Which Obama effects are durable?

Lots of people are talking about whether Obama's election is a sign of fundamental political realignment of the electoral map. I am generally skeptical of the biggest claims, given the strong structural forces boosting any opposition candidate in 2008. To the extent that there was a realignment, however, it seems mostly to be based on Democratic gains among educated voters, young voters, and African American voters.

Here is a Greg Mankiw post on the youth vote, and here is NBC's First Read on the college-educated vote:

The Graduate(s): Number crunchers have already unpacked the college split for this election cycle to show Obama's gains among grads. (In 2004, 42% of voters nationwide were college graduates, and they split equally for John Kerry and George W. Bush. This time, that number was boosted to 44%, and the vote broke 53%-45% in the Democrat's favor.) But consider this: In 2008, college-educated voters outnumbered non-college grads at the polls in eleven states (CO, VA, NH, PA, NJ, CT, MD, NY, MA, VT, and DC). Barack Obama won all of them -- by an average of more than 24 percentage points. In states that McCain won, on average, 42% of voters were college grads. In states that Obama won, on average, 47% had a college diploma.

The key question, it seems to me, is which of these effects are particular to Obama and which will carry over to other elections. Most of the commentary I've seen assumes that Obama's success among African Americans is due to his own race (and therefore particular to him), whereas the gains among educated and young voters are more durable. I'm not so sure about any of those assumptions: I wonder whether we are underestimating the symbolic power of the Democrats now being forever the party that first nominated non-white President, no matter the race of their future candidates. (Think of the enduring effects of the Dodgers' and Red Sox' involvement in the fall of baseball's color line.) Contrarily, I wonder whether we have underestimated Obama's special appeal to educated and young voters: this administration will feature a President, VP, and two spouses who have all worked in higher education, and the basketball-playing Obama seems even younger than he is.

I have no idea which of these effects will persist in future elections, but I do think the current conversation would be improved by peeking under our assumptions about all three factors.

Election Day Special: Friday Five on a Monday!

All politics this time--what else would we be thinking about?

The Republican mayor of San Diego changes his mind on Prop 8

Nate Silver's final pre-election take on the cellphone effect

From Errol Morris, People in the Middle for Obama--I'm always interested in how Morris moves between documentary and advocacy


My Wife Made Me Canvas for Obama; Here's What I Learned

Finally, don't worry: my opinions aren't likely to influence my students'.

A shootout in the saloon while the honky-tonk plays on

Here is the Obama campaign's latest attack ad, which has been noted mostly for the winking Sarah Palin at the end.

I'm more interested in the bulk of the ad: the typographical representation of John McCain's ill-advised self-deprecation about his knowledge of economics, backed by a cheery piano soundtrack. I know it's easy to look clever when things are going well, but this approach strikes me as a clever way to operate within the current campaign, when McCain is being skewered for negative advertising. The Obama ad is an all-out attack, to be sure, but it doesn't sound like one.

This approach brings to mind Wordsworth's comments on the interplay of metrical language and traumatic content in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads:

This is unquestionably true; and hence, though the opinion will at first appear paradoxical, from the tendency of metre to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose.

Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style

I love The Eyeballing Game. (From Kottke.) My first score was 3.20. Second, 2.92. Third, 2.64.

These days, who doesn't need a concise encyclopedia of economics written by bigshot economists?

TED brings us a charming story by John Hodgman

Malcolm Gladwell on big ideas--I'm especially interested in the distinction between artistic and scientific genius and what that distinction means for, say, a liberal arts college making a huge move in the direction of interdisciplinarity

Also via Kottke (sorry, but you gotta see this!), a lovely photo set of Obama on the trail. "I loved that he cleaned up after himself before leaving an ice cream shop in Wapello, Iowa. He didn't have to. The event was over and the press had left. He is used to taking care of things himself and I think this is one of the qualities that makes Obama different from so many other political candidates I've encountered. Nov. 7, 2007."

Intrade manipulation confirmed

Tim Jarret noticed this story before I did: the manipulation of the Intrade market to improve John McCain's standing has been confirmed. Tim has a couple of interesting insights about the situation, and I'll pop out a few bullet points of my own:

• Intrade has institutional investors? Bwa? That term must have a different meaning in this context, but I have no idea what it would be.
  
  
• A bunch of bloggers crowed about Obama's leap up on Intrade a few days ago, but what I saw was different: the Intrade market was simply allowed to catch up with the others.
  
  
• And therefore, the lack of McCainflation created a little bubble of baseless extra confidence and perhaps contributed to the Obama camp's anxiety that its supporters are growing complacent.
  
  
• But if that's true, why are Republican hacks so eager to make the case that McCain isn't so far behind after all?

Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style

Via boingboing: College Humor does a great little bit of satire: Fake Disney movie trailer for the Sarah Palin story

The effect of income anxiety on lottery ticket purchases

The Radiolab episode on making the hippo dance, or presenting academic ideas to a non-specialist audience

Obama: The price of being black

Via Kottke, Roger Ebert on how to read a movie

Obama's chances: an update

After I posted about the divergence between Intrade's and FiveThirtyEight's estimates of Barack Obama's chances of winning in November, I wrote to the FiveThirtyEight gang to see whether they had any thoughts about the matter. They didn't reply directly, but they responded to the issue with this very interesting post about the Intrade betting.

The other markets, while favoring Obama more than Intrade, still consistently rate Obama's chances as being lower than FiveThirtyEight's estimates, so my point is largely unaffected by this new information, but this new context is essential for interpreting my first post.

What are the current odds of an Obama victory?

Reader, I know not what to think!

Like a lot of other people, I have for a while had the sense that Nate Silver and friends at FiveThirtyEight.com and the gloriously impersonal markets at Intrade gave me my best reading of the winds of political opinion.

The two sites use radically different methods, but they attempt to answer the same kinds of questions, and for present purposes, the question is precisely the same: what are the chances that Barack Obama will win the election in November? (Naturally, I could use McCain's name throughout this post, but I find it easier to use the numbers for the current favorite.)

FiveThirtyEight is driven by Nate Silver's attempt to aggregate poll numbers and to interpret them based on the history of polling and election results. The site combines state and national polling, tweaking the model along the way and running simulations to estimate the most likely results given current conditions.

Intrade, however, uses the emergent collective wisdom of a market to answer the same question. In theory, the simplicity of the market might do as well or better than Silver at taking all information into account. For example, Silver has been trying to model the distortions of cellphone usage in this year's polls. Because the possibility of cellphone distortions is well known, a real-money market has the potential, at least, to account for their effects without relying on a controlling modeler to estimate them: in many cases, the aggregated crowd can be sharper than the market. (See the work of Robin Hanson for more on the power of markets in politics.)

In spite of these differences, the two ways of answering the questions have produced similar predictions, with small variations due in part to Silver's model deliberately reacting slowly to new developments. Until now.

As I write, FiveThirtyEight's "win percentage" for Obama has rocketed up to 74.4%, although Obama was a slight underdog shortly after the Republican convention. Intrade's bettors also made Obama a slight underdog at that point, and they too think that Obama has regained his status as the frontrunner, but only barely: there, Obama leads 51.5%-47.4%. (For reasons not worth explaining here, FiveThirtyEight's win percentages add up to 100, whereas Intrade's probabilities will be slightly lower.)

I do not see an easy explanation for such a huge divergence. Both sites attempt to look beyond a current snapshot to project the November result, and both attempt to use all the relevant public information (Silver explicitly, Intrade by means of the market).

I welcome correction on this, but I think the plain-language way to sum up the difference is this: the market is making a big bet that McCain will perform better than candidates who had similar poll results at this point in past campaigns.

The difference must rest on a claim about the present or a claim about the future. A claim about the present would involve something like the Bradley effect--the notion that polls will artificially favor Obama because voters don't want to admit they are voting against the Black candidate. Silver has written a series of posts discounting the Bradley effect in this election, however, and even a strong belief in the effect would not explain a divergence as sudden as what we've seen.

If the implicit claim is about the future, the logic might run something like this: we're seeing a close race, and the spectacle of the current Wall Street meltdown has directed the race in a direction favorable to Obama, but this is a bubble. That is, the polls we're seeing today are like post-convention polls, which involve a predictable but fleeting bump. Today's polls are a parenthetical remark, not the story itself.

Whatever explanation you favor, this is certain: the wisdom of the betting crowd sees something behind the numbers that favors McCain--not enough to make McCain the favorite, but enough to keep the race close to a coin flip. The divergence between FiveThirtyEight and Intrade has given us a window into the differences between analytical modeling and market mechanisms.

Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and the race of folk wisdom

I'm going to spend a few sentences explaining why I think Sarah Palin's place in politics is oddly and vexingly like Barack Obama's, so let me foreshadow the end of the argument by illustrating the profound difference between them. Imagine Obama saying at the Democratic National Convention,

Before I became a senator of the great state of Illinois, I was a community organizer. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a community organizer is sort of like a small-town mayor, except that you have actual responsibilities.

As I'm sure you know, this is a reversal of Palin's famous zinger from the RNC, with a similar level of sneering inaccuracy. While Palin's line about community organizers immediately stood out as unusually inflammatory and mean, this Obama version would, I think you'll agree, have ended the campaign in an instant: hello, President McCain. I'll return to this.

Lots of Democrats, including me, are feeling their heads explode anew every time Palin reveals her ignorance of the fundamentals of federal policy: she doesn't know what the "Bush Doctrine" is (OK, it's complicated, and an informed request for clarification would have been fine--but not a look of uncomprehending fear), she doesn't know how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac work, she doesn't know how countries get admitted to NATO--this last in a way that brought her alarmingly close to arguing for a war with Russia that even McCain wouldn't seek. And pointing out these problems seems only to prod Palin's supporters to new levels of defensive loyalty.

Obama's supporters have a similarly defensive loyalty. The defensiveness does not arise from policy-related gaffes, which Obama avoids with wonderful deftness: as M. J. Rosenberg has said (supported by details that are worth reading), Obama "knows his sh*t." But when his rivals challenge Obama's experience, the defense lies not in his knowledge, exactly, but in his "judgment," which partly means judgment but is also politically acceptable code for curiosity and, yes, utterly extraordinary intelligence--not only the possession of such intelligence but the unapologetic willingness to display it.

In other words, Obama supporters want someone with that kind of mind running the country: dispassionate, probing, academic. Big issues require elite capabilities, the kind of extraordinary talents that may be visible in a young candidate. This fact explains part of Obama's longstanding education gap among Democrats, which is more widely known than when I first noted it but remains underanalyzed. This valuing of the extraordinary young candidate works directly against the logic of blue-collar unions, which tend instead to value experience and credentials.

The logic of the Palin candidacy holds that big issues require the expansion of common sense: a connection with regular people and a certain set of values trump policy and elite rhetoric. As David Brooks points out today, this conflict between Obama and Palin has deep roots in American political rhetoric--or, I would say, in a longer, more European line of thinking about the potential sovereignty of the people. The arguments about Obama and Palin reflect centuries of debates about the relative powers of individual intelligence, personal experience, and collective (or folk) experience.

This last factor deserves more attention. Every major candidate must make a populist claim to the wisdom of the folk. Among the four major candidates now, Biden makes the most conventional claim: he has experienced a working-class childhood in Scranton and a terrible tragedy within his family. The other three candidates' claims are more interesting. McCain has used his military experience to express his solidarity with others' experience of battle, a routine political idea in itself but remarkable in its ability to cover for McCain's otherwise entirely unfolksly and occasionally sordid personal life.

As ever, though, the truly fascinating cases are those of Obama and Palin. Obama does speak convincingly of his family's financial difficulties, but his signature piece of folk experience has always been his move from editing the Harvard Law Review to doing community organizing on the South Side of Chicago: this is the folk connection of an elite man. And his rhetorical populism was until recently characterized by the call-and-response tradition of American Black churches. His DNC speech was essentially an artful reworking of old material with the call-and-response sequences removed.

Palin, however, identifies strongly with a "small-town" background. Other parts of her RNC speech have attracted more attention, but this theme was dominant: she claimed to represent a small-town culture that Washington and media elites could not appreciate, but the folk can.

The oddity of these identifications is that, taken narrowly, they are losing electoral identifications. A Democrat doesn't win an election by winning the Black church vote; a Republican doesn't win by winning the small-town vote. In the politics of folk identification, therefore, Obama and Palin are targeting the popularly marketed fantasies of these identifications, the fantasies that have made hip hop and country music into "popular" genres.

The difference is race.

Palin can mobilize the small-town identification explicitly, even relentlessly. The notion that rural people can represent the purer form of everybody is authorized by centuries of cultural products. While the identification with urban culture may be as powerful as that with rural folk, it must be hinted at and hedged against. In the conventions, Palin emphasized her rurality while Obama dropped the most racially-inflected elements of his rhetoric.

Palin played up her rural roots most memorably in the sequence I referenced at the beginning of this post:

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities.

This statement was, from the beginning, obviously extreme. As Nate Silver put it based on the advance text before Palin spoke, "it seems awfully petty for a party campaigning on the theme of service .... If you want a punchline that underscores liberal 'elitism', why not go after Obama's time as the President of the Harvard Law Review instead?"

My answer: this line was always about the reaction it would inevitably produce, which is the retelling of the well-known story that includes the Harvard Law Review and the South Side of Chicago. Palin's sneering portrayal seeks to reframe Obama's story of selfless service in a way that emphasizes simultaneously his elite education and his blackness. Thanks to the obvious demographic differences between small-town Alaska and South-Side Chicago, Palin's speech carefully mapped the common-elite opposition onto a white-black opposition.

Now consider my reversal of Palin's statement at the top of this post, its unspeakable mirror image. Unlike Palin's, it privileges mobility over rootedness and urban experience over rural experience. In the reversal, you can see what kinds of elitism are (and have long been) acceptable and unacceptable in American politics.

Underestimating Sarah Palin

Based on what I've read in a number of venues, I venture to say that if you support Barack Obama, you may well be underestimating Sarah Palin's potential benefits to John McCain's candidacy. Here are four reasons why:

1. Many people see this choice as a pander to Hillary voters and think it won't work. I agree that the pick won't work especially well in that way. But half of the electorate doesn't like Hillary Clinton, and a solid majority of independents don't like her. A lot of people who like the idea of seeing a prominent female politician will be very happy to see someone other than Hillary Clinton play the role.

2. Attacking Palin is going to be very dangerous. A great many people will see her primarily as an amazing woman: a dedicated mother who stands by her principles and has launched an impressive career while raising a bunch of kids. This is all accurate: I think Palin's policy positions are terrifying, but I hope the Obama people are thinking very carefully about how to respect Palin's personal accomplishments as they attack her policies. Getting the tone of this wrong will seriously rile up the right-wing base.

3. A point related to #1: I see a lot of commentary assessing potential reactions to Palin based on the opinions of college-educated women. But at least initially, men like the Palin pick better than women, and to the extent that choosing Palin involves targeting ex-Hillaryites, I'll wager the swing group is the less educated, more socially conservative, more Appalachian core. I can easily imagine people from my Appalachian hometown (where my mother has long been amazed at the resistance of Democratic women to Hillary Clinton) connecting with Palin, especially if, say, Biden says something that sounds condescending and eggheaded and dismissive about her.

4. Palin's background is in journalism, specifically broadcast journalism and more specifically sports journalism. I've only seen a couple of her TV clips, but she seems to handle that environment very well, and (unlike McCain) she should be very good at reading a teleprompter, which will be important next week.

All that said, I think such a cynical, pandering, precipitous choice should ultimately hurt McCain's chances. But if Democrats think it will be easy to dismiss Palin's appeal, they could pay dearly for the mistake.

But whom does it resemble kissing?

Slate.com's political gabfest has solicited sports metaphors for the current state of the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination. I propose that it's like the old college football bowl system and that the analogy has a lot to tell us about how we perceive close contests.

As a method of ranking teams, the old college football bowl system worked well. It worked for exactly the reason everybody else the world says it didn't work: it was messy and indecisive--and therefore accurate. At the end of a season, sometimes you had two or even three or four teams who could make credible claims to be the best in the country. Perhaps one team finished the strongest but lost a game early, another went undefeated against a weaker schedule, another lost two games while its best player was hurt. If these teams did not play one another in bowl games, analysts and fans could build different narratives supporting the claims of different teams to be the true national champions; the official rankings never settled the arguments. Leaving those arguments unsettles was the great strength of the bowl system as an evaluative tool. It was also the great weakness of the system as a mechanism of producing drama. The NCAA basketball tournaments, by contrast, create situations where, say, one referee's decision at the end of a game creates a durable consensus about the relative merits of the two teams playing the game. Tournament play takes contests that are essentially tied and forces them to a decisive result; tournaments produce wonderful drama by denying the messiness of rankings.

The race for the Democratic Presidential nomination will ultimately be a tournament: either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will become the nominee, and the narrative of both candidates success or failure will be shaped dramatically by the result. But for now, we have a process, like the old bowl system, that is driving analysts crazy by failing to impose false decisiveness on the contest. Obama does better in caucuses, Clinton in primaries. Obama does better with some demographics and Clinton with others, but most of these differences are relatively small and shift in magnitude from state to state. By awarding delegates proportionally and gradually, the system has done an admirable job of reflecting these uncertainties.

Of course, the nomination process is unlike the college football season in that the Democratic party, for all sorts of structural reasons, really does have to settle on a winner. But the drive for creating narratives of decisive wins--the narratives that produce drama at the expense of accurately messy judgment--has controlled media coverage of the race throughout. Consider the weight placed on Clinton winning the popular vote in New Hampshire, or Obama in Missouri, or Clinton in Texas. But come on: they basically tied. And the gloriously messy, generally proportional methods of delegate allocation have admirably reflected those ties, creating a calm and quiet story of ties and narrow victories while the campaigns and the media shout about decisiveness.

A Presidential nominating process, like the NCAA basketball tournaments, must eventually produce one winner, and the name of that winner will forever distort the narrative of the contest. Our memories will select the facts that make the result seem inevitable.

For the moment, however, let us give thanks for delegate allocations that muck things up, that let similar performances accrue similar benefits without forcing one referee's whistle, or one butterfly ballot design, to take on the force of destiny.

Clinton or Obama: Which Democratic Presidential candidate do the markets like in the general election?

Supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both argue that their candidate is better equipped to beat the Republican nominee for President in a general election. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution first alerted me to the fact that when the Intrade political market contracts for Clinton and Obama to win the nomination were swinging wildly in response to Iowa and New Hampshire results, the contract price for the Democratic party nominee winning the Presidency remained calmly in the low 60s.

(For non-Intrade junkies: the price of the contract is for a share that will pay $100 if the contracted event comes true. That is, if you buy a share of the Democratic nominee for President at $65 and the Dem wins, you get $100, but if the Dem loses, you get nothing. Therefore, the price functions as the market's estimate of probability: a $65 price implies a collective judgment of a 65% probability of the Dem nominee winning the Presidency.)

Since Tabarrok made his post, the probability of the generic Democrat winning the general election has climbed above 65, but many factors could explain the move: Obama's shift to frontrunner status, McCain's emergence as the Republican nominee, increased worries about the economy relative to national security, and so forth. Therefore, I did a snapshot analysis earlier today that derives the answer to this question: according to the markets, would Obama or Clinton give the Democrats a better chance to win the Presidency?

To answer the question, we need the market's estimate that each candidate will win the party nomination and, separately, the estimate that each candidate will win the Presidency. At an arbitrary moment earlier today, the market gave Obama a 71.0% chance to win the nomination and a 47.2% chance to win the Presidency; for Clinton, the numbers were 29.0% and 18.3%, respectively.

The ratio of the second number to the first is the probability of winning given the nomination. Obama's number is 66.5%, Clinton's, 63.1%. Obama gets an edge at that moment, but I've seen moments over the last couple of days that give Clinton an even tinier edge. I would guess that overall, the market is signaling that it considers Obama the stronger nominee by a tiny margin. What's certain is that the market doesn't care much about the identity of the nominee.

Therefore, the supporters of either candidate who have made the case that their candidate has a clear advantage as a general election contender might want to step back and consider that the arguments put forth by the other side are equally persuasive to the bettors on Intrade. I have made such arguments in support of one candidate (Obama), so I include myself among those who might benefit from reflecting on this data.

Super Tuesday Post: A Brokered Convention?

As I write, during the afternoon of the Super Tuesday Democratic primaries, the identity of the Democratic nominee for the Presidency is breathtakingly uncertain: Josh Marshall points out that two of the most influential polling services have come to incompatible conclusions about voters' opinions, and the Intrade futures for the two candidates are currently trading between 49 and 51, with Clinton just above the 50% line and Obama just below.

The closeness of the race has prompted Chris Bowers, in a widely noted blog post, to say that "the most likely scenario" in the Democratic race is a brokered convention decided by superdelegates rather than primary and caucus results. Bowers presents a brokered convention as nearly inevitable barring a whopping Clinton victory in today's elections.

Given the attention the Bowers argument has received, I think it worth noting that Intrade also has a market in the probability of a brokered convention: shares on the Democratic side last traded at $11.10, implying an underlying probability of only 11.1%, with no eye-catching volatility or trends in the price.

Reader, you choose the moral of the story, as it must be one or both of the following:

1. Something in Bowers's account dramatically understates or underweights the ways in which the party can avoid a brokered convention.

2. Bowers is more or less correct, and there are heaps of money available for the taking on Intrade.

On this blog, I try not to make points that are relevant only in a given news cycle. My intent here is to illustrate the tension between the blog narrative and the market and thereby to wonder, in the new age of prediction markets for increasingly contingent and sophisticated contracts, how frequently some of us will be checking market prices to weigh the importance of a wide range of stories.

The Iowa Democratic Caucus, Education, and Poll Reporting

This morning's Washington Post has a routine article about the paper's latest political poll in Iowa. The main thrust of the story is equally routine: Obama has a small lead, but everything will come down to turnout. As an Iowa caucusgoer myself, I scraped up enough motivation to click to the second page of the story and found this paragraph:

Considering other turnout factors brings no additional clarity. Age and education are two key predictors of caucus participation, with older and more highly educated people disproportionately showing up to vote. While Clinton outpaces Obama among older voters, particularly those aged 65 and up, Obama outperforms her nearly 3 to 1 among those with an education of a college degree or more.

THREE TO ONE? Obama is outpolling Clinton three to one among college grads? I am gobsmacked: I've read a lot of coverage of this race, and I would guess that I've seen a hundred times as much coverage of race and gender as education level. Yet there it is: alongside relatively tiny differences in other areas, an enormous gap based on one variable that almost nobody is talking about. Note that the gap isn't even the main topic of the Post's own paragraph: the gap is presented as a turnout factor, not as the crucial difference between the Iowans who prefer Obama and those who prefer Clinton.

In this race, the education level of voters also seems to work against some of the race's main narratives; for example, given the Clintons' alleged association with cultural elites, would we have heard more about this story if the numbers were reversed? Do we even know how to talk about Hillary Clinton as someone who connects with common people but flops among college graduates? I'm not sure we do.

But I also wonder whether this case illustrates a blind spot in political journalism more generally. I imagine so, at least to some extent. It might be easier, and it seems to me more conventional, to talk about political preference in terms of race, gender, and age than education. If I'm right that there is such a blind spot, does it relate to ways in which we do and don't discuss social inequality in America?