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Election Reflections

- October 29, 2012

I don’t have a twitter account (and can’t imagine how folks who do can find time for much else).  But here are four quick election-related reactions to recent events:

* POLLS SHOULD REPORT RESPONSE RATES: With poll watching becoming something of a national obsession, and with The New York Times‘ Nate Silver now the talk of the sidelines at kids’ soccer games, I have a simple suggestion.  A leading survey research journal, Public Opinion Quarterly, requires that authors report response rates for any surveys, using the standard definitions of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.  Why don’t we ask the same of public pollsters?  With response rates as low as they are, that knowledge might temper just a tad the frantic discussions of individual polling results.  At the very least, such a policy might shift the conversation toward the high-quality polls.

* WHY SO LITTLE ATTENTION TO THE SENATE?:  With so many competitive Senate seats, strategic donors on both sides presumably have to make tough choices about the relative value they place on the Presidency versus a Senate seat.  Now, in comparing the value of a House seat and a Senate seat, one calculation is straightforward, since there are 4.35 times as many House seats and they are held for only 1/3 as long a period of time.  So if I ignore the probability of influencing the majority party, don’t discount the future at all, and add in a few more assumptions, I can guess that a Senate seat is worth 13.05 seats in the House.  But how does one evaluate the Presidency relative to the Senate?  I’m totally open to suggestions.  My suspicion is that however the number comes out, it will indicate that our coverage of this election is overly focused on the Presidency, to the exclusion of the 33 U.S. Senators who will likely remain in office two years beyond the 2013-2016 Presidential term.  Depending on the Senate’s composition, many of the presidential candidates’ plans might not survive until the inauguration, let alone be enacted into law.

* INDEPENDENTS ARE A MOVING TARGET:  Over at the Washington Post, Chris Cillizza writes about President Obama’s lagging performance among independents.  The article is careful to distinguish covert partisans–the majority of independents whose behavior is reliably partisan–from pure independents.  But even so, independents are a moving target–and right now, more reliable Republican voters are adopting the term than are reliable Democratic voters.  In one September 2012 survey, 32% of Republican leaners and identifiers at first chose the term “independent,” while among the Democrats, the figure was just 24%.  In 2004, the pattern was reversed, with more Democrats at first calling themselves “independent.”  Such over-time shifts make it hard to talk about independents as a stable category.

* PERSUASION BEATS MOBILIZATION, AT LEAST IN THEORY: We’re reaching the part of the election cycle where there will be a lot of talk about the importance of getting out the vote, a.k.a. turning out the base.  Still, in talking about the trade-off between persuading undecided voters and turning out the base, there is a simple but important bit of math that commentators often neglect: 1-(-1) > 1.  That is, if I persuade a voter to change her vote from one candidate to another, I simultaneously add a vote to my column and subtract a vote from my opponent’s column.  If I mobilize a voter who was for me but otherwise would have stayed home, I get a vote while leaving my opponent’s tally untouched.  Turning out voters might prove far easier than persuading them–but if you can do it, the math is in favor of persuading your opponent’s supporters to join your side.