1. gnxp
  2. Andrew Gelman makes political punditry boring

Andrew Gelman makes political punditry boring

By razib on August 6, 2009.

Stories and Stats: The truth about Obama's victory wasn't in the papers:

Our story of the 2008 campaign confirms some parts of the journalistic narrative and refutes others. Yes, the economy was important; yes, young voters swung to Obama and the Congressional Democrats; yes, Obama did particularly well among minorities (Latinos and Asians as well as African Americans), even beyond the Democrats' usual strength among these groups; yes, the Democrats made new inroads among the most affluent voters. But no, working-class whites did not run away from Obama; and no, Obama did not redraw the electoral map. Since 2004 the Democratic Party gained about five percentage points of the vote both in presidential and Congressional elections: not a landslide but a large swing by historical standards. The chief lesson for Obama's first term is that the fundamentals will rule. Future elections will likely turn on the economy's performance under the new administration.

Most political punditry is actually more like historical fiction; it's a narrative yarn spun for the entertainment of a public which doesn't know much about history, but likes their fiction to be grounded in "reality." I find quantitative political science fascinating and much more illuminating, but alas there just isn't enough of it to feed the insatiable appetite of "news junkies." As I've said to for years, political & sports punditry really do bear a family resemblance to reading entrails.

Tags
Culture
Andrew Gelman
Blue State
Red State

More like this

String of Obama Victories Portends a Strong Performance in the General Election
Yesterday, Barack Obama won all three contests (Maryland, Virginia, and DC) in the "Potomac Primary", all by sizable margins. This means that he has won all eight contests that have occurred since Super Tuesday. He now leads the delegate race--even when superdelegates are included--and he…
Working for the Working Class Vote
the New York Times Magazine has a cover story this week about Barack Obama's efforts to reach working-class voters. The headline writers did it no favors by tagging it "Will gun-toting, churchgoing white guys pull the lever for Obama?," which makes it sound like the worst sort of demographic…
Some North Carolina politics....
On the Road: Charlotte, North Carolina: An observation we've heard repeated in Obama offices across America, Crandall emphasized how beneficial the contested primary had been for building the foundation for record turnout. "We had real hints of it in the primary," Crandall said. The first-time…
"Big picture" inferences about the 2008 election
I'm still chewing through the exit polls, though Steve is right that there are no big surprises. I think I'll put up a few charts which display questions where responses can be thought of in an ordinal manner just to make clear the trend lines. But of course Andrew Gelman has already crunched the…

Quite. I wonder if it would be possible to test this in some way. Perhaps you could present pundits with some fake election results - say, replace "Democrat" with "Republican" and vice versa - and get them to comment on it. Then present others with the real results. Then get some random people (or even other pundits!) to judge which of the op-eds was the "real" one.

The election results would have to be ones that the pundits didn't know about, but, State legislative elections would probably work (no-one outside the state in question knows about those right?)