Those of you who follow politics closely may have noticed a curious feature about the current state of discussion about the presidential election.
One is that the national polls and the so-called objective fundamentals models favored by political scientists show a close race between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama as to who will get the majority of the national vote.
On the other hand, the poll aggregators look at the polling in individual states and use those to predict the outcome in the electoral college, and those show Obama getting an average of around 300 electoral college votes, well above the 270 he needs to win.
One position for which there is no evidence at all is that Romney is cruising to an easy victory, even a blow-out. And yet, many Republican politicians and party hacks are being increasingly vocal in pushing this point of view. The question is why.
There is the suggestion that people like to vote for the winner and thus talking up the chances of your candidate fires up the enthusiasm of your supporters and increases the chances that they will actually go to the polls. Conversely, you seek to depress the morale of your opponent’s supporters and thus increase the chances that they will mope around and say there is no point voting. This is what drives all the ridiculous talk about ‘momentum’.
On the other hand, you can make the opposite case and say that people get complacent if they think their candidate is going to win easily and will go shopping instead of voting, so putting the fear of losing into their minds will increase their chances of getting to the polls.
What surprises me is that all this seems to be based purely on guesswork. You would think that there would be some empirical studies that would shed some light on this but I am not aware of any.
I suspect that it is a wash, with some voters behaving according to the first model and others according to the second, so there is no significant net effect. In the absence of empirical evidence either way, that seems like a reasonable assumption. It may also be that researchers have looked into this and there was no net effect. Such null results tend to be not attention-grabbing.
My guess is that people are far less influenced by such ephemeral things than the pundits think they are. Whatever the beliefs, a 55%-42% majority of the RAND panel thinks that Obama will win while Gallup has the margin at 54%-34%.
I believe there is empirical support — though I’m going to be lazy and not even look for a citation, so just consider this yet more hearsay I guess — that a near-certain result depresses turnout all around, which makes sense, but especially for the losing party.
That said, I really think the reason for the partisan hacks talking about Romney landslide is that they are totally divorced from reality. This is not a feature unique to the Right, though it does seem to be rather a badge of honor for their side, at least from where I’m sitting.
I simply do not understand the psychology of someone who can’t accept basic political realities. It is one thing to think that the status quo should be very different from what it is; it is quite another to falsely imagine that a drastic change is imminent when there is no evidence to the contrary! It would be like if you, Mano, decreed that within five years the former members of the Obama administration would be prosecuted for war crimes over the use of drone strikes. You might like that to be true, but you and I both know the probability is remote. I can’t see you making such a declaration… but there are those who would. I’ll never understand it.
Toss in as a motivation: laying groundwork for a claim that the election was “stolen”, or that the results were in some other way illegitimate. “We were ahead in a landslide! The only reason we could have lost is if thousands of illegals and dead people voted!”
How successful have the Rand Panel/ Gallup’s predictions been to date? What factors do they account for?
To add to this, perhaps the point is that they are actually expecting a loss, perhaps even a dramatic one, but they don’t want to look like they were naysayers afterward by their own peers or their audience.
All we can do in this matter is that to vote for the best.And vote wisely.