Converging to the Fundamentals
One of the fundamental disagreements between political journalists and political scientists is that journalists believe very strongly that campaign occurrences determine the outcome of elections. You can see this most strikingly in the current vogue for declaring that one candidate or another has won a certain week as if months-long campaign seasons are chock full of consequential occurrences. In fact, however, the vast majority of people vote as blind partisans. And the bulk of swing voters are people who pay very little attention to politics. Under the circumstances, it’s difficult to see how day-to-day news cycle events could have a large impact on election outcomes:
Meanwhile, in practice election outcomes turn out to be fairly predictable based on macroeconomic factors. Thus, while the press is full of little stories about why Obama is now leading, Brendan Nyhan is probably right to say that we’re just watching the fundamentals unfold. The evidence shows that campaign polls really do bounce up and down, but then they land just about where they were expected to land. You can think of the campaign as something like the world-spirit working its way through the public consciousness. Campaign events remind partisan Democrats of why they’re partisan Democrats, and partisan Republicans of why they’re partisan Republicans. And they provide fickle swing voters with official rationales for voting one way or another. So in 2004, folks who felt like sticking with Bush eventually all learned to say that the reason for this was that John Kerry is a flip-flopper. This year, weak (and weakening) economy has a magical way of dissolving doubts about Obama’s lack of experience while strong growth would almost certainly have heightened them.
Brendan quotes Larry Bartels:
I was very struck when I learned — many of you probably have seen, after each recent election, immediately after the election, Newsweek comes out with a big cover package on why, fill in the blank, won the election. And in 2004, they actually came out with a book that included a lot of analysis of why it was that Bush won the election. But before the election, they actually sent out an advertisement that had two books side by side; one was why Bush won the election and the other was why Kerry won the election. And given the times of producing these things, they actually had to produce most of the package, explaining to the readers of Newsweek the following week why it was that Kerry won the election.
Now, I didn’t read that issue, but I’m pretty sure that if I had read that issue, the narrative of how it was that Kerry had won the election would have been about as convincing as the narrative of how it was that Bush won the election.
My mother worked in the pre-Photoshop version of Newsweek’s art department so I saw as a kid their “Dukakis Wins!” complete with a banner teasing their account of how he did it and why the prognosticators were all wrong. As Bartels says, most of that account would have to have been written in advance.
41 Responses to “Converging to the Fundamentals”
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October 3rd, 2008 at 11:48 am
You can think of the campaign as something like the world-spirit working its way through the public consciousness
This is why we love you, Matt!
October 3rd, 2008 at 11:53 am
Wow, does your Mom still have the faux Dukakis Wins cover? That would be awesome to have framed and hung somewhere.
The Dukakis story is interesting, because 1988 is viewed by many people as an election the Democrats could have (and should have) won, despite the fundamentals favoring the incumbent party.
IMHO 2008 is going to be the GOP analogue to 1988. Despite the fundamentals, they’ll think they coulda, shoulda won it.
October 3rd, 2008 at 11:54 am
Personally, I prefer the original German. “The world-spirit working its way through the public consciousness” doesn’t hold a candle to “the Weltgeist working its way through the Volksweltanschauung“.
October 3rd, 2008 at 11:55 am
It sounds like you’re saying that the election results would be the same regardless of whether or not there was a terrorist attack on the Sunday prior to the election. There are terrorists Out There all the time so that a given attack shouldn’t make or break the election because it wouldn’t change the “fundamentals”. And yet we’ve seen that completely vacuous man George Bush get elected on the basis of anxiety unrelated to economic fundamentals.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Yes, it’s much like financial reporting. The market goes up or down. Reporters look on their shelf for the standard reasons why what actually happened would happen, and pull off the ones that match what the market actually did. No actual analysis, or even thought, necessary.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I remember seeing a quicky book published in the early fall of 1972 titled something like “How McGovern Won.” It was pretty convincing at the time.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Matt is basically correct. When the economy is doing well (’84, ‘96), the incumbent party wins. When the economy sucks, the insurgent wins (’80, ‘92, ‘08). When there is a huge scandal, the incumbent party loses (’76, ‘00?). Once in a while there is a close election where candidates and campaigns matter (’04) but most of the time the election result can easily be predicted by looking at GDP.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:25 pm
As a trinitarian, I believe our lives are ruled by the zeitgeist, the weltgeist, and the poltergeist.
I agree Greg above that a Dukakis Wins cover would be great. It reminds me that when I was a kid, we had a neighbor who worked for Time-Life and she gave me bunches of poster-sized Time covers. Sadly they were all discarded long before eBay arrived on the scene.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:25 pm
James:
I’m pretty sure it’s not Volksweltanschauung. And by now its all Öffendlichkeit in any case.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I never claimed I could spell…
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I agree with Ron E. (@ 7) that Matt has the general political science theory right, but something has happened since 1999. The 2000 and 2004 elections went the wrong way, and they did so because of increased turnout among people for whom the economy was not the dominant issue. There’s more to it than GDP right now.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Yeah, that’s usually true. I saw a graph somewhere that correlated economic performance to the incumbent party’s vote share, and it was very close…except for a few outliers, one of the biggest of which was 2000. Now, you could tie the 2000 election to a “major scandal,” as one of the commenters above did, but I don’t find that so persuasive. So, the answer is that campaigns don’t matter, except that occasionally they do–maybe 80% of the time economic fundamentals will determine the outcome of the election, but you never know when that other 20% is coming.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Eric @11:
2000 went the right way, just not by enough to prevent it from being stolen.
Do you really think that the Dems “should” have won in 2004? The economy was ok, Bush hadn’t fully squandered his post-9/11 popularity yet, we were at war…seems like the incumbent party should have been favored.
But I’d be interested in hearing why the Democrats should have been.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Have you read Eric Hoffer’s Natures of Mass Movements? I think he explains it perfectly.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Matthew, there was an article in either Science or Nature in the last few weeks that argued that this is essentially how people do everything, all the time. That is, it’s a fundamental aspect of our existence that we make decisions without really knowing why we made them, and then we construct a rationale for the decision we made. The article discussed research that was able to distinguish differences the events that triggered subjectds’ decisions and the rationales they offered after the fact. Very interesting stuff.
October 3rd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
In fact, however, the vast majority of people vote as blind partisans.
Why do so many writers insist in beginning sentences with “In fact, however . . .” It is redundant. Why not really go for it if you want to push just how in opposition a sentence is to the previous one:
“But in fact, however, on the other hand, in contrast, despite this, contrary-wise . . .”
Either phrase will do, but there is never a reason to say both “in fact” and “however”.
I saw as a kid their “Dukakis Wins!” complete with a banner teasing their account of how he did it . . .
Did they editors of Newsweek really think Dukakis stood a chance at all? The 1988 election was a complete blowout–nearly as bad as 1984, at least as far as EV totals go. Dukakis won only 111 electoral votes. I would have thought on election day everyone would have had to be pretty certain of the outcome.
However, if you look at the popular total, he got 45.6%, only 2.7 points less than the 48.3% Kerry got when he nearly won. I guess that just shows how bizarre our EV system is.
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:17 pm
This is wrong, and I’ll tell you why.
Modern polling is good. Really good. Pretty much every election outside a gerrymandered district ends within the margin of error. And looking at the 2000 and 2004 election, we can say the same.
Campaigns are driven by modern polling. They know what works, they’re tweaking the numbers. And unless they botch up the execution (which McCain is doing right now), the reason the races end within that margin is because they’re doing a good job of moving that polling.
The thing is, polls aren’t perfect. There’s still a bit of art to this game because we always have a margin of error. And pundits and campaigns try to understand and move votes within that margin pretty blindly. A HUGE amount of attention by pundits gets paid to the margin because the other stuff is boring.
But elections matter. Just not the way pundits think they do, in that margin of error category. The reason partisans are partisans is because of campaigns. The reason so many campaigns look the same is because for 95% of the votes, they know EXACTLY what to do, and it doesn’t change much from year to year, and they do it but the pundits pay no attention to it because there’s no news in “campaign pulls its 1’s to the polls”.
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:21 pm
“Meanwhile, in practice election outcomes turn out to be fairly predictable based on macroeconomic factors.”
The politics professors of America thank you for being one of the few media people who remember what was taught in their Political Science 101 course. It would be nice if journalists would at least acknowledge that there is this other view out there that none of these minute details of the campaign really make a difference. But if they did that, it would render ridiculous 90% of the hack-job horserace coverage they engage in.
“In fact, however, the vast majority of people vote as blind partisans.”
You’re confusing a very good indicator with a very strong causal factor. Party ID is a very good indicator for voting outcomes. But this does not mean that people are voting blindly. Most Republican candidates actually happen to be ideologically closer than their general election opponents are to most Republican voters, and party label is a handy way for voters to know this, so it’s no wonder party ID is such a good predictor, whether the voters are throughtful and informed or not.
“2000 went the right way, just not by enough to prevent it from being stolen.”
But 2000 is still a problem for the traditoon macro-economic explanations. Most prognisticators among political scientists picked Gore by a big margin. 2/3 of the country thought the country was on the right track and lot of them thought the economy was great. But a big chunk of people in the ideological middle of the country were fooled into thinking that Bush was the moderate figure of continuing peace and prosperity in the race (proof that the middle is frequently the stupidest persuasion of all). So it seems that in a non-incumbent race, campaigns can frame the election and cause people to associate one candidate more than an other with current good or bad times.
From this perspective it’s quite easy to see why Obama isn’t doing better. McCain is in fact a different person than Bush, he’s been a political rival of Bush in the past and so it’s possible to get people to believe that he represents a different direction from the current one. Without an incumbent the water can be muddied quite considerably.
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I think matt makes a good point here, and I think that’s why Obama was found to have ‘won’ the first debate. People want to vote for him because they want something different. That said, Obama is lucky as hell that the Lehman, AIG, etc. It made what was a difficult year for a Republican candidate to win into an impossible one, particularly when that candidate is completely inept at talking about the economy.
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:15 pm
The problem with the media’s perception is a fundamental misunderstanding of reality.
They really believe that the base for each party, the very partisan members of each party, are nothing but mindless automatons out to destroy the world in a fit of partisan rage.
Reality check shows that the majority of partisans are the best informed members of the electorate. We’re partisan because we know what is going on, and we have picked the party that most closely represents the things that are important to us.
There are mindless partisans, but they are a smaller sub-set of the partisan portion of the electorate. Partisans who mindlessly regurgitate talking points would likely still be partisans for their current party if they did pay greater attention. Their brain is wired in a conservative or liberal manner already.
On the other hand, the traditional media lionizes the myth of the great even handed swing voting independent. This is a mythical beast that goes into each electoral season completely open-minded and carefully watches the election unfold before, in an instant of heavenly grace, making a decision on who to vote for. This is a mythical creature that reads platforms and researchs the candidates, watches the debates, reads the newspapers, and is generally informed about everything there is to know. Her mind was a blank slate when the electoral process began, and she obtained all sorts of information and makes a fair and balanced decision based on an accumulated body of evidence.
The real swing/independent voter is a political imbecile. Maybe not in his day-to-day life. Hell, he may even be a genius in his day-to-day life or in his chosen field. But he doesn’t pay attention to politics. He hears some sound bites once in a while, watches ads, sees a few headlines, and might pay a bit of attention when the election is close, like in mid-October. He is probably biased from the get-go, but doesn’t admit his bias. He may or may not vote on election day, depending on how busy he is. If he sees something he really dislikes about the candidate from his preferred party, or sees something he loves about the other candidate, then he may “swing” his vote.
Sometimes the media tries to accurately portray the swing voter, usually in a very insulting and condescending manner. The independent/swing voter may care a great deal about the direction of the country, but lacks the time to pay attention. Or he finds politics dull. He hasn’t taken the time to really understand what his political beliefs are. But the media, in fits of condescendent spite, characterize the swing voter as someone who makes his decision based on which candidate seems like the cooler drunk. Or based on the candidate that looks best with a hunting rifle. Or the candidate that affects a folksy accent the best. Or he won’t vote for the candidate that orders an elitist beverage like orange juice. And God only knows that farmers won’t vote for someone who likes arugula!
Americans are anti-elitist, but we’re not dumb. I think Kerry got hurt when he pretended to not be elitist, when he was clearly an elite. If he embraced it without being cocky, he could have fared better. Showing up in camos with a hunting rifle just makes it look like he’s trying to hard.
W. was just as elitist, but he didn’t hide it - he embraced it. How many people have a private ranch? That’s not folksy, it’s elitist. Maybe not northeastern elitist, but elitist all the same. Ranch is a nice way of saying Estate, after all.
I don’t even remember where I was going with this. but, I’ll post it all the same. Have a great weekend!
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:32 pm
ResumeMan @ 13
The only thing I meant by the election going the “wrong” was in 2000 or 2004 concerned the direction of the economy was heading in the 6 months before the election. It was doing well in 2000, which was supposed to mean the incumbent party wins, and I thought it was sliding in 2004, but it sounds like I was wrong.
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I think there’s a lot of truth to this, but it’s important not to oversell it. I think campaigns and candidates DO matter, even if most political outcomes are driven by economic AND geopolitical fundamentals.
For example, by some measures, Clinton outperformed in ‘96 (several models actually had that race pegged to be very tight). Gore in 2000 was favored according to a lot of the analyses. And Bush was supposed to win bigger in ‘04 than he did. Thinking back, 1960 was a race in which the fundamentals favored the Democrats, yet it was a squeaker. It was the same story in ‘76.
Now, in most of the cases, even if the final margin was in dispute, the expected candidate won the race. So that suggests fundamentals play a big role, but that campaigns can affect the margin and of making the final outcome conflict with what the models predict.
I also think that these models may matter less in an open-seat race, or once the incumbent party has held power for two terms/8 years. Think 1960, 1968, 1976, and 2000. 2008 looks like a substantial Obama win right now, but let’s see if it narrows by election day (it could).
The exception so far to the eight year or non-incumbent rule is ‘88. I realize many of the models predicted a Bush win that year, but I still maintain that Democrats COULD have won that year. Much of the industrial midwest and the farm states were in the midst of serious economic problems. Nor was GHW Bush was NOT a popular or dynamic figure. Either Gary Hart (sans “Monkey Business”) or Mario Cuomo would probably have at least kept that race within 3 points and may have been able to pull of a win. I would say ‘88 is a year when the campaign DID matter, at least in terms of the margin — the Dukakis campaign was terrible and listless and the 7 point loss they endured was NOT preordained.
Likewise, 2008 looks right now like its reverting to what the generic ballot and the fundamentals would predict. But given that McCain has significant strengths and that Obama does have some weaknesses (age, inexperience, race), the potential was there for a close race and a possible McCain upset. Think Kennedy-Nixon 1960. Instead, McCain has alienated everyone with a bizarre, erratic campaign and pissed away what little chance he had. Now, given Obama’s strength, it likely would have been a 1-4 point Obama win regardless of how good McCain’s campaign was, but right now, McCain looks likely to be more like a Republican Dukakis. That margin is not preordained.
October 3rd, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Once again, we can all go home now. Matt’s called the election.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:37 pm
> You can think of the campaign as something like the
> world-spirit working its way through the public
> consciousness.
IMHO there is a fair bit of truth to Matt’s post. The question then becomes, however, who creates the world-spirit (or at least, who changes the world spirit from what it was 2 years ago) and who channels the thought-patterns of the public consciousness. Political memes don’t usually come out of nowhere; they are manufactured and forced into the public discourse. Something the Radical Right has excelled at over the last 15 years.
Cranky
October 4th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Re: But a big chunk of people in the ideological middle of the country were fooled into thinking that Bush was the moderate figure of continuing peace and prosperity in the race (proof that the middle is frequently the stupidest persuasion of all).
Unless you think “stupidity” is the inability to see into the future, there was really no indication that Bush was not a fairly standard center-right (and reasonably competent) Republican much like his father. He hadn’t governed Texas as a wingnut ideologue, and he hadn’t done a particularly bad job of it there either. True, there were indications of some personal failings (like mocking the woman on death row he refused to pardon), but American voters seem willing to pardon personal failings, as they also did with Cliton’s womanizing. I did not vote for George Bush in 2000, but I did not imagine that his presidency would be anything like the public catastrophe it’s become.
Re: The real swing/independent voter is a political imbecile.
This is really unfair. Some people are fairly stupid, and some are badly misinformed (in some cases voluntarily so). But there are also plenty of people whose views do not fit well with either party. They may be fiscally conservative, but quite liberal on social issues, or the reverse. Hence they will swing back and forth between parties depending on how well a particular candidate appeals to the things they care most about and doesn’t go too far out of their comfort zone where he differs with them. Also, circumstances matter very much: abortion and gay marriage may count for a lot when not much else is roiling the waters, but this year a whole lot of people have much more immediate concerns determining their votes. Neither party is ideologically coherent; both are stitched-together mergers of various causes and demographics that don’t have a lot to do with each other. It’s only natural that people who aren’t brainwashed into identifying as Republican or Democrat may not be able to choose globally and permanently between them
October 4th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
> Unless you think “stupidity” is the inability to
> see into the future, there was really no indication
> that Bush was not a fairly standard center-right (and
> reasonably competent) Republican much like his father.
Actually, it turned out that there was quite a bit of evidence leading in that direction but that the traditional media suppressed it throughout the primary and election period.
Cranky
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