It’s a fallacy atop an error built around something that isn’t happening.
That's a quote from Ezra's takedown of Microtrends, the new book from one of Clinton's most important political advisors, Mark Penn. If Klein is right - and everything I know about him suggests he is - Penn has absolutely no idea what he is doing with data. Which, given that his primary purpose in life is to analyze data, is really saying something.
I hate to admit this, but this book sounds so bad that I not only might have to buy it, I might have to assign it in my classes as well. Undergrads constantly confuse correlation and causation, and it's always helpful to explain the difference by showing them real mistakes. Moreover, the book looks to be a great example of the much wider problem of the misuse of statistics in general. Which given Penn's supposed expertise in the area is really saying something.
Actually, I have an even better idea. I'll assign part of the book together with Ezra's review. Because his conclusion is spot on:
Pollsters occupy a uniquely powerful space in American political discourse: They bring science to elections. Armed with heaps of raw data, they elevate their opinions into something altogether weightier: Conclusions. When an organization sends out a press release saying the organization is right, it’s ignored. When a pollster sends out a poll showing the electorate agrees, ears in Washington perk up.
The enterprise has always been dodgy. Populist pollsters reliably discover that the electorate thirsts for more populism. Conservative pollsters routinely discover a small government consensus pulsing at the heart of the body politic. When the libertarian Cato Institute commissioned a poll of the electorate, they found—shockingly—that the essential swing vote was made of libertarians. Remarkably, whenever a politician or self-interested institution releases a poll, the results show a symmetry between the attitudes of the pollster’s employer and those of the voters. But Penn’s book shines light on this phenomenon: If he is the pinnacle of his profession, then the profession uses numbers as a ruse—a superficial empiricism that obscures garden-variety hackery. And that’s a trend worth worrying about.
This is, in an odd, oblique sort of way, what my dissertation is about. Everything in politics is contextual, even our own attitudes and beliefs. We act in politics as if attitudes and beliefs exist separately and apart from our perceptions of the world, but they don't. They are the direct result of our perceptions; it can be no other way. As a result, how we react to an advertisement, polling question, or new bit of information is going to be highly context dependent. At a very high level these reactions might look entirely consistent, but when you look more closely very real and very important differences emerge. Elections are, I am going to argue, won and lost in those differences. It is not just what elections get people to think about, but also how.
Or at least that's what I think I'm going to argue. After all, I won't know until I've analyzed all of the data. Even Mark Penn should know that's how this works.
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