Swing State Project

Friday, May 19, 2006

Games People Play

Posted by DavidNYC

From Hotline On Call:

Maybe we're in the minority, but we love the trivia contest Republican Dick DeVos features in his weekly MI GOV campaign emails. In fact, they are so good, we thought we'd include this week's question from the DeVos email. As you'll see, these aren't bogus questions designed to elicit crappy campaign spin, but real political trivia. Enjoy.

Trivia Challenge

When Democratic Senator Pat McNamara died in 1966, Governor George Romney appointed this person to fill the vacancy. Name the person.

Please email your response, with the name of the city you live in , to Trivia@DeVosForGovernor.com.

In all seriousness, games are always a good way to create good will with you activists. We're surprised we don't see more of this. And if a lot of campaigns are doing this already, let us know.

That does seem like a good idea to me. I'm a nerd, so I love trivia. But including little games like this in your e-mails is a win no matter what. People who like trivia will be more likely to read your e-mails, and people who don't will just ignore it.

Anyhow, anyone know the answer? I'm stumped.

Posted at 12:15 AM in Elections | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0) | Technorati

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Correlating Presidential Approval with Midterm Performance

Posted by DavidNYC

A diarist at DailyKos, dmsilev, has a fascinating diary examing the correlation, if any, between presidential approval ratings and the performance of the president's party in midterm elections. The meat of it can be seen in this graph:

Looks like there is a pretty close correlation indeed. While there are some outliers, almost all of the notable ones are quite old (the most recent being 1958). Go read the entire piece for the diarist's full findings.

Posted at 09:53 PM in Elections | TrackBack (0) | Technorati

Friday, May 05, 2006

When Losses Yield Wins

Posted by DavidNYC

In a thread below, a staffer for Paul Hodes says that his candidate likes to joke that "the best way to learn how to be a Congressional candidate is to be a Congressional candidate." There's a lot of truth to this statement. Many, many politicians lost their first time out, only to prove successful on the second go-round. Many even lost badly in round one. Here are but a few examples:

• Melissa Bean - crushed by Phil Crane in 2002, beat him in 2004
• Eliot Spitzer - came in fourth in a four-way primary for AG in 1994; won the primary and beat the incumbent in 1998
• Mark Warner - lost a senate race to John Warner in 1996, won the VA-Gov race in 2001
• Brian Schweitzer - lost to Conrad Burns in 2000, won the MT-Gov race in 2004

I'm sure you guys know of other examples. The bottom line is that a losing campaign can be a huge learning experience, and it's a mistake to write someone off just because they lost once.

UPDATE: I'm totally remiss in not including Bill Clinton on this list. If you've got any more good examples, I'll add them in a further update.

Posted at 12:41 PM in Elections | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0) | Technorati

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

How Badly Do Losers Lose?

Posted by DavidNYC

This post is a response to some of the points raised by Chuck Todd, whose new piece on the 2006 elections I mention below. Let me elaborate on what I mean by the question I pose in the title.

What I wanted to know is, when the party in power loses seats in Congress, how bad do those losses tend to be? So I did a little research. I limited myself to the post-17th Amendment period of American politics - ie, 1914 onward, an era which covers 45 elections. During that period, the House switched hands seven times. Meanwhile, the Senate flipped eleven times. I don't think the frequency of flipping actually matters, though. I think the magnitude of losing is the important factor to look at.

With that in mind, the party in power ("PIP") in the House lost seats 25 times and gained seats 20 times. In the Senate, the PIP lost seats 26 times, gained seats 17 times, and remained unchanged twice. Those sets of numbers are pretty similar: In the House, 55.6% of the time, the PIP loses seats, while in the Senate, it's 57.8% of the time.

But here is where they are rather different: The median seat loss in the Senate (during losing years) is six. The median seat loss in the House, meanwhile, is 20. Put another way, 16 out of 25 losing years (64%) saw a seat change equal or greater to what we need this year (15) in the House, while only 14 of 26 losing years (54%) provided a margin equal or greater to what we need this year (6) in the Senate.

In other words, the Senate might change hands more often, but the delta of those changes is a lot less volatile than in the House. Of course, you can argue that the House is so much more gerrymandered these days and is likely to be less volatile today than it was in the past. If you're willing to consult a very small sample size, this is true: From Clinton on, the PIP lost 15+ in the House only once (1994), while it lost 6+ in the Senate twice (1994 and 2000). But if you extend the frame only as far back as Reagan, then it's four times in the Senate to three in the House.

This is all on a macro level. On the micro level, several commenters have pointed out that Dems would have to shoot the moon this year to take back the Senate. While it may be historically true that one party tends to do unusually well in Senate elections, the micro analysis just isn't that favorable to the Dems this year. Even if we draw a royal flush in PA, RI, MT, MO and OH, we'd still need a sixth seat. TN? AZ? VA? NV? With the possible exception of Tennessee, those are all extreme longshots.

In the House, on the other hand, we've got a lot more than 15 decent shots. There are (as of this moment) 23 GOP-held seats on CQ's list which are either no clear favorite or lean Republican, and Charlie Cook has 24. And on both of those lists, I think there are some hedges (for example, neither Sweeney nor Weldon are listed as toss-up or category 1 yet).

So for now, I'm still gonna say that I think the House is more likely to switch hands. I'm not saying I think we're gonna take back the House, but I could definitely see a House flip without a Senate flip as well.

Posted at 11:31 PM in Elections | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | Technorati

Friday, February 10, 2006

What's a Prediction Worth?

Posted by DavidNYC

Not much, apparently.

A commenter somewhere on the site (sorry, can't find it now) recently remarked about the fact that political prognosticators were way off the mark when it came to predicting the 1994 elections, the year of the GOP landslide. It got me wondering, "How bad were they?" So I managed to dig up an old Hotline item which tabulated the election eve predictions of 21 different so-called "experts". I can't link to it, but I've reproduced the relevant parts.

First, a little background. Prior to the 1994 elections, the Democrats held a comfortable 56-44 margin in the Senate and a huge 258-176 margin in the House. (Bernie Sanders had been kickin' it as the lone independent since 1991.) Those numbers are almost hard to believe today. After the election, the Dems were reeling. The GOP held a 52-48 advantage in the Senate (which would soon grow to 54-46 as two Democrats defected) and a 230-204 lead in the House (Sanders managed to barely hang on).

But no one saw it coming. Here, take a look:

Pundit	Senate Margin	House Margin
Alan Abramowitz	GOP +2	DEM +28
Charlie Cook	GOP +4	DEM +8
Ronald Lester	DEM +2	DEM +26
Frank Luntz	GOP +4	DEM +6
Mary Matalin	GOP +6	GOP +4
Chris Matthews	GOP +6	DEM +10
Ralph Reed	GOP +2	DEM +20
Bill Schneider	Even	DEM +18
Marty Tolchin	Even	DEM +6
Ron Walters	GOP +2	DEM +18
Fred Wertheimer	Even	DEM +14
Mark Shields	GOP +2	DEM +12
Al Hunt	GOP +2	DEM +10
Bob Novak	GOP +6	GOP +6
Margaret Carlson	GOP +2	DEM +22
Doug Bailey	GOP +6	DEM +10
Fred Barnes	GOP +6	DEM +6
Morton Kondracke	GOP +4	GOP +14
John McLaughlin	GOP +4	GOP +2
Jack Germond	Even	DEM +26
Eleanor Clift	DEM +2	DEM +22
Average Prediction:	GOP +2.57	DEM +11.24
Actual Outcome:	GOP +4	GOP +25

Most pundits predicted that the GOP would take the Senate - fully fifteen were within ±2 of the right answer (which was GOP +4). But oh man, no one even came close to getting the House right. Only four people even said the GOP would emerge victorious, and none of them predicted the eventual 25-seat margin. As far as the House results were concerned, these predictions were almost entirely worthless.

Now, you might respond by saying that fewer seats are in play today, and that predictions have greater utility now because the House picture is less volatile. In turn, I'd point you to this New Yorker review of a fascinating new book called "Expert Political Judgment," by Berkeley psychology prof Phil Tetlock. Tetlock did a systematic study of expert predictions over a period of twenty years (talk about patience). His findings are pretty extraordinary:

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable.

“We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.”

And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

Bottom line: Beware predictions, especially from high-profile experts. That's not to say we shouldn't try to make any - hell, that's half the purpose of the political blogosphere. It just means we all have to maintain a strong skepticism - and keep that salt handy.

Posted at 08:59 PM in Elections | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1) | Technorati