Brendan Nyhan

Tyler Cowen notes that Barack Obama’s response to Hillary Clinton’s VP talk is unlikely to be effective:

Read this, the headline is “Obama: I’m no V.P.”. That’s not just the biased framing of the journalist, it captures Obama’s words. My unsolicited advice is this: if you are a political candidate, proclaiming “I am not X” is not much better than admitting “I am X.” Either way it frames the debate. And avoid phrases like “If I’m not ready [for the Presidency]…”

The classic example is Richard Nixon saying “I am not a crook.” And indeed there is psychology research shows that the negation (i.e. “no” or “not”) is frequently forgotten over time, as the Washington Post’s Shankar Vendantam pointed out in 2004:

Experiments by Ruth Mayo, a cognitive social psychologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, also found that for a substantial chunk of people, the “negation tag” of a denial falls off with time. Mayo’s findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2004.

“If someone says, ‘I did not harass her,’ I associate the idea of harassment with this person,” said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. “Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person’s name again.

“If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind,” she added. “Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11.”

Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that “Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did,” Mayo said it would be better to say something like, “Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks” — and not mention Hussein at all.

The psychologist acknowledged that such a statement might not be entirely accurate — issuing a denial or keeping silent are sometimes the only real options.

I’m not a fan of politicians using advanced framing tactics; my interest in this research concerns its implications for correcting myths like the supposed connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Anyway, here’s the abstract from Mayo’s paper for those who are interested:

‘‘I am not guilty’’ vs ‘‘I am innocent’’: Successful negation
may depend on the schema used for its encoding
Ruth Mayo, Yaacov Schul, and Eugene Burnstein

Negations (e.g., ‘‘Jim is not guilty’’) are part of our daily language and communication. Linguistic and non-linguistic negations
can occur when receivers counter-argue what communicators are saying, when hypotheses are disconfirmed, or through negative
cognitive responses and many other social interactive processes. Our study explores how negations are encoded by considering the
predictions of two theoretical models. According to the fusion model, the core of a negated message and the negation marker are
integrated into one meaningful unit. Thus, Jim in the example might be encoded within the schema ‘‘innocence.’’ According to the
schema-plus-tag model, a negated message is represented as a core supposition and a negation tag, allowing for dissociation of the
two at a later point in time. We compare the two models by examining the nature of inferences that are facilitated by negations. Our
results show that the existence of a schema that accommodates the meaning of the original negation is critical in determining how a
negation will be encoded. When such a schema is not readily available, processing a negated message facilitates negation–incongruent associations, in line with predictions of the schema-plus-tag model. This model is also supported by analyses of respondents’
memory. We discuss implications of these findings for the communication of negated information, for discounting theories, and for the assessment of the truth of incoming information.

As many people (including me) have pointed out, John McCain’s reputation for “straight talk” is highly exaggerated. Indeed, he’s changed his views so many times it’s hard to know what he thinks. At the same time, however, his voting record is more conservative than his “maverick” reputation suggests.

A friend points out that the book Ideology and Congress by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, the two authors of the most widely used estimates of the ideal points of members of Congress, can help square the circle on McCain to some extent.

On pages 2-3, they note that their algorithm tends to place McCain as highly conservative but that his voting record is especially inconsistent, causing the predictive accuracy of their estimates to be the lowest of all the members of the Senate during the sessions in which he has served (i.e. “the worst fitting”):

There are, to be sure, occasional mavericks in Congress… John McCain (R-AZ), normally one of the very most conservative members of the Senate, has been the worst fitting member of the Senate in each of his eight Senates, most notably the 103rd (2001-02), where he frequently voted with the Democrats, perhaps in pique over losing the race for the presidential nomination in 2000.

They later note that the rapid evolution of McCain’s views is abnormal and not fully accounted for by their statistical model, which assumes members don’t bounce around so much (p. 93):

Given the pace of events, it would be possible for the major dimension to show rapid legislator shifts. In our dynamic model, very rapid shifts are foreclosed by our imposition of the restriction that individual movement can only be linear in time. This restriction fails to capture a few cases. For example, John McCain (R-AZ) started as a conservative, became a moderate after losing the Republican nomination to George Bush in 2000, and recently reemerged as very conservative. McCain is an exception…

The fact that he’s largely gotten away with this double evolution should be seen as an amazing political accomplishment. But I think the political environment is so favorable to Democrats that the media will eventually start hammering him. The questions about his dalliance with John Kerry in 2004 are already starting…

The current issue of the National Enquirer contains some ugly smears of Barack Obama.

The cover prominently features a picture of him along with the headline “Obama’s secrets… His close friendship with terrorist.” Out of context, this headline may reinforce the the myth that Obama is a Muslim, suggesting to casual readers that Obama is friends with a Muslim terrorist. In fact, however, the headline refers to Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, a former member of 1960s radical group the Weathermen.

In addition to scurrilous suggestions that the gay choir director of Obama’s church was murdered to silence him from revealing what he knows about the presidential candidate, the article uses the Ayers connection to suggest that Obama is anti-American. It quotes Bill Hobbs (the Tennessee GOP flack who authored an infamous press release smearing Obama):

Asked about Ayers, Obama’s campaign spokesman David Alexrod freely admitted: “Yes, they’re friendly.”

Bill Hobbs, communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party, revealed there are other links between the senator and America’s enemies.

“Obama has a foreign policy advisor, Robert Maley, who blames Israel for anything bad and suggests we ought to be doing business with Hamas (the radical Palestinian militants dedicated to Israel’s destruction),” Hobbs told the enquirer.

Hobbs believes Obama will be putting America’s strongest ally in the Middle East right in the crosshairs of our enemies.

Just as disturbing is the alleged link between Obama and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has referred to Jews as “dogs” and “pigs”…

Even worse, the Enquirer floats rumors that Obama is an Iranian agent without directly contradicting them:

The senator’s questionable associations have fired up Internet bloggers and their imaginations.

The “New York Post” recently reported that some Internet “posts” even claim that Obama is an Iranian agent sent to take over the U.S. government and wage war against Sunni Muslims.”

A pull quote stating that “Some posts even claim Obama is an Iranian agent” is featured in a separate picture of Obama that appears above the famous image of him in Somali clothing. Once again, the implication to casual readers is that Obama is a Muslim and possibly disloyal to the US.

While the tendency is to ignore the Enquirer as tabloid trash, it has a circulation of more than one million copies and is seen by many more people in supermarket checkout lines. We should not ignore what Mickey Kaus calls “the undernews.”

Update 3/13 3:34 PM: Due to a legal threat from the Enquirer, I’ve removed the images and PDF previously included in this post from my website.

It’s time to get the swami graphic out again because Bob Herbert is pretending to read minds (my emphasis):

More serious was Senator Clinton’s assertion that she was qualified to be commander in chief, and that John McCain had also “certainly” crossed that “threshold,” but that the jury was still out on Mr. Obama.

In other words, if a choice on national security had to be made today between Senators Obama and McCain, voters — according to Mrs. Clinton’s logic — should choose Senator McCain.

That is a low thing for a Democratic presidential candidate to do to a rival in a party primary. Can you imagine John McCain saying that Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney or even the guitar-strumming Mike Huckabee might be less qualified than Hillary Clinton to be commander in chief? It couldn’t happen.

But Senator Clinton never gave a second thought to opening the trap door beneath her fellow Democrat.

Of course, Herbert has no idea what Clinton has given “a second thought” to during the campaign. But he pretends that he does anyway.

There is a cool article in the new American Political Science Review reporting the results of a field experiment in which different mailings were randomly sent to voters. It turns out that making voting turnout public knowledge has a dramatic effect on turnout — here’s the abstract:

American Political Science Review (2008), 102:33-48
Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment
Alan S. Gerber, Donald P. Green, and Christopher W. Larimer

Voter turnout theories based on rational self-interested behavior generally fail to predict significant turnout unless they account for the utility that citizens receive from performing their civic duty. We distinguish between two aspects of this type of utility, intrinsic satisfaction from behaving in accordance with a norm and extrinsic incentives to comply, and test the effects of priming intrinsic motives and applying varying degrees of extrinsic pressure. A large-scale field experiment involving
several hundred thousand registered voters used a series of mailings to gauge these effects. Substantially higher turnout was observed among those who received mailings promising to publicize their turnout to their household or their neighbors. These findings demonstrate the profound importance of social pressure as an inducement to political participation.

Here’s the key passage reporting their results, which show an eight percentage point increase in turnout from one mailing:

Here’s a sample mailing:

While this might seem a little creepy, voting records are public information. It’s important to remember that voting was an act performed in public before the Progressive Era — a period when turnout was much higher than it is today.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reporter and an anchor insult each other on live television before:

Note: The first part of the clip is a prosaic news report about apartment maintenance — stay with it until it gets good (about a minute in).

Kevin Drum suggests that Democrats should calm down about the possibility of a long nomination fight hurting their chances in the fall:

The hot topic of conversation right now is the proposition that a long, drawn-out Democratic primary runs the risk of destroying the party and putting John McCain in the White House. So for the good of the country, Hillary should withdraw.

Now, this might be true. But I’d like to offer a historical counterexample: 1968. Consider. The Democratic incumbent president was forced to withdraw after a primary debacle in New Hampshire. The Vietnam War had split liberals into warring factions and urban riots had shattered the LBJ’s Great Society legacy. A frenzied primary season reached all the way to California in June, culminating in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The Democratic Convention in Chicago was a nationally televised battle zone. Hubert Humphrey, the party’s eventual nominee, had never won a primary and was loathed by a significant chunk of the liberal community. New Left radicals hated mainstream Democrats more than they hated Republicans.

In other words, this was the mother of all ugly, party-destroying campaigns. No other primary campaign in recent memory from either party has come within a million light years of being as fratricidal and ruinous. But what happened? In the end, Humphrey lost the popular vote to Nixon by less than 1%. A swing of about a hundred thousand votes in California would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives.

If long, bitter, primary campaigns really destroy parties, then Humphrey should have lost the 1968 election by about 50 points. “Bitter” isn’t even within an order of magnitude of describing what happened that year. And yet, even against that blood-soaked background, Humphrey barely lost.

This is all true, but it’s important to remember that Humphrey drastically underperformed in 1968 relative to what we would expect given the state of the economy at the time (a result that is often attributed to Vietnam War deaths). We can’t quantify what damage was done by the polarizing primary campaign, but it’s hard to see how it would help.

Democrats risk a similar scenario — a destructive primary campaign could turn a possible rout in November into a 50/50 coin flip a la 1968. And even if they do win, any significant reduction in the popular/electoral vote margin could have significant legislative and political consequences going forward.

On the other hand, as John Sides points out at The Monkey Cage, the most prominent political science article studying this question did not find a significant negative effect (gated JSTOR link):

Divisive Primaries and General Election Outcomes: Another Look at Presidental Campaigns

Lonna Rae Atkeson

American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 42, No. 1. (Jan., 1998), pp. 256-271.

Theory: The divisive primary hypothesis asserts that the more divisive the presidential primary contest compared to that of the other party the fewer votes received in the general election. Thus the party candidate with the most divisive primary will have a more difficult general election fight. However, studies at the presidential level have failed to consider candidate quality, prior vulnerability of the incumbent president or his party, the national nature of the presidential race, and the unique context of each presidential election campaign. Once these factors are taken into account presidential primaries should have a more marginal or even nonexistent effect in understanding general election outcomes.

Hypothesis: Including appropriate controls for election year context in a state-by-state model and creating a national model that controls for election year context, candidate quality, and the nature of the times should diminish the effect of nomination divisiveness on general election outcomes.

Methods: Regression analysis is used to examine the effect of presidential divisive nomination campaigns on general election outcomes.

Results: Once election year context in the state-by-state model is controlled for, divisiveness has a much more modest effect. This modest effect does not appear to change general election outcomes. In addition, the election year model, which posits that presidential elections are national elections and not state-by-state elections, indicated that divisiveness was not significantly different from zero.

Updating my posts analyzing the correlates of Obama support at the state level, here are some new graphs using the currently available numbers.

In a linear regression predicting Obama’s proportion of the two-candidate vote (i.e. his vote plus Hillary’s) in contested non-home states (i.e. not FL, MI, AR, NY, or IL), the statistically significant factors are black population (+), Democratic presidential vote (-), having a caucus (+), and levels of state education (+), while Hispanic population, state population (logged), and Southern Baptist population are not, which is largely consistent with my last post. Here are the relevant graphs:

Also, though these factors aren’t statistically significant in a linear regression using the same predictors listed above, the white vote for Obama continues to be significantly negatively correlated with a state’s black population and Southern Baptist population (the latter has been suggested as a proxy for “Southernness”):

(Notes: In the absence of a clear way to handle the hybrid Texas primary-caucus, I’ve counted the primary and caucus there as separate observations. The association between black population and Obama vote is concentrated among primary states and the linear fit above is only for those states. White support for Obama is only available in some states due to missing exit poll data. Finally, the fitted line above for Democratic presidential vote excludes the outlier of Washington, DC.)

Update 3/5 9:30 AM: TNR’s John Judis has a nice analysis of the exit poll data, as does Jay Cost at Real Clear Politics.

Update 3/6 8:48 AM: By request, here is the graph of Obama support by black population with a quadratic fit, which is heavily influenced by his strong showings in caucuses in heavily-white states (by contrast, the plot above is a linear fit for primaries only):

After her wins last night, Hillary Clinton is engaging in simplistic primary->general election extrapolation:

“No candidate in recent history — Democratic or Republican — has won the White House without winning the Ohio primary,” Mrs. Clinton, of New York, said at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “We all know that if we want a Democratic president, we need a Democratic nominee who can win Democratic states just like Ohio.”

She also said this:

“If we want a Democratic president, we need a Democratic nominee who can win the battleground states, just like Ohio,” she said. “We’ve won Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire, Arkansas, California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Tennessee!”

The New York Times echoed this take in its reporting, writing that “[t]he results on Tuesday also bring fresh questions about [Obama’s] electability in crucial swing states like Ohio that Democrats are eager to carry in the November election.” The paper added that “Mr. Obama’s inability to win major battleground states beyond Missouri, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and his home state, Illinois, is a concern of some Democrats — especially since Ohio and Florida have become must-wins in presidential elections.”

As I’ve argued, however, it’s not clear that primary outcomes prove much about a candidate’s likelihood of winning that state during the general election. In this case, the latest head-to-head matchups in Ohio from Survey USA, which were conducted February 25, show no difference between them (McCain beats Clinton 49-43 and Obama 49-41, a difference which is within the poll’s margin of error).

The New York Times quote about Obama failing to win “major battleground states beyond Missouri, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and his home state, Illinois” is especially inane. If we use Time Magazine’s map from 2004, there were (broadly defined) eighteen battleground states. (The list did not include Illinois.) Excluding the uncontested primaries in Florida and Michigan, thirteen of those states have had primaries or caucuses thus far. Obama has won seven (Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, Colorado, and Michigan) and Hillary has won six (Arizona, Arkansas, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, and New Mexico), although most of Obama’s wins in those states came in caucuses and most of Hillary’s came in primaries.

What is this elliptical comment from Josh Marshall supposed to mean?

[I]f John McCain would be the big winner of a result tonight that would insure a continued and hard fought Democratic primary race, you have to figure that a big loser would be the National Journal who would be faced with the possible need to re-re-jigger their congressional voting rankings to make Clinton the most liberal member of the United States Senate.

Politics is a rough biz.

Is he really suggesting that National Journal, which is about as non-partisan as any publication in Washington, is out to get the Democrats? On what basis? As far as we know, the problem isn’t bias — it’s the lousy methodology that National Journal uses. As in 2004 with John Kerry, if you look at more sophisticated classification algorithms used by political scientists, Barack Obama is not the most liberal senator in the current Congress.

Unfortunately, this post is yet another example of Marshall suggesting what he can’t prove.

Update 3/4 7:57 PM: A reader points out that Marshall may instead be implying that National Journal manipulates its rankings in an effort to generate PR, which is another plausible reading of the post. It’s important to note that the editor of NJ directly denies that the magazine had any advance knowledge of what Obama’s ranking would be when it picked the votes used to generate the ratings.