Why did Scott Walker defeat Tom Barrett in yesterday’s Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election? There is no single, simple answer to that question, any more than there is a single, simple answer to the question of why the Celtics defeated the Heat last night. But based on our knowledge of elections, we can identify some guideposts. Any reasonable analysis of an election’s outcome should start with this list:
– Physical characteristics of the candidates. Generally speaking, candidates that appear at first glance to be more competent and compassionate will defeat candidates their opponents.
– Incumbency. Incumbents tend to have an advantage in any election, due to a variety of factors: name recognition, familiarity, and the selection bias of having been already proven to be the kind of candidate who can win an election for that office.
– Publicity. Huge advertising discrepancies can matter, especially in building name recognition or in determining whether most voter’s first impression of a particular candidate is positive or negative.
– Big issues. Voters are not sophisticated about issues, but extremely positive, negative, or polarizing publicity surrounding a very small number of important issues can drive voters to the polls in some cases. Think corruption charges, rumors of an affair, or in the Walker case, his anti-union stances–which likely did affect a couple percent of the vote.
– Campaign apparatus. Campaigns matter a lot. Why? Because the biggest driver of turnout is whether or not a neighbor called you on the phone that day and asked you if you voted. Campaigns that don’t have the volunteers or the organization to drive name recognition and turnout among potential supporters will tend to get beaten in otherwise close races.
– Macroeconomic indicators. These provide rough indicators for how satisfied people are with their lives and with their government. Particularly rising unemployment and/or inflation can cause more people to feel poor and dissatisfied, and lead to a pretty strong anti-incumbency effect.
There are certainly other factors that might affect particular elections, but in most cases you probably don’t need to go any deeper than those six factors. And so, if you want a pretty good post-election analysis of why Walker won the Wisconsin recall, check out the Washington Posts’ Fix blog.
What does bad post-election analysis look like? What’s the equivalent of an analyst proclaiming that the Heat lost because Bob in the third row didn’t wear lucky socks tonight? Well, bad analysis looks like this New York Times Ross Douthat article, which tries to place the Wisconsin recall inside a broader sweep of modern political history in which the voters act as the hyper-rational arbiters on the sidelines of an epic political clash between the two parties.
Bull. Show me the evidence. Oh wait, he can’t. Because there is no evidence that “the electorate is getting more conservative”; it’s the 21st century equivalent of blaming cancer on an imbalance of humors. At best you can argue that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; more likely, it is an attempt to find a pattern in a series of largely unrelated events. And moreover, to extrapolate from this one election in Wisconsin to a broader trend about American politics is as absurd as saying that the fact that it warmed up this afternoon when the sun came out points to a broader trend of global warming.
Great piece. I do agree The Fix commentary was superior in laying out the specific and local reasons for Walker’s victory but I do not see your point at all in reference to the NYT piece being as poor as you postulate. Both make some valid points and the Times just put the WI recall into a larger perspective as the writer sees it – what is the ‘problem’ you have with that?
There are two problems. First, you can’t create a pattern from a single data point. Walker’s election was due to a wide variety of factors, most of which have absolutely no bearing on any other election. Most notably, any electoral outcome will be due in large part to the inherent characteristics of the particular candidates involved, and their innate inherent ability to connect with voters.
Second, if you’re going to argue that there is a correlation between elections, you need to have an actual causal argument, that links those elections together. Macroeconomic factors are often similar from one state to another–and in that sense, Obama might actually look at this election and infer that the economy is not quite as toxic to incumbents as many macroeconomic models might suggest. This election also says something about the state of the relative campaign organizations in Wisconsin, and suggest that Republicans have a leg-up in mobilizing their voters in a state-wide campaign in that particular state. Those are particular causal arguments about why some factor in this election might translate to another election.
But that’s not what Douthat is doing. Douthat is trying to make broader claims about the state of the American electorate. Somehow the fact that Walker won 53% of the vote in Wisconsin, as opposed to 49% of the vote, is deep and meaningful in some broader sense about what it says about the nature of the polarization of the American electorate. But at the end of the day, there is no causal relationship given. He tries to see himself stepping back and observing the winds of historical change. But he completely lacks any historical perspective; you can’t make a statement about an event’s place in history the day after that event occurs. More importantly, even a historian would demand that the socio-political phenomenon that Douthat claims that Walker’s election represent be explained in light of some broader socio-political changes that are taking place. (So, for example, I might explain Obama’s change of position on gay marriage in light of broader cultural acceptances regarding homosexual behavior, and then given evidence both for that broader cultural acceptance, and how that acceptance has affected Obama in particular.) Douthat does nothing of that sort either.
Which means, at the end of the day, Douthat’s “analysis” comes down to a bunch of unproven–and mostly unprovable–assertions that sound clever but don’t actual increase anyone’s understanding.