Comments on: What happened in Clark County?

By: Extinct Tory

Extinct Tory — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 12:12:43 +0000

Well, my friend Dan Martin lost his run for Clark County Commissioner, on the Republican ticket, by 1800 votes. Therefore the shift towards Bush was certainly not a universal Republican shift. Andrew, why couldn’t you all have asked readers to include local election outcomes in their letters, too? Then he might have won. (Sorry, I am in fact ‘taking the piss.’)

By: dsquared

dsquared — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 11:23:45 +0000

And I can promise you via very reliable channels indeed, that it was.

By: Chris Lightfoot

Chris Lightfoot — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 11:22:32 +0000

Marketing stunt? Hmm. I’d assumed that the Guardian had concluded (perhaps accurately) that a second Bush presidency will sell more newspapers than a Kerry presidency, and was acting accordingly.

By: cdm

cdm — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 09:46:04 +0000

Well, whether or not it was conceived as a marketing stunt, the Guardian editor(s) who signed off on it would have had to have been extraordinarily dim not to realize that there was a good chance that it would serve as such.

By: Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 08:44:39 +0000

I can promise you, as someone who writes for the gdn, that it was not conceived as a marketing stunt for the online edition, which had nothing whatever to do with the idea.

By: Dubious

Dubious — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 04:42:09 +0000

British Imperialism! This is why we need a 2nd Amendment, so Queen Elizabeth can’t lodge soldiers in our houses!

By: rd

rd — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 03:07:51 +0000

Little or no negative effect? Here’s what a writer at Slate.com had to say: “The most significant stat here is how Clark County compares to the other 15 Ohio counties won by Gore in 2000. Kerry won every Gore county in Ohio except Clark. He even increased Gore’s winning margin in 12 of the 16. Nowhere among the Gore counties did more votes move from the blue to the red column than in Clark. The Guardian’s Katz was quoted as saying it would be “self-aggrandizing” to claim Operation Clark County affected the election. Don’t be so modest, Ian.”

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 02:42:24 +0000

Marketing stunt? Don’t be silly, it’s a moral posing stunt. A one-leader-writer idea that displayed a tiny degree of insensitivity and a huge surplus of self-righteousness in those who wrote. I revere Richard Dawkins for ‘the blind watchmaker’ and I am shattered that he acted such a poonce.

By: cdm

cdm — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 02:17:25 +0000

Giving credit where credit is due, an even earlier analysis was at Volokh, who conclude that Clark County "moved 3.9% towards the Republicans compared to the rest of the state". I have to say that I'm not sure I agree with d^2 that focusing on Clark County alone is data-mining. Of course, any influence on the vote in Clark County would still only be a few thousand votes. In terms of the putative influence on the election, the real question, unanswerable from the data, is whether the publicity from the campaign shifted votes across the entire state.

I do completely agree that it was a marketing stunt, though.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 22:41:10 +0000

Yep. And another fair summary is that they had a pretty massive effect on traffic and brand awareness for the Guardian’s online edition, for which this was a marketing stunt.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 22:22:49 +0000

So would a fair summary of the findings be: “It seems that the Guardian’s effort either had no effect, or a very mild negative effect on voting for Kerry.”?

By: Benedict Eastaugh

Benedict Eastaugh — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 20:53:14 +0000

Sorry, that should be “a wide variety of…”; evidently my brain isn’t what it once was.

By: Benedict Eastaugh

Benedict Eastaugh — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 20:50:34 +0000

Crooked Timber is a group blog posting about a wide variety political, economic and philosophical topics. To be honest, I suspect certain parties just want to engage in tarring and feathering a newspaper that constantly challenges their policies. Personally I think the whole thing was pretty silly from start to finish, but no publicity is bad publicity and so on…

By: dglp

dglp — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 20:40:35 +0000

One comment and one question: 1. The hyperbole surrounding the Guardian scheme is taking on the status of an urban myth, despite simple logic such as the stats you show. It’s not hard to figure out who stands to gain by propagating the idea. 1. What is Crooked Timber? I came here via Google, and cannot see the smaller text in the photo banner. It’s way too dark for my screen. Nor do I see any ‘About Us’ links on the side. So, like, what IS this place? :)

By: chris waigl

chris waigl — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 20:37:53 +0000

Well, hum, that’s all pretty inconclusive. The turnout is up quite significantly, and both Bush and Kerry gote more votes in absolute numbers than Bush/Gore did in 2000. Knowing nothing whatsoever about Clark County, you’d have to find out first who those additional voters are. Not that I’m defending the G2 letter writing campaign, which was a bit too much tinged with selfimportance to come across as anything but patronizing.