Vote or Die - I Think Not

Every other year around this time we are lectured by celebutards and dissolute rock stars on the importance of voting. Never mind that they often don’t bother to vote themselves. What’s important is projecting a hip, sophisticated public image...dude.

But I applaud the fact they don’t vote. If you can’t name the vice president, how is voting going to help you or society? Please, stay home. Don’t vote. Voting is not a responsibility, informed voting is. If you’re not up to the task, don’t inflict yourselves on the rest of us.

In college, I had political science professors who would constantly bemoan low voter turnout, which they viewed as a manifestly bad thing. Naturally, when a bunch of poli sci profs all agreed, it was my instinct to take the opposing view. But first, I needed facts. 


So, off to the musty stacks (this was pre-internet, of course), where I examined voter turnout ratios around the world. It turns out it was very high (90% plus) in places like the Soviet Union and Cuba, while being low in the U.S. (presidential election turnouts were around 50% then, and only slightly higher now). If you’re wondering about the existence of elections in communist countries, they did indeed have them, but they were just a show for the West so they could call themselves “democratic.” Even though there would only be one candidate, you would vote because you feared retribution if you didn’t. Ergo, high turnout.

The next group of countries I would describe as distressed third world democracies, all of which had high turnouts (70-80%). Were these countries somehow better than ours, since they obviously had such good citizens?

The pattern that emerged, as I spent an all-too-rare late night in the stacks, was that really miserable countries have high turnouts while developed and prosperous countries have low turnouts. I correlated turnout with GDP, and it turned out to be a pretty good negative correlation.

The explanation? In countries like the U.S., with well-developed laws protecting one's liberties and property rights, it doesn’t always matter much which candidate wins. One might help you marginally, the other hurt you marginally, but the difference isn’t perceived by most as enough to justify paying attention. There is a “cost” associated with the time it takes to become engaged and informed, and for most people the perceived benefit of voting must overcome the cost in order to vote.

In a distressed country, the landscape is quite different. Who wins can determine whether there will be food on your table next year. You damn well vote.

My professor gave me a C. I was miffed at the time, but today I view it as a merit badge.

As an aside, the election next Tuesday represents probably the clearest ideological choice we have been presented in decades. There are two vastly different paths being presented for our country’s future. With more at stake than is typical, if my long-ago theory holds true we should see an uptick in turnout. The last few midterms have very consistently averaged about 37%. Let’s see where this one ends up.

October 29th Inex Update

Short term momentum still appears to favor Republicans.

For an explanation, go here: National Pulse Index

House model is at +71 seats for the Republicans.

October 27th Index Update

For an explanation of this, go here:

National Pulse Index

At this point we can say we've seen a momentum shift for the Republicans over the last week. Pennsylvania's senate race, much hyped when it appeared the Democrat Sestak was closing, now looks more solid for the Republicans. California and Connecticut are problematic, but Boxer's still not a lock. Here's the drill on the Senate: the Republicans will likely pick up nine seats and maybe a tenth, the tenth being Washington which is tight but with a slight edge to the Democrats. The 10th seat shifts Senate power.

Lots more house polls flooding in. My model now has the Republicans picking up 71 seats, which is considerably more than the conventional wisdom (which, itself, has been heading north rapidly - I'd say it's around 50 now). The way the model is constructed, it's almost impossible that it will change by more than three or four seats by Tuesday. this is a new one for me, so we'll see how I do.

Index Update

Scads of polls today. Yesterday, it took a big one day reading (+41) for the Dems to swing the Index in their favor. Today, the Republicans fought back with the biggest one day move yet recorded (a whopping +93) which swung the index well back to their advantage. Remember, the index uses a 3-day moving average.

For an explanation, click here: http://thenakeddollar.blogspot.com/2010/10/introducing-national-pulse-index.html.

House model stands at +69 for the Republicans.

Index Update - a Good Day for Dems

See here for explanation:

http://thenakeddollar.blogspot.com/2010/10/introducing-national-pulse-index.html

Commercial Shoot

Had an interesting experience the other day. My wife and I allowed some folks to come into our home to shoot a print ad for an Alzheimer's medicine. It was their third day of shooting in three different homes. How many people do you think it takes to do this? Keep in mind, the end product was a grand total of three images that will appear in magazines.

Answer: more than fifteen. There were directors, producers, photographers, make up people, wardrobe, technology, and lighting specialists, caterers, models, of course, and Lord knows what else. There were six or seven vehicles including a huge Winnebago. How much could this all cost? I don't know, but they paid us quite well and, boy, do they eat well. No sandwiches for this group.

One of the images was a shot of a mother and daughter baking together. I went on the the internet and found this:

in about 15 seconds. Do they know about the internet? What am I missing here?

Having said that, they were very nice people and I sure hope they come back.

National Pulse Index Update

The Republicans continue to enjoy a good few days, but overall the index has been treading water for a couple of weeks. Democrats do not have momentum, but they have succeeded, at least, in stopping Republican momentum.

Incidentally, my source for polling data is realclearpolitics.com, which is an excellent poll clearinghouse.

My house model now has Republicans picking up 72 seats.

Introducing the National Pulse Index

In college, we used to play a game called bladderball. The entire university (including grad schools) was divided into four teams, and each started in the corner of an enormous courtyard. A six foot inflatable ball was rolled into the middle and everyone charged. Goal was to push the ball to the opposite corner.

It was incredibly violent, and frequently resulted in injury, which caused the university, as part of their ongoing "No More Fun of Any Kind" campaign, to ban it.

Mostly, the ball didn't move much, because any momentum from one team would cause the other three to defend the threatened corner. The ball would bounce back and forth for a while until, inevitably it suddenly shot in one direction. It was a perfect metaphor for an information cascade.

I've pondered this of late in the context of next week's election. Clearly, over the last year, the political bladderball busted a move for the Republicans. But lately, the media narrative has shifted to the idea that the landscape has tightened, i.e. that Democrats are closing the gap. One or two polls are usually cited as evidence. But is this overall narrative correct?

I used to run a quant hedge fund. What we quants like to do is take lots of data and make sense out of it. So, how to capture the ebb and flow of an election cycle? What I've come up with is a simple metric that I call the National Pulse Index. Essentially, it aggregates polls from everywhere, exploiting the wisdom of crowds. Specifically, it compares each new poll with the previous poll from the same race. Today, for instance, Rasmussen reported that Republican Rick Perry is up by 11 points in the Texas Gubernatorial race. While this may seem like good news for Republicans, the last poll actually had him up by 14. I assign this a "minus 3" for the Republicans.

Each day as new polls come out, they are compared to the previous polls from the same races. The numbers are added up to get a net score for the day. Then, I use a moving average of the last three days to smooth out the data. This gives us a very good picture as to which side has the momentum.

Allow me to make my case for why this works, and then we'll get to the numbers.

1. On any given day, this will capture the aggregate opinions of up to 20,000 people, whereas an individual poll (that might get one side or the other excited) can have as few as 300 people.

2. There really is a national "mood," and it really does matter which way it's moving. Opinions are infectious. It matters in Ohio what people are thinking in Alabama. They may not be perfectly in sync, but they do tend to move in the same direction at the same time. Thus, if Charles Schumer just went from 40 points up to 30 points up, it doesn't mean anything for Schumer - he's still going to win easily - but it does mean the mood in New York is moving in a certain direction. This makes it likely the mood is moving in the same direction elsewhere.

3. Aren't some of these polls partisan and/or sloppy? Absolutely, but my system takes them all, because it evens out. For instance, a poll came out last week in Washington that had Patty Murray up by 15 points, which was a crazy outlier, and resulted in a +18 score for the Democrats. Two days later, though, another poll came out showing Murray only up by 8, which resulted in a -10 score. The bad polls tend to get balanced out. To the extent that they don't, they probably have useful information, which is why one doesn't want to make judgments about which polls to use.

4. What about the Generic Ballot polls, the ones where people are asked whether they intend to vote for a Republican or a Democrat? Don't those show the national pulse? Yes they do, but they don't come out every day, and they survey far fewer people (as few as 700).

With that, is there anything to the "races are tightening" narrative? Well, here are the numbers:

Anything below zero means movement in the direction of Democrats, anything above Republicans. What I see is a lot of back and forth, like prize fighters slugging it out. There doesn't seem to be a clear advantage to either party, but perhaps this feels like progress to Democrats and their media friends after several months of hemorrhaging.  So, as usual, the media has created a narrative out of thin air.

For those interested, I will post an update of this every day between now and the election.