Heartache With Hard Work

Just a little bit about percentages.

There’s a big fight going on about Nate Silver and statistical modeling and such things. It’s all pretty understandable. People want to believe the best, and the nature of elections means that we don’t get any confirmed info until next Tuesday evening.

But a lot of the concerns I’ve heard are about the level of certainty in Silver’s model. It has put the percentage chance of an Obama victory in the upper 70s all week. Right now it’s sitting at 79.0%.

A couple things.

First, during the 2008 campaign I was ultimately more impressed with Sam Wang’s election model, which uses a lot fewer bells and whistles to achieve its conclusions. I find that to be a good thing. I really enjoy Silver’s detailed analysis of the many complex elements that go into election results. And his approach is fantastic for under-polled races. It’s no surprise that he rose to fame in the 08 Democratic primaries. But when there’s a wealth of polling information Wang’s approach, which makes no effort to fiddle, seems more appropriate.

Anyways, the point is that Wang put the race at well above 90%. So Silver is actually pretty conservative in his estimate. And since I’ve been telling my friends for months to prefer Wang, I don’t feel like I’m cherry-picking the result that favors my guy.

Second, I think a lot of people who are upset about the 79% certainty haven’t really thought through what 79% really means.

To use a baseball analogy, the following circumstance carries a 79% chance of victory. You’re the home team, it’s the top of the 8th, and you’re up by one run. Your opponents have one out, and runners on first and second. Now, that’s a good place to be, but it’s pretty obviously not a sure thing. Teams come back from situations like that all the time. Well, 21% of the time to be exact.

Or, how about another one. If you’re the home team and you’re up by one run going into the bottom half of the 7th, you’ve got a 79.4% chance of winning.

I don’t have the numbers, but off the top of my head I’d guess that being up by just a point with five minutes left in a football games gives you the same percentage. Being up by three with five minutes to go in basketball. Being up by one goal at halftime in a soccer game. And so on.

In a game pitting two basically even opponents, even small leads provide huge percentages. Because you’d predict that almost half the time, the leading team will pull further ahead. And since they’re fairly even, most of the rest of the results will clump around simply preserving the status quo. However, these are general truths. Obviously in any given case, a team can go on a 10-0 run. Or Raul Freaking Ibanez can hit a homerun. Or Arsenal can score four unanswered goals (argh).

In the end, we just have to wait a week and we’ll find out for real.

Edit: I see that Silver’s most recent post also uses a sports analogy.  He says 79 percent is equivalent to being down by a field goal with three minutes to go.

Today, I’m going to read the front page of The National Review.  I try to do this fairly regularly because A) it’s nice to see what the other side thinks, just as an occasional reality check, and B) it’s nice to see what the other side thinks is the Most Important Thing in the World, which you have totally failed to notice because you don’t live in crazytown.

Category A helps to remind me that I live in an information bubble, and I’m just as subject to motivated reasoning as anyone else.  While I obviously don’t agree with much they have to say there, I find the National Review to represent genuine conservative/Republican talking points without making my blood boil too much.

That said, there’s enough there to fill up category B. That’s the one that helps to remind me why I’m on the team I’m on.

And, I have to admit, today there is a third motivating factor: C) as the election gets closer and all the numbers seem to point to a solid but small Obama lead, I grow nervouser and nervouser.  So I wanted to check in to see how the other side is taking the news that they are trailing – mostly to confirm for myself that as nervous as I feel, at least my guy is ahead. It’s not quite schadenfreude, but it’s not not that, either.

So let’s see what we have (with my quick categorization of the story):

1) A post making fun of Oliver Stone’s comment about the hurricane (C)
2) An apology for Christie appearing with (and lauding) the president (C, because of the tone, which communicates that it was perfectly reasonable for Christine to make this decision.  But also A because it’s a pretty reasonable argument)
3) A Fox News report about Benghazi (B)
4) Romney super PAC is running some ads in states he’s definitely going to lose (C)
5) Report about the OH Senate race, with some serious motivated reasoning about how Brown is going to lose (C)
6) Same as #5.  This one references Mandel’s ‘momentum’ – and links to the RCP polling average which puts Brown up by 5.5%.  So, yeah, not close. (C)
7) More on Benghazi (B)
8) Something about a weirdo who is running for Michigan’s 11th District (A, I guess)
9) Something making fun of Planned Parenthood for releasing a music video (B, because the implication is basically: lolz, birth control)
10) Poll in Ohio says Obama is ahead (not news)
11) Post explaining that, unlike a bunch of other ridiculous firestorms cultivated by the conservative media, this Benghazi thing REALLY IS A BIG DEAL.  (B and C)
12) Missouri Senate race tightens.  See #5-6 above.  This piece cites the poll which is most favorable to Akin, implies that this indicates movement, etc.  McCaskill is up by 5%. (C)
13) Neutral article about Christie (A)
14) reference to a Gallup poll which suggests that Romney is ahead in early voting.  This is actually interesting.  I was assuming that Obama was ahead there, but this shows it’s probably closer to a draw.  It comes with the normal caveat that Gallup’s numbers are pretty divergent from everyone else. And it also appears from looking at the numbers that the sample tilts pretty heavily Republican. But I’m not great at reading polls, so I might be missing something.  Regardless, interesting.  (Good example of A, since I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere in my normal circle)
15) Obama and Romney are tied – link to poll which says they’re tied (meh)
16) Dig at Biden for a totally milquetoast comment (B, I guess, but also meh)
17) Wildly misleading statement about a Virginia House race, that relies on people not actually watching the video (B)

So what is the result of my little unscientific bit of media analysis:

Things don’t look good from their perspective, I can tell you that.  Most of the things I categorized as C look like desperate attempts to put Humpty-Dumpty back together.  When the best you can do to persuade people that you’re in good shape is to reference Senate campaigns where you trail by 5 points with 5 days to go…

Things I expected to see, but did not: defenses of Romney’s ads about the auto companies and China, reference to any poll that shows Romney leading anything, someone really angry at the idea that we shouldn’t be allowed to ‘politicize’ Sandy (which I would actually agree with BTW – it’s a political matter).  Which is to say: it’s pretty low-key over there right now.

They’re still beating that Benghazi drum, though.  So that’s something.

Yesterday I went through a laundry list of supposed advantages to the Electoral College. One that I forgot to cover (astutely noted by friend-of-the-blog, Brian) goes as follows:

The Electoral College provides a more manageable mechanism to resolve election disputes, and reduces some of the problems of election monitoring. For example, in a razor-thin election you only have to do a recount in a couple states rather than the whole nation, which would be a much larger bureaucratic issue to manage.

In addition, the Electoral College reduces incentives to conduct electoral shenanigans in the states where it is easiest to manage (ones on the extreme edge of the spectrums which are therefore more likely to be dominated by one party). Right now there is no benefit to running up the score in Massachusetts or Illinois or Oklahoma or Texas. But once every vote counts, that would change.

This argument, while reasonable, has both uniqueness and impact problems. Most of these problems already exist. Witness Florida in 2000 for a bureaucratic nightmare of a recount. And while there’s no incentive to run up the score in the presidential election, there is very much an incentive for statewide offices. In Massachusetts, for example, whatever party factors might incentivize election-rigging efforts should already be triggered by the Brown-Warren race. The spate of voter ID laws being pushed around the country suggest that Republicans are very much willing to use state-level power to manage election turnout. And so on.

In fact, it seems pretty likely to me that a national popular vote for presidency would incentivize the federal government to actually institute some meaningful comprehensive election laws. Which might very well produce a net-positive result in terms of election shenanigans.

If you instinctively distrust the federal government and its ability to manage things, you might not buy that argument. But it sure seems to me like nationalizing regulation of fundamental rights tends to work a lot better than leaving them to states.

Another point made by Brian, which I had never considered, is that a national popular vote would strongly encourage states to facilitate maximum voter participation. It would probably be better for you (as, say, an Oklahoma state legislator) to simply get as many Oklahomans to the polls as possible and let the conservative tilt of your state do the magic, rather than screwing around with illegal vote management schemes.

A final point on all this: my preferred solution is just a constitutional amendment. But the National Popular Vote state compact is a pretty solid example of how easily we could find a constitutional workaround. The basic idea is that states commit to send their Electoral Votes to the national popular vote winner – but only once enough states have signed onto the compact to control the election. That is: once you get 270 Electoral Votes worth of states, the compact enters into force.

It would produce some screwy results in terms of the final numbers. But it would certainly work.

Unsurprisingly, all of the states that have signed on so far are Blue. Which is a shame because there really is no strong reason this should be a partisan issue.

The Electoral College should be abolished. To me this is pretty uncontroversial, but given the nature of our Constitutional structure it is tremendously difficult to make even obvious changes.

My previous post discussed the possibility that 2012 could become another example of an Electoral/popular split. If it did, it would of course be the second time out of the last four cycles. To me, the fact that this is even a possibility absolutely demolishes the single best argument in favor of keeping the Electoral College: that it is unlikely to ever make much difference.

Obviously, the primary argument against the Electoral College is that it is undemocratic. In this system, a relatively small number of voters have massively disproportionate effect. Anyone who lives in a ‘safe’ state in a given election is basically casting a meaningless ballot. While I am by no means a democracy-absolutist, and favor plenty of restrictions or limitations on the absolute spirit of democracy, those restrictions need to have a good reason to exist. And they should have a somewhat limited effect.

With the Electoral College, you end up with the vast majority of the population feeling no compelling reason to value their votes on the most prominent political question of the day. Which is damaging not just because it undercounts those votes, but also because it structures their broader political participation.

Which brings me to the supposed benefits of the system. Let’s go through them:

Geographic diversity

Supposedly, this system is better because it encourages campaigns that cover the whole of the country, rather than just the high-population coasts. For example:

the Electoral College serves to make Presidential elections truly national, requiring candidates to register support not just in the high population areas on the East and West Coasts but also in the interior of the nation where interests vastly different from those of the Boston-New York-Washington corridor and the San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Diego corridor motivate voters.

First, this is a great example of the vagueness in such claims. WHY precisely is geographic diversity a value? It can only be if the policy-focus it produces is better than you’d get with a ‘national’ campaign. Well, what happens when candidates focus narrowly on swing states? You get insane subsidies for ethanol thanks to Iowa. Virulent China-bashing for Ohio voters. The stupidest policy in the world (TM), our Cuba embargo, which has survived solely because Florida is a swing state. Excessive support for coal. And so on. Which of these reflect the value of geographic diversity?

Second, and building off of this, the Electoral College system doesn’t really enhance ‘geographic diversity’ in elections. It empowers a certain set of states – virtually none of which represent some of the most populated geographic regions of the US. Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Nevada. What do you notice about these states? None of them represent the densely-populated states of the Northeast, the Pacific coast, or the South.

Florida is kind of in the South, but not really. Colorado or New Mexico are in the southwest, but I bet the people of Texas don’t consider them to be perfect representatives of Texan interests. New Hampshire is in the New England but gets comparatively little ad spending precisely because it’s so expensive to pay for the media markets around it, which are not in play. Washington and Oregon used to be swing states, but are tipping further left these days. And the tens of millions of people in California probably feel like they have some different interests, anyways.

A system of one-person, one-vote has the advantage of improving geographic diversity via the simple process of making every single vote count. As an electoral strategy in such a system, trying to vulture votes merely from big cities on the coasts wouldn’t be tremendously viable. There are, after all, almost two hundred million people living in the Midwest and South.

Third, ‘geographic diversity’ is often a stand-in for a larger dismissiveness about certain kinds of people, which I find distasteful. We are a nation of people, not a nation of territory. The agents of our political system are people, not parcels of land. Those people shouldn’t have less political power simply because they happen to be bunched together in cities. More on that in a second.

Founder worship

The founders designed this system, so who are we to challenge it? Longtime readers of the blog will be well aware of how I feel about this argument.

I have a modest Burkean impulse to approve of existing institutions and the ennobling spirit of our history. But this is tempered by a desire to have institutions that, well, make sense. Some sort of reverence for the Founders can be useful if it’s serving the purpose of helping to bind together an existing political community. But treating them as infallible serves precisely the opposite purpose.

Further, it’s not like ‘the Electoral College’ looks anything like the Founders actually intended. And it hasn’t for almost 200 years. The original process for most state legislatures to directly select Electors. In the early 19th century, states started to turn to popular votes, which became a basically universal practice in 1828.

So: if you value the opinion of the Founders, you really should be pressing for states to take away the designation of Electors based on popular votes.

Status quo bias

This arguments says constitutional amendments are a big deal so we should be really skeptical about having them.  See above.  Preserving a stupid status quo is stupid.  It would not be at all complex to do this, and it is inconceivable that we would employ this system if inventing a new Constitution today.

Madisonian bottlenecks

For an example of this argument, see Jonathan Bernstein. I enjoy his perspective a lot on most things, but his fascination with Madisonianism is a bit too much for me in normal cases. And the Electoral College is not even a normal case.

The problem with this argument is twofold. First, I generally believe that the nature of checks and balances has changed a lot in the past 225 years.  The more radical claim is simply that the Madisonian system is a relic, designed for a time of limited communication and long distances.  The more moderate variant is: even if you love want to preserve the goal of competitive factions, we simply have other ways of doing it now.

Which is to say: given the nature of political legitimacy and effective government in the 21st century, I don’t see ‘too much unity’ as a particularly pressing problem.  Which means that embracing complexity for its own sake isn’t a great idea.

This is especially the case when the Electoral College double-counts a particular form of complexity.  It just models the same over-representation of rural citizens that we already have in the apportionment of the Senate.  I can’t think of any good reason why we need an additional layer of complexity in the selection-process for the executive.  The states are already represented in the legislature. What is the value of representing them again via the vote for the presidency?

Which brings back to the casual dismissal of huge chunks of the country.  When you favor the existing system, you are saying that this is a nation built of states, not of people.  And you are saying that if you make the mistake of sharing a geographic territory with too many like-minded people, you don’t really matter.

There should be very good for deciding that two different people should have disproportionate influence in an election where they are considering the precise same question.  The Electoral College does not come close, in my mind, to passing that test.

With a reasonable (although not especially high) chance of an Electoral split again this year, I just wanted to stake out my position before the dust settles.

The Electoral College is a silly system, which produces undemocratic results, and structures campaigns in ways that prevent us from ever achieving even the possibility of a ‘real’ result. It is, however, the system that currently controls our elections – and is not so terrible that it is fundamentally unjust.

Which is to say: I strongly support reform and will do so regardless of the specific results of this election. But I consider the results produced by the Electoral College to be legitimate enough. Just like I did in 2000.

The travesty that was 2000 was partially the fact that Gore lost despite getting more votes. That was a generalized problem. But I want to also stress that most people on the left who were really upset were focused on Florida, and the halting of vote-counting there. The Electoral College is a larger injustice of the system, but it does produce valid results. The Florida stuff was about changing the rules of the game in mid-stream.

I obviously don’t want another Electoral split, but if it does occur (in Obama’s favor), I hope that it helps to unite everyone in annoyance at the stupidity of our current system. I’m sure Republicans would be unhappy about it, and I don’t expect that Democrats would radically shift their position either, so it’s at least a theoretical possibility.

The ‘momentum’ narrative is in full-force these days, despite evidence to the contrary.  To wit: another post from John Dickerson at Slate (who I actually really like as a reporter – despite taking him to task twice in one week) with an article about Romney ‘peaking at just the right moment.’

The evidence for this momentum? Big crowds cheering, which is…not much to go on to say the least.  Also, Meatloaf has endorsed Romney.  Hmmm.

The framing device here is that “everyone is flying blind about Ohio” and “both campaigns believe the polls are essentially tied.”

But we’re NOT flying blind about Ohio. There are a massive number of polls there, which confirm an enduring and meaningful Obama margin. If both campaigns are calling it tied, in spite of the clear statistical evidence to the contrary, it seems like the real story is WHY they are each framing it that way.

The funny thing is, this article was pre-debunked by Nate Silver who earlier in the same day provided a pretty comprehensive takedown of the ‘momentum’ narrative.  And then, to pile on, Sam Wang (who remains my go-to for electoral predictions) provides a direct response to Dickerson here.  Based on the actual data, if you want to tell a story about momentum, then Romney has it only to the extent that he appears to be holding onto some of his gains and preventing slippage back toward the world of a 330-340 Electoral Vote blowout.

It’s not surprising that political reporters would like the narrative of momentum.  They’re trying to tell stories, not analyze data.  But this is precisely the sort of area that informed analysis could seriously improve reporting.  There are still plenty of stories to tell without relying on the crutch of momentum.

And, really, narratives like momentum actually kill the ability to tell good campaign stories.  The problem is that the reporting class is overwhelmingly inclined to think about politics from the perspective of marketing.  The race is defined by the image of the candidates.  From that perspective, gains in popularity really should snowball.  As something grows more popular, more people use it because they want to be in on the trend.

Of course there is some truth to that.  There are political bubbles just like there are bubbles for Tickle-Me Elmo or PBR or iPads or whatever consumer product is super trendy right now that I’m clueless about.  And there are certainly campaigns that looked close for a long time, where a small swing just kept growing and turned into a blowout.  But those are a lot more rare, and particularly for the sort of high-profile campaigns that happen for president over the last couple decades.

But it’s a big problem to reduce campaigns to only that ephemera.  Political issues are much more durable, much more important, and much more tightly held than opinions about random consumer goods.

As far as I can tell, there are two main ways that momentum can matter a lot. The first is in circumstances where you want to convince people that your idea/candidate/policy is reasonable.  So evidence that people are signing on is important.   The second is when you’re trying to gain the ‘inevitability’ crown.  The idea there is more to discourage the opposition with seeming evidence that you’re not only winning, but the trend-lines make resistance pointless.

This helps explain why momentum matters a lot more in primaries or early in campaigns.  When people are still sorting out their general feelings about a campaign, or are picking from one of many options, the bandwagon effect is far more likely to matter.

Here in California we have a wonderful thing called direct democracy.  And by wonderful, I mean catastrophic.  The California initiative process is a pretty clear demonstration that as bad as government can sometimes be at organizing itself, it’s not nearly so bad as what happens if the people get involved.

Anyways, there are 11 on the ballot this year.  Here is my run-through of how I’ll be voting.

30 – Tax hikes to pay for schools.  YES.  There are two competing propositions to deal with the educational shortfall.  This is the one supported by the vast majority of the Democratic establishment.  In a sane world, Gov. Brown and the legislature could have just passed it as a normal law.  But we live in California, which is not a sane world, so it has to go to the voters.  Speaking as someone who is a grad student in the UC system, this is pretty darn important to get done.

31 – Budget micromanagement. NO.  I’m not positive this is a bad idea.  But it’s precisely the sort of ridiculously specific policy stuff that has no business in the realm of initiatives.    In addition, it fails one of my key heuristic devices when judging propositions. The people who support it do so in a bunch of extreme mushy-mouthed language about ‘reform’ and ‘forward’ and ‘bipartisan’ and ‘transparent’ without any real details.  If I’m going to lock something into place, I want to be certain that it’s fixing a real problem and fixing it well.

32 – Restrictions on political contribution.  NO.  See my heuristic above, but times one million.  This is being sold as reform that ‘goes as far as the Constitution allows’ to limit campaign contributions.  Which is code for targeting unions.  Look, Citizens United is terrible. This initiative makes it a lot worse.

33 – Auto insurance reform.  NO.  Ugh. This one helps no one except for some auto companies.  And it’s ludicrous that it should be up for a statewide vote at all.

34 – End the death penalty.  Emphatic YES.  The death penalty is a travesty of justice.  The state has no business killing its own citizens, regardless of what they’ve done.  This initiative is, sadly, probably going to fail.  Despite the fact that, even on utilitarian terms, the death penalty is an abject failure.  It doesn’t deter, it costs millions, and it is really really really racist.  But people love their vengeance, so…

35 – Human trafficking.  NO.  See above.  This may be a good policy, but it is not something that needs to be taken care of at the initiative-level.  I worry about the vagueness of the regulations it would impose, and it would be a serious pain to fix any problems as they emerge if this thing is embedded as a proposition.

36 – Three strikes.  YES.  The three strikes law is terrible.  This wouldn’t get rid of it, but would at least require that the third offense has to be a serious crime.  It’s a tiny bit of a loaf, but it’s better than nothing.  This one is an easy call for me since my presumption is basically always to vote in favor of the rights of prisoners.  There are a massive number of social forces balanced against them and almost no one to advocate for them.  So any little thing that gets this far is almost certain to be better than the status quo.

37 – GMO labeling.  NO.  Ugh.  The outrage over GMOs is a pretty good example of what is wrong with our country.  All food is genetically modified.  Have you ever seen what corn looked like before it was cultivated?  Do you know that kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage are all the same damn plant?  How did that happen? Artificial cross-breeding.  As in, genetic modification.  The Punnett Square is a diagram for genetic modification.

I did some pretty extensive research about GMOs a few years back and there is basically no evidence that they are dangerous.  They pose no health risks, they are no more susceptible to the dangers of monoculture than ‘normal’ crops.  And so on.

The problem is not GMOs, it’s the entire apparatus of industrial agriculture.  And while GMOs don’t fix those problems, they do potentially help at the margins.  Crops which are fixed to need less water require less damaging irrigation.  Crops which are nitrogen-fixed don’t require as much terrible terrible industrial fertilizer.

And the real, actual problem with GMOs is the way they are connected with international trade regimes.  The relationship between intellectual property law and seed design, the way that this generates rather extreme corporate control over farmers in the global South, these are real problems.  But labeling GMOs does absolutely nothing to fix them.

In short, all the people with Yes on 37 signs in their front yard, who can’t be bothered to at least get a Yes on 34 or Yes on 36 sign need to take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves why they care so much about the faux-problems of yuppies and care not a whit for the real problems of the actual downtrodden in California.

38 – The other tax initiative to pay for education.  NO.  I’ll just defer to Kevin Drum on this one, for a spot-on rant about the insanity of our system.  If this proposition contributes to Prop 30 failing, I will fly off the handle.

39 – Tax treatment for multi-state business.  YES.  I’m a bit torn on this one, but ultimately chose to support.  There’s a pretty silly loophole in California law that prevents it from gathering about $1 billion taxes due to the nature of out-of-state businesses.  Given how hard it is to pass any law about taxes through the legislature (thanks to Prop 13), this seems like the only way to get it done.  This proposition does, unfortunately, target about half of the revenue, which is the sort of ballot-box budgeting that drives me up the wall.  But a) it’s toward energy efficiency which isn’t the worst thing to spend on.  And b) it’s a temporary earmark, only lasting five years.  Given the likelihood of passing an alternative to this within the next five years, I’ll take the money and run.

40 – Redistricting.  YES.  This one is perhaps the silliest of them all.  The state Republicans put it on the ballot, but then gave up on it.  But the way it’s phrased, you have to vote YES to preserve the status quo.  There is no one supporting a No vote, including the people who got it on the ballot. But it can’t be removed.  And given the confusion caused by needing to affirm a proposition to preserve the status quo, I bet it only gets about 60%

I Didn’t See It Coming – Belle & Sebastian

Today in c’mon folks, think for a second, we’re talking about the gender gap.  A couple things:

First, when one poll comes out which tells you that the gender gap is non-existent, the correct response is not to run stories about The End of the Gender Gap.  The correct response is to assume that polls which are wild outliers are, you know, OUTLIERS.

Frankly, any article that is premised on the idea that a single poll can provide useful information about The State of the Race is just ridiculous.  We have eight daily tracking polls these days and a ton of other national and state polls.  I realize we are starved for definitive news but single polls at this point are just not news.

Second, when talking about the ‘gender gap’ it would be nice if you didn’t phrase it in terms that imply men are ‘normal’ voters while women vote based on identity. Unless you have some actual reason to think that is true in a specific case, then the claim is, well, kind of sexist.

It’s a pretty common trope, where whatever white guys are voting is the standard against which everything else is measured, and it’s not really that surprising that it lingers.  But it’s still aggravating.

Two Princes – The Spin Doctors

Theory: most debates don’t matter very much to the outcome of elections primarily because both sides have a strong incentive to argue that they won. The media therefore reports the competing claims, and even if it supplements that with some element of ‘objective’ external judgment, that element will be submerged under the general morass of competing stories.

In essence, the actual debate itself doesn’t matter a whole lot. Which makes sense, really. Anyone who is willing to flip their vote (or commit their vote) based on a 90-minute debate is pretty likely to switch it again thanks to some other event later.

The thing that can really swing some votes is a drawn-out narrative. If you keep hearing for a week that one candidate is in trouble, then that trouble will stick. This is essentially what happened with the first debate. Although the narrative that the debate single-handedly rescued Romney is overstated, it really does seem to have had a significant effect. There is pretty good evidence that a big swing happened in the immediate 24 hour aftermath (supplemented by a ‘normal’ correction that likely would have happened anyway), but that swing could have been a bounce rather than a more permanent shift if not for the coverage in the days that followed.

We’ll get another data point on this question over the next couple days. Debate #3 was, to put it bluntly, a crush. Romney looked out of sorts, basically conceded that he would just do the same foreign policy as Obama except with more bluster and less success, and got stung by the president on numerous occasions who was well-prepared this time to stick him to his past statements.

But unlike debate #1, where Obama’s mediocre performance provoked a firestorm of Democratic panic and self-flagellation, the Republican side has stuck to their guns. It’s pretty impressive that the unity has held, really. Romney played the same ‘I’m not really a conservative’ game, but did so far less successfully. You’d think that a fair portion of the far Right would be going nuts right now about Romney selling out conservative principles – and using that fact to explain why he lost the debate.

But no, they’re just chugging along claiming that it was Romney’s plan all along to lose the debate.

And that’s how you get reports on the debate like this, from Slate’s John Dickerson. He notes most of Romney’s weaknesses and implies strongly that Obama won the debate. His opening line, in fact, is “Mitt Romney brought a knife to a gunfight. A butter knife.” And yet he accepts the premise that this was a reasonable strategy of just trying to maintain the status quo.

But this is precisely what Obama tried to do in the first debate, for which he was raked over the coals. For some reason in this narrative, Romney looking like a deer in the headlights is reasonable strategy, while Obama’s use of the same ‘strategy’ was catastrophic.

What else? Well, according to Dickerson, “the immediate exit polls were mixed.” But they weren’t mixed. They range from clear Obama victory to absolute Obama crush. He asks rhetorically: “Partisans love this stuff, but do undecided voters? Do the voters who were with Obama in 2008, but think he’s tarnished his brand?” Well, once again we can look at the polls which indicate that yes, the voters DO like this stuff. It’s not perfect evidence, of course, because these polls have small sample sizes and can only capture a snapshot. But it’s better than no evidence.

This is precisely the sort of report that can only be written if the losing candidate (and all supporters) spin madly. It does conclude that Obama won the debate, basically, but does so in a way that will be hard to notice if you aren’t already looking for it.

It’s not a uniquely bad piece of journalism. It’s just a demonstration that journalism about debates is fundamentally pretty stupid. Journalists desperately want to avoid making editorial judgments about who ‘really’ won the debate. Which means they report about the spin and/or they try to imagine who ‘swing voters’ will think won the debate. Which just amounts to editorializing in a different (more hidden) way.

For more on this see Kevin Drum on the hack gap.

The Con– Tegan and Sara

Shorter Mitt Romney: I’m totally different from Bush in that I value good things and he was a bad president who by definition cannot have valued good things because his five-point plan didn’t work. My completely identical five-point plan, however, will rule. Because I value good things.

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