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Punditry and Innumeracy

Here is a bit of blinding brilliance from Mickey Kaus: If Ohio is still in play, then I’m one of those who looks at the RCP electoral map and thinks, not “McCain’s path to 270 … is narrowing,” but “jeez, Obama could still easily lose,” even if the polls showing his non-trivial national lead are […]

Here is a bit of blinding brilliance from Mickey Kaus:

If Ohio is still in play, then I’m one of those who looks at the RCP electoral map and thinks, not “McCain’s path to 270 … is narrowing,” but “jeez, Obama could still easily lose,” even if the polls showing his non-trivial national lead are right. He’s got to win one of seven decidedly iffy states (Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Colorado, Missouri). You want to rely on Colorado?

Capping off the production, Kaus asks, “what am I missing?”

Here is what Kaus is missing. His two assumptions are (1) that state-by-state elections are independent events, insensitive to national trends, and (2) that to win the election, Obama has to win one of eight “decidedly iffy states” (in an update, he adds Nevada to the list). Let’s take this very, very slowly and deliberately; Mickey, get your No. 2 pencil and paper out. Suppose each candidate is 50:50 to win each of the crucial states — an assumption that is probably overly generous to John McCain, given that Barack Obama leads the polling average in the majority of those states. If McCain had to run the table in two 50:50 states, his odds would be (1/2) x (1/2), or 25 percent — not very good. The odds of running the table in eight 50:50 states are (1/2)8, or 1/256, or less than one half of one percent. Consequently, by Kaus’s assumptions and a generous assessment of McCain’s prospects in each of the states Kaus mentions, Obama’s odds of winning are 99.6 percent. I have a feeling most Obama fans would be willing to take those odds. But Kaus thinks they are reason for Democrats to panic.

This is not, I hope it’s clear, a partisan point, but a matter of basic, minimal competence with quantitative concepts and reasoning — although Kaus might be less prone to make such gruesome analytical errors if he could curb his reflexive hypercontrarianism a bit. (Incidentally, Kaus’s inadvertent declaration of Obama to be a lock in the election might be too sanguine for Obama, since Kaus’s assumption that individual state elections are independent events is obviously wrong; if the national popular vote spread is anything more than about 3 points at the most, the electoral college will follow.) And Kaus is hardly exceptional.  There is a large class of professional pundits who ought to be spending much less time writing about politics, and much more time playing poker against me.

(By the way, this being my first post at @TAC, allow me to introduce myself. I’m a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Oxford, where my major research interests are metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and philosophy of physics, but my love/hate connection to politics keeps me paying attention and occasionally writing about it. If I had to describe my own politics, it would be radical but pessimistic whiggery.)

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