Political Scientists To The Rescue!

of Neoliberalism and the Democratic party:

They don’t convene separate conferences or publish a journal teeming with rationales for Democratic failure. But their methods are strikingly uniform—as are their arguments. They share a stolid insistence that statistical analysis of a handful of quantifiable facts from past elections can predict with scientific confidence voter behavior in the next one.

The only metric that matters for predicting elections is economic growth.

Within this somewhat enclosed system of study, the main analytical challenge becomes just how much weight to give each fact under review—except in the case of the scholars who reduce the Delphic variables on hand to a single one: the rate of economic growth during the previous presidential terms.

So who are we talking about? Your typical Neoliberal political scientists. "We don't need no stinking policies or programs! It's the economy stupid!":

Vox maestro Ezra Klein, the wunderkind blogger-turned-journalist-turned-media-entrepreneur was prototypical. “For decades now,” he enthused that summer when he was manning the policy desk at the Washington Post’s web operation, “political scientists have been building election models that attempt to predict who will win in November without making any reference to candidates or campaigns. They can get within two points of the final vote, and they don’t need to know anything about the ads and the gaffes and the ground games. All they really need to know about is the economy.” Paul Krugman delivered a similar hosanna chorus a week later: “What political scientists, as opposed to pundits, tell us is that it really is the economy, stupid.”

Because it's science!

In March 2012 Klein scaled to the summits of The New Yorker to argue that that political scientists’ dispassionate empirical calculations had proven that politics—presidential speeches, in this particular case—had no influence, pretty much, on anything.

Then, in 2013, The Monkey Cage became part of the Washington Post. “We think that it will be a great place to continue the blog’s mission of publicizing political science research,” Sides enthused about his new journalistic home.

WaPo and The NY Times; where journalism and political science go to die in defense of Neoliberal Democratic Dogma:

Such complacency obviously works to forgive a multitude of analytic sins—in pretty much the same way that fundamentalists have produced a body of determinist dogma that has been deployed to explain away any and all Democratic failures.

Because this approach is a win/win:

Some fundamentalistpundits continued to hew to the one true faith for similar reasons—it provides both an all-purpose rationale for Democratic failure and a welcome release from the demands of exercising actual political agency. President Obama was as popular with the establishment pundits of his own party as any president since at least Reagan. Democratic Party pundits looked up to Obama’s charismatic wonkiness.

Excusing Obama’s failures via fundamentalism was much more appealing than concluding that his adoption of their preferred strategies in 2009-2010 had empowered abhorrent leaders like Boehner, McConnell, and Wisconsinites Paul Ryan and Scott Walker.

Which brings us back to history:

For the second time in the span of little more than a decade, traumatized liberals will have to figure out how to piece together a durable Democratic governing coalition atop the smoldering wreckage of a catastrophic Republican presidency. As they undertake this monumental challenge, one of the first orders of business will be to leave Obama’s embrace of fundamentalism where it belongs: in the dustbin of history.

Read the rest over at The Baffler to fill in lots of blanks:

The Do Nothing Discipline

The bottom line is that we won't get any help from historians, political scientists, think tanks or the media. Grassroots organizing from the bottom up is our only hope.

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Wink's picture

about two years ago when it became abundantly clear that the Beltway and Party Establishment were out to fuck Bernie every which way they could and twice on Sunday just for good measure. Is why and how we see all the Bernie spinoff groups doing just that - ground up organizing.
Speaking of Bernie, did you see all the H.S. kids screaming like school girls for Bernie as they spotted him at one of their gun violence protest walk outs? Running - running - toward him when they saw him, girls screaming like the school girls they are! Guys hollering "Bernie!" I swear to the political gods I have NEVER never seen a reaction like that to Any candidate Ever! Maybe JFK, but I wasn't paying attention then. It was Beatlesesqe! Talkin' 1964 Beatles as they got off the plane! I was paying attention to that. Beatles on the Ed Sullivan stage! Bernie a rock god! And many of those kids vote in 2020.
But, nope. Bernie wrong on all the important issues, stabbed us all in the back, is totally irrelevant. Wait 'til you see that video. It showed once again that Bernie still the most popular politician on the planet. Goose bumps watching that! Not becuz it was Bernie. But becuz those kids are woke! Woke! And vote in 2020.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

Meteor Man's picture

@Wink
That's the power of grassroots organizing. Carry the message to your family, friends and neighbors. Just like religion, the Good News cannot be rammed down their throat. It must be dolled out in small digestible chunks.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

@Wink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zV2_htGpV0

Teens Go NUTS Over Bernie’s Surprise Appearance At A Walkout Rally
The Rational National

Published on 15 Mar 2018

Teens went nuts over Bernie Sanders' surprise appearance at a National Walkout Rally.

What other politician actually supports protest demanding a public good, never mind the public good itself? What other politician promotes grassroot moves into politics and the taking back of government to be of, by and for the people. This is unheard of in America; Bernie is a first, last and only chance upon which the American people need to build.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/why-does-the-left-attack-itself-gener...

Caitlin Johnstone
Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerilla poet. Utopia prepper.
Oct 17, 2017
Why Does The Left Attack Itself? Generations Of Government Psyops.

...Why does the left eat its own so aggressively and consistently when there’s every reason to look past small disagreements and collaborate toward shared goals? Why is it considered normal in leftist circles to try to destroy someone you used to support the second they express one opinion you find objectionable?

My theory is that, like so many other dynamics in western politics, the most overlooked and underappreciated factor in this phenomenon is propaganda and psyops.

As we’ve discussed many times before, there is nothing more threatening to America’s unelected power establishment than economic justice. The oligarchy exists because America has a system wherein money equals political power, and the oligarchs are therefore incentivized to try and keep all the money for themselves in order to maintain their rule. The socioeconomic equality that socialism and leftist ideology moves the needle toward poses the single greatest existential threat to this oligarchy.

Is it any wonder, then, that the intelligence community and law enforcement agencies which are built to protect the investments of these oligarchs has been up to its elbows in the psyches of Americans for generations, trying to manipulate them away from a large-scale movement to the left? ...

...These things have an effect. To deny that they have an effect would be to deny that advertising, a half-trillion dollar industry, has an effect. I’m not saying that there are no legitimate grievances at all between the various factions on the American political left, but I am saying that this nonstop sectarian vitriol is exactly what we’d expect to see in a population that has been deliberately manipulated into self-destructive neurotic impotence by generations of government psyops.

And it’s not like America has gotten less Orwellian since J Edgar Hoover. The sprawling surveillance networks in intelligence agencies like the NSA and the CIA have enabled the same political establishment that benefited from COINTELPRO to get even deeper into our minds, and there’s no reason to think that in-person tactics employed in COINTELPRO wouldn’t be employed digitally online. Indeed, there’s already plenty of evidence that this is happening extensively.

Again, I’m not trying to dismiss anyone’s personal grievances here. It’s just that sometimes the lefty infighting reminds me of a harem of sex slaves imprisoned in a basement, attacking each other instead of plotting an escape from their captor. We’ve become like an autoimmune disease, attacking the healthy cells instead of the pathogens. These manipulative sociopaths have been pummelling our psyches and emotions for decades, and in my opinion we should turn and face them, our real enemy.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Alligator Ed's picture

When a party leader (NP) says "we don't need to change" after the most embarrassing political wipeout, since at least 1948 at least, she shows her complete understanding of electoral politics (s/). To her it and always will be who can raise the most money. Chuckles is in the same camp advising "hold steady to the course".

To them the success of the economy is not judged what happens to the population but by rewards to their rich donors.

Oxymoron ever since the term was created: "political science". It is not and never will be a science until MK Ultra is inflicted on the serfs. Much as the Mostly Shit Media tries to fool us, it ain't working. It is THE economy--the one that filters down to the 99%--not to billionaires and criminal government cronies. Being familiar with factor analysis in the overview, even apparently simple problems often yield complex factors which must be teased out of the generalities. Some will be prime factors, exerting effects independent of other variables. Other factors will be dependent on prime variables. Plus, there are interactions between prime variables mutually affecting each other.

How does one separate all the variables in a population of a city, let alone a state or nation? Are the selected variables actually what they seem to be, i.e., prime or dependent? Are all the variables known? How would one discover them? How is each variable weighted? Does such weighting use subjective terms, such as "perceived quality of life"--Compared to what or whom? Even objectively determinable variables may be identified, but how are they weighted?

Such calculations from their outset require underlying analyses--for instance static responses in a society. That's a real joke on the Dems after all the static that Killary generated.

Republicans stand for some really bad stuff, but they don't hide. The Demonrats stand for only one thing (besides greed): we're not Trump.

Fearless prediction, requiring two assumptions:
1. The stock market doesn't crash
2. Trump starts no new wars and/or hopefully diminishing/ending existing ones

= Trump wins in 2020.

Not only will donors desert the Dems, but even more meaningfully so too will the here-to-fore brainwashed establishment Dem remnant.

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Wink's picture

beating the Trumpster.
@Alligator Ed
Not a one.
I Do see Bernie - running as an Indy - beating the Trumpster. Like a drum. Bigly. Not even close.
But I doubt Bernie runs as an Indy. Hell, I doubt he runs at all, becuz he can't win as a Dem any more than he could two years ago. So it looks like four more years!
Better Trump than Pence.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

@Wink

or kidnapped by police and held handcuffed to a chair throughout the debate for trying, as was Dr. Jill Stein?

In the last Dem nomination (s)election, three candidates other than Bernie and Hillary were permitted into the first debate, in order to try to lose Bernie in the crowd, with Hillary - private owner at the time of the private-without-responsibility-to-membership DNC she'd leased for the duration - already declared 'inevitable', like or or not. But I don't recall Jill Stein being permitted into any Presidential debates - or did I miss that?

The roadblocks are up against '3rd parties', a telling phrase in itself, 'normalizing' an undemocratic two-party limitation which I've heard claimed to be Constitutional in nature. (That 'piece of paper' so easily ignored where the rights of the people and limitations of government in acting against the public interest and avoiding basic responsibilities such as those regarding even maintenance of roads and the Post Office, etc., are concerned.)

Unfortunately, the only way any party outside of the Two-Corporate-Party Trap is likely to ever have a chance is after one of the Corporate Party has been infiltrated and replaced by enough actual human beings with the will and power to ensure that Fair Voting is passed and the rules changed to allow other Parties to run freely and to win/form coalitions, to give people actual voting choice in actual democratic elections. And that's why Bernie is gritting his teeth and working with the Dems, despite everything. It's the best and only chance and almost certainly the last here will ever be for a pacific change toward democracy in America. Any chance being better, in my opinion, than none, and worth a try.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Wink's picture

as an Indy he wouldn't
@Ellen North
need the debates. Or much of anything else. He just needs to repeat 2016 and it's a slam dunk. The kids know and are woke, even if their parents aren't. If the kids show up to vote he wins. The youth vote gets him across the finish line. But I doubt he runs as an Indy. And he won't win running as a Dem - hell, won't win the nomination. In a 3-way race he wins.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

@Wink
to believe that Bernie or anyone else can win a presidential election as an independent. For a substantial number of Bernie supporters his pledge to back the Democratic nominee was critical to their support. There are reasons to believe a larger percentage of Bernie supporters voted for Hillary in the general than Clinton supporters voted for Obama in '08. They like Bernie, but have no intention of leaving the Democratic Party.

The most successful 3rd party candidate in the 20th century was Theodore Roosevelt and he had the advantage of having been a Republican president. He came in second. The result was that Woodrow Wilson won the presidency.

Finally, if Bernie won, and he wouldn't, what would he win? Maybe a half dozen independents would take house seats. The senate is less likely. How would he implement an agenda?

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Wink's picture

care about labels are
@FuturePassed
Repubs. And Dems over 55.
They'll vote the party line.
TheRestofUs? There are more registered Indys than registered Dems or registered Repubs. Bernie has caucused with Dems for forever. What, they're suddenly going to shun him, his presidency? Only if they're dumber than we think they are. And... if he wins so does the Senate. If not the House! Filled with new Berniecrats. Well, maybe not filled, but significant gains. I see no more of a problem for Bernie pushing his agenda than O'bummer pushing his. That is, it can't possibly be worse than that. Bernie wins in a 3-way.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

@Wink Who is waiting in the wings? the next hand picked 'rising star'? That 60 something 20 year loyalist waiting their rightfully earned place? (looking at you Chuck Schemer). The way things are going I see HRC on the horizon, again.

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@Snode

...The way things are going I see HRC on the horizon, again.

Yeah, Her's never stopped mooning the world - and Her spinning never stops... But maybe in 2020, Her'll be playing the (s)election game across from another Bush, the way Wall St. wanted it last time?

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Meteor Man's picture

@Alligator Ed
I can't argue with your analysis, but a lot of very smart people are studying the analytics of social media for marketing, politics and reasons good and bad. The Digital Poorhouse

Someday someone, or maybe a Tenth Generation AI, will figure this shit out. At the moment, my conclusion is that policies and programs matter and that's why Establishment Democrats ignore them. They prefer that the masses continue to believe It's the economy stupid!

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

Alligator Ed's picture

@Meteor Man

Rational discrimination does not require class or racial hatred, or even unconscious bias, to operate. It requires only ignoring bias that already exists. When automated decision-making tools are not built to explicitly dismantle structural inequalities, their increased speed and vast scale intensify them dramatically.

This is a good article and brings up intentionally managing differing "identity groups", like criminal gangs, coal miners, steel workers, etc. The object of this is obviously division, control and further impoverishment.

My comment does not contradict your article, nor does yours contradict mine. Both elements are in play.

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Meteor Man's picture

@Alligator Ed @Alligator Ed
Total agreement on my part.

[Afterthought Edit: I think the way Trump wins in 2020 is if Biden is the Dem nominee. Just like in 2016, the biggest predictive factor is who Establishment Democrats coronate as their nominee.]

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

@Meteor Man Great information over how little we will be able to control our own lives. It'll be complete when that friend in a chat group is an AI, and you'll never know it.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Alligator Ed

one of the first things that the democrats said was, "I look forward to working with him", or "I think he will be a good president," and other such nonsense.

That Trump is now the president after Obama says a lot about his presidency. This too is his legacy. Now that reports are being written about his presidency showing how lackluster his was. He was the Lame Duck President for his entire tenure.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg even when they should have had no chance, the Republicans fought Obama and the Dems, stated they would make him a one termed, etc. and the Dems bent over backwards to accommodate then. Hell, the Dems can’t even be bothered to pass what they ran on when they have a majority.

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Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.

CB's picture

@snoopydawg
Obama was not a Lame Duck President. I honestly believe that he served his masters well and fulfilled his mandated duties to the best of his abilities. Unfortunately for us, his masters were not the electorate that voted him in.

We were hoodwinked by a marketing concept. They tried to market Her Heinous. Unfortunately for her, she carried so much baggage that it could not be concealed. Obomber was clean as a whistle so they managed to pull off a bait and switch.

That's how we ended up with The Flim Flam Man for President.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7HE2an1Vcc]

Hands off the man, the flim flam man.
His mind is up his sleeve and his talk is make believe.
Oh lord, the man's a fraud, he's flim flam man.

Hes so cagey, hes a flim flam man.
Hands off the man, flim flam man.
He's the one in the Trojan horse making out like he's Santa Claus.

Oh lord, the man's a fraud, he's a flim flam man.
He's a fox, he's a flim flam man.
Everybody wants him, the people and the police and all the pretty ladies disarm.

Oh yeah, the beautiful gent, you know he has hardly a cent.
He pays his monthly rent with daily charm.
Hands off the man, the flim flam man.

His mind is up his sleeve and his talk is make believe.
Oh lord, the man's a fraud, he's flim flam man.
Hes so cagey, he's an artist.
He's a fox, he's a flim flam man.
Don't believe him, he's a flim flam.
Ole road runner, he's a flim flam.

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@CB
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8H0Iz2gaiU]

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

CB's picture

snoopydawg's picture

@CB

He just acted like a lame duck president because people gave him a pass on his legislation because the republicans blocked him from doing it. If this was true, then he should be known as the weakest president ever. Either wording fits him because what was his greatest legislation passed during his tenure? Lily Ledbetter or the ACA? Okay, the Iran deal was, but what did he do for us?

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Anja Geitz's picture

@CB

That was a perfect song to pick for Obama's candidacy and presidency. Sheesh, when I think of the volunteer work I did for his campaign in 2008, I still cringe.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

@Alligator Ed
they had not been asked rhetorically, there are various techniques of statistics, some of which go back over a hundred years, that allow one to make certain kinds of pronouncements and predictions about systems that have complex sets of variables such as you describe. these techniques are the underpinning of "machine learning", including everybody's new favorite buzz-phrase technological solution-to-everything, "deep learning". "Principle Components Analysis" (PCA), "Support Vector Machines" (SVMs), "Hidden Markov Models" (HMMs), "Recurrent Artificial Neural Networks" (RANNs), and so on: when you hear folks talking about "algorithms" for doing this, that, and the other, these mathematical tools are usually at the heart for those algorithms.

that said, collecting the kind of robust data required to train up such a system is a challenge. moreover, social scientists and psychologists have for many years been fond of analyses that rely on self-reported data founded on:
A. Counterfactual hypothetical situations that defy accurate self-reporting: "Who would you have voted for if Nader/Perot/Trump had not run?"
B. Inferring (and then asserting) a hard link between introspective musing and actual behavior: "Does blah blah make you more likely to vote for X?"
C. Poorly phrased questions that presume plasticity that may not exist, often in a well-meaning attempt to avoid the methodological error of herding respondents into a box that might exist mainly in the minds of the researchers. Again: "Does blah blah make you more likely to vote for X?", if interpreted with precision by the subject, would receive the answer "No" in 90% of circumstances, because for 90% of subjects/candidates, there is a likelihood of 0.0 or 1.0 that the subject will vote for that candidate, and nothing short of a "dead girl / live boy" scenario is going to move that likelihood. (Indeed, nothing can make someone "more likely" to do something when there is already a 1.0 likelihood that they are going to do that thing, nor "less likely" to do something when there is already a 0.0 likelihood ...)

Something interesting that these algorithms can do -- something most political scientists are not really going to like, when all is said and done -- is discover categories of individuals within the electorate that defy the preconceived models owned by the scientists, the psychologists, the politicians, the pundits, and the consultoriat. And here, "preconceived models" should be understood to rest as much on ideology as on anything else. Such algorithms often come within the compass of an approach known as "unsupervised learning". "Unsupervised" means that the system isn't told anything a priori about the classifications into which the subjects fall.

For example, consider a "supervised learning" system that attempted to predict whether an individual identified as "Republican", "Democrat", or "Independent". This system would be given boatloads of demographic information about each subject (income, racial/ethnic self-identification, education, zip code, occupation, faith, etc.), self-reported political information (perhaps something like the questions used to map folks onto that 2-dimensional social/economic libertarian/authoritarian political spectrum), as well as the all-important self-reported party affiliation. The researchers would then apply cool stuff like PCA in order to build a system that, given the data for any given individual, will correctly predict that individual's self-reported party affiliation.

There are at least two major methodological problems with such an approach. The simplest one is that it assumes that those three categories satisfactorily span the universe of voter party self-affiliation. This is fundamentally an error in ideology -- only people who have bought into the conventional duopolistic system would think that these three categories are sufficient. But ... how many options should respondents have? How many alternative parties do we include, before lumping everybody else, not with the "Independent" group, but into "Other"? And don't we need to have separate categories for people whose party affiliation is purely pragmatic, because they live in closed-primary states? Etc.

The more subtle methodological problem is that the analysis assumes that party affiliation is important. But what if it isn't? What if, for most people, predicting their party affiliation tells you little or nothing that you couldn't know without any reference to that affiliation -- or even worse, leads you to make erroneous predictions about those folks' likely response to any given political situation? This is, again, an ideological error, driven by one's buying in to the first principle of our current political establishment.

Unsupervised learning, on the other hand, would simply look for "clusters" of subjects -- people whose demographics and self-reported political views place them relatively closer to one another than to most of the other subjects. (In such a context, party affiliation might be simply one more input variable -- but probably a dangerous one, because it would tend to statistically overshadow more subtle relationships.) The resulting clusters would then themselves become the basis of deeper analysis.

Unsupervised learning is what systems like Netflix's recommendation system are based on. "You like movies A, B and C, and actors D, E, and F, but you hate movies P, Q and R, and actors X, Y, and Z? Well, here's movie M, which was highly rated by other people who like A, B, C, D, E and F, but hate P, Q, R, X, Y and Z".

In practice, the epistemological difference between supervised and unsupervised learning can be quite subtle. After all, the movie recommendation system I just described is learning to classify individuals as either "Will like M" or "Will NOT like M". One subtle difference, though, is that the system was not necessarily "trained" with any information about whether or not anyone does or does not like M. I haven't paid any attention to the current state of Netflix's system -- it got a lot of attention several years ago, when they held a contest for scientists to win a bunch of money by building a better one -- but my guess is that it doesn't need a whole lot of input variables: It could probably cluster people pretty damned accurately based on their 10 favorite actors, 10 favorite movies, and their relative rankings of maybe 20 movies that create a nice span of the universe. (Of course, since any individual might not have seen all of those movies, the system might need a working set of about 100 or so to present to the person.)

Unsupervised learning is not a magical solution to the methodological problems inherent in supervised learning. After all -- the analyst is still choosing which data to collect, and is still constrained by the problems of collecting that data with accuracy and precision. Nonetheless, if applied with some rigor and caution, UL can provide us with "out-of-the-box" interpretations of the population we are studying.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Meteor Man's picture

@UntimelyRippd
In addition to the problem of false categorization you point out, this is key:

The more subtle methodological problem is that the analysis assumes that party affiliation is important. But what if it isn't? What if, for most people, predicting their party affiliation tells you little or nothing that you couldn't know without any reference to that affiliation -- or even worse, leads you to make erroneous predictions about those folks' likely response to any given political situation? This is, again, an ideological error, driven by one's buying in to the first principle of our current political establishment.

Fighting "the first priciple of our current political establishment" is where we must start. Throwing out the ideological bias of the observers and take a revolutionary or countercultural view of the data will yield different results.

Ideally researchers take an objective view of data, but I'm not sure that is even possible when evaluating political data. All political analysis is biased and all researchers are human. I guess I'm suggesting re-evaluating the data to generate counter-propaganda or a left wing analysis to change the narrative.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

@UntimelyRippd
The state of the economy 6 months before a presidential election is a better predictor of results in the election than polls until just before the election. You need a measure of the state of the economy for the 99% rather than the 1%. You can integrate several measures of the state of the economy if you want and some models work better than others. They don't work every time. But generally they do a better job of predicting than polls.

Making the state of the economy an alternative to policy implementation would only make sense if policies had no effect on the economy. They do.

The question political scientists are trying to answer in this case is a macro question. They are making no attempt to say how any particular individual will vote. It's an effort to find a way around overlapping and ultimately paralyzing subdivisions of voters.

If you ever have to bet your life on how someone is going to vote, pick party ID. It isn't the only predictor, but it has the most predictive power. Have you noticed how successful Republican gerrymandering has been? It's based on distribution of party ID or previous party votes in polling places.

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@FuturePassed
if you begin a conversation with me by telling me that I misunderstand something, you're probably wrong -- as you are, very much, in this case -- and, having been misunderestimated and condescended to by someone who is unlikely to either understand more or know more about the topic at hand, I'm probably not going to continue the engagement.

but thanks for playing.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

@UntimelyRippd
Read an article in a refereed journal that makes the argument. But it's probably a waste of time since the article would have been written by political scientists who don't know what they're talking about. None of your deep insights occured to any of them.

Do you advise on cardiovascular surgery too?

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@FuturePassed
Attack with a definitive argument from authority, then ride off with a parting shot that pre-emptively dismisses the only workable defense against argument from authority, namely the questioning of the validity of the authority.

Well, I mean, the only workable defense, other than pointing out that argument from authority is inherently fallacious and doesn't deserve rebuttal.

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0 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Meteor Man's picture

@FuturePassed
about this:

The state of the economy 6 months before a presidential election is a better predictor of results in the election than polls until just before the election.

And you set a pretty low bar:

They don't work every time. But generally they do a better job of predicting than polls.

Part of the problem with both approaches is ideological bias of the pollster or "analyst" as well as sample size and data collection/selection errors.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

@Meteor Man
aren't taking surveys and have no need for samples. After the election they compare their results with the major polls taken by others. The data they use is generally collected by the government. I suppose bias could show up in the data sets they use. But after the election they can plug in other sets of economic data to see whether their predictions would have improved.

Since these people make predictions (Various researchers using different economic data differently weighted.) early you don't get the horse race quality of polls. So they get little attention in the media. It's more about bragging rights at professional conferences.

In social sciences you can only be so accurate. An economic meltdown in September is going to override the economy 4 months ago. It's a matter of trying, changing things, and hoping to get better. It's an interesting alternative to polling. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

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Alligator Ed's picture

@UntimelyRippd applied to politics. I took the precaution of reading all post here on this thread to date before writing this comment.

And here, "preconceived models" should be understood to rest as much on ideology as on anything else. Such algorithms often come within the compass of an approach known as "unsupervised learning". "Unsupervised" means that the system isn't told anything a priori about the classifications into which the subjects fall.

Here of course is the key. We use reason to "rationalize" emotionally-determined decisions. Many studies have said that decisions are 90% emotion and 10% "rational" afterthought. So if party identification and the economy as perceived are the two primary determinants of voting, the case for multivariate analysis should be narrowed down to two: 1) what is your party preference?
2) How is the present economy treating you?

I agree with Pluto that this comment stream should be in the c99 Hall of Fame.

Yahoo

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@Alligator Ed
For most of my lifetime the academic and applied endeavours of economists have been crippled by their comically lunatic assumptions regarding rational consumers and producers, which they bolster with ideological tautologies ("If the person thinks they want A, then they do want A, and if they think the price of A makes A the optimal expenditure of their marginal dollars, then A is the optimal expenditure of their marginal dollars." And so on.)

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Meteor Man's picture

@Alligator Ed
You said:

the case for multivariate analysis should be narrowed down to two: 1) what is your party preference?
2) How is the present economy treating you?

Along with a lot of other voters, my answers are 1) None of the above (i.e. Socialist) and 2) the present economy is treating me like disposable waste.

Is there room in this analysis for politically disenfranchised voters?

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

@Meteor Man
which i don't think he was buying.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Alligator Ed's picture

@Meteor Man The way the question is phrased directly influences the outcome. In this case the question was "what is your party affiliation?" This will elicit a different response than "Do you have a party affiliation?" The difference may seem slight but the second formulation allows more variability in response.

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snoopydawg's picture

and the Echo Chamber. Ahh, did we have fun with that or not?

This excuse is still being given for why Obama and the democrats could not pass the legislation that they wanted to. It was never their fault, it was always the republicans' obstructionisms blocking them from doing anything.

“In short, proponents of this view contend, Obama and the Democrats are mostly the victims of forces beyond their control.”

For Eight Long Years Obama played football with the republicans only to have them take their ball away at the last minute and go home.

Obama was like Charlie Brown to Mitch McConnell and John Boehner’s Lucy, constantly seeking to kick the football of bipartisan accord.

IMG_1872.JPG

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

mimi's picture

@snoopydawg
has not crossed over to the consciousness of German Social Democrats or general population. So somehow the way to make your pov and facts clear isn't a success in as far as people outside the US would be able to be convinced of them or knew them or consider.

As unfortunate and sad this might be, but I think it's a fact.

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brought on by their own broken view of the polity and the political system.

It may well be, for example, that the state of the economy will predict, to a very fine degree, the outcome of the presidential election. However, if true, that doesn't explain anything -- in particular, it doesn't explain why politics doesn't seem to matter, when so many voters, when asked, will insist that politics does matter.

One needn't be a particularly sophisticated analyst to come up with several hypotheses. The most obvious is that this is a predictable outcome of the consultoriat's dedication to pursuing the "monkeys in the middle" -- the so-called "independents", who are not beholden to ideology. This creates the duopolistic nightmare in which we find ourselves, where we have two parties that:
A. are dedicated to the jingoistic imperial enterprise
B. buy in completely to the toddlerist faith in market-based solutions and American "competitiveness"
C. are hostile to labor, and sympathetic to gazillion-dollar executive compensation
D. etc.,
and where the one party that gives any kind of lip service to left-wing social values fails to deliver, over and over again.

The outcome of such a system is one in which:
A. Right-wing jackasses continue to vote their bigotry and ideology (often in spite of their own interests), giving the Republicans a safe base.
B. The enormous (i.e., tens of millions) non-ideological working poor and working class find their particular interests unrepresented by the one party that, according to conventional wisdom, represents those interests; this leaves them generally unmotivated to vote.
C. The semi-ideological monkeys in the middle simply flip and flop based on whether things are currently going well for them. By "semi-ideological", I mean that they buy into the same obnoxious principles that drive the two parties: "America is the greatest country in the world", "Americans are the most intelligent/creative/imaginative/energetic/productive/virtuous folks in the world (but only because our unique system enables/encourages/drives/rewards those qualities)", "Socialism = evil", "Markets are solutions", "Growth is good and necessary", "We are threatened by scary Islamists/Russians/Iranians", "Education is too expensive to be universally provided for free", "Everyone needs more stuff", "Public transportation sucks", yadda yadda yadda.

So, yeah, when you have a system that actually excludes any serious reappraisal of how things are done -- at least, a reappraisal that will somehow engage the interest (and interests) of the enormous non-ideological ordinary working citizens -- you are going to get elections that turn almost exclusively on the dimwitted and superficial understandings and interests of the least thoughtful, least introspective, least dynamic, least radical members of our society: The monkeys in the middle.

At this point, I think we may well be in a situation where, barring some sort of economic catastrophe, the Democrats simply cannot win the Presidency without running an African American at the top of the ticket, because:
A. The Democratic elites have neither the courage nor the worldview they would need in order to present a platform that mobilizes the "declining class" of the occasional electorate.
B. That being the case, the Democratic candidate can only win by mobilizing the African American vote, and, given the reality of "A", the only thing that is going to motivate turnout among non-conservative working class African Americans (as opposed to the conservative southern christian African American community that went all in for HRC, creating the bogus narrative that she, rather than Sanders, was the candidate supported by -- and representing the interests of -- African Americans in general) is straight-up identity politics.

The thing is though -- we may be entering a period of unending economic crisis, in which case, as long as the parties continue to behave as they have been, we can perhaps presume that the "fundamentalist" model will hold sway, and that the Presidency will simply change parties every 4 or 8 years, depending on how close we are to whatever that magic GDP growth line might be.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Meteor Man's picture

@UntimelyRippd
Yep. The Third Way paradigm:

you are going to get elections that turn almost exclusively on the dimwitted and superficial understandings and interests of the least thoughtful, least introspective, least dynamic, least radical members of our society: The monkeys in the middle.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

illustrating Barack Obama's absolutely fundamental failure to comprehend the key to his own success:

In a November 2010 post-midterm election interview aired on 60 Minutes, no less an eminence than presidential polymath Barack Obama echoed the key articles of the fundamentalist faith. “I think first and foremost [the midterm elections were] a referendum on the economy,” the president announced—and added for good measure that “the party in power was held responsible for an economy that is still underperforming.”

In reality, the November 2010 midterms can be understood perfectly well by the application of a very lightweight understanding of American electoral politics, and a reference to the actual data (which I'm not going to go seek out, but having investigated in the past, I will comfortably invoke):
A. Presidential elections enjoy a relatively high turnout, because they apply celebrity culture, elevating one representative of each party into something much more interesting than a mere candidate for political office. They receive far more media attention than mid-term elections, stoking the public fervor into a carnival atmosphere comparable to other such artificial seasonal manias, e.g. the Superbowl and the Oscars.
B. Bereft of celebrity context, Midterm elections are about politics and ideology. In other words, they are boring and irrelevant to a significant fraction of the citizenry, which is why turnout is so much lower.
C. Obama came to office with enormous coattails that carried a surge of Democrats into Congress.
D. Obama's victory depended, more than anyone left of Mitch McConnell wanted to admit, on enormous turnout of African American voters. Without Obama to vote for in 2010, those voters stayed home, with the entirely predictable outcome: Elections were determined by voters who were motivated by ideological hatred of Obama in particular and the Democrats in general.

Obama's refusal to accept this essential truth of his own electoral success -- that he was in fact elected, not in spite of his ancestry, but because of it, and that his continued political success depended on his willingness to go out and be the mobilizing factor in the 2010 midterms -- doomed his Presidency, doomed the Party, and may have doomed the whole damned country. (Of course, the alternative interpretation favored by many in these parts is that he simply had no interest in defending the 2008 Democratic gains, as Democratic electoral success would have left him and the Democrat elites without excuses for their ongoing failure to pursue and enact policies that serve the people, rather than the donors.)

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Meteor Man's picture

@UntimelyRippd

Of course, the alternative interpretation favored by many in these parts is that he simply had no interest in defending the 2008 Democratic gains

That interpretation is supported by the DNC war on progressives. They only want to win on a centrist corporate agenda. The Liberal Surrender Strategy to Centrism goes back decades.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

@Meteor Man It was progressives that had to request Obama meet with them after he met with all the other factions,republicans and centrist democrats. Of course Rahm calling them 'fucking retards' kinda gave it away.

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@UntimelyRippd
Obama did not just benefit from the energy of his supporters, he energized his haters, and by and large support must be earned and maintained, while hatred must simply be. Hatred can only grow, at least without herculean effort. That was when policy comes in. When Obama was running his supporters came out in droves, and not just his black supporters. But when he wasn't running he had to have accomplished something, otherwise his haters would still come out - and did - while his supporters had no energy. (nothing maintained the illusion) This was seen as Obama's failure - no, this was his genius. It allowed him to run, and be elected, on an illusion withut his actually having to maintain (live up to) that illusion. In fact, it allowed him to act counter to that illusion without consequences.
Obama won. Obama betrayed. The Democrats were punished for Obama's betrayal. (in fairness and their own) Obama (Obama's illusion) won again. Obama betrayed. The Democrats were punished. Obama cashed out. The Republicans took the blame for all the failures (well, not really, the Democrats may still lose and lose thanks to Obama's betrayals) that Obama orchestrated. (but really he doesn't care, he's cashed out) He played us.
This is the fallacy that con men live on. I have a friend who has fallen for that "free stuff" bullshit. But it's not quite bullshit. Obama did not give away "free stuff", he actually took away earned stuff, but his supporters believed that they were going to get free stuff from him, that just voting for him would magically create good things without any further effort. You cannot con an honest man, but you can also con a lazy, selfish man.

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On to Biden since 1973

The Aspie Corner's picture

The Gentricratic Party will shit on any actual left-wing at every last turn.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

Big Al's picture

Wait, another one: "If you build it they will come".

All this bullshit about predicting how voters will respond to this or that, how they will vote, and zero focus on what the fucking citizens of this country want and need.

Liberal college elite bullshit revolving around the duopoly.

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@Big Al Is there even a definition of what 'economy' means anymore? My economy sucks. Someone who is in the stock market, their economy is doing great. They say more of the same. I say off with their heads.

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Big Al's picture

@Snode clearly there are two economies in this country, maybe three if you count a separate one for the super rich. They talk about the economy doing well while fifty million kids are on food stamps and 70% of the population can't raise 700 bucks for an emergency. Off with their heads is right, symbolically of course. I don't think they sell guillotines anymore. But maybe they do.

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@Big Al

... I don't think they sell guillotines anymore. ...

Ought to be a strong market demand - oh, wait, maybe that's why they're ensuring that everyone else is so broke and breaking more all of the time?

Still, there may be handy household items that DIY types could work with...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

@Big Al I just don't know. I guess I see everything of civilization beyond grubbing for berries and taking down the occasional mammoth as an invention, a machine. The barter system is an invention, capitalism is an invention, a machine. It's old, I read somewhere that the Greeks BCE had a workable version. The Nazis, the Medici, contemporary China, pick some time or place it existed in some form. But here we are, with so many ways to collect information, so many theories of how this machine operates when it's fundamental function is always to increase it's size. With out growth there is no more increase in wealth. In capitalism, if one entity gains control of everything, then what. They win? Then it's just shifting around paper or chits. And growth has devolved into wringing maximum profit out of needed things, and destruction of the only lifeboat we have for the manufacture of endless cheap junk, all to continue 'growth'. So, I'm all for manufacturing needed things and guillotines might be a good place to start.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

I have never bought into so many different perspectives, so completely, in so little time. I feel a little like a political slut.

But seriously, everyone is championing a different component (or set of components) for meta-level predictive analysis, and making a fairly inspired case for it. We wouldn't have seen this here two years ago. It's an evolution. After a great deal of practice and shared experience, many musicians with different instruments have become a symphony that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

I read the work product of quite a few think tanks. This is a think tank.

Of course, I have a comment regarding the the topic introduced by Meteor Man. What's in play here is identifying the key variable that will successfully predict federal election outcomes. The essay cites an opinion that proposes "the economy" as that component (or component set) that explains how Americans will inevitably vote, policies and issues aside.

That sounds cynical, of course. I follow an academic who presents 13 true/false variables, and it still sounds cynical and sterile. But it has long been my opinion, based on evidence, that this method is more accurate than human polling and data handling.

Big al calls the samplings and number crunching "elite bullshit" — "predicting how voters will respond to this or that, how they will vote, and zero focus on what the fucking citizens of this country want and need."

There is no denying it. That process is bullshit, but it is something more. It is participatory propaganda.

I think it is important to note that most of the Anglo nations and the US vassal states in Europe, including Germany and France, are experiencing these same experiences and having the same discussions about their elite. And that's no coincidence, especially in relation to Russia. We,re involved in an effort that has been going on for a very long time. "The Narrative." It has taken 70 years of hard work to convince the French, for example, that World War II was won by the Americans and not by the Russians. Only in the past decade has the majority in France finally succumbed to the Narrative.

This was accomplished by the work of three generations of 3000 members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Their steady goal since 1919 has been to position the US to Rule over the World. In that time, they became part of the State Department. They determine US wars and pick heads for the Intelligence agencies and Defense Department for the President. They select US Presidents from their Membership rosters. They follow the Narrative. That's why US leaders never speak of a plan or vision for the future — they denounce making plans as communism — and the people don't know where they are going.

I bring this up only to point out another variable that should be considered when predicting the outcome of federal elections.

______________________________________________________________
* Another Think Tank Weighs in: Center for Strategic Studies, Switzerland. Strategic Trends, 2017

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

@Pluto's Republic to be almost a script. No matter which party is in power there is a common agenda to both parties flying under the propaganda. Policy forwarded either by directed action, or directed inaction on each piece of legislation towards a common goal. The rest is window dressing and cover for the benefit of us rubes.

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