Finally, there’s the way that journalists cover the horse race. Traditionally, campaign reporters attend campaign events and seek to infer which campaign is winning, which is losing, and why. (Dickerson’s case that “Romney is peaking at the right time,” which acknowledges the tie in the polls, is based on enthusiastic crowds at his rallies.) Even though Obama remains in a stronger position in the Electoral College, his post-Oct. 3 strategy looks to journalists like the approach of a losing campaign, whereas Romney and his campaign aides are not just trying to convince reporters that they are surging but acting like it. When these campaign optics seem not to line up with the publicly available numbers, journalists too often discount the data, assuming that the campaigns must know something from their private polling that the media doesn’t.
Ideally, journalists should be trying to help the public better understand the true state of the race rather than constructing their own narratives. There are important stories to be told about why Romney stopped making gains and what implications that fact has for the final weeks of the campaign, but they can only be told if the media sheds its crude notions of “momentum” and grounds its reporting in the data.
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The notion that Romney still had “momentum” weeks after his early October gains in the polls has now been debunked by numerous commentators and academics
While Brendan makes a number of good points, I think his word “debunked” is an overstatement. “Disputed” is a better word. Yes, a number of studies showed no improvement for Romney in the second half of October or even some improvement for Obama. OTOH some polls showed large gains for Romney in this period. E.g., the ABC/Washington Post poll showed a 4 point improvement for Romney for 10/22-25 as compared with 10/10-13. Gallup also showed a 4 point improvement over a roughly similar period. What happens when we look at all the major polls?
Here's a list of major poll results over time. By eye, Romney has still been improving. Here are two ways to see the trend. The average of the ten polls with a sample starting date of 10/15 or later has Romney 0.9 percentage points ahead, while the average of the ten prior polls is a dead tie. So, by this measure Romney did gain in the last half of October. Or, look for an even more recent trend by splitting the most recent 10 polls in half. The latest five have Romney ahead by an average of 1.8%. The prior 5 show an exact tie.
IMHO this doesn't definitely prove that momentum continued into the second half of October. There are too many uncertainties. But, I think it does demonstrate that recent momentum hasn't been disproved. The recent gains may turn out to be real.
#1 Posted by David in Cal, CJR on Fri 26 Oct 2012 at 03:59 PM
David in Cal simply repeats the errors of the misled journalists by analyzing the national polling data. In our country, we don't elect presidents by the popular vote. Instead, take a look at some of the sites suggested in the article, and you will find that Obama has led in electoral college projections the entire time. Never has Romney crossed the 270 vote threshold, and has in fact been trending downward since Oct 12-13, while Obama has trended upward. There are other issues as well, including the predominance of Republican-leaning national polls that skew the numbers rightward. If you take out clearly biased polling from Rasmussen and the Gallup LV, the picture is very different even at the national level. But as I said, that is barely relevant anyway.
#2 Posted by Ross C, CJR on Fri 26 Oct 2012 at 05:40 PM
Ross C is correct in all aspects of his post. Moreover, the overuse of robo-polls has had a tendency to make certain states closer than they are. Obama has a commanding lead in enough states, including Ohio, when live interviewers, who are permitted to call cell phones, are used. Romney's path to victory, even at his peak in early October, was tenuous at best. I would stick with Nate Silver if you want an incredibly conservative take on who is going to win, and he has Obama at almost 75%. Other websites, like Silver's, that focus on the state by state races have Obama at a 90% chance of being re-elected.
#3 Posted by Jonathan, CJR on Fri 26 Oct 2012 at 05:54 PM
Thank you for this very good post. I had been puzzled by the "bad narrative about momentum" narrative on progressive blogs (largely because I interact with the rest of humanity largely by reading progressive blogs). You demonstrate that there was indeed a mittmentum narrative.
I'd like to add some thoughts. First, aside from the general tendency to seek facts which confirm the story we want to tell, people have huge amounts of trouble with time series which have no momentum. This has been demonstrated by psychologists.
The experiment is to show people a random walk -- a time series in which the changes are uncorrelated so the best forecast of where it will end up is always exactly the current level. Subjects just can't resist perceiving mean reversion or momentum. These are opposite. Mean reversion is called "a bounce" in the campaign literature. The idea is that a recent change shall partly fade away and things will go back to the way they were. So immediately after the first debate, there was much discussion of whether Romney's gains were a bounce -- destined to vanish. Momentum is the opposite, people see a trend and extrapolate it so they think a shift will not just last but grow stronger over time. Basically people always see one or the other when they are shown data with neither.
These opposite errors are linked. The idea that a random series of changes shouldn't move in the same direction for a while (so changes are perceived as bounce) makes people think something funny is going on when they happen to be in the same direction for a while (we see a new trend). Notably, since polls contain sampling error which is independent across polls, polling averages contain independent changes and give the sort of series which we just can't mentally accept.
Tracking polls make things trickier still. Because they are moving averages, the will have trends even if overall public opinion doesn't. Say the Gallup poll will tend to move in the same direction for a week, because it is a weekly moving average. It is psychologically hard to see something trend for a week and not extrapolate the trend. This is true even if one knows that the data are a weekly moving average.
I don't know votamatic (I check Jackman, Talking Points Memo, fivethirtyeight ,and Real Clear Politics uh often). Jackman and the TPM group add to the problem. Their smoothed average is LOESS which means they calculate the value for t as follows: estimate a time trend with data with weights which decline for polls further from t then report the fitted value for time t. this means that they extrapolate trends. The approach assumes that there is momentum. Then people extrapolate the trend in the extrapolated trend. I have checked and confirmed that dropping a medium old poll with huge Romney - Obama can cause the current estimate of Romney minus Obama to go *up*. I try and try to find such cases and have found one or two IIRC think the McLaughlin for Allen Virginia poll was one (the web user clicking buttons experiment depends on what other data are used so can't trivially be reproduced using tools at the sites).
There is also just a lag in reporting. Total webaholic political junkies consider early October ancient history. The ink, paper and TV reliant not so much. This post stresses how a 10 day old pattern was noted 3 days after it was confidently asserted that there was no such pattern. 7 days has not always a huge amount of time.
Finally there is spin frankly reported as spin. A whole lot of the momentum stories quoted (often anonymous) Romney campaign staff claiming they had momentum. It is just a fact that they made those claims. Importantly the Obama campaign didn't push back (Ezra Klein claims this and he would know). Reporters just don't report that while he said and she said the same thing, the data show something else. I think many consider reporting the mutua
#4 Posted by Robert Waldmann, CJR on Sat 27 Oct 2012 at 08:58 AM
Curious there is no mention of Yule-Slutsky effects.
#5 Posted by Mike Alexander, CJR on Sat 27 Oct 2012 at 04:50 PM