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A reminder from Keith Humphreys at the Washington Monthly on the inherent limitations of statistical prognostications:
… In psychiatry, there is a fun logical problem in which students are asked to generate an instrument that will accurately classify people with and without schizophrenia in a sample of the population. Students draw up elaborate series of questions and diagnostic procedures and sometimes do as well as being right 95% of the time. But those approaches are all inferior to a different diagnostic system, which classifies all people as non-schizophrenic without bothering to ask them anything. Because only 1% of people have schizophrenia, such a system is correct an impressive 99% of the time. When you are trying to predict something with a very low base rate, most of the time you make a positive prediction (e.g., this person has schizophrenia) you will be wrong, and most of the observations you make about the group for which you make a negative prediction (e.g., this person doesn’t have schizophrenia) will be true but have trivial predictive power because they are true of almost everyone…
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Fast-forward to President Obama, whom you may have heard cannot win in 2012 because no President has been re-elected with high unemployment. After it was pointed out that FDR and Ronald Reagan were both re-elected with high unemployment, the shocking historico-statistical proof of Obama’s political demise was re-framed to “No President since World War II other than Ronald Reagan has been re-elected with high unemployment”. But so what? Only 5 people have been twice elected President since World War II, and an infinite number of things is true of all the people who haven’t.
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No one who wasn’t from California, Texas or Arkansas has been re-elected President since World War II (Doom for Obama!). No one whose last name starts with an O has been re-elected President since World War II (Double doom!). No one who was African-American has been re-elected (Triple Doom! Hey wait a minute, how did he get elected the first time…he was African-American then wasn’t he?). At least President Obama can take comfort in the fact that every single left-handed President who ran for re-election since World War II has won, as long as you don’t count George H.W. Bush.
Yutsano
This has been done. Just sayin’.
Elections are messy. Can’t we just install a nice straight white male and restore the natural order of things?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
I can’t emphasize the point made in the post enough. None of these “No one has been [re]elected when X is true” has any real merit to it. Another thing that makes them suspect is selective endpoints. This is particularly true of ones that have multiple criteria. If you choose them just right, you can create an impressive array of attributes that are just barely true for the case in question, while excluding cases that actually fit the data better but fail to meet the threshold on a small number of criteria.
Yutsano’s point is correct, too.
Yutsano
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): It’s correct only in the sense of what the establishment wants. If they had their druthers we’d still be British subjects too. Nothing like a good monarchy to keep the lessers in their place.
Emerald
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): I chuckle. Indeed. They have to say “after World War II” because FDR was re-elected with unemployment in the high teens. Reagan was doomed until he was re-elected, so now the criteria has to be above Reagan’s seven-point-something UE percentage.
I have no doubt at all that as the election grows nearer and Romney (or Cain, or et. al.) starts to look like a sure loser, the media will come up with more bogus stats proving that Obama cannot possibly win.
Anything to keep the horserace close and boost those ratings.
And in years to come, be sure that we will hear that no one can be re-elected with UE percentages above what Obama’s were.
And what Yutsano said too.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Yutsano: I was talking about your video.
Yutsano
@Emerald: Another part of this is Obama may yet get re-elected with a friendlier Congress. I know I’ve seen doom and gloom scenarios all over regarding the Democratic majority in the Senate, but the fact is the Dems have put up a few good choices so far (Sanchez in Texas, Warren in Mass) and a few Dems are also quite safe (Cantwell AFAIK as of right now has no serious challenger). So if we work our butts off we might just be in good shape come 2012. I’m willing to put up what little time and money I have within constraints of the law (FY Hatch Act) to get that done. That is our big challenge now.
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): Oh. Yeah. Right. Carry on then. :)
wag
No president whose last name starts with a vowel,has three syllables, and ends in an “a” has ever been re-elected.
Too Many Jimpersons (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
I’ll be heading off in an hour or so to the airport to fly to Honduras for two weeks. I should still be asleep, but the dog has diarrhœa, and kept waking me up. (Diarrhœa isn’t nearly as awful when you spell it with an œ; hell, it almost makes it worthwhile. Well, that might be a bit far, but it is less appalling somehow with funny letters.)
Anyway, I hate and fear flying, so wish me luck. I only pray the plane doesn’t crash into the sea or a big mountain or something. The whole time I’m up there, all I can think about is how far it is to the ground if something goes wrong. Damn, I hate flying.
wag
so for shit and grins, If you spell diarrhea using the British convention of diarrhoea, do the fonts run the e and o together, or is there something special you have to do to get the effect? Another british convention is spelling fetus as feotus. we are 2 people divided by a common language
Davis X. Machina
Well, no previous Democratic president has sold out The Base quite so often, or thrown it under quite so many different buses, or slapped it so hard in the face quite so many times, now has he?
@wag: There are pre-formed glyphs for both diphthongs, alt-q and alt-apostrophe on a Mac (œ and æ) respectively.
In HTML æ will do for the first, œ for the secondwag
@Davis X. Machina:
Thanks
wag
@Davis X. Machina:
And did you know you could use both diphthongs in succession? Diarrhœæ is a british term for uncontrollable diarrhœa
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
No president who was ever elected in 2008 has ever been reelected. We’ll just have to see if it is true or not.
Samara Morgan
kinda like denigrating al-Islam as “harem culture” and the trope that not all muslims are terrorists while all terrorists are muslims, eh, JAFI?
Gotta watch out for those “shariah-ridden brown babies”.
Do you think they are “terror babies”, Anne Laurie?
Keith
@Davis X. Machina:
None since the traingulating Clinton
Baud
And Carter before that, I guess, seeing as how Kennedy primaried him.
Fulcanelli
Come on now, Bush the younger must’ve really pissed his base off too as some of still have our homes and a few bucks in our pockets…
Hal
I’m pretty sure he does that so some people can use the phrase s under the bus, slapped in the face, and my favorite, capitulation.
Hal
Also, Chris Christie is now the new GOP front runner, even though he hasn’t even announced he’ll run. Can someone explain to me how a guy who’s been Governor for 20 months, hasn’t created a single job, and has gone from high ratings to GWB territory in all of 12 months going to run for President?
It’s like they’re going to run the Chris Christie from the summer of 2010.
mai naem
Please please run Chris Christie. That thin skinned prick will ream a couple of the MSM elites a new one and that will be the end of him. I don’t think he’s going to run. He’s just enjoying the fawning attention. He’s getting all fluffed up. Bobby Jindal must be jealous.
Allen
Well, this being an open thread and all, I guess I will open it up, especially for those in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The Cat Adoption Team in Sherwood (Portland suburb in Washington County) is having a cat food drive. Good program for those in need (felines and their minions). Go here. Kitzel, my 16 pound cat, is lying at my side giving meowey thanks for me posting this.
Emma
@Yutsano: They’d be disappointed. It’s common knowledge that the Royal Family aligns itself with the middle class in the UK. Oops.
gnomedad
No Black president has ever been re-elected!
agrippa
@Davis X. Machina:
Just exactly who is in this ‘base’ of yours?
And, just exactly what does ‘sold out’ mean?
You ever consider that presidents do not dance to your tune? You ever consider that presidents make their own judgements?
Unsympathetic
Wait a minute, the Washington Post obliquely paid homage to what we call “science” ? What’s next, a sane article from David Brooks?
Of course, Keith could have actually referenced “Type 1 Error” and “Type 2 Error” – but that would, you know, suggest that things exist which are difficult to understand in this world.
Amir Khalid
@gnomedad:
This game is fun!
— No Hawaii-born President has ever been re-elected!
— No President born after 1960 has ever been re-elected!
(Yeah, I went twice. I hope nobody minds.)
Amir Khalid
@Too Many Jimpersons (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
Hope you got through the flight OK. Also hope that whatever you’re in Honduras for turns out all right.
El Cid
I don’t have time to locate the sourcing, but fairly recently it was pointed out that the single biggest statistic predicting whether or not the White House incumbent was re-elected wasn’t the level of unemployment, but whether or not unemployment was increasing or decreasing in the months before the election.
Even if it was only the most cynical ploy, passing a jobs bill with any notable effect in the late summer and fall of 2012 might make all the difference.
If you’re going to talk about policy sci independent variables and all.
Mnemosyne
@agrippa:
Please bring your snark detector in for service — it seems to be malfunctioning.
kth
@Unsympathetic: sorry, no. it’s the Washington Monthly, a venerable magazine that used to have Kevin Drum blogging for them, and now has Steve Benen in the same capacity. And despite the presence of Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent, there is no hope for the Washington Post.
Glen Tomkins
Well, if the reasons I am pessimistic about Obama’s re-election chances were based on statistics, I would be awfully encouraged by this article. But they’re not. I’m more worried by the fundamentals.
Why would swing voters stay with an incumbent who had failed to reverse abysmal unemployment rates? I can give you an answer for Reagan, that the numbers, while still bad, were clearly on the mend by Labor Day 1984. I can give you an answer for FDR, that he had the luxury of following the clearly smartest Republican of that time, Hoover, whose response to a Wall Street crash led to 25% unemployment. FDR was open with the electorate about the difficulty of achieving anything quickly, the need for new solutions just to tread water — and Hoover’s recent really disastrous results made the electorate settle for continued unemplyment at a merely disastrous, but stable, level. The electorate rewarded that honesty with continued support despite the lack of dramatic improvement.
What’s Obama’s explanation for why unemplyment is still hovering near 10%? He had the misfortune to be elected in a time sequence closer to Hoover’s than FDR’s, in that he came into the WH just after our equivalent to the Crash of ’29, and has had to preside over the dismal employment consequences, analogous to Hoover’s term. But instead of making any reasonable attempt to cope with this bad timing by being open with the electorate about the difficulty in getting unemployment down quickly, despite all early indications that this was not going to be the typical 2-year recession we’ve seen since the Great Depression, he’s been as serenely confident as Hoover about the success of policies that have now proven to have not worked. He settled for a stimulus too small to get the job done. Even if he had to settle, didn’t have the votes to do better, no one forced him to pretend that the package he could and did get was just right, would surely work. It wasn’t and it hasn’t. How does he regain the confidence of the electorate in that trickiest of tasks for a politician, explaining away failure? How does he do that, how does he sell somber realism, after having been part of the chorus of mindless confidence?
I don’t see how he does that, and that, not the statistics, is what has me worried about his chances.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Samara Morgan:
WAT IS THIS I DON’T EVEN…
Dr.BDH
If you have the authority to define “schizophrenia” any way you want, you can accurately predict the prevalence of schizophrenia. See, for example, the Soviet Union’s psychiatric system.