Comments on: Flipping coins

By: Zizka

Zizka — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 04:25:06 +0000

My Canadian brother is recruiting family members like crazy. At least one niece seems ready to go, and maybe my son. Me too, if they’ll have me. I’ve really come to believe that some of the things I don’t like about the US are structural. So I feel a duty to a degree to keep things from getting even worse, but not much hope that they’ll get much better. It looks as if we’ll be spending the next year figuring out how to save Social Security, for example.

By: Jason McCullough

Jason McCullough — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 03:26:41 +0000

Was this supposed to be a thread to cheer up Democrats? Yeah, I guess the economic left is at best going to get small advances; it took the cataclysm to get us even mild advances in the 1930s. What’s really worrying me is the insane margins on the gay marriage vote. There’s never been a liberal cultural plurality, much less a majority, and even in Ruy’s EDM demographic shift, there won’t be. The best reasonably likely outcome is “tiny margin left on economics, way conservative on culture.” If things go badly (substantial defections from hispanics and blacks on culture), liberals are faced with the appalling Hobbes’ choice between sucking up to the fucking libertarians to get social justice for gays or sucking up to the religious to get economic justice for them. And seeing how the religious poor apparently don’t want it, hell, looks like the libertarians. Really, one of my daydream horrors this week is having to pretend I agree with Megan McArdle for the good of a future party.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 22:51:50 +0000

It’s pretty sad if the left – the left! – has to hope for EC technical wins in swing states to overcome a 3.5 million vote Bush margin. If we were talking about elections in Sweden or the Netherlands, I would say yes, pretty sad. Given that we’re talking about America, the most capitalist, most religious and least leftwing developed economy in the world, I’d say it’s pretty good going. That would be my contribution to the “Democrats and religion” debate – if people really want to see a world in which America has a structural social-democratic majority, as opposed to occasional progressive victories against a background culture of conservative capitalism, then yes, they probably had better start praying. (Jason; I mean this with all respect and not at all sarcastically that you will probably have a happier life if you relocate from the USA. I have three or four Yank friends who have done this, and as far as I can tell, none of them have regretted it yet). I think it was Peter Cook that explained to a British audience that there are two political parties in America – “The Republicans, who are the equivalent of our Conservative Party, and the Democrats, who are the equivalent of our Conservative Party”.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 21:22:22 +0000

Holy cow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an odder comment thread with comments that completely miss DD’s point. How about this: with increasing sophistication and the ability to poll better and better, the outcome of every election ought to be random. On the assumption that you go into the thing trying to win, the goal is to get as close as you can to the median voter. Both sides try to do it, and when you’re done, the outcome of the election is absolutely random. DD’s point is that this has been going on for some time, and while the issues change, and exactly where the parties stand on the issues change, and the degree to which they hide their “true agendas,” whatever that means, change, you can always fine-tune the message next time to whatever the voters want to hear, and what you actually do (on the assumption that that’s what people really catre about) need have very little to do with it. It’s neither cynical, nor heartless, nor flippant (pardon) to think of elections as random—the strategies aren’t random, but there’s something odd if the results aren’t. Unless of course you think that the point of elections is simply to express one’s own point of view rather than to try to win.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 20:29:36 +0000

Okay. Well, again, I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong. My gut instinct is that US presidential elections are too “different” from each other to provide enough useful data to pick out the “noise” in the “signal”. But, truly, I have no idea. I can imagine some sophisticated and exhaustive methods that could pin it down to a range, anyway. Nevertheless, I’m arguing against your point on the basis on which you’ve defended it. And, so far as I can tell, that’s merely on the recent history of US presidential elections, the margin of this election, the assumption that the last election was very “like” this one…and that’s about it. My impression has been that you’re arguing on a gut basis that the small margin in this election is within the noise range. And it may be. It also may well not be. If we could replay this election in the sense that you’re hypothesising—that is, leave everything the same except those supposedly random exogenous factors—frankly I wouldn’t be surprised to see a variation as small as within one-tenth of one-percent or a variation as large as ten percent. I just don’t know. And my point is that that 2% margin doesn’t mean anything by itself.

By: abb1

abb1 — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 20:21:41 +0000

It’s pretty sad if the left – the left! – has to hope for EC technical wins in swing states to overcome a 3.5 million vote Bush margin. Who said it’s ‘the left’? It’s the US Democratic party – centrist coalition of various liberal (socially liberal mostly) groups. To call it ‘the left’ is absurd. There is no left in the US.

By: LizardBreath

LizardBreath — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 20:17:28 +0000

My reasons why The Left doesn’t do very well in American elections covers the whole last 60 years. Since about 1941, the left has never done well in the US. In Europe, sometimes it does, sometimes not. Yes, and I think your reasons are pretty convincing. Unfortunately, what they aren’t is either changeable or suggestive of any course of action. There may not be any fundamental problem with the Democratic party that is any more fixable than the reasons you list, but I think the hope that there might be, if we could just put our fingers on it, is what tempts people to look for major structural changes. It feels as if, if only we could just find the magic bullet, suddenly Middle America would start voting its economic interests. (BTW, as a very occasional commenter on a lot of the blogs you comment on, I’d like to say how useful and informative I generally find your posts.)

By: Jason McCullough

Jason McCullough — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 20:00:48 +0000

“Oh come on. A 1-2% swing in either Ohio or Florida and it would have been the Republicans having this conversation.” It’s pretty sad if the left – the left! – has to hope for EC technical wins in swing states to overcome a 3.5 million vote Bush margin. And Ruy himself doesn’t think we’ll get demographic wins with these kind of blowout margins with the white working class: http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/archives/000923.php Some technical adjustments would get us over the top, but geez, is planning to win only half of the whtie working class long-run a good idea?

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 19:58:15 +0000

Keith, you’re addressing quite deep issues here, with which I have a certain degree of sympathy, since I use similar arguments myself in economic contexts. I’ll try and deal with this at greater length in another post.

By: Jason McCullough

Jason McCullough — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 19:57:21 +0000

By: Zizka

Zizka — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 19:38:42 +0000

My reasons why The Left doesn’t do very well in American elections cover the whole last 60 years. Since about 1941, the left has never done well in the US. In Europe, sometimes it does, sometimes not. (Second try after error message).

By: Zizka

Zizka — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 19:36:11 +0000

By: LizardBreath

LizardBreath — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 19:35:19 +0000

The French socialists haven’t done all that well, and the Italian Socialists are still in the doldrums after the Craxi affair ten years ago. Yes, but we haven’t had a viable party that’s dared to use the word ‘socialist’ as anything other than an epithet in my lifetime. This isn’t a new problem relating to this election, of course, but it does make it easy to leap to the conclusion that the Democrats have some massive structural problem: why are the social democratic ideals that are appealing to voters worldwide so comparatively ineffective as vote-getters to Americans?

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 17:49:16 +0000

What is “them”?? You don’t know what those effects are. It doesn’t matter if they’re random or not, you can’t even tell me what they are or how much they affect the outcome. Don’t you see that your argument which assumes exogenous factors but doesn’t rigorously quantify them could work as well for any election, or series of election, with any results? It matters not a whit that the election was close. If you assume that there’s some exogenous factors that cause some randomness in the outcome of a national election, then you need to make a plausible argument for how large that randomness is. You haven’t. You’ve just asserted that it’s within that 2% margin by which this election was won.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 17:27:26 +0000

With respect, Keith, that’s exactly why I propose to model them as a random variable.