All posts by Jay Pinho

About Jay Pinho

Jay is a data journalist and political junkie. He currently writes about domestic politics, foreign affairs, and journalism and continues to make painstakingly slow progress in amateur photography. He would very much like you to check out SCOTUSMap.com and SCOTUSSearch.com if you have the chance.

Who do you think will win the election?

Politics, , , , , ,

Justin Wolfers and David Rothschild are coming out with a paper called “Forecasting Elections: Voter Intentions versus Expectations.” In it, they explain that voters predict election outcomes more accurately when they are asked who they think will win, as opposed to who they intend to vote for. The authors’ takeaway?

The answers we receive from the expectation question are about as informative as if they were themselves based on a personal poll of approximately twenty friends, family, and coworkers. This “turbocharging” of the effective sample size makes the expectation question remarkably valuable with small sample sizes. Moreover, because our model gives insight into the correlation between voting expectations and intentions, even samples with a strong partisan bias can be used to generate useful forecasts.

The key insight from our study—that analysts pay greater attention to polls of voter forecasts—in fact represents a return to historical practice. In the decades prior to the advent of scientific polling, the standard approach to election forecasting involved both newspapers and business associations writing to correspondents around the country, asking who they thought would win. We are in many respects, recommending a similar practice. Having shown the usefulness of this approach for forecasting elections, we hope that future work will explore how similar questions can be used to provide better forecasts in a variety of market research contexts from forecasting product demand to predicting electoral outcomes, to better measuring consumer confidence.

I’ve noticed before that polling analysis usually fails to take into account the wording used in the question. Assuming Wolfers’ and Rothschild’s reasoning bears out, this will be a very useful start to rethinking exactly how pollsters should frame their questions if they want to achieve the most accurate results (which, quite frankly, is not the objective of many organizations that conduct polls).

Related articles

FOMO

Miscellaneous, , ,

Or the “Fear of Missing Out.” For today’s children of the mid- to late-’80s, it’s a mounting dilemma:

The acronym has previously been defined as a syndrome born from the constant pressure of social media, and it is in that context that Twentysomething addresses FOMO. But FOMO should really be understood much more broadly than that; by limiting itself to the strictly social elements of the syndrome, the book only scratches the surface of the term’s emerging ubiquity amongst Millennials and the extent to which it shapes our lives.

“I moved to New York City after college purely because of FOMO,” said Sarah Muir, 25, who grew up in Portland, Maine. She explained that the move was a lifestyle choice rather than a career one. Muir, who double-majored in International Studies and Spanish and always saw herself doing something “meaningful”, took an entry level job in Search Engine Marketing because it paid the bills. “I hated the work, but it allowed me to live this glamorous urban lifestyle that I’d always dreamed about,” said Muir.

Even living the life, Muir’s FOMO persisted, only now she found herself wondering if she was missing something else, somewhere else. She found herself scouring travel blogs at work, dreaming of backpacking through Asia or moving to Argentina, where she studied abroad in college.

As a card-carrying member of the late-’80s crowd, this is definitely a problem to which I can attest.

Not quite the shellacking they needed?

Politics, , , ,

The Economist wonders if it would have been better, in the long run, for the Republicans to have been defeated more soundly on November 6th:

Republican pessimism is more than a PR headache. Put simply, it is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it seems to dislike. Mr Romney’s campaign slogan was “Believe in America”. But too many on his side believe in a version of America from which displeasing facts or arguments are ruthlessly excluded. Todd Akin did not implode as a Senate candidate because of his stern opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest: many Republicans in Congress share those views. His downfall came because in trying to deny that his principles involved a trade-off with compassion for rape victims he came up with the unscientific myth that the bodies of women subjected to rape can shut down a pregnancy.

It was a telling moment of denial, much like the comforting myth that there is no such thing as climate change or, if there is, that humans are not involved. Ensconced in a parallel world of conservative news sources and conservative arguments, all manner of comforting alternative visions of reality surfaced during the 2012 election. Many, like Mr Akin’s outburst, involved avoiding having to think about unwelcome things (often basic science or economics). It became a nostrum among rank-and-file Republicans that mainstream opinion polls are biased and should be ignored, for instance, and that voter fraud is rampant and explains much of the Democrats’ inner-city support. Both conspiracies sounded a lot like ways of wishing the other side away.

Thoughtful Republicans are not oblivious to the dangers that they face. Optimists hope that new leaders will emerge to lead their movement rapidly towards greater realism, and greater cheeriness. If not, electoral defeats far more severe than those inflicted this time will surely impose such changes. Republicans may look back and wish the reckoning had started sooner.

The problem with David Brooks

Media, Politics, , , , , ,

His column in today’s New York Times, “The Party of Work,” makes a lot of good points before crashing and burning in the conclusion (excerpted here at length):

The Pew Research Center does excellent research on Asian-American and Hispanic values. Two findings jump out. First, people in these groups have an awesome commitment to work. By most measures, members of these groups value industriousness more than whites.

Second, they are also tremendously appreciative of government. In survey after survey, they embrace the idea that some government programs can incite hard work, not undermine it; enhance opportunity, not crush it.

Moreover, when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a modern economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages still don’t rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the world into turmoil. It’s a university system that is indispensable but unaffordable. It’s chaotic neighborhoods that can’t be cured by withdrawing government programs.

For these people, the Republican equation is irrelevant. When they hear Romney talk abstractly about Big Government vs. Small Government, they think: He doesn’t get me or people like me.

Let’s just look at one segment, Asian-Americans. Many of these people are leading the lives Republicans celebrate. They are, disproportionately, entrepreneurial, industrious and family-oriented. Yet, on Tuesday, Asian-Americans rejected the Republican Party by 3 to 1. They don’t relate to the Republican equation that more government = less work.

Over all, Republicans have lost the popular vote in five out of the six post-cold-war elections because large parts of the country have moved on. The basic Republican framing no longer resonates.

Some Republicans argue that they can win over these rising groups with a better immigration policy. That’s necessary but insufficient. The real problem is economic values.

If I were given a few minutes with the Republican billionaires, I’d say: spend less money on marketing and more on product development. Spend less on “super PACs” and more on research. Find people who can shift the debate away from the abstract frameworks — like Big Government vs. Small Government. Find people who can go out with notebooks and study specific, grounded everyday problems: what exactly does it take these days to rise? What exactly happens to the ambitious kid in Akron at each stage of life in this new economy? What are the best ways to rouse ambition and open fields of opportunity?

Don’t get hung up on whether the federal government is 20 percent or 22 percent of G.D.P. Let Democrats be the party of security, defending the 20th-century welfare state. Be the party that celebrates work and inflames enterprise. Use any tool, public or private, to help people transform their lives.

Emphasis mine. This is classic Brooks-ian thinking: decrying the failure of the Republican Party to measure up to its potential, admirably encouraging them to reform, and meanwhile forgetting that his prescription for success is exactly what the Democratic Party has been doing for years — and the precise reason they won again this year.

I bolded that last portion because it sets up such a clearly ridiculous straw man: the Democrats as the unimaginative defenders of the “20th-century welfare state,” while the Republican Party “celebrates work and inflames enterprise.” How can he attempt such a tried-and-failed GOP talking point immediately after acknowledging that “the basic Republican framing no longer resonates” for so many Americans? When Brooks says to “use any tool, public or private, to help people transform their lives,” he’s taking a page straight out of the Democratic playbook. This makes his characterization of the Dems as the “party of security” (whatever that means, exactly) all the more ridiculous.

Leverage and the fiscal cliff

Politics, , , ,

Unsurprisingly, Joshua Green sees a highly favorable situation for Obama now:

To keep the economy afloat, the White House cut the deals it felt it had to. Many, such as Obama’s agreement to extend all of the Bush tax cuts in 2010, were poorly received by Democrats. Now comes the payoff. The expiration of those cuts and the automatic reductions set to take effect at year’s end—the so-called fiscal cliff—mean that Obama and the Democrats can gain a huge source of new revenue by doing nothing at all. Republican priorities are the ones suddenly in peril. The combination of tax increases on the rich, higher capital-gains taxes, and sharp cuts in defense spending have congressional Republicans deeply worried. To mitigate these, they’ll have to bargain.

Despite their post-election tough talk, Republican leaders have dealt themselves a lousy hand. Obama can propose a “middle-class tax cut” for the 98 percent of American households earning less than $250,000 a year—while letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more—and dare the Republicans to block it. If they do, everyone’s taxes will rise on Jan. 1. It’s true that going over the fiscal cliff, as some Democrats believe will happen, would set back the recovery and could eventually cause a recession. But Democratic leaders in Congress believe the public furor would be too intense for Republicans to withstand for long.

Going over the cliff would also weaken the Republicans’ greatest point of leverage: renewing their threat to default on the national debt. Right now, the Treasury expects to hit the debt ceiling in February. But if the cliff can’t be avoided, tax rates will rise and government coffers will swell, delaying the date of default—thus diminishing the Republicans’ advantage. Alice Rivlin, the founding director of the Office of Management and Budget and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says that “as quickly as the IRS began changing the withholding schedule, the date would be pushed back.”

The literary unelectables

Books, Politics, , , , , ,

One of my favorite literary web sites, The Millions, asks which fictional political characters would cut it in the YouTube era:

There is an element of fiction in all successful politics, but these works show the deliriously entertaining distortions that result when fiction (or creative nonfiction) asserts its authority over the political realm. John Cowper Powys’s epic poses the following question: if getting caught with a dead girl or a live boy is political suicide, what does an affair with an endangered, aboriginal giantess portend for a prince about to ascend to the throne? How would Charles Kinbote’s claims about his native Zembla in Nabokov’s Pale Fire hold up in the age of PolitiFact? Ben Marcus’s dystopian allegory-cum-bildungsroman­-cum-anthropological study lets us ponder what debate format would best suit Jane Dark, the pantomiming leader of a political party called the Silentists. A Henry James’s story, “The Private Life” asks just what happens to a figure with a preternatural knack for finding a public when nobody is around. Finally, Gertrude Stein’s authorized autobiography of her lover and modernist Paris explores why the military should embrace the avant-garde or risk obsolescence. Each work puts forth a character who, however indelible, remains doggedly unelectable.