"Obsessed with Demographics"

Slicing the demographic pie for political analysis:

Polling's fuzzy math, by Crispin Sartwell, Commentary, LA Times: American "political analysis" has become obsessed with demographics.

For example, pundits and pollsters held that the Democratic contests in Ohio and Pennsylvania between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama turned on the vote of "white working-class men,"... Those primaries supposedly showed Obama's problem for the general election.

I suggest to you that this kind of analysis ... is both fundamentally non-empirical and fundamentally non-explanatory.

Take an election, for example, that finishes 54% to 46% in Clinton's favor. Now say that white working-class men constitute 12% of the vote, and 10 of every 12 of them (10% of the overall vote) go for Clinton. Obviously, white working-class men were the pivot on which the election turned. If Obama could have broken off half the vote that went to Clinton, he would have won: He would have increased his vote by 5% and reduced hers by 5%, and won 51% to 49%.

But notice that the vote of any like-sized segment is equally explanatory. If most "soccer moms" or most "people ages 35 to 44" or most people "with annual incomes between $50,000 and $70,000" or most "people in the southeast corner of the state" voted for Clinton, we can say that had they voted for Obama, he would have won.

So the assertion, for example, that the result turned on the votes of white working-class men is completely unsupported by the demographics. It no more turned on that group than on any other substantial group that supported Clinton. ...

The way that polling and demographics slice up the population is, ultimately, a matter of preference; it does not derive from, but is a presupposition of, the "science." Searching for segments of the electorate that vote as a bloc, demographers split the population up into groups they decide are important or salient. And their decisions don't necessarily reflect empirical results -- they are more an index of their own social attitudes, presumptions and prejudices.

It would be nearly as scientific to rig up any segment of the population and regard it as decisive: blue-collar women, black and white, under 35; black men plus Latino women; left-handed divorcees.

The results might be striking; the voting habits of such groups might be as, or more, strongly correlated than race, income and gender grouped in the conventional ways. But even if the results were not striking, even if the groups were evenly split, they would be decisive by the standards of this sort of demographic analysis.

When you bring a set of racial or gender-based categories to the data, the divisions these attitudes represent will always be confirmed as the most important divisions in our society. That just reinforces the problematic divisions that infested the attitudes of the pollsters in the first place. And then, at the end of each election, our divisions of race, gender and class are, in our imaginations, stronger.

The right response to the notion that "scientific polling" shows that the election outcome turns on white men or black women or soccer moms is a shrug of the shoulders and the arch of an eyebrow.

This has been bugging me, so let me try to put down some thoughts. To answer the question "which groups and which issues were decisive in the election," one way to proceed would be to find groups of people that you believe are particularly sensitive to a political message, a message that differs across the candidates, and then see if the groups are swayed one way or the other. If they are, then it's fair, I think, to say that the particular political stance was a determining factor.

But it's not enough to just define large groups, or at least groups large enough so that if they had moved substantially one way or the other, then the race would have come out different. The groups have to be sensitive to the message, it has to be possible to move people across the line by adopting a particular stance (or having particular characteristics, some of which you may not be able to change). In addition, this group needs to be more sensitive, significantly so, than any other possible grouping of people to the issue. If everyone is equally sensitive to the issue, then any grouping is arbitrary.

So I think the real objection is in how the groups are defined. To say white males are sensitive to race, or populist stances, etc. may or may not be true, but this linkage is assumed when the groups are defined - it is often simply asserted. If it then turns out that the votes are skewed as hypothesized, then causality is attributed to the factor in question. If white male votes are skewed to the protectionist candidate, and if we have assumed white males are sensitive to the trade issue, then we will conclude that trade is the determining factor, and white males the determining group (this doesn't have to be unique, there could be another issue and another group that was also decisive in the same sense).

Given this, the assertion that a group is sensitive to a particular message needs to be established, it can't just be asserted. If it's true that certain groups care deeply about certain issues, and if the candidates differ on these issues, and if the vote is weighted strongly in one direction, then I would accept this as evidence that this issue and this group was a decisive factor in the election. But if I'm reading the above correctly, that would be an invalid conclusion.

What am I missing?

Comments

[Jay]

"What am I missing?"

Maybe the fact that groups don't vote, but instead individuals vote. P(a single vote swings a U.S. presidential election) = 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%.

Maximize your utility, don't waste your time voting. I guarantee you enough irrational(emotionally charged) people will go to the polls that not voting is a rational individual's nash equilibrium.

[gordon]

Sartwell seems to be complaining primarily about the arbitrariness of the process of defining demographic groups. Pollsters don’t measure the attitudes of all possible groups (a very, very large number). That being the case, pointing to one or some small number of groups and saying that their votes were critical to an election outcome is open to the objection that another group (eg. soccer mums) was really responsible, only they were never defined and measured as a group, so we’ll never know. Similarly, if eg. white working class men voted predominantly for one candidate and that candidate won, it could be objected that their voting pattern arose not from their membership of the “white working class man” group but from the “employed people earning $50,000 to $80,000 annually” group, or “people who take the bus to work” group, or some other undefined and unmeasured grouping/s. And even if some group is found to be evenly divided between the candidates, you can still say that the winning candidate wouldn’t have won without getting his share of their votes, so actually that group was critical. In the absence of measurements of all possible groups, we’ll never know.

In a world of imperfect information and arbitrary definition of groups, assertions about critical groups are always in principle open to such objections, which is why Sartwell is dismissive. But that might not mean that we should always ignore them. Depending on circumstances, such assertions might be quite convincing, like Prof. Thoma’s example. They can never be conclusive, however, only a “best guess”on the basis of limited knowledge.

[Luis Enrique]

I don't think you're missing anything - you are making a more sophisticated point, to do with thinking about tendencies across the distribution of voters, and identifying blocks with the greatest potential to shift the outcome, in response to existing differences between candidates, and coming up with a thoughtful definition of what it means for a certain block to determine the outcome (be decisive). Sartwell isn't going there - he's just pointing out that it's facile to arbitrarily attribute decisiveness to any particular block, simply become if they'd voted differently, the outcome would have been different - which, he says, is about as intelligent as most 'scientific' voting analysis gets.

[anne]

"Maximize your utility, don't waste your time voting."

Nihilist idiocy, for the sake of nihilist idiocy.

says...

Or that one group making up 12% of the electorate who overwhelming voted for one candidate caused the other candidate the lose. Rather, it was over 50% of the electorate who voted for the winning candidate which caused the loss. So, unless we can ask every individual voter how they voted and why they voted (and hope they tell the truth), we're just guessing on why they voted together as a group.

[A Voting Bloc of One]

Both Sartwell and Thoma have good points, but I thought the purpose of defining a group and making statements about its particular decisiveness (or lack thereof) was comparative.

For instance, if white, male working-class voters overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates for President prior to 1980, then the loss of those votes in later elections could be said to have "cost" the Democrats elections and have been "decisive" when compared to other groups of voters who maintained their support of Democrats relative to the white, male working-class group.

Thus, statements about the decisiveness of a particular group only make sense in comparison to other elections and other groups.

[paine]

" Pollsters don’t measure the attitudes of all possible groups (a very, very large number)."

that made my morning

thank u

[paine]

polling for facts and feedback
are two different motives

horse race touts and just plain sepectators
like to follow the movement and or none movement
of preferences
sub groups are prolly defined by activists however
those wanting not just to know
but to change preferences
locating groups that are targets for conversion
or resistence to conversion

in building a plurality
the job is to produce and deliver
message that move folks
starting with the easy movers first... eh ??
and of course counter messages
that scotch the other outfits move making messages

finite resources with alternative uses

smart campaigning
tries narrow targeting
aiming specific move messages
at certain moveable groups

its like market differentiation

why does the press use the campaigns groups ???

because the mass media quite spontaneously
having no "independent "brain
must go with
what the ultimately partisan if
mutually neutralizing pollsters suggest

ie

these are polls for action and spectacle
not science

[paine]

jay: logical negativist

[paine]

"Maximize your utility, don't waste your time voting"

utility analysis gets you no where jay

u know that

the joy of participation
is no more irrational
then the join of non participation

adding in ones preference
to the tally in a forgone outcome
is not a waste of time
its an assertion of solidarity

time at the polls casting a non decisive vote
is not necessarily
"better " spent ...
tapping out smart alec
comments on the internet

[paine]

v bloc one has the nub

"statements about ... decisiveness
(or lack thereof) are
" comparative"

"but for" type stuff

based on preference movement and non movement
of ID-ed sub groups

on a more sophisticated level of analysis
trend movement and thus expected preference ratios
vs
actual movement and actual preference ratios

[Jay]

"the joy of participation
is no more irrational
then the join of non participation"

The joy of participating in voting is the equivalent of the joy in going to church on Sunday.

[baileyman]

There is only one "minority faction" in the USA, and that is the faction of wealth. All else is marketing.

[wjd123]

During the Bush/Gore election you had Democrats switching to vote for Ralph Nader. It was continually repeated during the Florida recount that if Gore would have gotten the Nader vote he would have won. That's true, mathematically, but it doesn't tell us if Gore would have gotten the Nader vote. Without having Nader, more or less a one issue candidate centered around trade, to vote for, protest voters, most likely, would have just skipped Gore's name on the ballot.

Would it be fair to say that Nader voters costs Gore the election. Not if that statement is being used to assign blame rather than merely say something about demographics. There is a difference in saying the candidate lost because he couldn't appeal to this group of people and saying that this group of people caused the candidate to lose. As I recall economist like Paul Krugman were making the latter argument after the 2000 election.

To assign blame is how these "cost" statements are used by voters. Pollsters get excited about mathematical tautologies, not voters. So if assigning blame is the aim of these statements, it's not sufficient to stop at the waters edge although it would be convenient for many people if we did so.

Most Democrats voted against NAFTA. This put Gore on the wrong side of Democratic sentiment. When the Clinton Administration chose Gore as their point man to sell this unpopular issue, they, in effect, made Gore own the issue. Can we assign blame for Gore's loss to a President that went against the sentiment of his party members and chose Gore as point man to sell the endeavor? Assigning blame here makes more sense that assigning blame to Nader voters in Florida.

What about economist that gave politicians cover to vote for NAFTA. Are they responsible for Gore's loss? To the extent they pulled their punches and pushed the lessons of comparative advantage with nary a word about the lessens of price-factor equalization, they are. As professionals those economist who pulled their punches deliberately crossed over the line and conspired.

Even if they didn't explicitly conspire I find the reasoning of economist for not pushing the price-factor lessons somewhat specious. Krugman, for instance, said that at the time there just wasn't enough free trade for price-factor equalization to make much of a difference. Couldn't he project what would happen as free trade grew.

Today most Americans believe that free trade does them more harm than good. Economist, for the most part are in a losing battle to make Americans believe that generally this isn't so. They point to all the benefits of free trade as though normal trade relations wouldn't have brought much of the same good without much of the bad.

What "bad" did free trade as practiced today--the WTO and free trade agreements--bring? It gave corporations too much power in our political economy. They lost their fear that tariffs would be raised up against them if their practices were seen as harmful to our society, and it set in motion the wheels of global competition that made concern for the needs of our society a concern that would hurt their bottom line.

Their new power, their need to compete globally, and their ability to compete freely outside the rules and regulations of our society weakened our political ability to see that corporations served the interests of our society and not just their own interests.

I don't know if organized labor ever made an explicit argument that NAFTA and agreements like it would shift dramatically the balance of power in our political economy in ways that would hurt our society, but it's likely that any attempt to do so would have been drowned out by the way the NAFTA debate was framed. The "giant sucking sound" dominated the debate on labor's side. Any attempt to look at NAFTA's effect on the power relations in our political economy just couldn't find it's way into the free trade debate. Discussion of the domination of our political economy by corporate interests was pushed out of the free trade picture.

Even today NAFTA is an agreement that keeps on giving to the Republicans. The passion of those who are upset about illegal immigration which NAFTA helped spur will help Republicans in the general election just like the passion of those who opposed NAFTA hurt Gore.

Immigration is a winning issue for Republicans unless Democrats can change the answer away form fences and toward making it easier to prosecute employers. I'm not saying that it's an issue that will allow Republicans to win in November, Republicans have dug their political graves too deep to escape that easily, but the issue of illegal immigration won't help Democrats.

More so than free trade illegal immigration brings to the heart of trade the question of whether the undermining of the rules and regulations of our economy is shifting the balance of power in our political economy in ways that will prove socially harmful.

Those who answer "no" tend to support free trade as practiced today. Those who support free trade as practiced today are logically bound to support open borders since not to is a hindrance to corporate competition. The logic of this is seldom made explicit. Once again, like the effects of price-factor equalization Americans are discovering that the logic of open borders isn't something they signed up for when free trade was sold to them.

Perhaps it won't be long until voters, not with the help of academia but through their daily experiences, get around to understanding the dangers of allowing corporations too much power over our political economy.