Nevada Caucuses

It's hard to come up with something meaningful to say at this point..about the only suspense remaining is at what point everyone will concede that there's no longer any doubt about the nomination. Well, I suppose there's suspense about what wild accusations Newt Gingrich will make next. I'm hoping that he'll turn against Rick Santorum, because I'd like to hear what kind of sneering disdain Newt can come up with for the Keystone state (to join his sneering disdain for Massachusetts, San Francisco, Chicago, New York...am I missing anything? That's 18M+ Americans that Newt regularly sneers at if we confine it to city limits, quite a few more if we look at metro areas. It's true that there are liberals who do bash GOP-dominated states, but I'd be surprised if anyone could find an example of a Democratic national politician doing so, especially not as part of his or her regular public rhetoric).

Anyway, the biggest disappointment last night was in our TV pundits. I didn't watch all of it, of course, but I did have the TV on quite a bit on the cable nets, and despite the fact that Romney obviously had Nevada won with something around half the vote, I was terribly disappointed that the TV pundits didn't immediately move to create artificial suspense by deciding that Romney had to break 50% in order to "really" win the state. This shows an appalling lack of creativity in our TV pundits! We'll no doubt be overtaken by pundits from Japan or China or India or wherever it is that we're worried about being overtaken by these days. 

Ignore Those Polls! (Influence on the Vote Edition)

This has come up twice already this week, so I guess it's time for a reminder: people usually don't know why they vote for the candidates they choose to vote for, and are not particularly good at assessing how something influenced that vote -- let alone how some hypothetical future event would influence them.

Today's installment was from one of the sillier events on the campaign trail: Donald Trump's endorsement, which apparently is going to go to Mitt Romney today. Now, in real life no one is going to care one way or another that Donald Trump endorsed a candidate. About the only effect would be a very short blast of publicity, but leading presidential candidates get plenty of that anyway. This isn't something that will be forgotten by November; this is something that will almost certainly have been forgotten by Saturday, when Nevadans caucus. In other words, it's not going to affect vote choice at all. And yet if you ask voters, it turns out that some will tell you that they would be more likely, and a somewhat larger number will tell you that they'll be less likely, to vote for someone with a Trump endorsement. Hey, reporters: don't believe those polls! You can take it as a measure of what respondents think about Trump, if you care about such things, but there's no reason to believe that this kind of self-reporting about vote choice is meaningful at all, and it shouldn't be included in stories about a Trump endorsement as if it was meaningful.

Similarly, there was a ton of coverage about exit polls in Florida that asked about whether ads or debates had influenced vote choice (sorry, no links; most of what I heard was on TV and radio). Hey, reporters: don't believe those polls! People have no real way of knowing how they were influenced in these sorts of things even if they try real hard, and there's no reason to believe that exit poll respondents did any such self-examination. Don't believe me? Ask a room full of people if they vote based on political party. You'll get only a handful of people who believe that they do -- and yet we know very well that party is far and away the biggest factor in partisan elections.

The bottom line here is that polling is a really good tool for reporters to use in many cases, but remember: what polling tells you for sure is only what people will say if they're asked a question by a pollster. We can be confident (if it's a competent pollster) that the answer can be extrapolated out to the full relevant population, but only to the extent that we can be confident that everyone would give similar answers to those questions when asked by pollsters. It's the reporters job to stop and think whether those answers have anything to do with real attitudes or real behavior. They might -- polling about vote choice the day before the election is usually very accurate! But in cases when there's no good reason to think the poll is telling us something meaningful, it's a disservice to readers to report those poll results. 

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday today to Pat Tabler; he's 54. 109 PAs with the bases loaded: .489 BA. OBP/SLG of 505/693; that's an 1198 OPS, which is just a bit higher than Babe Ruth's career number. Alas, we don't know what the Babe did with the bases loaded. I wonder who the guy is who was the Pat Tabler of, say, runner on second base?

The good stuff: 

1. Sasha Issenberg noticed that Newt's campaign in Florida was a mess. Amy Gardner noticed that Newt's campaign in Nevada is a mess. Hmmm. I sense a theme.

2. Rick Hason on Super PACs and Citizens United. My general sense is that the big thing you want to do if you want publicity for something is to get it called "Super" whatever. Seems to just mesmerize reporters.

3. What Matt Yglesias said about Romney's "very poor" gaffe: it's the policy that matters.

4. But it's also true that we could use some better journalism. Greg Marx explains.

5. Suddenly a lot less interested in supporting Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation? Over at Good, Nona Willis Aronowitz suggests five alternatives for supporting women's health.

6. And Seth Masket reports that redistricting doesn't seem to matter much in state legislatures, at least not on electoral competition and polarization. I know, it seems like the way districts are drawn should matter a great deal, but it just doesn't seem to.

Sunday Question for Liberals

Same question that I asked of conservatives. With the debates winding down for this cycle, what lessons if any should Democrats learn for 2016 about the way they were organized? What worked? What didn't?

Of course, the incentives of individual candidates and of the potential sponsors of debates may well differ from those of the party as a whole. But to the extent that the party could change things, what should be changed and what should be retained?

Hey, Reporters! (Debate Edition)

I've seen a few commenters (see for example here) treat the Florida debate audience last night as autonomous actors, neutral (between candidates) partisans who were honestly reacting to what they heard from the stage. I also read my brother the expert Romney-watcher's tweet during the action:

Strange that it took the Romney campaign 19 takes to realize that they should pack the debate hall.

I'm inclined to believe that it was a packed hall, and not spontaneous reactions -- but I don't know! Hey, reporters: first of all, we really should know whether Romney packed the hall or not last night. Second, and more basically: the audiences at GOP debates this year were a big story, and one that was underreported throughout. I know a lot of reporters are at this things live; who is packing the audience and how effectively should be a standard part of every debate story.

Pundits watching: be careful. And, I guess, I have to recommend this of all things: be more cynical. Please don't assume that debate audiences are a random cross-section of party voters. It's possible -- but campaigns rarely leave to chance those things that they can control, and if you don't know, it's safest to assume that an enthusiastic crowd is that way for a reason.