Real Clear Politics / Real Clear Books December 3, 2013 'The Gamble' and the Rise of Data-Driven Journalism By _Sean Trende_ (http://www.realclearbooks.com/authors/sean_trende/)
For decades, the journalistic campaign narrative has been the standard means for the average political junkie to understand presidential elections. These books have a grand tradition, beginning with Theodore White’s The Making of the President series, covering the 1960 through 1972 elections, moving through Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, perhaps the best political book ever written (if not one of the best nonfiction books ever written), and culminating in the Holy Trinity of the 2008 elections: Richard Wolffe’s semi-hagiographical Renegade: The Making of a President, Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson’s The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election, and of course, the granddaddy of them all, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s blockbuster, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Election of a Lifetime. In the past few years, a new sort of campaign narrative has sprouted up: what we might call the political science campaign narrative. This rising form mirrors the broader ascendency of data-driven journalism, where the standard narrative is supplemented by statistical interpretations of the increasingly voluminous amounts of data available to the average reader. In truth, this form actually predates the journalistic campaign narrative, arguably beginning with Samuel Lubell. A journalist, Lubell figured out in the 1930s that he could use door-to-door interviews with voters in key areas of the country to predict elections. His books are more qualitative than quantitative, but then so too are many of the older classics of political science, such as Richard Fenno’s Home Style: House Members in Their Districts. Lubell notwithstanding, for many years these political science campaign narratives took the form of collections of papers on the elections, often published in series such as Gerald Pomper’s The Election of 1984 (or 1988/1992/etc), or Paul Abramson, John Aldrich and David Rohde’s Change and Continuity series. These books were wonderful in explaining the nuts-and-bolts of elections, but their form made them disjointed, and they were often written in a voice that went over the heads of many readers. But in 2000, the year that RealClearPolitics was founded, Richard Johnson, Michael Hagen and Kathleen Hall Jamieson drew upon voluminous polling data from the Annenberg Center to create an integrated, data-driven narrative of that election. Eight years later, Kate Kenski, Bruce Hardy and Jamieson revived the genre with The Obama Victory: How Media, Money and Message Shaped the 2008 Election. It remains, to my reading, the most useful narrative of that election. Now, George Washington University’s John Sides (founder of the political science blog “The Monkey Cage”) and UCLA’s Lynn Vavreck are out with probably the most successful attempt to integrate political science and narrative to date: The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election. Their hypothesis is simple (and widely shared by data-driven election analysts): Journalists spend far too much time covering every “game changer” in election cycles and far too little time examining the underlying stability of these elections. Sides and Vavreck are literally anti-“game change.” They lead off by noting that journalists identified 68 “game-changing” incidents during the 2012 election, and that the term had been used by journalists more than 20,000 times during the campaign. They proceed, over the course of 240 pages, to demolish many of these supposed game changers. In Sides and Vavreck’s telling, the most famous “turning points” -- President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” comment (around which Republicans inexplicably organized their convention), Obama’s first debate performance, and Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment -- did move the polls briefly, but things quickly regressed to a mean of Obama holding a narrow, steady lead over his opponent. Elections -- both primary and general -- are, in this view, governed by fundamentals: the state of the economy, presidential approval, and incumbency. The rest comes out in the wash. Perhaps a more accurate take on Sides and Vavreck -- this nuance is sometimes lost in the book -- is that they think game changers do matter, but such events are so frequent and random that they cancel out one another. If one candidate committed no gaffes, raised all the money, and ran all of the effective ads, he or she would win in a 70-point blowout. But both parties nominate quality candidates who mostly avoid gaffes, raise money well past the point of diminishing returns, and generate their share of compelling ads. Think of it as a professional football game. Both sides make spectacular catches, create momentum sapping drives, and celebrate devastating tackles. But actual game changers -- points on the board that never go away -- are relatively rare, and while we like to say that any team can win on any given Sunday, the best teams tend to come out on top, and almost always do over the course of a season. If you just look at the box scores, the games tend to look pretty darned boring. This stability is present, according to Sides and Vavreck, not only in general elections but also in primaries. The polling for the 2011-12 primary campaign looks ugly, but when one peers closer, a pattern emerges. The authors explain that all of the candidates endured a cycle of “discovery, scrutiny, and decline,” with Romney’s support being the only real constant. Viewed in this light, this chart of primary polling suddenly makes sense. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
