You can’t expect any fair person to disregard what we know he said in favor of what a partisan like you claims he said but can’t actually prove.
2. I think you missed the word “unjust” in what I wrote, Jack. You could argue that there’s some justice in admitting students based on grades even if that leads to a racial disparity. (And even affirmative action advocates like me would agree with you – no one is saying that good grades aren’t relevant, or should never lead to more whites than blacks being accepted.)
I don’t think you can argue that a law that has the effect of disenfranchising blacks and the poor much more than other groups is just in the same way that merit-based admissions are just. Unlike college admission, the right to vote is not supposed to be dependent on individual merit.
That said, you’ve already admitted that it’s probable that when Republicans make a rule that just-so-happens to disenfranchise lots of people likely to vote Democrat, it’s naive to assume that they were pure of heart and had no interest at all in electoral outcomes. So either way you define it, racism is part of what’s behind voter id laws.
3. My grandmother lives in Florida, I live in Oregon, and I don’t have a drivers’ license. And in any case, the issue with my grandmother is that she can’t stand in line for even a half-hour, let alone the six hour lines some Florida voters faced. Voter ID laws, and some other laws Republicans have pushed, cause longer lines. (Just as the post-9/11 security stations at airports have made getting through the airport on a busy day a much slower process.)
I assume my grandmother did vote, of course – she has my mother (who also lives in Florida), plus despite being physically limited she remains very mentally sharp and able to navigate bureaucratic barriers, and she arranged for an absentee ballot. But not everyone has my grandma’s advantages. Someone who isn’t super-smart, who isn’t good at navigating bureaucracy, who doesn’t have a daughter-in-law in the state to help her, and who isn’t extraordinarily determined should still be able to vote.
In The Patch (a local PA newspaper), a woman leaves this comment:
Of course, in Pennsylvania, there is no legal requirement of showing ID to vote – but the Republican Secretary of State decided to ask all voters for ID anyway, and to put up big “prepare to show photo ID” signs, knowing that this would deter some voters.
Conservatives like to pull this trick – they say that as long as someone can vote with extraordinary effort, then they haven’t been disenfranchised at all. So someone like Laila Stones or Donna Jean Suggs isn’t really disenfranchised, since she has a great deal of sharpness, a legal aid attorney, and an ACLU lawsuit to help her get around the fact that she can’t get picture ID without extraordinary efforts. But there are thousands more like her who don’t have legal aid, haven’t retained enough sharpness to navigate difficult bureaucracies, and aren’t able to pursue a lawsuit.
There are many real-life examples of people who have in fact been prevented from voting: see the people listed here, for instance. But of course, the real issue isn’t the folks who get publicity and pursue lawsuits, who by definition are the people who are better able to find ways to defend themselves. The issue is the many thousands of people in similar situations who end up shrugging it off and not voting, rather than suing. But of course, most of those people aren’t Republicans, which is exactly why Republicans are so eager to make it harder for them to vote.
Arghhh. I did it again…I just wrote a fairly long response to this, and lost it. I’m sorry. I will try to reconstruct it when I am not so mad at myself and have the time. I hate that.
Oh, man, I hate it when that happens to me! Sorry that happened to you.
No worries. Respond if you have time, no worries if you don’t have time, or just don’t feel like rewriting. I have to go give a talk at a school – I shall be telling them all that Republicans are evil greedmonsters and Barack is The One — so probably won’t read any response before tomorrow.
P.S. Okay, really, I’ll be talking to them about writing and drawing comic books. :-p
Thanks for understanding. I think I forgot to hit the enter button.
I really want to give your comments a thoughtful response, Barry, because they are always enlightening. I’m going to try to get back to this.
The “simple act of requiring ID to vote” is not so simple. In Texas they accept gun licenses, but not student ID’s? Do you not see anything the matter with that? In Pennsylvania they need a court to explain to them that if you truly want to implement voter ID do so after this election, and give everyone a fair chance to get one. A disproportionate number of minorities and students lack ID. Say what you will about why this is so. The fact is they don’t have it. So your position seems to be ” it’s a simple act. If you don’t have it, forfeit your right to vote.” Even if you believe that it’s a simple request and we should do it, the only rush to do so, and to change the laws at this point in time was because we have a black President, and a deliberate, but failed attempt was made to stop black people and other minorities from voting. There has never been wide spread in person voter fraud. This was the reason used to justify the need for new laws. If you simply want to require every eligible voter to have an ID say so. Don’t cloud it in racist bullshit. And please don’t knit pick and claim I’m calling you a racist. I know how sensitive you are to that.
I have no intention of black mailing you. I just want an honest discussion, and an acknowledgement that these efforts at suppressing the vote were racist and real as a prerequisite for continuing the discussion.
I think many of the voter ID laws were badly drawn and would not work well. I have no objection to postponing them until they are fair and give proper notice. The one in Virginia seem pretty reasonable. My objection is not to critiques of the laws, but to the characterization of those who propose them as racist. I think that’s dirty politics and unfair debate tactics. Nor is it logical to equate inconvenience with suppression. My polling place is literally next door, a two minute walk. In some rural areas, it’s an hour drive or more. Should those who have to drive a long distance claim that they are discriminated against because I have a convenient polling place and they don’t? When Justice Stevens endorsed ID requirements, nobody accused him of being a racist. The fact that one Pennsylvania GOP official was recorded saying that the ID laws would stop minority voters has been cited over and over as proof that the whole Republican party was out to suppress minority votes. How fair is that? All one statement proves is that one guy is a corrupt creep. You can assume everyone is like him, but that is pure confirmation bias.
I find the argument that the lack of voter fraud justifies installing no safeguards against it bizarre at best. This is parallel to my discussion with Barry, and I have the same comment—there is nothing illogical or unethical about locking the barn door before the horse escapes. Your argument no doubt was employed when some far-sighted Tom Clancy reader suggested more stringent airport security measured prior to 9-11. Voting is important enough that reasonable protections should be put in place. I am hearing about Philadelphia polling places that reported over 100% voter participation. maybe that’s just rumor. I see nothing wrong with measures that would make it impossible.
Let’s start with what constitutes voter fraud. The most common types, and most likely to have significant influence on the outcome of an election are ballot box stuffing, vote removal, precinct dropping, vote flipping, and throwing away absentee ballots (I guess another form of vote removal). This type of fraud is more prevalent, and much easier to perpetrate, than in person voter fraud, which is the only type of fraud that ID laws address. These methods are coordinated, and could actually swing an election. For in person voter fraud to have an adverse effect on the outcome of a given election, you’d have to have a severely coordinated conspiracy, and lots of folks ready to stand in numerous lines in various precincts. All to do something that still might not even work. Should we consider that it might happen and maybe do something about it? Sure. But my issue, and what makes these attempts (all by republican administrations by the way) racist, un-American, and designed solely to suppress, not inconvenience voters, is that the attempts to deal with “voter fraud” have not centered on the real way people are most likely to cheat. Instead, they’ve spent millions of dollars to implement, and try to preserve laws that don’t adequately address their own justification for the law in the first place. But these laws clearly influence, and disenfranchise people that tend to vote democratic, and are disproportionately minority. Surely you must see this Jack. I”m starting to hear some republicans admit that this tactic was a bad move and back fired on them. Call it what it is. The chances of minorities voting with the republican party in its current state, is limited. So rather than figure out a way to appeal to them, or change portions of the platform, the solution was screw it. Let’s just try to stop them from voting. While I hate the racist nature of this, I hate the fact that they so cynically went about fiddling with such a critical and fundamental part of our democracy as well. This offends me as much, if not more than the reasons why they did it.
If Republicans are second-guessing the effort, all that means is that they acknowledge that the Democratic efforts to smear a legitimate initiative as racist worked. I’m sure it worked, and I’m sure no political party will hold on to principle if it loses enough votes—hence I expect the GOP to begin aping Democrats who want to make breaking the immigration laws a sign of virtue and worthiness.
How would the voter fraud addressed by ID’s be caught and measured in studies? It seem pretty fool-proof to me. You have the name and polling place for a voter who is recently deceased or disabled, and not voting. You send someone who knows that individual’s address to cast the vote. How is it discovered, unless the real voter shows up unexpectedly? When Rep. Moran’s son was asked by a James O’Keefe fraud about how to vote for 100 such voters, he didn’t say, “WOW! I’ve never heard of anyone trying that!” He didn’t say, “Impossible! Can’t be done!” He said that the Virginia ID law made it tough (-er than it used to be.)” A wide open opportunity to cheat is intentionally left open, we know that votes have been stolen and manipulated since elections began, and yet the argument against closing the door is that nobody ever does that. First—you don’t really know that; it just is important to believe it to argue against a reasonable safeguard. 2) It makes no sense to leave an obvious security weakness just because nobody’s breached it. The Gardiner Art Museum in Boston went decades with no security except some ancient, unarmed guards for a mega-million dollar collection. Then a few guys just walked in and took masterpieces off the walls. Would you really argue, as a trustee, that a proposal to put in modern security devices on the collection was an unnecessary inconvenience to art lovers because, after all, no thefts had ever occurred? 3) Where there is opportunity, motivation, wherewithal and perceived benefits, crimes will occur. I view the claim that there is no stolen identity voter fraud to be on par with the claim that global warming is a myth.
While I hate the racist nature of this, I hate the fact that they so cynically went about fiddling with such a critical and fundamental part of our democracy as well. This offends me as much, if not more than the reasons why they did it.
then do you believe that laws requiring photo ID to buy a handgun are racist?
Could you edit my reply top urbanregor?
I forgot the blockquote tags.
In reply to your most recent comment- I started this leg of the discussion with a comment about the most prevalent types of voter fraud, and attempted to make the case that if fraud is the main reason for voter ID laws (and this is what the republicans say!) ID’s will do nothing to prevent the most common, and most damaging types of fraud. Rather than admit or argue why this is not true, or relevant, your narrative chose to deal with a fictitious example of how one might go about voting in place of dead or disabled people. This was after you clearly refused to deal with the racist nature of the voter ID laws, and your insistence that they’re reasonable, and that the dems smeared a legitimate initiative as racist. Your reaction is so typical of the reaction of the right to the election. A refusal to even consider that your way of thinking is inaccurate, a refusal to address factual claims made by the opposition, and hypothetical stories that while they could exist, we don’t know that they do. And even if we assume that they do exist, you wouldn’t get an argument from me, and I suspect a lot of others on the left to stop it. But if voter fraud continues to be the justification for voter ID laws, I will continue to call them racist, because they seek only to address the least documented form of fraud that happens to have the most likely chance of disenfranchising voters. This is exactly why i didn’t want to go down this path to begin with. Your refusal to be at least honest about this surprises me Jack.
“This was after you clearly refused to deal with the racist nature of the voter ID laws, and your insistence that they’re reasonable, and that the dems smeared a legitimate initiative as racist. Your reaction is so typical of the reaction of the right to the election. A refusal to even consider that your way of thinking is inaccurate, a refusal to address factual claims made by the opposition, and hypothetical stories that while they could exist, we don’t know that they do. And even if we assume that they do exist, you wouldn’t get an argument from me, and I suspect a lot of others on the left to stop it. But if voter fraud continues to be the justification for voter ID laws, I will continue to call them racist, because they seek only to address the least documented form of fraud that happens to have the most likely chance of disenfranchising voters. This is exactly why i didn’t want to go down this path to begin with. Your refusal to be at least honest about this surprises me Jack.”
This resort to ranting undermines your whole premise. The fact that other forms of voter fraud may be more common and more likely are irrelevant to whether every obvious avenue for fraud should be closed. “you clearly refused to deal with the racist nature of the voter ID laws” is assuming your position is right—it’s not, and my argument proceeds from that basis. It is not because integrity is an essential value in something as critical as voting and elections, and protecting that trumps everything. Everything—including the convenience of some voters, whether they fall into specific identifiable demographic groups or not. And this is for the benefit of all parties, all voters, and the nation. If some assholes say “Goody! Fixing the holes in the ID system will stop some Democrats/blacks/ old people from voting”, I could not care less, except that it gives unscrupulous race-baiters the ammunition to claim that theirs is the real motivation. That some focus on the negative results of a reasonable regulation for cynical partisan purposes—and I refer to both parties—that simply does not invalidate a good and necessary law.
I’ve been reading the right wing blog comments, and do you know what they are saying? That Obama lost every state with voter ID laws. Wild conspiracies about swing state precincts with %110 or more turnout at the polls. Twitter users boasting that they had voted three or more times (these appear to be real tweets, if not true ones.) Don’t you see? As long as there is an easy way to cheat that members of the public see as being left intentionally open and available, it undermines faith and belief in the results, the process, and the system—whether use of it is widespread or not. The same goes for financial sector regulations, airport security, and dozens of other examples.
All you are doing is vilifying one segment of the public and presuming that because it is arguing for integrity at the polls, the effort must be ill-motivated. My argument isn’t “typical of the reaction of the right to the election”—I consider that an outright smear, and beneath you. There is nothing in my reaction to the election that is typical of the right, nor am I a member of what you call the right, unless it means “right of you.” My fact, and it is a fact, is that a voter ID system increases both the reality and the perception that elections are honest and free of fraud, and both reality and perception are equally important. Integrity is paramount. If it inconveniences specific classes of voters, fix that problem too, don’t lobby to keep voting vulnerable to fraud, simply because widespread fraud hasn’t yet occurred.
Honestly, I don’t see why pollsters, statistical analysts, and pundits have to be so at odds; the first two help provide information on who votes what (and provide criticism on each others’ methodological assumptions), and political analysts help to figure out why this might be the case, as well as to look out for unexpected shifts (and also to provide informed criticism on each others’ methodological assumptions).
However, I will also say that Silver’s main service is as that of POPULARIZING the probably necessary use of statistical analysis in political analysis. His record, while solid, is not necessarily any more impressive than other stat-minded researchers like Wes Colley and Sam Wang who use simpler statistical models. Most infamously, he thought the Liberal Democrats would double their Parliamentary seats in 2010; they actually lost 5; even his predictions based on exit poll data ended up being less accurate than the BBC’s own projections (whose methodology he regarded as too simplistic). I certainly think his projection on American politics are and will still be mostly accurate, but I don’t see him as markedly superior to other mathematically-rigorous analysts who utilize polling data.
Nate Silver also wrote that “[i]n almost every competitive general election, the party that loses the contest has also lost independent voters”
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/332212/guess-who-declared-losing-candidates-lose-independents
A better answer probably would have been that the guy who performs less well with moderates loses, at least if the exit polls are any indication: http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/results/race/president#exit-polls
I might be responding in wrong location, but, to answer your question, i don’t believe that laws requiring ID to buy a gun are racist. I do however find the locations of gun shops to be interesting. I’m not a gun owner, and can’t stand guns. But i have no objection to people owning them. However, of I decide tomorrow that I want a gun, based on living in a densely populated urban area, I couldn’t get one easily. I’m sure folks would argue economic and market factors, but given the level of black on black crime, guns are getting to poorer and darker communities anyway. It’s just a little harder to obtain one legally close to where you live. Similar to Jacks convenience argument. Maybe not explicitly racist, but interesting.
You have a point there. Most guns used in crimes are obtained in the black market or through straw purchases, neither which the ID requirement can conceivably stop.
For some reason, I’m having trouble getting my replies in the right place. Perhaps you can move this comment when you see it.
I would hardly call my responses ranting. At the same time I’m clearly frustrated by your method of ignoring issues that you don’t feel are relevant. I’m wondering if you just don’t see the contradiction in your own position? You claim that the FACT that other forms of voter fraud are more prevalent and harmful, is irrelevant, yet later say “integrity is an essential value in something as critical as voting and elections, and protecting that trumps everything.” You say this, yet fail to see that the failure to deal with more serious acts of voter fraud is what caused folks like me to suspect that other motives were really behind the insistence and very recent proliferation of ID laws. Additionally, what makes this relevant and your argument wrong, is that the justification given for these laws is dishonest. Regardless of how prevalent in person fraud is, reasonable people would most certainly look to do all they could to minimize it. People on both sides of the aisle! But when the original justification is based in voter suppression, and racism, you’re going to have a hard time getting people to see the reasonableness of ID laws. If not for the backdrop of a Presidential election, the speed to implementation, the lack of planning or caring for how these laws might disenfranchise people, ID laws may well have wide spread support. I suspect that they eventually will. But the attempt to do so under the guise of voter fraud is a sham.
I don’t believe that calling out racism is vilifying anyone. I do however realize how pissed off people get at the mere implication of being called a racist. I don’t believe that’s what I’ve done. As for you taking offense with my comparing your reaction to those of the right, I’ll apologize. I do want to remind you though, this whole thing started as a discussion on Nate Silver. The rights reaction to his work before and after the election speak for themselves. Some people just fail to see what they don’t want to see. When you refused to deal with my argument based on you feeling it was irrelevant, I made the association, but did not imply that you’re a member of the right. You are right of me, and that’s fine. Neither is good or bad. it just is. Lastly, your fact is also something we can agree on. But it should not be selectively applied, because to do so minimizes its effectiveness as an argument. The real way to preserve the integrity and perception of fair elections is to deal with all aspects starting from the most likely to do harm. We certainly don’t have unlimited tax resources to deal with this. Just from a financial standpoint, I would think reasonable folks would want to get as big a bang for the fraud dollar as possible. ID laws are not it.
Is this really a debate over priorities rather than methods? I have no idea how to make absentee ballots more secure, other than eliminating them. That would be my preference. Obviously the easiest way to prevent voter fraud is to have everyone required to vote in person, with ID’s, at one place, on the same day. All the measures to make voting easier, especially electronic voting, also make it less secure. Could you really be saying that its not voter ID per se that is racist, but choosing to make that fix before others? I can think of several good reasons to make that fix first: it’s straightforward and likely to work. If what you are saying is that voter ID should wait until other voter fraud measures are undertaken, I’m down with that: sure, as long as there’s a timetable. My one caveat would be that the fixes of the other kinds of fraud are really feasible short of just eliminating those options. Are they? I don’t know. But choosing the simplest fix over dubious or complicated ones, even if the simplest fix is controversial, hardly seem proof of racist motives. I’ll fix the hole in the window before the hole in the roof, if I don’t know how to fix the hole in the roof. Won’t you?
Ballot box stuffing, vote switching and precinct removal are the most common forms of fraud, even before you get to absentee ballot issues. The fix for all of them is simple. Get rid of partisan Secretary of states, or make election boards equally split between the parties. Non-partisan altogether is the best answer. Take these steps first because they are more easily fixed, and ultimately cheaper to fix. The window versus the roof is an apples to oranges comparison. So I am saying that making the ID fix first and in a hurry is in fact racist. If only because the people that proposed this were told that it would disenfranchise voters, and they made little if any effort to ensure that the new law would not cause a new problem. An easily avoided problem, unless you had an ulterior motive. And it was clear to me, and lots of others that the real motive behind these laws was certainly not voter fraud, but voter suppression. We agree on a time table and comprehensive plan to fix all forms of fraud. But I also see no reason why we must all vote on the same day and at the same time. The technology exists to make our system safer, more inclusive, and yes, more convenient. Our collective efforts are much better suited to improving the system from this angle, than from one focused on a tactic that is unnecessary as well as divisive.
And I find the willingness of smart people to believe that all human decisions can be reduced to numbers and algorithms, as people like Silver believe, more than alarming.
I heartily agree with this. The trouble is that I don’t think my personal discomfort with the topic actually falsifies the ability of mathematics to predict things that I’d rather weren’t predicted. You seem to have a different perspective on this.
A watchdog press is essential for a healthy democracy.
A lapdog press is harmful to democracy.
You have to hand it to President Obama.
thanks to him, workers at the TV stations can get some overtime.
I must say, I got a great laugh out of looking at a side-by-side comparison of Silver’s probability map and the electoral results map. As of current projections, it appears that he was absolutely correct about every single state.
That’s really something, huh?
I mean, isn’t that interesting?
Does it take just a little bit of the wind out of your (?)argument’s sails?
Could the latter be responsible for the former being “partially successful as an election strategy”?