As I said yesterday, always expect the worst; all your surprises will be happy ones. That sort of cynicism comes easily to me because I read Schopenhauer as a young man.
(By the way, whatever happened to good old Schope? They don't teach him in Philosophy classes these days!)
The big surprise in California is the across-the-board defeat of every single one of Ah-nold's propositions, which were designed to increase power for him and his party. I predicted wins for at least two of those initiatives.
Do yesterday's results invalidate the vote fraud thesis? Let's look at the Schwarzenegger quartet and compare the actual numbers (rounded off to the nearest whole number) to the predicted numbers in the most recent Los Angeles Times poll:
Proposition 74 (teacher tenure): 55-44. Predicted: 47-45
Proposition 75 (labor impotence): 53-47. Predicted: 51-40.
Proposition 76 (spending cap): 62-38. Predicted: 60-31.
Proposition 77 (redistricting): 59-41. Predicted: 56-34
For 74, the predicted 2 point spread increased to a dramatic 11 point spread. I will have to admit that the results here defy the vote fraud thesis.
But...
In the case of 75, a predicted 11 point spread tightened to six points. For 76, a predicted 29 point spread tightened to 24 points. For 77, a predicted 12 point spread tightened to eight points.
Predictive polling is not a precise science, of course. Some voters waited until the very last minute to make up their minds. Still, one should expect polling errors to go in either direction. If polls consistently underrate the conservative vote -- in state after state and election after election -- then either something is wrong with the way those polls are conducted, or something is wrong with way the votes are counted.
(And before some wag calls the LAT a "liberal" paper -- it isn't. It just isn't.)
The propositions most helpful to the Republicans (in the long run) were probably 75, 76, and 77 -- and those were the races that saw a noticeable tightening. Did we see "just a smidge" of vote fraud -- enough to give a five-or-so point advantage, not enough to change the results? Some people will suspect as much.
But the Prop. 74 scenario comes as such welcome news that even this notorious cynic feels the need to restrain himself from conspiratorial conclusion-hopping.
That doesn't mean I'll feel a similar restraint in 2006!
(By the way: Hearty congrats to the victorious Democrats outside of California.)
3 comments:
But...but...Joseph...I count on you to screw up my happy, stupidly-optimistic thoughts at least once a day... What gives? You can't come up with one really depressing thing about yesterday's vote?
Joseph,
If you look at the discrepencies you listed in each case you can get an answer close to the actual vote if you take the predicted vote and split the undecided vote (either 9% or 10%) evenly between yes and no. It's not surprising to me that the undecideds split on yes/no. After all, if they couldn't make up their mind maybe they flipped a coin.
Randy
It seems to me that the important question is: What did the exit polls predict? If in this case the exit polls were accurate, as opposed to the exit poll results in 2004, then what it means is that they didn't bother to steal this election, but that they can and do steal elections when they choose to. Same goes for the two governor's races; does anyone have exit poll info on those?
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