Back in October 2008, Markos Moulitsas was asked by Charlie Jane Anders over at Gawker.com’s Io9 blog “…to pick one piece of science fiction that you must read or watch before stepping into the voting booth…”
Markos chose the 1955 classic short story, “Franchise,” by Isaac Asimov…
6 Science Fiction Classics To Help You Choose The Next President
Charlie Jane Anders
Io9.com
October 6, 2008 2:20PM
We asked six political pundits, including Andrew Sullivan and DailyKos' Markos Moulitsas, to pick one piece of science fiction that you must read or watch before stepping into the voting booth next month. After all, science fiction often deals with some of the biggest what-ifs and alternate futures imaginable. So we couldn't imagine any better preparation for participating in democracy than six science fiction classics, as chosen by the experts…
The pundit: Markos Moulitsas (DailyKos)
What they recommended: "Franchise" by Isaac Asimov.
What it's about: This 1955 story is part of Asimov's "Multivac" series of stories. In the futuristic world of 2008, the United States has become an "electronic democracy." Multivac, the super-computer, chooses one lucky person to be "voter of the year." This person, Norman Muller, answers a series of questions and the computer uses those to decide what the results of an election would have been, if an election had happened.
Why is this good election-season material?
Moulitsas tells io9:
We live in a world that has accepted 1984's doublespeak as part and parcel of the political process. But that's too easy and cliched and answer. So how about Asimov's "Franchise"? A single voter, chosen by computer, decides the election, and he's proud that the citizens got to make their voice heard through him, except, of course, that everyone else didn't get to vote. Consider the modern political campaign, with robo polls which proclaim the electorate's choice after a few hundred responses, and robo calls and electronic voting machines and all that stuff, and maybe someone can torture out an analogy. In reality, this election season has been stranger than any fiction imaginable…
Well, it’s four years later and, actually, Markos wasn’t that far off (at least as it relates to the 2012 election cycle), according to political pundit and Democratic Party luminary Paul Begala, as well as two of our nation’s leading political scientists: Vanderbilt’s Larry Bartels and UCLA’s Lynn Vavreck.
(More about UCLA political science professor Lynn Vavreck in a moment. I think this brilliant woman has a LOT more influence over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, right now, than most may realize.)
Meet the Undecided
By LARRY M. BARTELS and LYNN VAVRECK
Campaign Stops Blog
New York Times
July 30, 2012, 11:47 pm
Most American voters have already decided whether they will pull the lever for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney in November. Their decisions were largely predictable even before Romney emerged as the Republican standard-bearer. But there are still a few people out there who are truly undecided — and if the race remains as close as it is now, their votes will be crucial to the outcome. Who are these people, and why do they seem to be having such a hard time making up their minds?
The one fact everyone seems to agree on is that there aren’t many of them. Using its latest polling data, The Wall Street Journal writes that “American voters are growing more polarized and locked in their views.” The Washington Post describes the election as “a settled issue for nearly nine in 10 voters.” The race is “tight and stable,” according to the Post’s Ezra Klein, who adds that “Romney and Obama are realistically fighting over three or four percent of the electorate.” And Paul Begala says “there are about as many people in San Jose as there are swing voters who will decide this election” — 916,643 people in six swing states, to be much too precise.
Typical opinion surveys do not include nearly enough respondents to provide a statistically reliable portrait of this narrow undecided sliver of the electorate. However, the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (Diarist’s Note: See link for this in original post, linked above) has been surveying 1,000 people each week since January, providing a much larger pool of respondents than any single survey can offer. By putting together the responses from 10 of these surveys conducted from May through July, we have assembled a mega-sample of 10,000 respondents interviewed after it became clear that Mitt Romney would be the Republican nominee…
(Bold type is diarist’s emphasis.)
I’ve left most of the “good stuff” out of this teaser/excerpt. And, I cannot recommend this piece more strongly than by saying this blog post by Bartels and Vavreck (especially when taken in context with their respective bodies of work) is nothing short of exceptionally enlightening, even to the most seasoned of political observers (of which I’m sure there are many that view themselves as such that are reading this right now).
As promised, here’s a little more on Lynn Vavreck, author of “The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns,” 2009, Princeton University Press. (Please remember that this book appeared in print in the Spring of 2009. But, it's clearly even more pertinent in this year’s election.)
…The economy is so powerful in determining the results of U.S. presidential elections that political scientists can predict winners and losers with amazing accuracy long before the campaigns start. But if it is true that "it's the economy, Stupid," why do incumbents in good economies sometimes lose? The reason, Lynn Vavreck argues, is that what matters is not just the state of the economy but how candidates react to it. By demonstrating more precisely than ever before how candidates and their campaigns affect the economic vote, The Message Matters provides a powerful new way of understanding past elections--and predicting future ones.
Vavreck examines the past sixty years of presidential elections and offers a new theory of campaigns that explains why electoral victory requires more than simply being the candidate favored by prevailing economic conditions. Using data from presidential elections since 1952, she reveals why, when, and how campaign messages make a difference--and when they can outweigh economic predictors of election outcomes.
The Message Matters does more than show why candidates favored by the economy must build their campaigns around economic messages. Vavreck's theory also explains why candidates disadvantaged by the economy must try to focus their elections on noneconomic issues that meet exacting criteria--and why this is so hard to do…
(Bold type is diarist’s emphasis.)
A little more on Vavreck via Kossacks jamess and DemFromCT…
h/t to Jamess from his post on January 27th…
Politics Is a High-Stakes Game
NYTimes.com, Jan 22, 2012
by Lynn Vavreck, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles
“All warfare is based on deception</>,” Sun Tzu wrote. To talk about lying in politics, we have to begin by appreciating that for most candidates, elections are a lot like war. Winning is everything and anything else that comes from running for office (advancing a policy agenda, gaining notoriety, becoming secretary of state) is a consolation prize. They run to win -- and that makes the conflict epic.
[...]
Why do Americans tolerate politicians who lie? Because most political lies are exaggerations or contextual lies. They are lies of omission, or put the way a politician might, they are economies of truth. And while Americans might not tolerate lying from kindergarteners (for whom the setting of a moral standard seems very important) when a candidate from a particular party engages in a half-truth to win an election, it benefits that party’s voters -- and that’s the truth.
Partisanship is sewn up in the identity of most Americans who pay attention to politics at all. To call people Republicans or Democrats is to say more than what their positions are on policy matters. It is a statement about who they are and perhaps where they have come from or how they have “come up.” These partisan identities affect Americans’ perceptions of almost everything that happens in the political world.
Via
DemFromCT’s Abbreviated Pundit Roundup On March 14th…
Muddled Economic Picture Muddles The Political One, Too
David Leonhardt
New York Times
March 14, 2012
“If you could know one thing and you had to predict which party was going to win the next presidential election,” Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, “you couldn’t do better than knowing the change in economic growth.”
Particularly important, Ms. Vavreck said, were the first six months of an election year, when many voters form impressions that stick.
This brings us full circle, back to Markos’ prescient comments in October 2008, as they relate to the 2012 election. (See up above.)
It’s not one person, as Asimov wrote about it in 1955, but according to Begala and, tacitly, to Bartels and Vavreck, too, approximately 916,643 people will decide the election this year.
And, Markos, on a personal note, if you have any doubts that we’re not already miles beyond any semblance of “democracy,” and light years past “clichés” about 1984, I’d suggest you read THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, THIS, and especially THIS.