Horserace politics and the American Election
Jeff Jarvis smacks down the American media’s love for (and lack of skill at) horse race politics:
It’s amazing that reporters love horse-race coverage since they’re so damned lousy at it…
Any idiot can bet on a horse and lose. And there’s a word for them. Losers.
While we’ve also been quite critical here about the Australian election coverage and its horse-race narratives, we’re very lucky to have an electoral system that is open to good psephological analysis. As Simon Jackman points out in addressing the lack of an American Antony Green:
The United States doesn’t have an Antony Green. I’m not sure it can. It doesn’t have the ABC (the national broadcaster), it doesn’t have the AEC, nor compulsory voting, nor standardized, nationwide election administration (balloting procedures, registration procedures, etc).
Antony is and would be a super-pseph anywhere you put him to work, but the American case is just hard, at least relative to the Australian case. There is not much there, there, at least compared to Australia. For one thing, election administration is a county level function, and in some cases a township level function. There is no XML feed from the AEC to then run through your algorithms etc. The networks themselves form loose and shifting alliances to coordinate data-acquisition (exit polling, and a network of stringers across counties and states etc): i.e., take the AEC out of the picture, and try to imagine what election night TV coverage would look like in Australia. Could/would the ABC fund the effort required to get booth-by-booth data in from the field in some way, in the way that the American networks do? Would we then see more reliance on exit polling, as we see in the USA? Perhaps.
That said, there are a few journalists out there actually doing some straight analysis and not falling for baritone voices and baby-back ribs:
Talkingpointsmemo and sister site TPMMuckraker , the Rolling Stone National Affairs blog and Truthdig’s Ear to the Ground blog.
There’s also been some quality work from Australian bloggers as well: Troppo, Pollbludger, LP and Freedom to Differ, but there’s obviously more out there. What blogs are you reading for your fix of US election news?
I have used an automotive metaphor for the Clinton/Obama race rather than horses at the Great Presidential Race http://laborview.blogspot.com/search/label/2008%20election
It’s more your touring cars than Formula One but you can get more supporters into a family car. As we used to say in the NT, “How many people can you get on board a Troopie? Just one more.”
I disagree about the US system being beyond psephology. It is readily open to both quantitative and qualitative analysis. For starters it uses first past the post in the actual election. The formula used in primaries would also be readily available.