Who Wins in November?

It's a standard survey question:  who ya gonna vote for?

Less standard:  who ya think is gonna win?

A new WPost/ABC News poll has both questions.  The one getting attention is the tie, at 47 percent apiece, on who people say they're going to vote for in the presidential election.  In fact most people are settled on their candidate (4 percent of Obama supporters say there's a chance they'll change their mind, 8 percent of Romney supporters say so).  Obama's also ahead in the "enthusiasm" scores.

Less attention is going to the question asking people to predict the outcome.  Six-in-10 say Obama wins come November, and only a third predict a Romney victory.  In the scholarly biz, we talk about wishful thinking, which means we tend to predict our preferred candidate will win.  Yes, I've written about this topic on my own blog, in at least one newspaper column, and in my own academic research. 

It's fascinating that the two candidates are in a tie but there's a significant difference in predictions of who will actually win, leaning heavily toward Obama.  Lemme break this question down a bit more for you.

• Party ID:  87 percent of Dems predict an Obama victory, while only 60 percent of GOPers predict a Romney victory.  For you budding scholars out there, this supports the wishful thinking hypothesis.  It also demonstrates the softness of Romney's support among Republicans.  Oh, among "independents," 51 percent predict an Obama win and 38 percent predict a Romney victory.

• Ideology:  Looks like party identification above, with 52 percent of conservatives expecting Romney to win and 86 percent of liberals predicting an Obama victory.

• Education:  By a small amount, the greater the education, the more likely you are to predict an Obama victory (56 percent predicting Obama at the lowest level of education, 62 percent at the highest level).

• Region:  Respondents in the Northeast were the most likely to predict an Obama victory (68 percent), while in the South 54 percent predicted an Obama win.  It's interesting that even in solid GOP South, over half expect Obama to win.

• Income:  No real effect here, ranging from 58 to 62 percent predicting an Obama victory.  I find this fascinating in that it suggests the 1 percent and the 99 percent are about the same, at least in predicting an election outcome.

• Sex:  No real difference between men and women.

• Religion:  This gets a bit messy.  Among those with no religious convictions, 77 percent expect Obama to win.  White evangelical protestants are the least likely to say Obama wins (31 percent).  No real surprise if you read this in terms of the results above on party ID.

• Previous Voting:  Not surprisingly, 86 percent of the people who voted for Obama in 2008 expect him to do it again in 2012.  Among those who say they voted for McCain last time around, 66 percent expect Romney to win.

What's this tell us?   First, it says I need to find another way to spend my summer afternoon.  Second, it tells us that Romney's support is indeed soft, or softer than he'd like.  Third, it tells us that people really do expect outcomes based on preferences.  There's a danger here, or at least theoretically a danger, when you expect one kind of outcome and you get another.  That could possibly lead to less trust in democracy and voting, at least it's a plausible argument, but I've tinkered with this question and have never found this to actually be the case, even in the tortured 2000 U.S. prez election. 

Objective Journalism -- Here to Stay?

The last thing I want to get into is one of those tired debates about objectivity in journalism (it's an approach to information gathering, not a verb to describe journalists themselves), but this ABC News piece caught my eye today.  I strongly recommend listening to the audio rather than reading the story (and how often will you find me, Mr. Print Guy, suggesting something like that?).  The author of a study and book, Prof. Ron Jacobs, says there is a "push back" against opinion-style stuff that poses as journalism. One hopes so.

Let's assume for the moment there is a push back against the Foxification of news.  That's a big assumption, but let's go with it.  What are the consequences in terms of what people know versus what people feel or think?  The easy answer is we'd have more fact-based instead of emotion-based attitudes and opinions.  That's the easy answer, but I don't know if that's necessarily true.  The American public has never been terribly consistent in its political beliefs and it's hard to imagine the media make all that much difference, or at least you'd think so looking at most of the political science literature, which tends to view the news and entertainment media as relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things.  Indeed, there's a strain of political science research aimed at downplaying the role of news exposure/consumption, either on methodological or conceptual grounds, in part because the dominant model still relies heavily on party identification and associated concepts.

Back to the supposed push back. It's hard to identify from which segment of society this might emerge.  The chattering political class, those high in knowledge but also in partisan identification?  No, that seems unlikely.  The great unwashed middle part of America?  Maybe.  One would hope so.  But if that were the case, CNN would be improving in its audience numbers at the expense of MSNBC and Fox.  So far, that's not happening.  Hopeful thinking on the part of certain elites?  Probably yes.  Count me among them, except that I hardly qualify as elite.

To be fair, I'm relying on a brief ABC bit and I've not read the book, so until then I can't really truly comment on the premise in any detail, other than to say -- I hope it's right.

Voting, or Not

I blogged yesterday about John Stossel asking whether there are not some people who simply should not vote. Here's a link to Stossel's ABC bit (thanks to Jon-Michael). See my post below for the link to Stossel's column.

To pick on a rock concert to question young people on their political knowledge, that strikes me as unfair. I notice Stossel didn't go to a nursing home and quiz old people. Why not? Maybe because they're the only ones still watching ABC.

Are some people simply so politically disconnected that we're better off not having them vote?

That raises the counter question -- would you have a test for who can vote, who cannot? The typical response is to spit and sputter and explain how that's not what he or she is proposing, not a test. Not a Jim Crow test. But it comes down to that, doesn't it? Hell, even Jon Stewart posed this one to Rick Shenkman, who wrote Just How Stupid Are We? The book details the political ignorance of the American electorate. I blogged about it some time ago. In that blog you'll find a video link to Shenkman's funny The Daily Show appearance. Watch it. Shenkman doesn't agree with a test either. But it is the natural consequence of asking this kind of question.

People who can't answer how many U.S. senators there are -- and we agree everyone should know this -- can still vote their economic self interest, or at least their perceived economic self interest. There is no constitutional requirement for basing your vote on specific criteria such as those approved by political scientists and journalism professors who blog too much. Sure, this leads to ideological inconsistencies and unexplainable voting patterns, but let's face it -- that's good fodder for political scientists who study this stuff, yet more academic articles to be read by tens of people worldwide.

In a perfect world we would have a deliberative democracy, and in a perfect world Georgia would not have lost to Florida. But the world ain't perfect, and neither is democracy. It's messy, and people who vote who don't know a hell of a lot, and they vote for what some may think are the wrong reasons. I suspect this has a lot to do with Stossel's problem. He'd be less concerned about the youth vote if it was going one way and not the other.

Match Your Candidate

ABC News has a fun little quiz in which you read two comments, one by John McCain and one by Barack Obama, and decide which one you most agree with. At the end it tells you who's your guy in the 2008 election.

Takes about five minutes to see who gets tossed off the see-saw.