Nov
2
The Mood Of The Country
Filed Under Uncategorized | 6 Comments
Excellent point by Nate Silver at 538.com:
But if a Glenn Beck-ian conservative is able to win a district that shares a frontier with Vermont and Canada, ought that not be at least a little bit worrying for Democrats in terms of the mood of the country?
A year in politics is one heck of a long time.
Oct
13
Authoritarianism
Filed Under American Politics | 82 Comments
Noted liberal blogger Nate silver has a post up discussing a book about authoritarianism in American Politics. Guess who get to be the authoritarians. Yes, it’s white southern evangelicals. The authoritarian in this view is:
really about order–achieving it, maintaining it, and affirming it–and especially when citizens are uncertain or fearful. This, they say, is why authoritarians seek out and elevate, well, authorities–because authorities impose order on an otherwise disordered world. They provide a useful review the existing literature on authoritarian traits, which have been connected to negative racist stereotyping, a belief in biblical inerrancy, a preference for simple rather than complex problem-solving, and low levels of political information.
The truth is, conservatives are authoritarian. They believe that an ordered world is a better one. But this is not a political authoritarianism, rather it is one based in society and tradition. And that is where this study (I haven’t read the book, only Nate Silver’s interpretation) is disingenuous. Wikipedia identifies authoritarian traits as:
conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and “toughness,” destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sexuality. In brief, the authoritarian is predisposed to follow the dictates of a strong leader and traditional, conventional values.
But the liberal impulse is similarly authoritarian, they have just disguised it as positive rights. Regulation, higher taxes and forced equality are all authoritarian measures, an imposed will by one group on another. Whilst conservative authoritarianism is teleological, liberal authority is intellectual in nature, an abstract judgement about what is right for society.
Authoritarianism is not necessarily a bad thing, a functional society requires order and a sense of fairness. But this has to be balanced by personal freedom, the authoritarian impulse is too intoxicating for those who wish society to match their own vision. It is this balance that both sides of the political divide in America are losing sight of.
May
29
According to Nate Silver, yes they can
It is a long piece with a number of different electoral combinations and I’m not going to go into it in too much detail here so I strongly advise you to read the piece. However, Nate Silver is saying that the Hispanic vote did not put Obama over the top in the election, it was his stronger showing amongst white voters that made the difference. He goes on to say that the GOP could effectively give up on Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico with their strong Hispanic presence and target whiter states like Indiana, North Carolina, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia and Florida. Now I know that Florida has a strong Hispanic makeup, but Cuban Hispanics are more Republican than Peurto Rican and Mexican Hispanics (John McCain won 43% of them in 2008).
Andrew Gelman at the same site expands on the role of Hispanics in the election:
The removal of the Hispanic vote wouldn’t have changed the election outcome in any state (although New Mexico, Florida, Indiana, and North Carolina are within 1% of flipping, and small changes to the model (for example, using exit polls instead of the Pew surveys) might cause some of these to flip)
The bottom line: Hispanics were not a key component in Obama’s win. However, this is not to say that the Republicans should not try to contest the Hispanic vote. As the last scatterplot above shows, further losses of Hispanics would make the Democrats competitive in Georgia, Texas, and Arizona. In some sense this is no big deal, at least at the presidential level: If the Democrats remain at 53% or 54% of the vote, they’ll win nationally in any case. If we imagine a national swing of 3% or so toward the Republicans, so they’re competitive nationally, then their big risk if they lose Hispanic votes is to no longer be viable in Florida (where we estimate McCain to have won 43% of the two-party vote among Hispanics in 2008). That’s the state where Republicans really can’t afford to abandon the Hispanic vote.
So the Sotomayor matter may not affect the GOP too dramatically, if the Republicans keep their Hispanic support at the level it is now and can effect a 3-4% swing amongst white voters, they could win in 2012. Of course that’s all easier said than done.
May
28
In the Interests Of Fairness
Filed Under American Politics | 4 Comments
Ref the Auto Dealer ’scandal’ I referred to yesterday, Nate Silver has a post up debunking the story.
He has done a cursory search of donor databases using different constructions of the phrase “auto dealer”. His findings are that 88% of auto dealers who donated to politicians donated to Republican ones. Doug Ross has found that 92% of the dealerships closed down donated to the GOP. Obviously, if true, these margins are too small to suggest any malfeasance on Obama or his administrations part.
However, Nate Silver’s search was a general one, not on a name by name basis but I did suggest that:
Now it may just be that Automotive dealers are a uniformly Republican bunch,
This story is not at the “nothing to see here” stage yet but there is going to have to be some pretty compelling evidence to blow this one into the MSM.
I’ve recently been accused of being too partisan. Too which I say “put this post in your pipe and smoke it”.
Have a look at the link and make up your own mind.
May
18
Oh Dear! Liberals Are Better Bloggers Than Conservatives
Filed Under Conservatism, Liberalism | 7 Comments
So says Nate Silver (a liberal blogger by the way).
So come on Israel and THX, it seems I need your posts.
May
15
Nate Silver Spins on Abortion
Filed Under American Politics, Polling | 19 Comments
Nate Silver at 538.com has a piece up about abortion and asks whether the American public, as evidenced in a recent Pew Research poll is becoming more pro-life.
In the poll, Pew Research finds that 46% of Americans agree that abortion should be legal whilst 44% take the opposite view. What is really interesting about the poll though is that 18-29 year olds now favour abortion being illegal, albeit by a small margin (48%-47%). This flies in the face of the generally held belief that the younger generation are socially liberal across the board.
Nate Silver, argues that this poll is an outlier and that there is no general shift towards anti-abortion sentiments. He uses a graph, taken from Pollster.com to try and support his argument.
What this graph shows is a slow but definite shift towards the anti-abortion position since the late nineties. This doesn’t support Nate Silver’s position and so he takes a different set of data (ie. whether people think of themselves as pro-life or pro-choice) and endeavours to extrapolate the trends from that.
Now the figures are more to his liking and he is able to support his conclusion. I’m unable to explain why less and less people are favouring abortion, whilst more and more people are declaring themselves to be pro-choice. Perhaps it is just statistical noise, perhaps it is something psychological but the divergence between the two positions is interesting.
The Pew Research poll is an endorsement of my belief that it is not the social conservative positioning that is damaging the GOP, it is a competence and messaging issue.
Nate Silver, although a self-declared liberal, is an interesting voice in the blogosphere. His blog is an excellent resource. But I do find it interesting to watch a statistician hunt around for the right data to support his political position. At least he was prepared to show us the process for his spin.