Game Changers and Double Downs
by digby
This conversation on Up with Steve Kornacki about campaign “game changers” was interesting (and not just because he quoted me at the top of the segment:)
I’ve thought about this quite a bit. I’m sympathetic to the idea that most of the time the presidential election is pre-ordained because of external conditions and the candidates are either riding the tide of good times or swimming against it. By the time of the general election we most often do know who’s going to win just based on the general mood of the country. Even without looking at polls I usually predict the winner pretty early on that basis (unless they steal it …) But I remain unconvinced that this is the whole story. Even aside from the good points that Sasha Issenberg makes about how the narrative of the winning campaign informs us about the approach to governance of the eventual winner, I still think campaigns themselves could surprise us, even though they haven’t yet. There just haven’t been enough of them measured in this way ultimately to prove it.
Be that as it may, the numbers are what the numbers are and they show as of now that the winners of presidential elections can be correlated to certain factors having to do with the economy and (I assume — I haven’t read he book) national security. But author John Sides says something in his comments above that’s very important and which I don’t think most people quite understand: the only elections they feel can be predicted with this specificity are presidential general elections. And yet I see pundits and other observers applying these findings to elections of all sorts and that’s definitely a big mistake. All you have to do is look at presidential primaries to see just how volatile elections can be and how important campaigns are to the outcome.
I hope that people will come away from this understanding that elections at all other levels are still very much dependent on what we call campaigns and political talent, however you define that. There are wave elections and referendums on certain policies of the party currently in charge. But the factors that go into any winning specific race are highly individual and even our favorite numbers crunchers are not going to be able to predict them based on polling alone.
Anyway, thanks to Steve Kornacki for calling out my post (and picking one that sounds halfway literate.)
Btw: Heuristic