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. 

That Facebook Guy vs the Speaker of the House

We all use Facebook, and apparently more young people can name the guy who created it than can name the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, so says this new Pew survey. 

In all fairness, Mark Zuckerberg did have a movie made about him.  John Boehner?  Well tanned, he runs the people's house, and he tears up occasionally -- not the same as a major film or 500 million "friends."

The results are interesting, especially the age breakdown (see below).  Among 18-29 year olds, 63 percent correctly identified the founder of Facebook (Zuckerberg).  Only 21 percent in that age bracket correctly identified the Speaker (Boehner).  So let's jump to the 50-64 year olds.  Among that illustrious group (um, mine), 58 percent knew Zuckerberg (not half bad) and 58 percent knew Boehner (respectable).  In other words, older respondents have a more well-rounded knowledge, or at least that's my interpretation and I'm sticking to it.

A Washington Post blog discusses the results, with writer Scott Clement suggesting it has to do with education and interest.  As he writes:

Young people, on average, have lower levels of education, are more likely to identify with the Democratic Party and are generally less interested in politics — all of which are linked to lower levels of political knowledge generally and, at least for education and partisanship, knowledge of Boehner in particular. Wide awareness of Zuckerberg among young people may be due to the fact that 86 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use social networking sites.

Plausible hypotheses, to be sure.  Ability (education) and motivation (interest) play key roles in predicting political knowledge and, in general, young people tend to score lower on tests of political knowledge.  A less likely hypothesis, also raised by Clement, is the role of party affiliation.  Yes, young people may be more likely to be Democrats, but I doubt they'd do any better identifying the Senate majority leader (a Dem) than they were in identifying the Speaker of the House (a Republican).

The full table is reproduced below.

Hell Freezes Over

The National Enquirer as a Pulitzer Prize contender?  Yep, says Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post in today's column, for its groundbreaking coverage of the John Edwards mistress mess.  Ironic twist, this week Edwards admitted the woman's kid was his.  People were shocked!  shocked!

Is it a likely winner?  Hell might freeze over, but global warming will come to the rescue. 

The rag won't even earn a finalist spot, in part because of all the crud they run, in part for their reporting methods, in part because frankly this is not the kind of story that wins a Pulitzer.  Dick Cheney destroyed this guy ages ago in their VP debate.  The Enquirer was just piling on.

Slant and Exposure from D.C. Newspapers

Here's an interesting field experiment in which authors randomly assigned real live people to receive either the Washington Post or the Washington Times or to a control group of neither newspaper to see what effects were found.  I love real-world studies like this.  Sure, they're messy, but they're also generalizable beyond the intensive study of the college sophomore.

They looked at something they call a Fact Accuracy Index, which is a fancy name for accurately answering three questions about number of dead in Iraq and correctly identifying a couple of political actors.  The Specific Issue Index is a 5-question current events quiz.  The Broad Policy Index is an odd index of four questions about the parties, President Bush, and self-placement -- I think all on a left-right continuum (though it's not exactly clear).  The theoretical reasons for these interrelated measure is unclear to say the least, and to me rather baffling.  Even the study's cited references are disturbingly innocent of the serious, seminal works in political knowledge research.  Very odd.

Okay, enough bashing.  It mattered not at all whether subjects received the Post or the Times on political knowledge, turnout, or attitudes.  Receiving a paper did result in more support for the Democratic candidate (interesting given the Times is considered conservative).  The authors try, not very satisfactorily in my opinion, to explain this effect.  I don't envy them on this.  It's hard to figure.

As an aside, it is kinda odd to find this published American Economic Journal.  But, in defense, I've seen a few bias/slant studies of media content in economic journals, so maybe this makes more sense that it seems on the surface.

Polls

Public opinion polls are obviously one key way to learn what people know or think about some subject. The Washington Post has tightened its rules on reporting about polls. The Post's new regs are now out yet, but they will be "especially wary of unproven new polling techniques," according to the story. We're saturated by polls. Many are excellent. Some are complete crap. News organizations need to tell us when a poll is crap, and why. It'd be nice if bloggers did the same, even when they like the results of a poll to prove some partisan nutjob point.

Memory and Mismemory

Okay, as I move into my, um, later years, this story hits a little too close to home.

The Washington Post reported on how when the CDC gave a list of truths and myths about flu, older people who read the flier -- in just 30 minutes! -- misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true.

In other words, it took only a half hour to get a quarter of the stuff wrong. Myth becomes truth! And in three days, 40 percent made the dramatic change from myth to fact.

Scary.

Now I am starting to remember back to all those myths I learned when I was a kid in school and, even worse, I wonder if I am misremembering some stuff as being fact. Did Mary Beth Lumpkins mean it when she said she liked me in the fifth grade? Or am I misremembering that so that myth became fact. Beth, if you're out there, lemme know. I'm really confused.

Anyway, back to the question at hand -- what people know. Or maybe I should call this blog, what people think they know.

Younger people didn't ace this test either (yes, you hear me sighing in relief). They did better early on, but within three days young people did as poorly as older folk. So what's all this mean? "This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi," says the article. "Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane."

In other words, myth becomes reality.

What do people know? Whatever their minds create as fact, apparently. I'd love to know if certain kinds of people are more likely to do this than others. Perhaps some other time I'll explore possible personality or individual differences.

The media role? Reminding people what is fact, what is myth, and why it matters that people keep the differences straight in their heads.

Beth? Fact or myth?