The Hot Idea in Cocooning
Plus--Blame Mary, Save Dan?
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2004, at 12:31 AM PT
Mayflower Hill, the blogger who scooped Dan Rather's sword-falling, goes all goo-goo and earnest,** but not before delivering the dish from his CBS source about a likely Howard-Mapes toast sandwich. ...**: He says we should talk about "the situation in Falluja," the uninsured, energy prices, etc. Yeah. But this is the blogosphere, where we get to talk about ... what we are interested in talking about! You want duty stories, read David Broder. ... It's not every day that a new information medium undermines an old info-constricting, caste-like hierarchy either. (Think Protestant Reformation.) There are enough pixels to discuss both Rather and Zarqawi.. 10:58 P.M.
Donkey Cocooning: Given my recent posts linking to polls showing Bush ahead, I should say I think Democrats have been too discouraged by last week's CW that Kerry's finished (as opposed to the previous, even sillier CW that it was Kerry's "race to lose", or this week's coming CW sigh of relief that the campaign is finally about something important, namely Iraq). I also think the Feiler Faster Principle** means Kerry has plenty of time to win, more than most analysts believe. But I oppose cocooning in all its forms! The "new, cocoon-building liberal analyst meme," poll-savvy kf emailer "Y" writes, is the argument that polls showing Bush ahead are wrong because polls should be weighted by party identification. Ruy Teixiera argues that the "CBS News/New York Times Poll Has It Close to Even" if you
"weight their data to conform to the 4 point Democratic party ID lead which we have good reason to believe is the underlying distribution in the voting electorate."
I'll let Y lay out the problem with this hot new idea:
What's his reason for thinking "underlying distribution" is 4-point Dem? He explains, in defending his re-analysis of CBS/NYT data:
"Reweight their data to conform to an underlying Democratic 4 point edge (using the 39D/35R/26I distribution from the 2000 exit poll) and you get a nearly even race, 47 Bush/46 Kerry."
[snip] At MyDD.Com, Greg Bowers says he's only going to trust polls that weight by PID, and will reweight to party ID those polls that don't. His is a long post, but here's the conclusion:
This provides evidence to support both aspects of my hypothesis. First, polls that weight [by party ID] are more similar to one another than polls that do not weight. Second, polling firms that weight show less movement from poll to poll than polling firms that do not weight.
Well, yeah. If you weight every poll to the same PID [party identification], you will get the same vote. How can you not, when about 90% of Dems vote KE and about 90% of Reps vote BC? Imposing a pre-determined PID weight insures consistency, at the cost of repressing changes in public opinion. In fact, why do we bother doing poll after poll after poll at all? PID, and therefore the vote, will be the same as last time, right?
Wrong. PID changes in the electorate, both because Reps, Dems and Indies have differing levels of motivation to vote, and because sometimes one party or the other is temporarily more appealing or less appealing to people. That's why PID changes, and why it is a mistake to impose pre-determined PID on a poll.
For example, according to the world's leading expert on public opinion polling, Ruy Teixiera, "[A]s a campaign progresses, the level of interest among voters tends to change, particularly among those with partisan inclinations whose interest level will rise when their party seems to be mobilized and doing well and fall when it is not. " (emphasis in the original).
So, on the one hand, Ruy says the Proper Analyst will reweight to a fixed PID [derived from the actual 2000 turnout]. Then he says people in different parties will be more or less likely to want to vote as the campaign progresses--and of course, that means Reps and Dems will have differing turnout....PID will change with turnout.
Is there a reason to think relative interest levels of Dems and Reps are different now than they were as reflected in the 2000 Exit Poll? Yes:
1. In 2000, Dems were coming off a 1992-1996 winning streak, and Reps were two-time losers. In 2004, Dems go in feeling like losers, Reps like winners. Isn't that Ruy's point, emphasized in the original--when it feels like your party is going to win, you can't wait to vote.
As I said, interest in voting (turnout) is not the only reason why RVs and LVs will demonstrate changing PID over time. The other reason is that in times like these, sometimes one party's or the other's appeal may be rising or declining.
2. 9/11. The sudden shift in PID after 9/11 is thoroughly document[ed] in Ipsos and Gallup polls. Independents started calling themselves Republicans after that. The pro-Republican advantage in PID had been fading all year, but now appears to be returning in the Rep's favor. Why? There is a little evidence now that the 9/11-fest in NYC has created an echo of that original 9/11 change in PID. [Emphasis added]
** The Feiler Faster Principle didn't operate in the Democratic primaries. Kerry took a lead and kept it for months without any new plot twists, without voters even learning much old information about him, let alone new information. Why did the FFT fail? I suspect because there were no negative ads and negative campaign themes to drive new information into the race. Blame John Edwards' wussiness and McCain-Feingold's "I approve this ad" requirement. But lack of negative campaigning does not seem to be a problem in the current general election. ... 2:57 A.M.
Mr. X emails to point out what was really egregious about CBS's--and Rather's--behavior:
the really appalling thing is not that they got snookered by an anti-bush partisan whose original story-- about the destruction of documents in 97-- couldnt be substantiated. its the after the fact circle the wagons coverrup. look at the string of cbs statements once the docs were challenged-- particularly the Sandy Garelius statement here...http://www.topangaonline.com/wboard/messages/8093.html-- about how they "confident of the chain of custody." How could they be confident of the chain of custody if, as appears, they never even spoke to the apparenlty mythtical person from whom burkett said he got the documents. Leave said getting taken in by a source with an axe to grind. Leave aside the shoddy journalism in not vetting the original source. How could they have kept putting out those public statements -- after the docs were questioned-- assuring everybody that they had done things that they clearly didnt do.
I thought before that this was unlikely to lead to rather's quick, as opposed to eventual, downfall. Now Im not so sure.
The only reason Rather wouldn't be fired is that the network has so much invested in him--that's the source of his power, and why he was able to jerk around the top brass and drag down the network's name in the soap opera of the last ten days. But that's also why it's hard to believe the Danron debacle would have happened if Rather himself hadn't constantly pushing to believe in the anti-Bush story against all reason. Which makes him responsible for the crime as well as the coverup. ... Update: Mr. Z chimes in:
wouldn't you think they need a bigger scapegoat than mary mapes, or even the executive producer of the broadcast, Josh Howard ? from what I could see, it was dan who was most pugnacious about defending the story before today's climb-down. On the other hand, my experience at [name of network omitted] demonstrated that it is usually the on-air "talent" who pay the lowest price in a journalistic disaster. |
