“There’s a lot we don’t know”
by digby
It’s amusing watching the right wingers get up on their “skewed polls” horses once again to explain why it’s just not possible that the country doesn’t agree with their tactics on this government shut down. (I understand the impulse — it’s the old Pauline Kael trope about not knowing anyone who disagrees with you, right?) But it seems quite clear to anyone without blinders on that the Republicans are taking the bigger hit in public opinion on this. There are very few Ted Cruz fans out there.
On the other hand, I do recall that in the last election, everyone I knew said that we should “trust Nate Silver” and indeed, he turned out to be right. So unless we want to be as unrealistic as Republicans we should probably pay attention to what he’s saying about all this as well — just so we don’t go off half cocked. He points out once again that presidential polling is pretty good and that, for the most part, by the end of the campaign it’s fairly clear who’s going to win. Then he says this:
However, presidential elections are more the exception than the rule. As I discuss in my book, the more common tendency instead is that people (and especially the “experts” who write about the issues for a living) overestimate the degree of predictability in complex systems. There are some other exceptions besides presidential elections — sports, in many respects; and weather prediction, which has become much better in recent years. But for the most part, the experts you see on television are much too sure of themselves.
That’s been my impression of the coverage of the shutdown: The folks you see on TV are much too sure of themselves. They’ve been making too much of thin slices of polling and thinner historical precedents that might not apply this time around.
There’s been plenty of bullshit, in other words. We really don’t know all that much about how the shutdown is going to be resolved, or how the long-term political consequences are going to play out.
He goes on to lay out six reasons why everyone should show a little restraint when predicting the political outcome of all this:
1. The media is probably overstating the magnitude of the shutdown’s political impact.
2. The impact of the 1995-96 shutdowns is overrated in Washington’s mythology.
3. Democrats face extremely unfavorable conditions in trying to regain the House.
4. The polling data on the shutdown is not yet all that useful, and we lack data on most important measures of voter preferences.
5. President Obama’s change in tactics may be less about a change of heart and more about a change in incentives.
Read the post for his reasoning on all this, but in a nutshell he points out that these stories tend to have a shorter shelf life than people realize, that Clinton was always likely to win in 1996 and he had no coattails so his victory was sort of pyrrhic anyway, gerrymandering and polling on this is imprecise and that Obama isn’t facing election so he’s behaving differently.
All of that is thought provoking and worth taking into consideration before we plan our victory party. But this may be the most important insight:
6. The increasing extent of GOP partisanship is without strong recent precedent, and contributes to the systemic uncertainty about political outcomes.
Congress has gone through periods of relatively high partisanship before — for example, at the turn of the 20th century. But the degree of polarization in the Congress is higher than at any point since the Great Depression by a variety of measures, and is possibly at its highest point ever. (Most of the evidence suggests the trend is asymmetric: Republicans in Congress have become much more conservative, while Democrats have become only somewhat more liberal.)
What this means is that, whether they assume the form of statistical models or more anecdotal takes on the evidence, conceptions based on recent history of how the negotiations might play out may not be all that reliable. That there were 17 government shutdowns between 1976 and 1996, for example, none of which persisted for more than three weeks, may not be all that meaningful since none of those came at a time when Congress was nearly as polarized as it is now. Similarly, the fact that an aggregate limit on federal debt has been in place since 1939 [PDF] may not tell us all that much. This is not to imply that the risk of a debt ceiling breach is all that high, especially given the reports of progress in budget talks as of Thursday morning.
But there’s a lot we don’t know.
The joy with which Democrats greet the bad polling numbers for Republicans is understandable. And there could be some very serious fall-out for them a year from now in the mid-terms. These guys are certifiable and one hopes that sanity will reassert itself in American politics sooner rather than later. But if this joy at the short term polling breeds Democratic hubris (as if often does) that always hurts the ball team. As Silver says, “there’s a lot we don’t know …”
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