Read the Twitter conversation between Sasha Issenberg and Christina Bellantoni (PBS Newshour). Search on @victorylab or follow this link for the questions:
https://twitter.com/#!/search/%40victorylab
Sasha Issenberg tweeting away
I’ve been reflecting on my differences with John Sides about the impact of gaffes, and I realize that explaining counterfactuals–an issue that John raises effectively in his recent posting– is very challenging. It’s challenging to explain to students, who tolerate our philosophizing about the world of “what if.” It’s much harder with journalists, who are attuned to a world of facts.
What brought this to mind was a query today from a reporter. He wrote:
If campaigns only swing the popular vote 1.1 percentage points (or whatever), is there a reason for them to grab our attention the way they do? That’s the part of my piece that’s the thinnest — what campaigns are for if they’re not (quite) for convincing independent voters, given how few bona fide independent voters there are. Continue reading
It’s difficult to know quite what to say about Mitt Romney’s statements about the 47% of American society who don’t pay taxes and apparently utterly dependent on government and solidly in the Obama camp.
The statement is inaccurate in so many ways–there are nearly 5000 hits from the search phrase “Romney 47%” and most utterly pummel the candidate. I love the most recent discovery that there are 4000 millionaires in that 47%! Continue reading
A thoughtful new essay by Gary King and Maya Sen on the future of higher education, apparently part of a forthcoming symposium, just came across the transom. I look forward to reading the rest of the papers.
While it is a decade old now, Distinctly American: The Residential Liberal Arts College, edited by Reed’s then president Steven Koblik provides more details on this niche of higher ed. The article by Morton Schapiro (currently president of Northwestern and at the time president of Willams College) on the financial challenges faced by these institutions is particularly sobering. It should be required reading for every faculty member at an LAC.
Bull Run Watershed, Courtesy of The Oregonian
The Portland City Council voted to add fluoride to the Portland water system today, thus ending the city’s dubious distinction as the largest municipality in the U.S. without fluoride in its water. The debate has been heated–just peruse the comments section after stories in The Oregonian. I’m not interested in rehashing these issues here.
What I am interested in is the claim that the Council’s actions are somehow anti-democratic. This is a common meme among crotchety local bloggers–Jack Bogdanski for example compares the Portland City Council to North Korea. 74% of readers who answered an online question said that “it is wrong to deny citizens a say in public health decisions.” Continue reading
Tip of the hat to Larry Bartels at The Monkey Cage blog who provides a brief reference to this story by Dylan Matthews, “Do 15% of Ohio Republicans think Romney killed Osama bin Laden? Probably not.”
Matthews asks:
Public Policy Polling has a new poll (pdf) out of Ohio showing Obama with his biggest lead since May. Given how hard it would be for Mitt Romney to win the White House without winning Ohio, that’s a big deal.
But a secondary finding in the poll has gotten a lot of attention. PPP asked voters who they thought deserved more credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden: Obama or Romney. 63 percent said Obama, 31 percent weren’t sure, and 6 percent said Romney.
The results for Republican voters were even more astonishing. 38 percent said Obama, 47 percent weren’t sure, and 15 percent said Romney. What the heck is going on?
… and then goes on to give a nice summary of political science and social psychological work on the topic, including links back to articles by, guess who, Larry Bartels!
The timing for me is perfect, because we are reading Glynn, Herbst, Shapiro, and Keefe’s wonderful chapters (4-7) on different disciplinary conceptions of individual cognition and opinion change, followed by four chapters from Zaller (also linked from the Matthews’s story), then Converse’s seminal piece on mass belief systems (the foundation on which Zaller’s book was built).
Nice timing Dylan and Larry!
P.S. I hear through the rumor mill that there is a new edition of Glynn et al. being completed. I like that book and look forward to the third edition.
The merger of Roll Call and CQ Daily is not going to register in a lot of circles, but I remember both as required reading for any aspiring scholar of American politics. Both publications are apparently making money, but readership patterns are shifting to online publications, and the publisher thinks they can deliver the same content at one online and print publication.
What’s interesting is how the change happened–once they allowed tablets onto the House floor, their print sales took a nosedive.
Crossposted at Earlyvoting.net
(Apologies to my commenter; I can’t get the graphics into a comment.
I appreciate the comment, and you’re right–if I collapse the categories into Independent (including leaner), Weak, and Strong Affiliators, the Independent value is significantly lower from the two values 12 of 44 times. It seems like Independents are consistently giving a lower score than all partisan groups.
But that focuses on just a small part of Killian’s argument. Her key claim is that declinin trust in government is being driven by Independents. As we saw in the previous post, for the past 40 years, trust among the three main partisan groups has moved in tandem. There is just no evidence that Independents are accounting for all or even a large part on the change. The only way you could say that is if the number of Independents was rapidly increasing, which it is not (see the end of this post)
But i did want to pursue the question. I think the main claims are that a) Independants are becoming a larger part of the electorate, and b) independents trust government less than partisans. I think both don’t stand up to scrutiny.
It gets a bit complicated, and I didn’t put some of these figures in at first because I didn’t want an overly long post.
How many people vote early? Or when 50% becomes 45% becomes 17%.
Kyle Inskeep of NBC News titled his Sept 21st story: “Early Voting: Half of US Begins Voting Tomorrow.”
Michelle Franzen of MSNBC repeats the statement: “Early Voting Begins in Many States.” The title on the video says “Early Voting Expands” except that early voting has not expanded substantially since 2008 and in at least three states (GA, FL, OH) has been somewhat restricted. Details, details.
What’s the problem? Inskeep is strictly accurate if, when you hear “half the nation” you think “25 of 50 states, not counting DC.” But I think most of us think “half the nation” means half of the voting population. Just like the U.S. Senate, Inskeep counts Wyoming as “1” and California as “1” even though Wyoming’s population is only 1.5% of California’s. Continue reading →