(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Nadia Hassan writes:
I saw your article in Slate. For what it’s worth, this new article, “Ideologically Extreme Candidates in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1948–2012,” by Marty Cohen, Mary McGrath, Peter Aronow, and John Zaller, looks at ideology-based extremism and finds weak effects of ideology. Like the high end is 1980 and the authors estimate Carter got ~1.4 points of vote share from being appreciably closer to the median voter.
This seems consistent with what Rosenstone wrote in his classic 1983 book, Forecasting Presidential Elections, and what I wrote in my Slate article. It’s good to see the argument updated and presented in more detail.
Hassan continues:
Two other factors may have impacted in 1964 and 1972: approval and incumbent party tenure. LBJ had a sky high approval rating, perhaps bolstered somewhat by JFK’s death. The other is time in office. Parties seem to do better their first term in office than 2nd or later. LBJ and Nixon got a couple of points from that. Eisenhower had economic performance slightly weaker than 2004 in 1956 but he still won by double digits—his approval rating was over 60%, compared to Bush in the high 40s.
Yes, good points. Also since I’m linking here, let me just say that I don’t like the headline Slate gave to my article, “Trump-Clinton Won’t Be a Landslide.” The subheading, “Conventional wisdom is that fringe candidates get repudiated, à la 1964 and 1972. The story isn’t so simple,” is fine. But I don’t like going on the record with a deterministic prediction—especially a prediction that I never made!
My article’s fine, though, it’s just the headline that bothered me.
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