Brendan Nyhan

This blog gets results!

On Tuesday, I pointed out that a rapid response blog post by Hillary Clinton’s campaign referred in a transcript to Barack Obama as “BHO,” an unusual reference that implicitly highlights Obama’s middle name of Hussein.

Someone must have noticed because, as commenter Jinchi noted last night, the post has been changed to refer to Obama by his last name.

After a long history of questionable practices (PDF), including distorting his own poll and hyping bogus Internet polling, pollster John Zogby missed California by about 15 points. Can we stop taking him seriously as a legitimate pollster now?

Update 2/7 9:29 AM: Via Sullivan, Zogby downplays the error:

About California: Some of you may have noticed our pre-election polling differed from the actual results. It appears that we underestimated Hispanic turnout and overestimated the importance of younger Hispanic voters. We also overestimated turnout among African-American voters. Those of you who have been following our work know that we have gotten 13 out of 17 races right this year, and so many others over the years. This does happen.

I love the euphemism that their “pre-election polling differed from the actual results.” Well, of course it did — almost everyone’s polls fail to get the exact numbers. But most pollsters don’t miss by double digits!

With Hillary currently leading the delegate tally on the strength of her margin among superdelegates, a backlash seems inevitable. Discuss…

Update 2/6 3:38 PM: The prospects of superdelegates deciding the nomination makes the backlash even more likely, particularly if Democratic incumbents bail out Hillary. See Ezra Klein for early criticism.

Memo to pundits and campaigns: can we please stop extrapolating from primary election results to the general election? Here are three inferential problems that are already plaguing discussion of the Super Tuesday results:

1. Winning primaries in states dominated by the other party doesn’t mean you will be competitive there in November.

Ezra Klein flags a Hillary Clinton press release claiming that her wins in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Arkansas proves she can “compete and win in red states.” But as Klein points out, “Democrats always win Democratic primaries in red states.” Obama’s wins in North Dakota, Kansas, etc. are just as meaningless as a measure of his ability to win those states in a general election. To take a silly example, I’m sure Bob Dole won primaries in “blue states” before getting slaughtered in them during the general election in 1996.

2. Demographic breakdowns of primary voting don’t necessarily translate to the general election.

Via Matthew Yglesias, John Judis writes that “Hillary Clinton…. is going to have problems with white male voters” and that “Obama is having trouble with white working-class voters and Latinos” based on primary election results, a pattern that he then extends to the general election, where he suggests both will struggle with those demographic groups.

But as Yglesias points out, this approach has an an epistemological problem:

Judis’ method is going to reach the conclusion “Party X is Doomed” any time Party X has two fairly equally matched contenders. Even if the two contenders are both very strong, each is going to look “weak” among whichever groups of voters prefer the other candidate. Conversely, if there are two very weak contenders then they’re both going to look “strong” within the demographic groups where their rival is especially weak.

To illustrate the point, Hillary Clinton is performing poorly among African Americans in the primaries, but if she is the nominee, she will surely do well because blacks as a whole are a heavily Democratic constituency (a point Judis concedes). Similarly, I’m not sure that Barack Obama’s weakness with Latinos in the Democratic primaries is a significant problem given the way GOP immigration rhetoric is alienating that community.

For this kind of analysis to make sense, we need to make some distinctions among demographic groups (to be fair, Judis makes some of these points). For instance, struggling to win primary votes among groups that aren’t particularly favorable to Democrats is a real sign of potential trouble in the general election. Hillary’s weaknesses with men and Obama’s weakness with white working class voters could be serious problems in the general.

3. Primary turnout levels aren’t a measure of general election appeal.

The argument that Yglesias offers in response to Judis is also flawed:

To me, most indications are that the Democrats have two strong contenders. Consider that in Missouri about 552,000 people came out to vote in the GOP primary — a primary that all three candidates seriously contested. By contrast 800,000 people came to vote on the Democratic side. If you put all five candidates into a single election, Hillary Clinton’s second place showing of 395,000 would have trounced John McCain’s 194,304 for third place. Both candidates, in short, are good at appealing to large numbers of voters and getting them to show up.

All this means is that they are good at appealing to large numbers of people who vote in Democratic primary elections. Energizing the base is part of a good campaign, but it doesn’t prove much about the candidates’ ability to attract support from independents and moderates in the other party. Even the independents who cross over and vote in open primaries are not necessarily representative of independents as a whole.

Update 2/7 9:34 AM: Like Yglesias, Media Matters suggests that record Democratic primary turnout shows that the party’s candidates have a broad appeal. That just isn’t necessarily true.

In a rapid response blog post this morning, Hillary’s campaign refers to Barack Obama, whose middle name is Hussein, as “BHO” in a transcript of an Obama appearance on CNN that is rendered as follows:

ROBERTS: Senator, she suggests that you’re falling short here by mandating coverage for children but not mandating it for their parents. What do you say?

BHO: …[I] mean, if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating that everybody buy a house. the reason they don’t have a house is they don’t have the money.

However, the official CNN transcript labels him as “Obama,” not “BHO,” and never refers to his middle name. A Google search of the Fact Hub blog shows one other post referring to Obama as “BHO” in a transcript.

The problem, of course, is that people have used Obama’s middle name to promote the myth that he is a Muslim. As a result, even if their intent is benign, it’s a bit disconcerting that Clinton’s people are calling him “BHO.”

Everyone is talking about the “Yes We Can” music video supporting Barack Obama, but we shouldn’t forget an early classic of the genre — Jin’s “Open Letter 2 Obama”. As I said back in June, I bet you’ve never heard “higher fuel-efficiency standards” in a rap song before…

Update 2/5 1:07 PM: Via my brother-in-law, the underground rapper Mully Man also has an Obama song (MP3).

I don’t trust stories from the campaign bus/plane, but this anecdote about Mitt Romney trying to make small talk with a Star Wars reference is bizarre:

Mr. Romney has been making more of an effort to cultivate the news media as part of his refashioned candidacy. When he sauntered back onto a flight on Saturday, he broke the ice with an unusual remark.

“What did they say in ‘Star Wars?’ ” he asked. “What’s that line? ‘There’s nothing happening here. These droids aren’t the droids you’re looking for.’ ”

Eric Fehrnstrom, his traveling press secretary, said it had actually been rendered: “These are not the droids you are looking for.”

“These are not the droids you’re looking for,” Mr. Romney said. “Sorry.”

Huh? Did this make more sense in context?

In the New York Times today, Edmund Andrews mentions that the firm Global Insight is predicting the GOP will only get 46 percent of the presidential vote:

“From a political point of view, the job market is not going to provide a lot of comfort at election time, especially for Republicans,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight.

Drawing on a model that correlates past economic performance and past election results, Global Insight is predicting that the Republican candidate for president in November will receive only 46 percent of the vote.

Such models have often been wrong before. But Republicans are keenly aware that Mr. Bush received little credit from voters for the last five years of good economic growth.

If Global Insight is predicting Republicans will get 46 percent of the two-party vote (as these models typically do), the result they are projecting would be comparable to Bill Clinton’s win over Bob Dole in 1996.

However, Democrats shouldn’t get so cocky. Lane Kenworthy, a professor of sociology and political science at the University of Arizona, notes that one of the least ad hoc presidential forecasting models — the “bread and peace” model of Douglas Hibbs, which combines war deaths with weighted growth in per capita real disposable personal income — actually projects a close election narrowly won by Republicans based on Kenworthy’s calculation of the “bread” figure at the end of 2007.

Here is its track record to date (the regression line excludes the outliers of 1952 and 1968):

Here are three 2008 scenarios Kenworthy plots (2008a is based on income through the end of the year, 2008b assumes the GOP is punished for deaths in Iraq, 2008c assumes a continuing economic slowdown through November) — as you can see, they are each extremely close to the magic 50% line:

The Yale economist Ray Fair also has a well-known election forecasting model. In his latest update, he projects a GOP two-party vote share of 48 percent. However, Fair writes that “it should be noted that the forecasts of inflation from [his econometric model] are more pessimistic than the current consensus view and the forecasts of real output growth are more optimistic.” (By contrast, if you project -2% economic growth, his model predicts a GOP presidential vote share of 45.4 percent.)

Of course, as Kenworthy notes, we shouldn’t take any of these forecasts too seriously. A model is a representation of how things worked in the past; there’s no guarantee of future performance, especially in an election in which no incumbent president or vice president is on the ticket. Also, each model has specific limitations that are worth keeping in mind. For instance, in terms of Hibbs’s model, Kenworthy correctly points out that growing income inequality means that per capita income has become an increasingly unrepresentative measure. (The main critique of Fair’s model is that the specification has been frequently modified for ad hoc reasons to maximize fit, as Hibbs discusses at some length in an unpublished paper.)

Still, the Hibbs projection in particular is a reminder that Democrats shouldn’t get cocky, especially if John McCain consolidates his hold on the GOP nomination tomorrow night. This election may be closer than anyone expects…

Oh, the echo chamber.

During the State of the Union, President Bush offered one of his trademark misleading “average” tax cut statistics:

Unless Congress acts, most of the tax relief we’ve delivered over the past seven years will be taken away. Some in Washington argue that letting tax relief expire is not a tax increase. Try explaining that to 116 million American taxpayers who would see their taxes rise by an average of $1,800.

But as I pointed out, that figure is skewed upward by the large tax cuts received by those Americans with the highest incomes. The middle quintile of the income distribution only received a tax cut of $814 in 2010 from the 2001-2006 tax cuts.

This already misleading claim was then distorted further by Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who falsely paraphrased it to a focus group on Fox News by asking “Over 100 million Americans would see their taxes rise $1,800. Doesn’t that concern you?”

Sadly, a lot of people probably interpreted Bush’s claim the same way.

Bill Kristol — who backed McCain strongly in 1999-2000 — overplays his hand, claiming “no McCain, no surge”:

One might add a special reason that conservatives — and the nation — owe John McCain at least a respectful hearing. Only a year ago, we were headed toward defeat in Iraq. Without McCain’s public advocacy and private lobbying, President Bush might not have reversed strategy and announced the surge of troops in January 2007. Without McCain’s vigorous leadership, support for the surge in Congress would not have been sustained in the first few months of 2007. So: No McCain, no surge. No surge, failure in Iraq, a terrible setback for America — and, as it happens, no chance for a G.O.P. victory in 2008.

Um, no.