Though it's always tempting to draw historical analogies between elections, each contest is invariably unique. This year is no exception. We have an incumbent president -- who also happens to be the nation's first African-American to hold that office -- facing the electorate in challenging economic circumstances. He is trailing his opponent with independent voters and on many of the issues that voters say they care most about, yet on Election Day his approval rating is right up against the 50 percent mark and he maintains a slight edge in the polls.
As a political analyst, this election is also unique in that it’s the country’s first true “data-driven” election. I mean two things by that; first, that statistics-based political analysis has become a booming cottage industry over the last four years. We now have more “data junkies” providing often thought-provoking analysis than ever before. In fact, as someone who began his writing career attempting to apply a more rigorous approach to political analysis, I can honestly say we're probably at the point where a course correction is necessary the other way....
The end result this cycle has been that we’ve seen two sets of polls at the state level, as Jay Cost described here. In Ohio, this has manifested in a cluster around a four-to-five-point Obama lead, and a cluster around a one-point Obama lead. Of the 20 polls with start dates in the last two weeks, only two have shown Obama up by three. This should be the most common result in an average of random draws. Instead, we see more pollsters showing Obama up one and as many showing a tie; we see more pollsters with Obama up five. Most of the states have this “bimodal” distribution.... How do we resolve this? Well, let’s say that you say the U.S. capital is Washington, D.C. I say it is New York City. We could compromise and find a point halfway between. This would minimize the chances of an outlier, but it would also minimize the chances that you were correct -- in fact, it would guarantee you were wrong. Far better to consult historical sources, and discover that the capital moved from New York City in 1790.
In the last week or so, an intense kerfuffle broke out over the poll-prognosticator Nate Silver.... On any given day, Silver might announce that — given the new polling data — "the model" now finds that the president has an 86.3% chance of winning. Not 86.4%, you fools. Not 86.1%, you Philistines. But 86.3%, you lovers of reason. When Josh Jordan, a National Review colleague of mine, posted a data-heavy and entirely civil critique of some of Silver's projections, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman unleashed a diatribe denouncing Jordan and the National Review for what he saw as a kind of heresy....
The truth is that any statistician can build a model.... As the computer programmers like to say, garbage in, garbage out.... [The] serious numbers guy[s]... at the University of Colorado's political science department... Oct. 4... predict[ed] Romney will win, as do others.... What interests me is the way people talk about math as if it's divinely prophetic.... What kind of scholarship do we have to look forward to when, in the words of Krugman, "facts really do have a well-known liberal bias"?...
[I]sn't it possible that the passionate defense Silver arouses from some people on the left has just a bit more to do with the comfort he dispenses than with the sophistication of his analysis? And isn't it also possible that some of the conservatives screaming bloody murder about how his model has to be rigged are paying homage to the same cult of the numbers...
