Still, many political observers seem to struggle to understand how hindsight bias is clouding their judgments and the media’s coverage. It can be difficult to imagine the stories we would be seeing now if Romney had won, for instance. That’s why it’s instructive to consider Politico’s premortem on how an Obama loss would be interpreted, which seems like a plausible counterfactual account of the stories that would now be circulating. (They also wrote a Romney premortem that didn’t anticipate the emphasis that would be given to Obama’s ads and the ground game.) Or consider the story of the 2004 election. According to an American Journalism Review article, reporters relying on flawed exit polls ended up writing stories “explaining” why Kerry won that had to be replaced by alternate accounts recounting how Bush won a narrow victory:
Like their TV counterparts, many newspaper reporters saw early exit polls, and some crafted preliminary stories relying on those numbers.
Jack Torry, a Washington reporter for Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch, helped write two different analysis stories on election night. The first, never published, was based on late afternoon exit polls and explored how Kerry won the election, a “referendum on President Bush.”
“The more I kept checking with Republican sources who I really do trust, the more I began to wonder: Could those exit polls be right?” Torry says. He and his colleagues scrapped the first piece around 9:30 p.m. Their second analysis, which actually appeared in the paper, examined why the race was so tight.
Before that election, Newsweek went so far as to promote two different versions of a post-campaign book about how either Bush or Kerry won before the election had even happened—check out this amazing image:
A similar process of retrospective justification would have likely ensued among observers had Kerry’s reported lead held up.
Of course, it may actually be true that Obama won this election because of his superior ground game or devastating barrage of negative advertising, but convincing evidence does not yet exist to support either claim. Obama performed about as well as we would have expected given the political and economic fundamentals of the race. Until proven otherwise, little credence should be given to post-election narratives that are constructed after the fact to “explain” the outcome we have observed.
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I'd be curious to hear from Brendan Nyhan whether he practices any hindsight bias of his own. Does he now think that Romney's Etch a Sketching and his dissing of 47% of Americans as victims and moochers played a role in the election outcome, when he was so critical before the election of reporters and pundits who focused on those issues?
#1 Posted by Harris Meyer, CJR on Tue 13 Nov 2012 at 06:09 PM
"... little credence should be given to post-election narratives that are constructed after the fact to 'explain' the outcome we have observed."
That's nonsense. There are explanations for everything, and it is useful to figure out what those explanations are. Obviously, the "why"s are easier to pinpoint after an event than before it. Before-the-fact prognostications are often just blowing smoke, as you point out. I can't predict what I'll do tomorrow, but I can pretty much explain why I did what I did today.
In something as complex as a general election, with all the conflicting motivations of millions of voters, reasonable people can posit varying explanations. It's helpful of course to put these hypotheses to some quasi-scientific/statistical tests. Perhaps pollsters & political scientists can test premises like "Obama defined Romney in swing states before he defined himself," but in the meantime, that sounds like a plausible factor, as does "a majority of Americans feel the economy is improving," and, as commenter Harris Meyer writes, so does "Romney dissed 47% of Americans." And so forth.
I'm glad a few knowledgeable writers are trying to make some sense of the election results & share their hypotheses with the public. Nobody is casting these theories in stone, & it's likely later analysis will shade some of them.
#2 Posted by Marie Burns, CJR on Wed 14 Nov 2012 at 07:10 AM
Thanks for this article. Some of this hindsight analysis was just CYA, so these pundits can retain credibility. As was noted by the NY Times' Nate Silver, gamblers, Real Clear Politics, and others who looked at state-by-state polling, it showed that Obama was threatened only briefly in this race, shortly after the first debate. And even then, Romney never went ahead in poll averages in the key swing states he needed to win. To call it a dead heat, particularly at the end, was a stretch.
#3 Posted by Myron Pitts, CJR on Wed 14 Nov 2012 at 05:02 PM
I want to purchase "The 2004 Election: How Kerry won" apparently Amazon is not carrying it.
#4 Posted by JP, CJR on Thu 15 Nov 2012 at 11:19 AM
When these self-appointed gurus start paying the price for their flawed foresight with their jobs is when I'll take any of this seriously. George Will, for example, hasn't been correct in his predictions about anything, ever. And yet he sits in the royal box every Sunday and sells bull manure and gets rewarded as if it were ambrosia.
#5 Posted by Paul J B, CJR on Thu 15 Nov 2012 at 12:43 PM