Congratulations to Obama Field Office Staff and Volunteers
Filed Under Barack Obama, Indiana, Politics, Porchy
Jonathan Bernstein links to Seth Maskets blog where he links to his recently published bit of political science for you all cynics out there. As Masket notes, political scientists have a hard time determining what effect exactly campaigns have on the actual votes of actual human beings who vote. It seems surprising, especially if you aren’t a political scientist why the effects of campaigns would be so hard to find. After all, if you watch the broadcast media or even dip your toes into the political journalistic pool, most of the stories you find there are horse race stories. “Who’s ahead in the polls right now?” and with the question a trite and usually incorrect answer that fits either the campaign, or its opposition’s, narrative.
Did Obama go up in the polls because of this speech? Did he pronounce that one word too Frenchy and that’s why he’s down? Did McCain’s vague and vaguely troubling medical report card ignite the oldies but scare away the youngies? Golly! It seems quite clear that every hiccup has an effect on whom we vote for. What’s so hard to find? It’s right there.
But, as I’ve noted here before, several pre-campaign models predicted that whatever Democrat ran would likely win and potentially win with about 53% of the popular vote. Lo and behold! that’s what happened. But the implication there is that whichever Democrat would win no matter what he or she did. And that, to many people, political scientists included, just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Certainly voters would turn away from a Democrat that refused to comment on hot button issues, would grow suspicious of one that refused to show up to fundraisers, speeches, or debates. Certainly we aren’t just heading to the polls and brainlessly picking R or D based on nothing more than an alphabetical preference for staffs with humps or staffs with a small hump and a leg.
That’s where Masket’s research comes in. He found a statistically measurable difference in counties where Obama had a field office versus counties where he did not. I’m not the guy to critique his model or his research. Read it yourself at the third link above and decide on your own. However, he does note that this difference was significant enough to have won him three very hotly contested states: Florida, North Carolina, and Indiana.
And since I happen to know a few people who broke their backs last year hitting the mean streets for Obama, let me extend to you same the congratulations that Bernstein and Rising do on their sites. Look! You actually made a difference.
