I just got called by a robo-poll. I really think there should be a law that anyone who wants to call like this should be a real person and supply their home phone number. This sort of one-way contact is nothing more than harassment. As well as poisoning the well by reducing the inclination of […]
bjn39coble
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
NYT columnist says some positive things about election forecasting models
Nate Silver writes: The forecasts made by Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, for instance, are done very well and do a good job of accounting for pertinent information without resorting to data-dredging. Unfortunately, Nate doesn’t get to that until paragraph 55 of a 58-paragraph article. I fear that casual readers will be misled by […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Same old story
In a review of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s recent book, “The Righteous Mind,” William Saletan writes: You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong. . . . Haidt diverges from other psychologists who have analyzed the left’s […]
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Tweets/likes crossover
To continue from Josh Tucker’s discussion . . . I posted an entry (“Voting patterns of America’s whites, from the masses to the elites”) both here and at the sister blog. From the Monkey Cage: 51 tweets, 19 likes. From Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science: 15 tweets, 66 likes. An odd non-monotonicity. I’m […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Voting patterns of America’s whites, from the masses to the elites
Within any education category, richer people vote more Republican. In contrast, the pattern of education and voting is nonlinear. High school graduates are more Republican than non-HS grads, but after that, the groups with more education tend to vote more Democratic. At the very highest education level tabulated in the survey, voters with post-graduate degrees […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Public opinion and the Supreme Court: How can the Administration best defend the ACA, and how can its opponents best attack it, beyond the confines of legal briefs and oral argument in the courtroom?
The following is a guest post by Tom Clark, a professor of political science at Emory University and expert on judicial politics who recently wrote a book, Judicial Independence. Clark writes: On Monday, the Supreme Court hears oral argument in the expected-to-be-landmark case considering a key provision of the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. […]
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Some disputes (at the sister blog)
Freakonomics. Hot hand. Economics & Freudian psychology. Ranking philosophy departments. Actual philosophy.
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Kaus surprise
When pundit and O.G. blogger Mickey Kaus ran a longshot campaign for the Senate a few years ago, I assumed he was doing so to gather material for a book. My reasoning was that his move from long-format journalism to blogging to microblogging to Twitter had reached its logical conclusion, and that he’d be more […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
What is the political center?
In an article about Obama’s recent meeting with New York mayor Bloomberg, Thomas Ferguson writes the following about a well-funded third party effort: Last year a group, Americans Elect, surfaced with a plan that strikingly resembled one of the schemes of 2008. . . . Once again, the media response was enthusiastic: Thomas Friedman of […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Vote swings are (approximately) uniform across the nation, so there’s no point in focusing on median America
I got the following in the email: Bush-Obama America There are 272 Bush-Obama counties across the country. George W. Bush carried these counties in 2000 and 2004. In 2008, Barack Obama won them. Now where do they go in 2012? I [David Dent] am launching a blog to focus on these pivotal counties to the […]