Michael Barone writes in the Washington Examiner: If Republicans run as strongly as Brown, only 103 House Dems are safe.
The logic (so to speak):
there’s a pattern here: Coakley carries districts where Obama got 65% or more of the vote and runs essentially even in the district where he got 64%, and Scott Brown runs ahead in districts where Obama got less than 64% of the vote.
Let’s extrapolate those numbers to the nation as a whole and assume that a district that voted 64% or more for Obama is safe for Democrats even under the most dire of circumstances. How many such districts are there? Answer, according to this source: 103. The other 332 districts voted 63% or less for Obama. Interestingly, there are more 64%+ Obama districts in the West (36) than in the East (27) and more in the South (21) than in the Midwest (19).
The problem (or, at least, the most obvious one) with this analysis is that this absolutely not reason to assume that this pattern is at all exportable to other races across the country. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no particular reason (except wishful thinking on the part of Republicans) to extrapolate much of anything from one special election to the forthcoming 2024 general election.
It is all true as far as it goes insofar as any statement that says if X is like Y, then X will be like Y (no joke, yes?). Sure, if all the races in all the sub-64%-for-Obama congressional districts go the same way that the districts in Massachusetts went on Tuesday, then they will be the same. However, to repeat myself with emphasis: there is absolutely no sound reason to assume that this will be the case.
There was a time when I thought that Barone was a fairly serious analyst who happened to have conservative preferences. However, columns like this seem to underscore that the conservative preferences outweigh any desire to be a serious analyst,1 which is a shame.
Sphere: Related Content- A view that has been growing in my mind for some time in re: Barone. [↩]
January 22nd, 2024 at 10:31 am
RCP had a similar “analysis” of the senate and concluded that the Dems may be down to 52 seats. Everyone likes to rag on Nate Silver, but the Nate Silver paradigm of cheerleading-through-what-seems-to-be-thoughtful-analysis is more insiduous than Barone’s. There’s also the fact that sometimes, serious analysis leads to conclusions that one would rather not write, but Barone does have deadlines to meet.
January 22nd, 2024 at 10:57 am
I once thought he was serious, too.
January 22nd, 2024 at 10:59 am
While I will readily acknowledge Nate Silver’s partisan preferences, I must confess I don’t agree with the assessment.
And “deadlines to meet” (a concept I do have personal experience with) isn’t an excuse for manifestly shoddy work.
January 22nd, 2024 at 12:31 pm
You are absolutely right. Any time analysis gets filtered through ideological filters, the result is questionable. But most people, journalists included, do not really understand statistical significance, standard deviations, normal distributions, etc. Just because something happened once in Massachusetts, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen elsewhere, like San Francisco or Dallas. IMHO, in most cases, accurate political forecasting is more of an art, than science.
January 22nd, 2024 at 1:52 pm
The Silver-Barone comparison attempted in comment #1 is seriously misguided. Silver actually knows how to do serious quantitative analysis (though I have misgivings about certain aspects of the methodology), is transparent about both his methods and his political preferences, and is not above telling the progressive types in his readership when his methods lead him to a conclusion that does not support their (or his) political preferences.