Dark Data and the US Election

The 2020 US Election wasn't the first time that many people misread a political situation, and I'm sure it won't be the last. What I want to look at in this post is the way that these misreadings were a consequence of missing data - commonly known as Dark Data.

The first misreading was the polls predicting a strong result for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Although Biden still had a majority of the popular vote, and also a majority in the Electoral College, the margin of victory was much smaller than most polls had predicted.

A plausible explanation for this error is that the data collection on which these estimates are based systematically excludes certain types of voter, and therefore underestimated the support for Donald Trump and the Republican party. Either because these voters are less easy than others to reach by traditional polling methods (telephone calls), or because these voters are less willing than others to reveal their true voting intentions (the so-called Shy Voter).

Following errors predicting the 2016 election, polling organizations thought they had worked out how to correct these errors. It seems that they were wrong about that.

The second potential misreading involved analysing the demographic breakdown of voters based on exit polls, resulting in statements such as Donald Trump increased his share of the XYZ-category vote from A% to B%.. But given that Trump voters were more likely to vote in person and Biden voters were more likely to vote by mail, surveys of people leaving polling stations would be highly skewed.

The third misreading was perhaps to take social media too seriously. Ed Pilkington argues that although Trump's strongest advantage going into the election was the economy, Trump proved incapable of keeping to the economic message.

Because his modus operandi is to stimulate a positive response from his fans, as well as outrage or scorn from his enemies. He then leverages the negative response from his enemies to reinforce the loyalty of his fans. (As Judith Butler argues, this effect is linked to shame.)

As I wrote in my earlier post 

What is special in Trump's case is that there are some feedback loops that strongly reinforce these particular behaviour patterns, because they have produced the desired outcomes in the recent past. Trump's worldview (Weltanschauung) causes him to pick up certain signals and ignore others.

Why this stupid behaviour? (October 2017)

Trump has a remarkable ability to create noise on social media, and he has often used this noise to his own advantage. He had a refined sense of what would play well to his core audience, and would rattle his core opponents, because those were the two categories that reacted on social media to his every move. But he appears to have had rather less sense of what mattered to those who didn't belong to either of these categories, and didn't broadcast their partisan views at every opportunity.

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Judith Butler, Is the show finally over for Donald Trump? (The Guardian, 5 November 2020)

Ed Pilkington, Loser: Donald Trump derided defeat – now he must live with it (The Guardian, 11 November 2020)

Zack Stanton, People Are Going To Be Shocked: Return of the Shy Trump Voter? (Politico, 29 October 2020)

Related posts: Why this stupid behaviour? (October 2017), Dark Data (February 2020)

Vain Repetition

At the time of writing this post, the US election is not quite over. The mainstream media (now including the Murdoch empire) are presenting the strong likelihood that the Biden-Harris ticket will turn out to have won, but President Trump and his loyal supporters appear optimistic of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, with the aid of legal arguments, aggressive protest outside the vote counting stations, and of course prayer.

In this post, I want to talk about a prayer session on the Thursday after the election led by Paula White-Cain, Trump's controversial spiritual advisor.

Presidential spiritual adviser Paula White is currently leading an impassioned prayer service in an effort to secure Trump's reelection. pic.twitter.com/hCSRh84d6g

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) November 5, 2020

A number of people have offered musical interpretations and mashups. @pjgrisar of @jdforward saw parallels with Steve Reich's 1965 composition It's Gonna Rain, which used a tape recording of an apocalyptic Pentecostal street preacher called Brother Walter.

Meanwhile, many people took to social media to remind Mrs White of something Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. (Matthew 6:7).

Regular readers of this blog may not be surprised to learn that this verse has been subject to many different translations and interpretations, going back at least as far as Martin Luther. (The Greek version features the curious word battalogein, but Jesus's original words were probably in Aramaic.)

Theologians sometimes argue that there is no problem with repetition as such, the problem is with the vanity of the repetition. Steven Winiarski argues that repetition becomes vain when it is used with bad motives. Bad motives for repetition include any attempt to use music and repetition to elicit a purely emotional response, to gain a personal audience, or to manipulate God.

So what exactly was the purpose and intended effect of Mrs White's incantation?

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P.J. Grisar, Paula White’s wild Trump sermon is begging for the Steve Reich treatment (Forward, 5 November 2020)

Tom McCarthy, Rupert Murdoch-owned US outlets turn on Trump, urging him to act with 'grace' (The Guardian, 7 November 2020)

Seren Morris, Paula White's Trump Prayers Go Viral on Twitter, Inspire Memes and Remixes (Newsweek, 5 November 2020)

Nicholas Till, Joy in Repetition: Critical genealogies of musical minimalism (Performance Research 20:5, 2015)

Steven Winiarski, Music, Culture, and Vain Repetition: Matthew 6 in its Context (Artistic Theologian 4, 5 April 2016)

Wikipedia: It's Gonna Rain, Language of Jesus, Matthew 6:7, Paula White

Related post: Worshipping the Golden Calf (October 2008)

Political Theatre

May 2012 - Failure as Success

"Wanting failure for what end?" @Bricoleur questions the purpose of a recent vote in the US Senate. As far as I understand it, the Republicans submitted a budget that was sufficiently similar to President's budget for the Republicans to reject, but sufficiently different for the Democrats to reject as well.

Failure for whom? According to @michaelbd, the purpose of the Republicans is to achieve a certain headline. Presumably this is not the purpose of the Democrats. But what is the purpose of the system as a whole, and does this kind of political theatre represent a systemic failure of the US political system?

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Jan 2013 - Stalemate as Victory

@JohnFriedman (via @Bricoleur) describes the perennial incompetence of the US fiscal system in terms of game theory (Nash Equilibrium), and suggests that all of the players are so invested in preserving their positions that the larger purpose gets lost. He attributes the following version of the POSIWID principle to Greg Pawlson.

"Whenever a system reliably and consistently produces the same results, one must accept that the system was designed to create those outcomes, whether or not those outcomes were the intention of the system's architects."

The so-called Fiscal Cliff is essentially a political crisis with apparently severe financial consequences, rather than a financial crisis as such, and so it is the political system to which POSIWID directs our attention here. Fiscal decisions are made by politicians for political ends: although they may often try to frame these decisions as if they were merely exercises in financial good management, POSIWID warns us that this may be a misleading illusion.

Friedman argues that if the American people consistently reward politicians for their intransigence and unwillingness to compromise, then they have no right to complain when these characteristics prevail over cooperation and common sense.

Amitai Etzion (via @Bricoleur) reframes the US political system, suggesting that the apparent division between Republicans and Democrats masks a deeper division between conservatives and liberals. He concludes

"Pay no mind to the argument that Washington is not working or gridlocked. It works quite well, most times, for conservatives. Those who are out to change Washington -- better start by recognizing the way it works rather than being distracted by the myth that it is gridlocked."

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Stephen Dinan, Obama Budget Defeated 99-0 (Washington Times, 16 May 2012)

Michael Brendan Dougherty, What It Means That The 'President's Budget' Went Down 99 To 0 In The Senate (Business Insider, 16 May 2012)

Amitai Etzion, The Conservative 'Party' Dominates (Huffington Post, 11 Jan 2013)

John Friedman, A Lesson in Accountability as U.S. Goes Over Fiscal Cliff (Huffington Post, 1 Jan 2013)

Jason Linkins, Senate Unanimously Rejects A Budget Offered By Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) (Huffington Post, 16 May 2012)

Michael Tomasky, Obama’s Big and Quiet Transformation (New York Review, 7 February 2013)

The Benefits of Doubt 2

@ghall49 (Gerald Hall) writes: "Birthers are a great example of how impervious delusional beliefs are to reason and evidence. They only accept what they want to believe."

According to the BBC, a growing number of Americans (the so-called Birthers) doubt the circumstances of Obama's birth [Q&A Obama's Birth Certificate]. Some of them suggest that he might possibly be Kenyan or Indonesian.

Birthers do not seem overly concerned at the absence of evidence for either of these suggestions. Obviously the absence of evidence merely proves that the evidence has been destroyed by the conspirators. For them to feel morally justified in rejecting the authority of the elected president, it is apparently sufficient that there is a smidgeon of doubt about the documentation that the President has produced. The fact that Obama is supported by a "fairly significant faction" puts him into the same historical category as the mediaeval antipopes.

Do Birthers actually believe that Obama is Kenyan? Or do they merely believe that he might be Kenyan, that he might as well be Kenyan? Or that, like Macduff, he was not of woman born? Birthers don't have to be certain that Obama is this or that, they merely have to be uncertain that he is American. The real delusion is not about the circumstances of Obama's birth, but about the relevance of these doubts to the American polity.

Meanwhile, some Birthers have discovered a further reason to deny President Obama the respect owing to a duly elected president. According to the latest theory, Obama's middle name is not Hussein or Mohammed but Lucifer.

Here's the method. First take the following verse from the Bible, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." (Luke 10:18). Now insert the Aramaic word for "lightning" (barak) and the Hebrew word for "from the heights" (bamah). Obama isn't just Kenyan, he's also the Antichrist?

Just the faintest possibility that he might be the Antichrist? Isn't that enough?

See also From Malcolm X to Barack Obama

First Family

Like several of his predecessors (Johnson, Nixon, George W Bush), President Obama has two daughters.

Kennedy and Carter had interesting brothers; Ford, Reagan and Clinton had interesting wives. Who was the last president with a son? Oh I remember, it was George HW Bush.

Missouri loses bellwether status

As was widely predicted, Missouri has lost its bellwether status [BBC News, 21 November 2008]. For only the second time since 1904, Missouri voted for the losing candidate in the presidential election. Aw, shucks! Immediately after the election, David McCoy pointed out that the concept of bellwetherhood was Bad Statistics. It is also bad inductive reasoning to suggest that something is unlikely because it hasn't happened before, or that something is remarkable because it is unlikely. J.R. Lucas (author of several books of philosophy including The Concept of Probability) used to call this the Dover Fallacy.

There was a young curate of Dover Who bowled twenty-five wides in an over, Which had never been done By a clergyman’s son On a Tuesday in August in Dover.

The BBC reports Larry Sabato, Professor of Political Science at the University of Virginia, as saying that trying to identify bellwethers may not be a worthwhile enterprise. But if you search for "Larry Sabato bellwether" you can find what appear to be many attempts by Professor Sabato to do just that for various state and national elections including the most recent.

• Virginia's Bellwethers May Point the Way to Victory and Defeat (2001)
• WA-SEN: Sabato Pegs Cantwell Race as Bellwether (2006)
• N.C. a presidential bellwether? (July 2008)
• Battle for Votes in Bellwether Ohio (October 2008)

Glad to see a professor willing to change his mind about something. Meanwhile, there is apparently some status involved in being a bellwether state. Now I don't know a lot about herding sheep, but I think the way it works is that if you are herding sheep you only need one bell, but if you are herding goats you need one bell for each goat. Perhaps having a bell around its neck made Missouri feel more important than the other sheep. Now people are already discussing how to get Missouri its bell back.

• What killed Missouri's bellwether status? (Saint Louis Beacon)
• Missouri: Promoting Diversity Key to Reclaiming Bellwether Crown (Moderate Voice)
• So Long Bellwether Status (Midwest Voices)

Listen Missouri, you don't need this. Did you know that the bellwether was originally a castrated ram? Or you could always try astrology instead: Reclaiming our Revolutionary Roots.

 

See also You Don't Need to be Smart Here (October 2008)

From Malcolm X to Barack Obama

Many of us expected some kind of statement or action by Al Qaeda after the election of Barack Obama. But I don't know whether anyone expected anything quite like the statement that appeared yesterday [Al-Qaeda vows to hurt Obama's US, BBC News 19 November 2008].

Malcolm X contrasted "field negroes" who hated their white masters with "house negroes" who, he said, were loyal to them [Message to the grassroots]. Referring explicitly to this speech, Ayman al-Zawahri described President-elect Obama as a "house negro". (Mr al-Zawahri actually used the arabic expression "abeed al-beit, which means "house slave", but this was rendered as "house negro" in the message's English subtitles.) What possible effect is this message supposed to have, in America or in the rest of the world? Or has AlQaeda lost the plot?

• Al-Qaeda plays the race card against Barack Obama … no, seriously (TrainWreckPolitics)
• Al-Qaeda's most epic fail ever (The American Prospect)
  

What effects is it likely to have? Firstly, it has prompted several bloggers to refer sarcastically to the crazy rightwing myth that Obama is actually Malcolm X's love-child. Sounds like Star Wars to me - Obama as a Jedi knight, overcoming the black ideology of his symbolic father. I guess AlQaeda would read the symbolism the other way around - Amerika as Sith. In any case, AlQaeda and the American Right are both attached to the kind of simplistic mythological worldview promoted in films like Star Wars, and perhaps Mr al-Zawahri will be happy to see anything that reinforces this worldview.

The second potential effect is reflexive. People often inadvertently reveal their own weaknesses and shame when criticizing others. Perhaps this is because they focus on those characteristics they are most uncomfortable or ashamed about in themselves. As a result of contrasting President-elect Obama with "honourable Black Americans", Mr al-Zawahri is inevitably going to find himself and his terrorist pals contrasted with "honourable Arab Moslems". And perhaps at some level he thinks this too.

Is Change Possible?

November 2008

Predictions about the likely outcome of the US election. And once Obama looks like he's won, predictions about the likely direction of the Obama administration.

"The fact is that all of the dire predictions each side has made about the other can only partially come true because the genius of our system is that nothing stupid can happen very quickly."  Fred Weinberg, Whoever wins gets Herblock's Clean Shave (Penny Press Las Vegas, Vol 6 No 6, 30 October 2008)

"Obama may turn out to be less red in the practice of his presidency than his words and aspirations would imply." Robert Peston, Obama shackled by Debt (BBC News, 5 November 2008)

 

"The Democrats will owe their widened mandate to the success of some centrist and conservative Democrats elected in formerly red states and districts, and Obama and his Congressional partners will have to bring them along, too. The challenge, of course, is not letting those people drive the agenda, strangle the opportunities for change, and alienate the energized base that elected Obama, and created this momentum for a really different politics. We can't let the Village take over again." Joan Walsh, Election Day Blogging (Salon, 4 November 2008)

"The political Establishment of both parties is ideologically loyal to conservative corporatism. Indeed, that is the power of money -- the power of the hostile takeover, if you will. And that means the uprising that this election season has stoked will need to become all the more intense starting tomorrow if we are to make sure a (hopefully) President-elect Obama doesn't spend the first days after the election constructing another conservative Presidency -- only this time, building it with bricks and mortar marked 'progressive'." David Sirota, Election Day Blogging (Salon, 4 November 2008)

Negative Campaigning

There have been many comments about negative tactics in the 2008 US election

• Jon Kelly, US Election takes a negative turn (BBC News, 6 August 2008)

Of course this is nothing new

• Wikipedia: Negative Campaigning
  
• Carl Pyrdum, Negative Campaigning, Medieval Style (22 October 2008)

And what's wrong with negative campaigning anyway, providing it is based on an honest appraisal of your opponent's weaknesses?

• Steve Chapman, Some Positive Thoughts About Negative Campaigning (Reason Online, January 2008)
• Dick Morris, Negative Campaigning is Good for America (US News, 6 October 2008)
  

Are negative tactics counterproductive, and did they backfire on this occasion? Do they damage the candidate who uses them, either during the election or when elected?

• James Leach, Negative Political Ads Hurt the United States (US News, 6 October 2008)
• Jonathan Freedland, The End of Attack Politics (Guardian, 16 October 2008)

And do they work at all?

• Do Negative Campaign Ads Work? (This Nation)

What's the purpose of negative tactics? There are two possible effects that negative campaigners might be aiming at. One is to reduce the approval ratings of your opponent, and the other is to discourage people from voting at all.

At least in this election, neither of these effects have materialized. Negative tactics were used on both sides, and yet both candidates seem to have ended the campaign with personal approval ratings over 50%. (McCain's campaign may have been dented by the widespread public perception that it was relying more than Obama's campaign on negative tactics, but many people seem willing to blame the party and the campaign team rather than the candidate himself. Who is the real McCain?)

And turnout has been staggering. When I vote in a British election it takes a few minutes, maybe ten minutes if I go at a busy time. I just cannot imagine any British elector being willing to stand in the cold and rain for three hours or more waiting to vote. What passion for democracy is expressed by a nation that is willing to stand in line for several hours in order to play with an unreliable voting machine.

(There is a cultural difference here. The British voting process is designed to save wasting the time of the electorate: we collect the votes as quickly and reliably as possible, and then spend all night counting and checking them. The US voting process is designed to get the result to the TV networks as quickly as possible. Americans are far more patient than the British when it comes to voting, but much more impatient to know the result. And yet in Britain the new elected leader takes over the following day, whereas in America the leader-elect has to wait a couple of months. Different subjective views of time and the proper amount of time things should take.)

What will campaigners remember about this election next time around, and what lessons will they learn? Will they abjure negative tactics - at least until they perceive their opponents doing it? Or will they just develop more sophisticated negative tactics?

Political Effects of Satire

Did Saturday Night Live swing the election for Obama? Thomas Schaller asks about
The end of the satirical industrial complex? (Salon, 4 November 2008).

"Has any of this smart political humor had an impact on the candidates, the election or our politics? It may be safe to argue that comedy changes the national mood, but can it change the national political climate in more fundamental ways?"

and quotes Robert Provine

"Plato and Aristotle feared humor's power to undermine authority."

The word "end" is often ambiguous - it can mean either "termination" or "purpose"? So what is the answer here - does satire have a purpose?

"Plato and Aristotle feared humor's power to undermine authority," says Robert Provine, who distinguishes between "laughing with" and "laughing at" types of humor. "'Laughing with' is bonding, and what we do with friends and like-minded folks. 'Laughing at' is directed to others, as in ridicule and jeering. Recently, Palin has been tapping the 'laughing at' mode toward [Barack] Obama." Provine says 'laugh with' humor tends to be more effective, however. "Tina Fey may have a very real effect on the election outcome, and to a lesser extent, so will David Letterman, because their more gentle and devastating variety is more effective than the heavy-handed Palin sort. It may sway the uncommitted and influence the faithful."

There are precedents of course. In Britain, TW3 is sometimes credited with having helped finish the Conservative government in the early 1960s.

When Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Tom Lehrer said that political satire had become obsolete. As he explained later, "everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it" [Interview May 2000]. In another interview he complained that people didn't laugh at political jokes any more, they just applauded [Stop Clapping, This is Serious, March 2003]. In other words, it is just predictable entertainment for the people who have already made up their minds.

There are still some survivors from the TW3 generation pushing a line of intelligent satire, such as Bird and Fortune. But will they swing elections? And is that their purpose?

Who is the Real McCain?

Glen Greenwald writes Poor John McCain: Forced against his honor to run an ugly campaign

"McCain has spent weeks overtly linking Obama to "terrorists" and "Palestinian donors" and posing the sinister question: "Who is the real Barack Obama"? ... But McCain's vaunted principles and honor make him absolutely hate these tactics and he vehemently does not want to win this way."

"The national press corps continues to revere John McCain despite what is widely acknowledged to be the toxic and ugly campaign he's running because they still think that this campaign is being run despite McCain's character and wishes, not because of them."

Meanwhile, David Brooks, Thinking about McCain, puts the other side.

"Nonetheless, when people try to tell me that the McCain on the campaign trail is the real McCain and the one who came before was fake, I just say, baloney. I saw him. A half-century of evidence is there."

There are three related issues here. Firstly, it is a good POSIWID principle to judge people not by their words but by their deeds. Greenwald quotes the New Testament: "By their fruits ye shall know them". Secondly, the American people are being asked to decide who shall be President. If McCain can't get his hand-picked campaign staff to respect his character and wishes, what chance has he got for getting the White House staff and the world to take him seriously?

The third issue is the profound undecidability of character. If we judge from his deeds, we get a different picture of the man according to which deeds we focus on. McCain is a more contradictory character than most politicians, and therefore a lot more interesting. (His running mate is also a profoundly contradictory character, as I discussed in Political Double Acts.)

So neither words nor deeds can give us a deep and thorough understanding of the Real McCain (or for that matter the Real Palin). Unless you leave out a good half of the evidence, it seems to be almost impossible to come to a rational left-brain assessment of the ticket. But maybe that's the point.

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Who is John McCain?

• Arizona Republic
• New York Review of Books
  
• Washington Post
  

Would I Stay True ... If My Personal Ambitions Seemed ... Achievable?

• Reason Online
  

Make-Believe Maverick

• Rolling Stone (via American Idler)
  
• Guardian
• UnderNews
  

Putting Country Last

• Consortium News
  
• New Republic
• The Atlantic

The Effects of Conflict - Battle-Readiness

In his Washington Diary, BBC Correspondent Matt Frei explains why the Democratic campaign for the presidency has such strong groundroots.

"With hindsight, the prolonged agony of the family feud between the Clintons and the Obamas helped to keep all those campaign offices open, register more and more voters and keep the rank and file of the Democratic Party excited and engaged."

Finally, as the hour approaches, 42+44=?

Isaac Asimov based some of his science fiction wars on classic conflicts between the Greeks and the Persians. In one story (I forget which) he makes the point that the divided Greeks had far more experience of warfare than the united Persians.

Politicians are often obsessed by party unity, but sometimes party disunity (healthy debate) is better for democracy.

The Effects of Conflict - Turning into the Enemy

There is lots of debate about the counterproductive effects of counter-terrorism: how the denial of freedom and the extension of intolerance (together with the apparent tolerance of crimes like torture) mean that the terrorists have won. But that's not what I want to talk about here.

In his Washington Diary, BBC Correspondent Matt Frei reports on something that has been getting more obvious for a while - the complete destruction of John McCain by his captors. Taken prisoner by the Republican Right (his Freudian slip a few weeks ago revealing his true feelings), McCain is no longer the honest and open-minded anti-politician, and now sounds more and more like the man who beat him in 2000.

"Was George W Bush about to beat McCain once again, this time because of an excess of friendship?"

"Perhaps the man who had spent almost six years in solitary confinement had developed political Stockholm syndrome? "

And here's a similar comment from Rolling Stone

In his current campaign, however, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000.

Which Election?

Which election are they fighting?

Some people suspect that Governor Palin's real goal is to set herself up for 2012. She never thought McCain had a chance of winning, but she thought she might as well benefit herself from the national exposure.

Many people think Governor Palin is unintelligent, because she doesn't seem to know much about the political issues, and she is "not good at process questions". But Jane Mayer in the New Yorker describes her as a politically astute operator with boundless ambition. She studied journalism, and seems to know how to get half the media on her side. She is also known for stabbing people in the back.

• The Insiders: How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin, by Jane Mayer (New Yorker, 27 October 2008)
• Barracuda: The Resentments of Sarah Palin (New Republic)

Why would she want to campaign in Iowa? This is not going to swing the 2008 election, but it sure helps groundwork for next time. But why would McCain go along with this?

• McCain's visits to Iowa baffle GOP strategists (Des Moines Register)
• Is Palin GOP front-runner in Iowa — for 2012? (Iowa Independent)
• CNN reports Palin's 'going rogue,' McCain aide says (via BBC News, Independent)

See also Notes on Trust: Can the candidates in the US election trust their running mates?

Female Politicians and Electoral Crisis 2

It's not apparently just men who have an irrational reaction to Governor Palin. Women are also strongly polarized, between those who love her to bits and regard all attacks on her as sexism and/or elitism (for example, the editor of the PalinSexismWatch blog) and those who regard her as a sorry representative of their sex.

Clearly some of the items found by the PalinSexismWatch blog includes some pretty stupid and abusive stuff - childish rubbish and worse. But it also includes some serious questions posed by Palin's critics: to put serious political comment into the same category as childish rubbish is either naive or devious.

It is hard to guess the motives behind the childish rubbish. Some people may think that it is terribly amusing to be abusive about Governor Palin. But the effect of this is to create noise that gets in the way of serious debate. So who benefits from this? The people who want Palin to fail, or the people who want Palin's critics to fail?

Pam Atherton asks Why Some Smart Women Think Palin is a Good Choice, and suggests that it is hard for partisans to change their mind when there are so many narratives that help to explain away inconvenient observations. This explanation works both ways of course: there may be as many Democrats who are not prepared to give her a fair hearing as there are Republicans who are not prepared to give her critics a fair hearing.

Female Politicians and Electoral Crisis

In my previous post Playboy Models and Economic Crisis, I criticized research that purported to show men preferring taller, older women during an economic downturn, studies which were based on the rather unconvincing evidence of a few Playboy centrefolds. 

In Something about Sarah, Kathleen Parker accuses Senator McCain of having allowed sexual attraction to influence his selection of running mate. Parker cites a Canadian study published in 2003, which indicated that men made hasty decisions for short-term reward when confronted with attractive women.

Obviously McCain's selection of Governor Palin is based on extremely short-term thinking - she is chosen to help him win the election and certainly not to be an effective Vice-President (let alone, God forbid, President). And according to Robert Draper in The Making and Remaking of McCain, McCain struts like a younger man when he has Palin at his side. So it apparently benefits his campaign for him to appear more vigorous and virile, despite what I said in my post on Political Double Acts. 

The key question is whether McCain was himself befuddled by Palin's womanly charms, or whether he was calculating on this effect befuddling the American voter. There is also a question whether this befuddling effect is amplified by the current economic crisis, which evidently causes great anxiety for the American electorate (and therefore for McCain himself), thus providing a further reason for discounting the future. Parker ends her piece thus:

"If McCain, rightful heir to the presidency, loses to Obama, history undoubtedly will note that he was defeated at least in part by his own besotted impulse to discount the future. If he wins, he must be credited with having correctly calculated nature's power to befuddle."

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Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future? Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B (Suppl.) 271, S177–S179 (2004)

More Endorsement for Baruch Spinama

Following General Colin Powell's endorsement of Senator Obama (Who Gains From Endorsement?), right-wing commentators hastened to explain it away in terms of General Powell's skin colour (Rush Limbaugh plays race card on Powell’s Obama endorsement).

But of course there are other endorsements that cannot be explained away so easily. Other senior Republicans. Major newspapers. Eric Schmidt and Vint Cerf of Google. Other hi-tech bosses had previously endorsed McCain, including Meg Whitman (former eBay CEO), John Chambers (Cisco CEO) and Carly Fiorina (former HP CEO).

Google is an interesting one. Arianna Huffington (not Huffungton, sorry) credits Google (and its subsidiary YouTube) with foreshortening the latency between political lies and political exposure. [The Internet and the Death of Rovian Politics] In this particular election, this effect appears to favour the Democrats. But we may expect political strategists, including Rove himself, to seek ways of exploiting this effect to their own advantage in future elections.

Who Gains from Endorsement?

The political statistics blog FiveThirtyEight expresses some scepticism about the value of Colin Powell's endorsement for Barack Obama, arguing that relying on endorsement represents a lazy short-cut for the voter and is therefore most effective when the election is unimportant, and least effective when most voters already have a vast amount of available information about the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the two main candidates.

There is also a question of timing. Endorsing someone who is way ahead in the polls looks more like jumping on the bandwagon, or a bid for a decent job after the election, than a serious attempt to swing opinion. However, endorsing someone too early in the campaign may be a tactical error as well. Note the critical importance to Obama of those senior Democrats who announced their support for him when the Obama-Clinton race was reaching its final stages.

I agree with FiveThirtyEight that it is irrational for a voter to rely on endorsements when there is so much at stake. But in this election, many voters will experience conflicting reasons to vote one way or the other, and this will include irrational loyalties to various groups. Some people have assumed that the military would automatically support McCain. Following General Powell's endorsement, military folk who were uneasy with McCain and Palin now have less reason to vote for McCain merely from some sense of group loyalty. But it would be insulting to the thoughtfulness and rationality of voters with a military background to suggest that many of them hadn't already come to their own conclusions about McCain's grasp of economics, or Governor Palin's readiness for high office. After all, the military have more reasons than most to vote for a Commander in Chief who will not make rash decisions.

Poisoned Chalice

The best time to lose an election is just before the country tips into recession. Then your opponent can take the blame, and if you play your cards right you should be able to win the following two elections at least. That doesn't mean that any politician ever wants to lose an election, but there may sometimes be elections that they don't fight quite as hard.

After the Australian elections last year, Ross Gittins suggested that the Labour win was a poisoned chalice, because the Labour Prime Minister was likely to preside over economic decline.

So how much does the Republican Party really want to win the US election this year? It's not as if Senator McCain was overwhelmingly popular with the party establishment. Governor Palin is incredibly popular with some sectors of the population, and treated as a joke by most other sectors. Surely if they really wanted to win, they'd have picked someone else. Therefore perhaps they don't really want to win. Let President Obama screw up for four years and then the Republicans can have the White House back plus a strong majority in both houses, plus a popular mandate to undo any reforms that President Obama might have forced through.

According to the fears and hopes of the Republican party, Obama's presidency may be like Carter's, bad while it lasts but paving the way for another great Republican president. Parts of the Democratic Party hope and believe they are wrong, while perhaps other parts think that Carter was just ahead of his time.

Ticket-Balancing

Am I alone in finding something quite absurd about the concept of ticket-balancing?

Newsweek's cover story on Sarah Palin (The Palin Problem via Sarah Palin Counter) points out that "ticket-balancing to attract different constituencies has been with us at least since Andrew Jackson ran with John C. Calhoun, a man he later said he would like to kill".

I have discussed Senator Biden and Governor Palin in my posts Political Double-Acts and Partisanship, but in this post I want to look more broadly at the concept.

The ticket-balancing article on Wikipedia contains a number of historical examples. Perhaps one of the classic choices is that of Richard Nixon in 1960. Nixon was a Californian from an ordinary Quaker family, who couldn't afford to take up a place at Harvard or Yale. His running mate Cabot Lodge came from an elite Boston family. The attempted balance was transparent - WestCoast/EastCoast, Poor/Established. But during the campaign Cabot Lodge failed to compete effectively with Kennedy in Massachusetts; he also made some liberal statements about race, which may have lost votes in the racist South. Nixon would probably have done better without a running mate at all.

How is ticket-balancing supposed to work anyway? Are the East Coast elites really more likely to vote for some humble West Coast guy if there is someone reassuringly posh on the ticket? Do the East Coast elites really believe Nixon would ever give Cabot Lodge a real job? (After winning the election, it was fellow-Bostonian Kennedy who gave Cabot Lodge a job.)

The more the running mate is chosen for the sake of ticket-balancing, the less likely it is that the person will be granted any real power as Vice President. Therefore it seems like a completely cynical and irrelevant exercise, like having someone in a boy band or girl band who is cute but can't sing. Or Ringo Starr, who wasn't allowed to play the drums on some of the Beatles recordings. Presumably the political classes believe that American people haven't worked this obvious fact out yet.

At the other extreme is George W. Bush. In an article on Ticket-Balancing on Suite 101, John S. Cooper thinks that by selecting a running mate without taking advantage of the "benefits" of ticket balancing, Bush did something very rare in American politics. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Dick Cheney has been one of the most powerful Vice Presidents ever.

Barton Gellman, The Power of Vice (Oct. 6, 2008) "Palin is no Cheney, and neither is Biden. How much clout will the VP's successor have?"

See also

Politics of Ticket Balancing (November 1997)
McCain Discounts Ticket-Balancing (AP, Feb 2008) (found on several sites including Time and Brietbart)
The Logic of an Obama/Edwards Ticket - Balancing as Reinforcing (Open Left, May 2008)