Month: November 2004
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Polarization got you down?
If you liked the purple map, check out Morris Fiorina’s Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, which I was reminded of this morning by Robert Samuelson. It’s a useful corrective to the red vs. blue hysteria that has gripped the country. We are divided in many ways, but Fiorina, an eminent political scientist,
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The partisan divide on the economy
Kevin Drum points out an interesting difference between Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004 and Clinton’s re-election bid in 1996: [I]n 1996, of the people who thought the economy was in good shape, a total of about 63% voted for Clinton. In 2004, of the people who thought the economy was in good shape, an astonishing
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Problems with the Florida conspiracy theory
The “Bush stole the election” meme was dealt a blow today when Slate’s Josh Levin finally examined one of the key claims – that vote totals for Bush in Florida counties using optical scan ballots were disproportionately high, indicating that nefarious conspiracies were afoot. Lo and behold, the vote totals in those counties weren’t that
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Is Hillary a “good closer”?
The implausible case for why Hillary Clinton could win the presidency — which we’re going to hear a lot about over the next four years — seems to depend on her surprising success at winning over skeptical New York voters in 2000, particularly upstate. Don’t believe the hype. First of all, her 55%-43% win was
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A Stewart backlash?
Though I love the Daily Show, I keep waiting for the Jon Stewart backlash — it’s basically inevitable that media coverage eventually turns nasty when someone gets so much positive press. But it hasn’t happened yet. Even the professionally vicious Wonkette admitted she likes the show: I keep on wanting to write something mean about
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Silver lining search XIII
Michael Moore has offered the definitive entry in the silver lining sweepstakes in a new email to his list. Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. Some choice excerpts: 1. It is against the law for George W. Bush to run for president again. 2. Bush’s victory was the NARROWEST win for a sitting
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The mandate debate
The debate is raging in Washington and across the country. Many reporters and conservative commentators are calling Bush’s victory a mandate, while liberal groups and other observers are denying that it is anything of the sort (Media Matters usefully rounds up both sides of the debate in the process of arguing the liberal side). All
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How did the models do?
The latest issue of PS, a political science journal put out by the American Political Science Association, features a series of articles forecasting the 2004 presidential vote using various models that have been developed. Though they all illustrate that political scientists are much better at predicting the past than the future, it’s useful to take
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Politics goes Moneyball
Yale political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber deserve a lot of credit for the high turnout on Tuesday. For a long time, the effectiveness of different methods of voter contact was an open question. It was too hard to control for all the different factors affecting the turnout decision. So they conducted a series
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Silver lining search XII
Slate’s Daniel Gross endorses the mess cleanup thesis: The only solace for sullen Democrats is that now Republicans might have to clean up their own fiscal mess. And Larry Beinhart says much the same thing in the Baltimore Sun: Sen. John Kerry’s loss of this election is a disaster for the country, but it could