Events, My Dear Boy
Harold Macmillan, allegedly at least, when asked what presents the greatest challenge for a statesman replied “events, my dear boy, events.” Similarly, events are consistently the most overlooked aspect of political prognostication. The conventions of political journalism imply that clever campaign tactics can overcome every challenge and that the more cunning candidate always wins when, in fact, the shape of events typically determines the outcome. But conversely, model-mania can get out of hand as well (emphasis added):
An election forecast model developed by a political scientist 99 days before the 2008 elections and before the recent Wall Street crisis predicts significant Democratic gains in the 2008 congressional elections—including 11 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 3 seats in the U.S. Senate.
The predictions are made in an article authored by Carl Klarner (Indiana State University) and published in an election-specific symposium in the October 2008 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association (APSA).
Projections based on assessing the “fundamentals” have a decent track record. But the fundamentals themselves can change over time.
15 Responses to “Events, My Dear Boy”
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October 23rd, 2008 at 9:29 am
Projections based on assessing the “fundamentals” have a decent track record. But the fundamentals themselves can change over time.
No sh*t? Really? Unexpected events in the real world sometimes produce results that diverge from mathematical predictive models? That is so unfair! Really, we need laws prohibiting this sort of thing.
October 23rd, 2008 at 10:41 am
Of course, the reason why fundamentals-based models don’t take many “events” into account is because of what it means to be a forecast. As much as I value the Iowa Prediction Markets and Intrade, they’re not a true forecast, for the simple reason that they can change from day to day (and hour to hour). They’re more of a distillation of the current campaign status than forecasts. For a forecast to be a true forecast, it has to be run once, ideally before the real campaigning begins, and let to sink or swim in the currents of subsequent events.
October 23rd, 2008 at 11:16 am
This is a good point. I would like to believe that Americans are just coming around to believe that the Democrats as a whole are better for this country, and that Obama has just run a stellar straight up and honest campaign. But its more likely that given the economic woes, this is a short term, once in a cycle, gain for the Democrats. We can say that Obama has run a great campaign but refusing to go negative, and that the American people are responded to it. But in 4, 8 years? This might not work anymore.
October 23rd, 2008 at 11:18 am
This is a good basis for understanding McCain’s campaign over the past few weeks. As crosstabs on the R2K tracking poll showed, after the economic crisis and McCain’s first reaction to it, his support was sliding among Republican respondents. And he was far enough behind that he either needed a race-changing event to occur, or to steal the election. But to win by either path … a race changing event or voter suppression … he needs strong Republican support.
So a campaign focused almost exclusively at gaining support among Republican affiliated voters, at the expense of support among independents, and hope that either an event occurs that brings the race within reach, or the Democratic party affiliation advantage can be overturned with successful voter suppression.
Of course, the result, according to the crosstabs on the R2K tracking poll, is a rapid rise in support among Republicans and a slower decline in support among independents, registering in the headline numbers as a “narrowing of the race”, but a narrowing on a track that requires a game changer to actually reach break even and then overcome Obama’s apparent advantage in the electoral college map.
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