MI and Fl Delegate Debacle – Do The Voters Care?

A brief follow-up to my last post about the Michigan and Florida Democratic Primary kerfuffle. Gallup released some numbers today about what Democrats feel should be done with the MI and FL primaries:

Democrats Favor Compromise on Florida, Michigan Delegates:

In general, most Democrats (55%) favor a compromise that would allow the two states’ delegates to participate, rather than excluding those states’ delegates entirely (23%), which is the current plan. Twenty-one percent do not have an opinion either way.

But those who favor a compromise divide almost equally between a “do-over” primary or caucus to be held in those states between now and the convention, and finding a way to abide by the results of the January contests in which neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama actively campaigned (in Michigan, Obama was not even on the ballot) and no delegates were officially at stake.

Why Seating the Michigan and Florida Delegations Would Disenfranchise Voters

Anyone following the 2008 Democratic presidential primary has heard about the kerfuffle over Michigan and Florida delegations. I’ll review the history briefly below, but more importantly, I am going to argue here why seating the Michigan and Florida delegations would in fact disenfranchise voters, indeed those voters who listened to their party, and not the other way around. I haven’t heard this argument almost anywhere in the mainstream media (one exception below), nor really even in the land o’ blogs, which confuses me as the argument is fairly straightforward.

Follow Up on the Survey USA Data from Pollster.com

As usual, the folks at Pollster.com have put together an impressive analysis of the Survey USA data. In particular, they draw on the notion of statistical significance to classify states as strongly for a candidate, leaning towards that candidate, or toss-up.
Pollster.com: SurveyUSA’s 50 States with Sampling Error:

SurveyUSA colors in states on their maps even if a candidate leads by a point or two, margins that are not close to achieving statistical significance. However, since SurveyUSA says they did 600 interviews in each state, we can take their analysis a step further, applying statistical sampling error to the candidates’ margins in each state.

Professor Franklin and I have done just that, classifying each state based on the statistical significance of the candidate’s lead. We call a state “strong” for the candidate if they lead by a margin that is statistically significant at a 95% level of confidence, the level typically used to calculate the “margin of error” attached to most surveys. We label as “lean” any state where a candidate leads by more than one standard deviation, which amounts to a 68% confidence level. We label all other states as toss-ups.

Details below the cut.

The Social Construction of Booze and Pot

What’s socially constructed about alcohol and inebriation, or pot and getting high? Well, almost everything:

New York Times – When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why:

In a series of studies in the 1970s and ’80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study room outfitted like a bar with mirrors, music and a stretch of polished pine. The researchers served alcoholic drinks, most often icy vodka tonics, to some of the students and nonalcoholic ones, usually icy tonic water, to others. The drinks looked and tasted the same, and the students typically drank five in an hour or two.

The studies found that people who thought they were drinking alcohol behaved exactly as aggressively, or as affectionately, or as merrily as they expected to when drunk. “No significant difference between those who got alcohol and those who didn’t,” Alan Marlatt, the senior author, said. “Their behavior was totally determined by their expectations of how they would behave.”

In a repeat of the session performed for a coming documentary, one participant insisted that she could not have been drinking because alcohol always made her flush.

“We told her that, yes, in fact she was drinking it,” Dr. Marlatt said. “She immediately flushed.”

Election Coverage: Electability by the Numbers

So, I’m hoping to avoid too much election coverage in this blog, but when Survey USA released general election polling results for all 50 states, I decided I had to dig into the data a bit deeper. In particular, I wanted to understand the claim that winning a primary implies that a candidate will do better in the general election in that state. For example, Senator Clinton might claim that her strong showing in Ohio suggest she’s more likely to win the state in the general election. The question is: Does this argument hold any water? For example, a strong showing in a primary might suggest that a candidate is highly favored by the base, but has little crossover appeal, and thus would be negatively correlated with general election polls. On the other hand, strong performance (especially in a primary rather than a caucus, more on that later) might mean that a candidate has a lot of support among independents, and thus would be likely to do well in pre-election polls. So, we begin the analysis with no particular conclusion in mind, with perhaps a slight bias towards the 2nd if for no other reason than that is is the argument most commonly made.

XKCD vs. Parsimony, via Total Drek

I fortunately happened upon the Total Drek blog today, and in particular this wonderful entry combining three of my favorite things: xkcd, philosophy of social science/methodology and sociology. The post is quoted at length below with a brief discussion, but mostly you should just go read the original.

Two Thoughts on the ‘Voter’s Paradox’

Freakonomics guest blogger Ian Ayres links to some interesting new work on the problem of voting:

A Poll Tax on Selfishness – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog:

On a wintry night a few weeks ago, I was walking with Aaron Edlin across the Harvard campus when he casually claimed that the “voter’s paradox” wasn’t generally true — that it could be rational for people to vote for purely instrumental reasons.

I did a double take, because the chance that my vote will change the result of any election in my lifetime is vanishingly small. People might vote because it gives them pleasure, or because of its expressive value, but most economists think that it would never be worth your while to vote in order to impact an election, because of the small probability that any one vote is “pivotal.” But Aaron, together with co-authors Andrew Gelman and Noah Kaplan, has written a very important article showing that it can be rational to vote if you care about other people. If you care even a little bit about the welfare of your fellow citizens, then as the electorate increases, even though the probability of being pivotal becomes small, the impact of being pivotal becomes large. Thus, it can be instrumentally rational to vote even in winner-take-all elections with very large number of voters.

Two quick thoughts on the rational voter problem, i.e. why would any rational person vote if the odds of their vote being decisive were small?

“Undercover Economist” On Insurance and Annuities

Why are you so scared of annuities? – By Tim Harford – Slate Magazine:

Here’s what I like about insurance: You pay the insurers money when you do not desperately need it, and then the insurers pay you money just when you need it most.

Curiously, this is not what other people seem to like about insurance. Most people do not try to arrange for insurance payments to arrive when they will need them most. Instead, they arrange for insurance payments to arrive after bad luck.

If your house has just burned down, “when you need money most” amounts to the same thing as “after bad luck.” But what if your son has just been accepted by Harvard? That is when the money would be useful, but we are temperamentally more inclined to insure against the tragic death of a child. It goes against the grain to insure against “good news.”

Generally speaking, I enjoy Tim Hartford’s Slate column. This Saturday’s column features an otherwise interesting discussion of why annuities are so unpopular (a bit more on that below). But first, I want to look at Hartford’s prefatory comments on insuring against ‘good news’.