Category Archives: Politics

Republicans (and Democrats) need to pay attention to data rather than just spinning a story

Posted on by

Conor Friedersdorf suggests conservatives clearly had their own misinformed echo chambers ahead of this week’s elections:

Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, “What went wrong?”, they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: “Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?”

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday’s result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout — Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes. Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that the election was anything other than a toss-up. Peggy Noonan insisted that those predicting an Obama victory were ignoring the world around them. Even Karl Rove, supposed political genius, missed the bulls-eye. These voices drove the coverage on Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, and conservative blogs.

Those audiences were misinformed.

Outside the conservative media, the narrative was completely different. Its driving force was Nate Silver, whose performance forecasting Election ’08 gave him credibility as he daily explained why his model showed that President Obama enjoyed a very good chance of being reelected. Other experts echoed his findings. Readers of The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other “mainstream media” sites besides knew the expert predictions, which have been largely born out. The conclusions of experts are not sacrosanct. But Silver’s expertise was always a better bet than relying on ideological hacks like Morris or the anecdotal impressions of Noonan.

But I think Friedersdorf misses the most important point here in the rest of his piece: it isn’t just about Republicans veering off into ideological territory into which many Americans did not want to follow or wasting time on inconsequential issues that did not affect many voters. The misinformation was the result of ignoring or downplaying the data that showed President Obama had a lead in the months leading up to the election. The data predictions from “The Poll Quants” were not wrong, no matter how many conservative pundits wanted to suggest otherwise.

This could lead to bigger questions about what political parties and candidates should do if the data is not in their favor in the days and weeks leading up to an election. Change course and bring up new ideas and positions? This could lead to questions about political expediency and flip-flopping. Double-down on core issues? This might ignore the key things voters care about or reinforce negative impressions. Ignore the data and try to spin the story? It didn’t work this time. Push even harder in the get-out-the-vote ground game? This sounds like the most reasonable option…

View from foreign observers: American voting system heavily reliant on trust

Posted on by

Foreign observers watching the voting process in the United States suggested it is a system that involves a lot of trust:

“It’s an incredible system,” said Nuri K. Elabbar, who traveled to the United States along with election officials from more than 60 countries to observe today’s presidential elections as part of a program run by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). Your humble Cable guy visited polling places with some of the international officials this morning. Most of them agreed that in their countries, such an open voting system simply would not work.

“It’s very difficult to transfer this system as it is to any other country. This system is built according to trust and this trust needs a lot of procedures and a lot of education for other countries to adopt it,” Elabbar said.

The most often noted difference between American elections among the visitors was that in most U.S. states, voters need no identification. Voters can also vote by mail, sometimes online, and there’s often no way to know if one person has voted several times under different names, unlike in some Arab countries, where voters ink their fingers when casting their ballots.

The international visitors also noted that there’s no police at U.S. polling stations. In foreign countries, police at polling places are viewed as signs of security; in the United States they are sometimes seen as intimidating.

It can be helpful to get outside perspectives on what takes place in the United States. Two thoughts based on these observations:

1. How long will this trust last? There was a lot of chatter online yesterday about voting irregularities. Do the two parties and Americans in general trust each other to handle voting? This reminds me of the oft-quoted de Toqueville who wrote in Democracy in America that Americans were more prone to join civic and political groups. The United States was born in the Enlightenment era where old ways of governing, church and tradition (meaning: monarchies), were overthrown and citizens turned to each other and a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” (Lincoln in the Gettsyburg Address). Of course, we can contrast this with Robert Putnam’s work in Bowling Alone which suggested Americans have retreated from the civic and social realm in recent decades. Plus, confidence in American institutions has declined in recent decades.

2. Trying to implement an American-style voting and government system in countries that don’t have the same history and culture is a difficult and lengthy task. In other words, this sort of system and trust doesn’t just develop overnight or in a few years. Voting systems are culturally informed. This should help shape our foreign policy.

Sociologists lost their public voice because of increasingly liberal political views?

Posted on by

Sociologist Stephen P. Turner makes a historical argument about how American sociologists lost their public voice. Here is the abstract:

Sociology once debated ‘the social’ and did so with a public readership. Even as late as the Second World War, sociologists commanded a wide public on questions about the nature of society, altruism and the direction of social evolution. As a result of several waves of professionalization, however, these issues have vanished from academic sociology and from the public writings of sociologists. From the 1960s onwards sociologists instead wrote for the public by supporting social movements. Discussion within sociology became constrained both by ‘professional’ expectations and political taboos. Yet the original motivating concerns of sociology and its public, such as the compatibility of socialism and Darwinism, the nature of society, and the process of social evolution, did not cease to be of public interest. With sociologists showing little interest in satisfying the demand, it was met by non-sociologists, with the result that sociology lost both its intellectual public, as distinct from affinity groups, and its claim on these topics.

And here is another paragraph excerpt with some interpretation as reported on a Smithsonian blog:

Basically, he’s wondering: what happened to sociologists? When did they give up questions of human nature, altruism, society? Well, Turner argues that a big problem is that sociologists started getting political. “It is evident that many of the most enthusiastic adherents of the new model of professionalization in the United States had roots in the left, and not infrequently in the Communist Party itself.” And that political slant limited the types of questions sociologists were allowed to ask. He writes:

“Sociology was once a place where intellectuals found freedom: Giddings, Sorokin, Alfred Schutz and many others who could have pursued careers in their original fields chose sociology because of this freedom. To some extent sociology still welcomes outsiders, though now it is likely to be outsiders with ties to the Women’s Movement. … But in general, the freedom of the past is in the past.”

Turner’s basic point is that sociology is now a joke because every sociologist is a liberal. That’s not untrue: over 85 percent of the members of the American Sociological Association (ASA) vote for either the Democratic or Green parties. One survey found the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the ASA to be 47 to 1. Now, whether or not sociology is joked about because its researchers political leanings is another question. But that’s the argument Turner seems to be making here.

I wonder if social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would agree with this assessment in light of his look at the political leanings of the field of social psychology.

If sociology gave up this freedom, what other fields filled in academic vacuum? If I had to guess, economics generally provided some room for conservatives. Does this mean that some bright academic stars that once might have gone to sociology have instead pursued other fields?

Three changes that come with “The Rise of Poll Quants”

Posted on by

Nate Silver isn’t the only one making election predictions based on poll data; there are now a number of “poll quants” who are using similar techniques.

So what exactly do these guys do? Basically, they take polls, aggregate the results, and make predictions. They each do it somewhat differently. Silver factors in state polls and national polls, along with other indicators, like monthly job numbers. Wang focuses on state polls exclusively. Linzer’s model looks at historical factors several months before the election but, as voting draws nearer, weights polls more heavily.

At the heart of all their models, though, are the state polls. That makes sense because, thanks to the Electoral College system, it’s the state outcomes that matter. It’s possible to win the national vote and still end up as the head of a cable-television channel rather than the leader of the free world. But also, as Wang explains, it’s easier for pollsters to find representative samples in a particular state. Figuring out which way Arizona or even Florida might go isn’t as tough as sizing up a country as big and diverse as the United States.”The race is so close that, at a national level, it’s easy to make a small error and be a little off,” Wang says. “So it’s easier to call states. They give us a sharper, more accurate picture.”

But the forecasters don’t just look at one state poll. While most news organizations trot out the latest, freshest poll and discuss it in isolation, these guys plug it into their models. One poll might be an outlier; a whole bunch of polls are likely to get closer to the truth. Or so the idea goes. Wang uses all the state polls, but gives more weight to those that survey likely voters, as opposed to those who are just registered to vote. Silver has his own special sauce that he doesn’t entirely divulge.

Both Wang and Linzer find it annoying that individual polls are hyped to make it seem as if the race is closer than it is, or to create the illusion that Romney and Obama are trading the lead from day to day. They’re not. According to the state polls, when taken together, the race has been fairly stable for weeks, and Obama has remained well ahead and, going into Election Day, is a strong favorite. “The best information comes from combining all the polls together,” says Linzer, who projects that Obama will get 326 electoral votes, well over the 270 required to win. “I want to give readers the right information, even if it’s more boring.”

While it may not seem likely, poll aggregation is a threat to the supremacy of the punditocracy. In the past week, you could sense that some high-profile media types were being made slightly uncomfortable by the bespectacled quants, with their confusing mathematical models and zippy computer programs. The New York Times columnist David Brooks said pollsters who offered projections were citizens of “sillyland.”

Three things strike me from reading these “poll quants” leading up to the election:

1. This is what is possible when data is widely available: these pundits use different methods for their models but it wouldn’t be possible without accessible data, consistent and regular polling (at the state and national level), and relatively easy to use statistical programs. In other words, could this scenario have taken place even 20 years ago?

2. It will be fascinating to watch how the media deals with these predictive models. Can they incorporate these predictions into their typical entertainment presentation? Will we have a new kind of pundit in the next few years? The article still noted the need for these quantitative pundits to have personality and style so it their results are not too dry for the larger public. Could we end up in a world where CNN has the exclusive rights to Silver’s model, Fox News has rights to another model, and so on?

3. All of this conversation about statistics, predictions, and modeling has the potential to really show where the American public and elite stands in terms of statistical knowledge. Can people understand the basics of these models? Do they simply blindly trust the models because they are “scientific proof” or do they automatically reject them because all numbers can be manipulated? Do some pundits know just enough to be dangerous and ask endless numbers of questions about the assumptions of different models? There is a lot of potential here to push quantitative literacy as a key part of living in the 21st century world. And it is only going to get more statistical as more organizations collect more data and new research and prediction opportunities arise.

Correlation and not causation: Redskins games predict results of presidential election

Posted on by

Big events like presidential elections tend to bring out some crazy data patterns. Here is my nomination for the oddest one of this election season: how the Washington Redskins do in their final game before the election predicts the presidential election.

Since 1940 — when the Redskins moved to D.C. — the team’s outcome in its final game before the presidential election has predicted which party would win the White House each time but once.

When the Redskins win their game before the election, the incumbent party wins the presidential vote. If the Redskins lose, the non-incumbent wins.

The only exception was in 2004, when Washington fell to Green Bay, but George W. Bush still went on to win the election over John Kerry.

This is simply a quirk of data: how the Redskins do should have little to no effect on voting in other states. This is exactly what correlation without causation is about; there may be a clear pattern ut it doesn’t necessarily mean the two related facts cause each other. There may be some spurious association here, some variable that predicts both outcomes, but even that is hard to imagine. Yet, the Redskins Rule has garnered a lot of attention in recent days. Why? A few possible reasons:

1. It connects two American obsessions: presidential elections and the NFL. A sidelight: both may involve a lot of betting.

2. So much reporting has been done on the 2012 elections that this adds a more whimsical and mysterious element.

3. Humans like to find patterns, even if these patterns don’t make much sense.

What’s next, an American octopus who can predict presidential elections?

Sociologist defends statistical predictions for elections and other important information

Posted on by

Political polling has come under a lot of recent fire but a sociologist defends these predictions and reminds us that we rely on many such predictions:

We rely on statistical models for many decisions every single day, including, crucially: weather, medicine, and pretty much any complex system in which there’s an element of uncertainty to the outcome. In fact, these are the same methods by which scientists could tell Hurricane Sandy was about to hit the United States many days in advance…

This isn’t wizardry, this is the sound science of complex systems. Uncertainty is an integral part of it. But that uncertainty shouldn’t suggest that we don’t know anything, that we’re completely in the dark, that everything’s a toss-up.

Polls tell you the likely outcome with some uncertainty and some sources of (both known and unknown) error. Statistical models take a bunch of factors and run lots of simulations of elections by varying those outcomes according to what we know (such as other polls, structural factors like the economy, what we know about turnout, demographics, etc.) and what we can reasonably infer about the range of uncertainty (given historical precedents and our logical models). These models then produce probability distributions…

Refusing to run statistical models simply because they produce probability distributions rather than absolute certainty is irresponsible. For many important issues (climate change!), statistical models are all we have and all we can have. We still need to take them seriously and act on them (well, if you care about life on Earth as we know it, blah, blah, blah).

A key point here: statistical models have uncertainty (we are making inferences about larger populations or systems from samples that we can collect) but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are flawed.

A second key point: because of what I stated above, we should expect that some statistical predictions will be wrong. But this is how science works: you tweak models, take in more information, perhaps change your data collection, perhaps use different methods of analysis, and hope to get better. While it may not be exciting, confirming what we don’t know does help us get to an outcome.

I’ve become more convinced in recent years that one of the reasons polls are not used effectively in reporting is that many in the media don’t know exactly how they work. Journalists need to be trained in how to read, interpret, and report on data. This could also be a time issue; how much time to those in the media have to pore over the details of research findings or do they simply have to scan for new findings? Scientists can pump out study after study but part of the dissemination of this information to the public requires a media who understands how scientific research and the scientific process work. This includes understanding how models are consistently refined, collecting the right data to answer the questions we want to answer, and looking at the accumulated scientific research rather than just grabbing the latest attention-getting finding.

An alternative to this idea about media statistical illiteracy is presented in the article: perhaps the media perhaps knows how polls work but likes a political horse race. This may also be true but there is a lot of reporting on statistics on data outside of political elections that also needs work.

Neither Obama or Romney tackling issue of housing

Posted on by

There are plenty of issues to talk about this election season but neither Obama or Romney have done much to address housing:

For existing homeowners and the government, though, housing remains an enormous issue. If new government initiatives are not implemented, it could take another three to five years for the market to fully recover, analysts estimate. And The Wall Street Journal reports that neither candidate has offered ways to remake failed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have already cost taxpayers $140 billion and face further losses.

Across the United States, nearly 10.8 million properties — 22 percent of homes with a mortgage on them — remain underwater, according to CoreLogic, a data analysis firm. The numbers of properties where owners owe more than their home is worth is shrinking, but analysts say the process can, and must, be sped up.

Both Obama and Romney, though, have been silent on the issue. Why?

“It turns out to be a lose-lose issue for both candidates,” John Vogel, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, recently told MarketWatch. “And therefore gets ignored.”

For each candidate, the reason for staying mum on housing is different. Obama does not have the strongest record to run on. And Romney has found that wading into housing opens himself up to being painted as a heartless corporate mogul.

So housing greatly contributed to the economic crisis yet neither candidate wants to bring it up. Perhaps this topic might top an unfortunate list titled something like “topics that candidates absolutely do not want to talk about.” They can discuss a range of controversial topics like abortion, education, social security and medicare reform, the outsourcing of jobs, and tough foreign policy topics but not housing…

After seeing a variety of opinions on the topic of housing in the last few years, I wonder if most people, including the experts, are just hoping it comes back. Thus far, government policies do not seem to have helped much. As some have noted, without a more robust housing market, it is difficult for people to move and take advantage of the jobs that might be available. Local governments need increasing property tax values to bring in more revenues. Mortgage lenders, the real estate industry, and builders and developers would benefit from more activity. And if the housing industry doesn’t come back quickly? There doesn’t seem to be much in place for this possibility.

I wonder what Americans would want to hear about housing, if it even rates highly enough (or might simply be part of “the economy”). In the earlier stages of the economic crisis, there was a lot of talk about not providing a lot of support to people who should have known better than to take out mortgages they might not be able to afford. Who deserves to get help? Would Americans be happy with more regulation of mortgage lenders so they won’t be allowed to offer mortgages homeowners that could harm borrowers?

State Budget Crisis Task Force: big debt trouble in Illinois

Posted on by

Even if politicians in Illinois don’t talk about this much, outsiders such as the State Budget Crisis Task Force are noticing the debt trouble in Illinois:

For years, Illinois has racked up billions in public debt to plug budget holes, pay overdue bills, and put money into its mismanaged pension funds. And for the people who live there, this has resulted in decrepit commuter trains and buses, thousands of unsound bridges, 200 hazardous dams and one of the most inequitable public school systems in America…

The group, led by the former Federal Reserve chairman, Paul A. Volcker, and the former New York lieutenant governor, Richard Ravitch, recommended an overhaul of Illinois’ budgeting practices, to make it harder to kite money from year to year and raid special-purpose funds. It also warned that tax increases may be in store…

Illinois has the lowest credit rating of the 50 states and has America’s second-biggest public debt per capita, $9,624, including state and local borrowing. Only New York State’s debt is bigger, at $13,840 per capita. But Illinois has not been able to use much of the borrowed money to keep its roads, bridges and schools in good working order, because years of shoddy fiscal practices have taken a heavy toll, the report said…

While many states have heavy debt burdens and unfunded pensions, the task force warned that Illinois’ problems had been building for decades and were advanced. The state was “insolvent” even before the financial crisis hit in 2008, the report said, but that was hard to detect because “budget gimmicks became a standard practice.”

Not exactly a rosy outlook.

This could relate to the discussion at the national level about how the federal government doesn’t have to balance its budget while other levels of government do. Well, states and other government bodies can still mess up the process even if they are “balancing the budget.”

How Republicans became the party against cities

Posted on by

After noting Republicans barely mentioned the word “city” at the Republican National Convention, the rest of a review piece in the New York Times looks at how Republicans became anti-urban:

IT could hardly be otherwise. The Republican Party is, more than ever before in its history, an anti-urban party, its support gleaned overwhelmingly from suburban and rural districts — especially in presidential elections.

This wasn’t always the case. During the heyday of the urban political machines, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Republicans used to hold their own in our nation’s great cities. Philadelphia was dominated for decades by a Republican machine. In Chicago — naturally — both parties had highly competitive, wildly corrupt machines, with a buffoonish Republican mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, presiding over the city during the ascent of Al Capone. In the 1928 presidential election, the Republican Herbert Hoover swept to victory while carrying cities all across the country: Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Detroit; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Houston; Dallas; Omaha and Los Angeles…

FOR Republicans, cities now became object lessons on the shortcomings of activist government and the welfare state — sinkholes of crime and social dysfunction, where Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” cavorted in their Cadillacs. The very idea of the city seemed to be a thing of the past, an archaic concept — so much so that Gerald R. Ford seriously considered letting New York go bankrupt in 1975…

In short, they promise to rip and tear at the immensely complex fabric of city life while sneering at the entire “urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” There is a terrible arrogance here that has ramifications well beyond the Republicans’ electoral prospects.

Fascinating.  A sociologist adds an addendum through a letter to the editor several days later:

While I agree with much of Kevin Baker’s article, his statement that in the postwar years “newly prosperous whites and eventually blacks pursued the American dream out to the suburbs” suggests that postwar urban America became the bastion of the poor and minorities.

Mostly true. But in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston, many members of the black middle class continue to live in proximity to their poor and working-class counterparts.

Indeed, in the postwar and post-civil-rights era, blacks have been inheriting urban America, hence the rise of black mayors and other elected officials across all levels of government. Mr. Baker’s analysis of the concerted turn away from urban America by the G.O.P. reveals that a major consequence of this strategy is not just a forsaking of cities but also the alienation of a large swath of poor, working-class and minority voters.

This has all led to the situation today where both parties try to cater to middle-class suburbanites as more exurban and rural voters are in the Republican camp and more urban dwellers are in the Democratic camp.

I have three other ideas about this:

1. Republicans have shifted over the years toward protecting “traditional” American life which sounds often like it can best be lived out in small towns. While the country may still hold on to some small town values (think of President Obama’s talk about Wall Street versus Main Street), the era of Main Street, even in suburbs and towns that have real Main Streets as opposed to the shopping mall kinds (see here and here), is over.

2. This is a bit odd considering that cities and metropolitan regions are massive economic engines. Aren’t Republicans for markets and a growing economy? Most of this is not happening in rural areas but rather in cities.

3. Tied to #2, suburbs are in part made possible by cities. On one hand, suburbs are more independent than ever before but they are still tied to cities for things like major cultural institutions, major financial institutions, airports and other transportation facilities, and sports teams. Additionally, we should be thinking more about metropolitan regions anyway rather than cities versus suburbs

Overall, we aren’t going back to a United States that is primarily small town or rural. The percent of Americans living in non-metropolitan areas in 1910 was 71.6% while over 80% of American live in metropolitan areas today – a complete switch. The population density of the country tripled from 25.7 to 79.6 people per square mile between 1900 and 2000. The United States of today is an urban nation – and both Republicans and Democrats have to adapt to this.

Lack of WASP candidate for election due to the Internet?

Posted on by

Several commentators have picked up on this feature of the 2012 presidential election: neither candidate is a WASP.

Right now, we’re looking at an absence that would have been a startling presence 50 years ago. With all the focus on economic issues in the U.S. presidential race, there’s hardly any talk about the fact that, for the first time, none of the leading presidential and vice-presidential candidates is a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court has no WASPs. These are new phenomena in the United States.

The totally non-WASP tickets signify major political and social shifts in the networked age. As Robert Putnam showed a decade ago in Bowling Alone, organized groups such as churches, political clubs, fraternal clubs and Scouts have declined in importance. People have moved sharply away from traditional, tightly knit groups into more loosely knit networks that have fewer clan boundaries and more tolerance. The rise of the Internet and mobile connectivity has pushed the trend along by allowing people to expand the number and variety of their social ties…

In 1955, sociologist Will Herberg showed how white America was rigidly divided in Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Indeed, one of the authors of this article was barred from college fraternities because he was Jewish.

Now, when Chelsea Clinton marries, no one remarks on the kippa on her husband’s head. This year, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that 81 per cent of those who know Republican Mitt Romney is a Mormon are either comfortable with his affiliation or say it doesn’t matter to them.

I’m not sure I buy the Internet argument; WASPs lost their elite control because of the Internet? I think the process had started way before this. I wonder if the most basic explanation is that there are simply less WASPs overall in the population. Since the 1950s, there has been a sharp uptick in immigration and more people have had access to education and college and graduate degrees.