The election is coming up so this is our last DC event . . . I’ll be
speaking on Red State, Blue State this Mon, 27 Oct, at the New America
Foundation. The event will be from 12.15-1.45, and there will be a
discussion by David Frum. Frank Micciche of the New America
Foundation will moderate. Info is here. I’m looking forward to the discussion.

Aaron Strauss provides more evidence that, compared to forecasts based on fundamentals, early polls give almost no information about election outcomes. Strauss writes the following about allocation of campaign resources:

The key to a effective strategy is determining, ex ante, which states will be pivotal on Election Day. Existing Bayesian election models are inappropriate for this game, as they estimate the current standings of the candidates or states rather than the final outcomes. I [Strauss] develop a Bayesian dynamic linear forecasting model that incorporates informative priors from historical regressions, updates based on in-cycle state and national polls, and accounts for the uncertainty of events that take place between the polls’ issuance and Election Day. National and state shocks are modeled as a reverse random walk beginning with the final outcome and moving backwards through time. Uncertainty about the final outcome is calculated by combining the random walk’s linearly decreasing variance over time, natural poll measurement error, house effects of national polls, and historically stable trends of election results. Using the resulting estimates of the states’ standings relative to each other, I simulate electoral vote outcomes and determine the probability of each state being pivotal. I find that early polls can be misleading to such an extent that putting any weight on them produces worse forecasts than solely relying on historical trends.

I’ll be speaking Tues 14 Oct (that’s tomorrow) 10am on Red State, Blue State at NYU, at 802 Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Square South. Pat Egan will discuss, and then there will be time for discussion. The talk will be open to the public.

Matthew Yglesias asks what my coauthors and I think of this article by George Packer on white working class voters in Ohio. (This is the same issue of the New Yorker where our book is briefly noted.)

I have a few thoughts on Packer’s article. First, it’s definitely a struggle for me to relate to the people interviewed there. For example, it says that Barbie Snodgrass used to buy 8 bags of groceries each week and now, “because of inflation,” only buys 4 bags. But the price of food can’t have doubled! And she presents going out “for a McDonald’s Dollar Meal” as chepaer than “spending seven dollars on a bag of potatoes and cooking at home.” First off, how big is that bag? Even in Manhattan, a 5-pound bag of potatoes costs a lot less than $7. Second, such a bag wil supply you with enough food for many many meals. I agree that a Happy Meal or whatever can be convenient, and I bet it’ll make the kids happy, but no way is it cheaper than cooking potatoes at home.

At some level, I can follow this–after all, here I am blogging at $0/hour, so I understand that not all activity is economically rational–but I have to admit that I don’t have a great framework for making sense of this person’s attitudes. (If I’d been conducting the interview, I would’ve asked Snodgrass how she could think that cooking a bag of potatoes is more expensive than going to McDonalds. But that probably just means that I don’t know the first thing about interviewing.)

OK, enough of that. For my discussion of the voting data, see here. Richer voters remain Republican, and that’s true even if you restrict the analysis to whites:

And here are the trends. David Park made this graph of what’s been happening since the 1950s with the rich-poor voting gap (the difference between Republican vote share among the upper third of income, minus the Republican vote share among the lower third) in Presidential elections. The gray dots represent all voters, the black dots represent whites only (yes, I know, they should be white dots…).

The rich-poor voting gap among whites has in recent elections been a bit below its 1970s-1990s peak, but it’s far from zero. Yes, it’s different rich and poor people than before, but it’s still there. It’s a mistake to think there was a past golden era of class-based voting. Geographic factors were important in voting decades ago, and they are now as well.

Whenever people are talking about social issues and voting, it’s good to remember this graph:

Religious attendance predicts Republican voting much more among the rich than the poor.

See chapters 6 and 7 of the book (or, for the short version, our Vox EU article) for more on religion, income, and voting, including an international comparison that shows that the U.S. isn’t so special in this regard.

Laura Wattenberg has a fascinating discussion of the one topic you think you’ve already heard enough about . . . Sarah Palin’s kids’ names. You really have to read the whole thing, but here’s the gist:

No naming event has ever filled my [Wattenberg's] inbox with as many reader queries as the unveiling of Sarah Palin–mom to Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig–as John McCain’s running mate. “Any comment?” “I’ve never heard Trig as a name for anything but a math class.” “Is this ‘an Alaska thing’?'”

In a way, yes, it is “an Alaska thing.” If you had nothing to go on but the baby names and had to guess about who the parents were, you’d guess that that they lived in an idiosyncratic, sparsely populated region of the country…and that they were conservative Republicans. . . .

For the past two decades, a core set of “cultural conservative” opinions has served as a theoretical dividing line between “red” (Republican/conservative) and “blue” (Democratic/liberal) America. These incude attitudes toward sex roles, the centrality of Christianity in culture, and a social traditionalism focused on patriotism and the family. If you were to translate that divide into baby names it might place a name like Peter—classic, Christian, masculine—on one side, staring down an androgynous pagan newcomer like Dakota on the other. In fact, that does describe the political baby name divide quite accurately. But it describes it backwards.

Characteristic blue state names: Angela, Catherine, Henry, Margaret, Mark, Patrick, Peter and Sophie.

Characteristic red state names: Addison, Ashlyn, Dakota, Gage, Peyton, Reagan, Rylee and Tanner. . . .

Why is it the blue parents who name with red values? Because in baby naming as in so many parts of life, style, not values, is the guiding light. . . .

The states won by the Democrats and Republicans in recent elections are almost the opposite of the result of the election of 1896:

In their article, “Activists and partisan realignment in the United States,” published in 2003 in the American Political Science Review, Gary Miller and Norman Schofield describe this as a complete reversal of the parties’ positions. In their story, in 1896 the parties competed on social (racial) issues, with the Republicans on the left and the Democrats on the right. Then the parties gradually moved around in the two dimensional social/economic issue space, until from the 1930s through the 1960s, the parties primarily competed on economic issues. Since then, in the Miller/Schofield story, the parties continued to move until now they compete primarily on social issues, but now with the Democrats on the left and the Republicans on the right.

It’s an interesting argument but I have some problems with it. First off, it was my impression that the 1896 election was all about economic issues, with the Democrats supporting cheap money and easy credit (W. J. Bryan’s “cross of gold” speech) and the Republicans representing big business. At least in that election, it was the Democrats on the left on economic issues and the Republicans on the right.

Getting to recent elections, the evidence from surveys and from roll call votes is that the Democrats and Republicans are pretty far apart on economic issues, again with the D’s on the left and the R’s on the right. So, from that perspective, it’s not the parties that have changed positions, it’s the states that have moved. The industrial northeastern and midwestern states have moved from supporting conservative economic policies to a more redistributionist stance. Which indeed is something of a mystery, and it’s related to attitudes on social issues, but I certainly wouldn’t say that economic issues don’t matter anymore. According to Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder, social issues are more important now in voting than they were 20 years ago, but economic issues are still voters’ dominant concern.

1896 vs. 2000 by counties within each state

Here are some more pretty pictures. First, within 6 selected states, a scatterplot of Bush vote share in 2000 vs. McKinley vote share in 1896. There are completely different patterns in different states! Nothing like as clean a pattern as the statewide plot above.

And here’s another plot, this time showing each county as an ellipse, with the size of the ellipse proportional to the population of the county (more precisely, the voter turnout) in the two elections.

Nowadays the Democrats clearly do better in the big cities (in these graphs, the large-population counties). In 1896 the pattern wasn’t so clear.

The recent role of population density

I asked Jonathan Rodden what he thought of the above graphs, and he replied, “I would like to see when this relationship developed, in which states, etc. My hunch is that suburbanization, especially after the race riots, significantly reduced the heterogeneity of cities. The era of Democrats winning 80 percent of the presidential vote in big cities seems fairly recent.” He also sent along these graphs of voting by population density:

As Jonathan noted, the pattern of high-density areas voting strongly Democratic is relatively new. (But I don’t buy the way his lines curve up on the left; I suspect that’s an unfortunate artifact of using quadratic fits rather than something like lowess or spline.) Also there seems to be some weird discretization going on in the population densities for the early years in his data. But the main trends in the graphs are clear.

Jonathan added the following comment: “The relatively high values on the left side of graphs in early years is due to Southern Democrats and some mining districts. Graphs of the UK, Australia, and Canada look very similar during the same period, with left voting concentrated in urban and mining districts.”

Here.

I’ll be speaking on the book this Monday (22 Sept) at 4:30pm at the University of Pennsylvania. It’ll be at the Annenberg School for Communication, Room 109. The address is 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA. This is your chance to ask questions and also to meet some interesting people: the talk is cosponsored by the departments of Statistics, Biostatistics, and Political Science as well as the Annenberg School.

Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientists blogging at The Frontal Cortex from withing ScienceBlogs, comments on new research on partisan bias in perceiving reality:

Yesterday, we looked at some new research that found that when conservatives were exposed to evidence demonstrating the falsity of a partisan belief – such as a report demonstrating that Iraq didn’t have WMD, or that lowering taxes doesn’t increase government revenue – they became more convinced than ever that those beliefs were actually true. The scientists call this “the backfire effect”.

The researchers argue that conservatives are particularly vulnerable to this cognitive flaw, as their beliefs tend to be more rigid and immutable. But I’m not so sure. As a liberal partisan hack, I’m very aware of how my political biases distort my processing of information. I fixate on news that jives with my beliefs and tend to ignore those inconvenient facts that contradict my inner talking points.

We discuss this in our book, in chapter eight: 

Polarization as a perceptual screen on reality appears ubiquitous. We can see an example of this in a recent survey on 9/11 conspiracy theories. One prominent conspiracy theory about the attacks centers around the claim that President Bush knew about the attacks in advance. This conspiracy comes in the form that Bush either planned the attacks himself or was too incompetent to do anything about them despite his knowledge of their imminence.

Respected commentators of all political stripes have categorically rejected this theory. But what about the public? Republicans in the survey rejected the idea that President Bush knew about the attacks in advance by a 7-1 margin. On the other hand, Democrats were close to evenly split on the question.

The country is divided geographically as well as by party. For example, Edward Glaeser and Bryce Ward note that in 2004, “twenty-three percent of respondents in Oregon, Washington and California thought that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks. Forty-seven percent of respondents in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas had that view.” Glaeser and Ward also report that “56 percent of Mississippi residents think that AIDS is God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior. Only 16 percent of Rhode Island residents share that view.”

Looks like partisan filters are a generic feature of being human (one might describe them as especially strong priors). But do these filters have policy consequences? Perhaps Condorcet’s jury theorem can save us (if errors are independent), perhaps not (if they are not). Or perhaps the moderates that help decide elections are far less inclined to such mistakes than committed partisan. I’m not sure; I’d like to see some evidence on this score.