Primaries and Caucuses

After beginning the day reading that ridiculous article I spent the last two posts complaining about, I ended the work day by a hearing a group of people as I was walking away from the office talking about how Howard Dean is like Hitler because of his speech in Iowa where he said "Yee-haw."

The press commentary on the Iowa caucuses is really pretty sad.  And a big area where reporters go wrong on these things is not understanding political polling well enough. Polls are reasonably good at predicting the outcome of general elections. They're not so good at predicting primary outcomes. And they're generally pretty bad about measuring the effects of foreign-policy issues on voter behavior. So we get pundits discerning Big Changes In Public Opinion because the results of actual elections or party caucuses didn't fit with their prior misreadings of polling data.

The problem with measuring primary outcomes largely has to do with identifying likely voters. Primaries have all sorts of variables that affect this. In New Hampshire, for instance, independents can vote in the Democratic primary.

On foreign policy, things are even worse. The polls often ask questions poorly, for instance, giving respondents a yes-or-no-only choice on agreeing with a statement like "The US did a good thing in removing Saddam Hussein from power," and the punditocracy processes the resulting majority saying "yes" into "support for the war." So in Iowa, the pundits puzzled over the surprising phenomenon that strongly antiwar voters went heavily for John Kerry, when the reporters all knew that Dean was the "antiwar" candidate.

But look at Kerry's pre-Iraq War statement that I quoted earlier: "But one thing I know to a certainty, in my heart, in my mind, in my gut: The United States of America should never go to war because it wants to go to war; it should only go to war because it has to go to war!"

Isn't it just possible that Iowa Democrats figured he was right in his attitude toward the Iraq War? It's not at all hard for me to see why Democrats appalled over the Iraq War would vote for Kerry.

Just don't tell the pundits. We wouldn't want to spoil their act.