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  • From: Duncan Murrell <dvmurrell AT nc.rr.com>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Regional bashing
  • Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 13:10:50 -0500

While we're putting in our wishlists, I'd like to see someone look into the statistical analysis Rove and Co. used to focus their efforts in the last couple of months. I have a feeling that we -- the mainstream media, the consumer of mainstream media -- are missing some crucial element of how the Republicans ran their campaign on the ground. I think I've heard that Karl Rove is a rotisserie baseball geek -- is it not possible that he applied something like sabrmetrics to examine some of the hory assumptions about what it takes to win, and found some mistaken assumptions that he could use to his advantage? To begin with, he seems to have shown no fear of a large turnout, when the conventional wisdom said a big increase in voter turnout would swing toward the challenger. Did he know something that the Dems and the rest of us didn't know? I'm wondering if he hasn't developed some sort of technical body of knowledge about the electorate that the mainstream media hasn't begun to fathom. In that light, I wouldn't be surprised if he were laughing at our discussion of values and what not, while secure in the knowledge that he won that race on the ground with, perhaps, a more scientific approach to the problem of where to find votes, and the most efficient way of finding them.

Or maybe it's just that I'm sick of our political journalists, and their uncreative reporting of common wisdom, traditional beliefs, and whatever else the campaigns feed them, and I'm just hoping there's more to it -- and our defeat -- then whatever Frank Rich and Joe Klein and David Broder think.

d

OK, I'll admit -- I just read Moneyball for the first time, and now everything in my life seems reduceable to a series of decisions based on the right data, and the exploitation of inefficiencies found. I believe I've found an inefficiency in the received wisdom about yard work which may free up my weekends from here on out. I'll keep you informed.



On Nov 11, 2004, at 9:40 AM, grady wrote:

Good Frank Rich in the Times that touches on some of these issues (talks about % of Bush voters who were right-wing nutjobs, and Thomas Frank's assertion that it's all about values until the day after the election, when it goes back to being all about $$): http://nytimes.com/2004/11/14/arts/14rich.html

I'd like to see somebody, maybe the Democrats but maybe better Soros or Moveon separate from the D.P. itself, do some serious intensive research into what keeps the remaining 40% of eligible voters from voting. We already know that massive registration drives do a little bit to get some of them involved, but pollsters also know that just being registered is useless by itself as an indicator of voting likelihood.

Is it access? Regardless of what else happens, pushing for more widespread early-voting, with more open polling places in more states, should be a Dem Party Platform issue.

Is it satisfaction with the status quo? Do we write that % off entirely then as unreachable?

Is it like the guy in Cary who called into the State of Things to complain that their attitude towards non-voters was really patronizing, and when MPK asked why he didn't vote, he said "my politics are to the far left of the spectrum." And unfortunately nobody on the panel that day had the sense to say "do you realize that your non-vote is actually a vote for the incumbent?"

I mean, there is a massive third party in America, one that would have won this election had it voted as a bloc. Tapping it by massive voter-registration drives seems to be close to a zero-sum game for both parties. What about finding out what would motivate it? Or is it all about legalizing pot?

Re: moral values issues, I think you're discounting the number of single-issue abortion voters somewhat. I've known plenty of folks who were that way, and I heard a few on the radio leading up to the election as well. I'm curious to know whether at this point it would be possible to reframe that dialog. I know that for a comparatively tiny die-hard minority, even birth control and particularly the morning-after pill are just as bad, but I wonder whether some ground could be gained by pushing harder to reduce the number of abortions performed by increasing education and access to birth control.

That is to say, by explicitly saying "look, you want fewer abortions, we want fewer abortions, but logic and common sense say you've got to teach people how not to get pregnant, and abstinence alone isn't cutting it," is it possible to reach the large % of people who are unhappy with abortion but who aren't so right-wing as to be against sex-ed and birth control as well?

I know there are already people trying to work this angle, but I don't know that it is being explicitly pushed as the most logical "solution" to the abortion "problem."

Changing the subject, I heard the tail-end of a piece on the radio about a ranked-choice voting experiment in San Francisco. How did that work out for them? It would seem to almost necessitate moving to touchscreen systems (although one could redesign the op-scan to handle it by switching to little round SAT bubbles instead of the arrows, and having 3 bubbles by each name--but I think the spoilage rate would go way up) but I think the gist of recent hacking discussion has been that the most likely point-of-hack is the central server and not the UI anyway.

Lastly, if y'all aren't aware, the new FM talk-radio station in Greensboro (101.1) has that total freaking psycho nutcase Michael Savage on nightly from like 6-10 p.m. Hoo-boy he's a loon. If radio elsewhere is sucking I'll turn him on to remind myself just how completely off-the-scale the right-wing propaganda machine is. In terms of sheer egregiousness, I don't think it would be close to possible for The Left to match him, no matter how hard it tried, unless Air America gave Seymour Butts a talk show that consisted of nothing but on-air reenactments of dirty sexual innuendoes about republicans.

Ross



I don't see what's wrong about talking values when it comes to figuring out how people vote for president. There's forty years of hard, statistical evidence that suggests that values of one sort or another trump just about everything when people vote for president. Check out Thad Beyle's stats at the Center for the Study of the American South. Furthermore, my affinity for the Democratic party's position on most of the issues are fully in keeping with, if not directly the result of, the values I hold, some of which derive from my (gasp) church background, some from the hours sitting zazen at the zendo, and some just because I'm a fan of the Enlightenment. I'm not afraid of a discussion of values, but I'm sorry they make you berserk.
values don't bother me a bit; that's how *i* voted.
what bothers me is the rush to make sense of it all, which seems to be
leading in the direction of easy platitudes like "wow. all those 'church
people' voted for bush. we've really got to figure out a way to reach
out to them." how far does one go "reaching out"? where do you give
ground? choice? gay rights? prayer in schools? what?
i thought i heard the dems talking about "moral values" quite a bit during this campaign. i seem to even recall a speech containing that refrain over and over again--"it's a moral value to want decent healthcare. it's a moral value to want people to earn a decent wage, etc..." unless i was just hearing things, where was the disconnect? fear?

On the other hand, the statistics also seem to indicate that in races down the ticket, people _do_ vote the issues more often, probably because they're more immediate and less abstract.
assuming those statistics are true---my own experience makes me doubt that they are--how do we make the issues less abstract at the national level?
Democrats still live on down the ticket, and as a result the Democrats (this time) increased their share in the State House. Julia Boseman was a county commissioner, and therefore was 1) a proven, well-known leader who had 2) obviously long ago resolved any issues her electorate had (if they had any at all) about her sexuality. Boseman's experience isn't one from which you can extrapolate a lesson for the national Democratic party.
i think it's one from which you can extrapolate *a* lesson, not
*the* lesson. there are many lessons to be learned from this election.
-k
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