Some reporters live for numbers and calculate the horse race. Literally, that seems to be their job at newspapers. One is Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post. Part of his directive (meaning I blame not him but his editors) is to declare “winners and losers” and to provide interpretation on numbers.<\/p>\n
This story<\/a> is one where his interpretations are, for the most part, over-hyped. A more precise way of saying it is that he’s wrong and provides conclusions that cannot be supported, though to his credit, he warns that drawing conclusions based on a small sample set is dicey. Which makes one ask, then why do it? To wit, (Numerals track the issues Cillizza raised.)<\/p>\n Women made up 52 percent of the overall electorate in 2016 \u2014 down from 53 percent in 2012. And Hillary Clinton’s 12-point margin over Trump among women was pretty darn close to the 11-point win among women that Obama claimed over Romney four years ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So it was a \u201crecord\u201d when Trump won maybe<\/em> one percent more of white voters, but when Clinton won one percent more of the women\u2019s vote, it was \u201cdarn close.\u201d Again, margin of error for both surveys (I\u2019m assuming 2012 had the same margin of error) was 4%.<\/p>\n Just 10 percent of voters said that the 2016 election was their first time voting. Of that group, Clinton won 56 percent to 40 percent over Trump. Of course, new voters often overlap with younger voters who are eligible to vote for the first time; Clinton won among 18- to 24-year-olds by 21 points.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What we don\u2019t know: How many new voters were first time eligible voters? Maybe only 2%. Of the other 8%, how many voted for Trump vs. Clinton? We don\u2019t know, so this is metric is meaningless.<\/p>\n Provided with four candidate qualities and asked which mattered most to their vote, almost 4 in 10 (39 percent) said a candidate who \u201ccan bring needed change.” (A candidate who \u201chas the right experience\u201d was the second most important character trait.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What\u2019s wrong with this? One thing is we don\u2019t know is where he got the 39% figure. It is not in the poll data he cites, which is here<\/a>. Secondly, he doesn\u2019t tell us the figure for \u201cright experience.\u201d Was it 38% and therefore well within the margin of error?<\/p>\n Finally, I must remind you: These are exit polls. Which are not very reliable<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some foolish journalists<\/a> might write entire posts that assume that the black share of the electorate was 15 percent in Ohio. In reality, the exit polls just aren\u2019t precise enough to justify making distinctions between an electorate that\u2019s 15 percent black and, say, 13 percent black.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Let\u2019s say, as the talking heads often do, we\u2019ll just leave it there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some reporters live for numbers and calculate the horse race. Literally, that seems to be their job at newspapers. One is Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post. Part of his directive (meaning I blame not him but his editors) is to declare “winners and losers” and to provide interpretation on numbers. This story is one… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[220,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1923"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1927,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions\/1927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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