Thesis Defense
When the tempest over Robert McDonnell’s thesis began, I didn’t think it would exceed the proverbial teapot. Now I’m beginning to wonder. In my wonderment is a lesson about how to identify the effects of campaign events.
The first lesson: here we are three weeks after the story broke, and only now is it possible to see a potential effect. The lesson, in other words, is “wait.” Above I’ve taken Pollster’s graph, and made the smoothing more sensitive. You can see an inflection point around September 1, when story broke. Another way to look at this is to compare the margin between the two candidates in two sets of polls: those in August and the first week of September, when McDonnell’s average margin was about 10 points, and the polls taken after the first week of September, when McDonnell’s average margin was 4.5 points. The race does seem to be narrowing.
The narrowing isn’t necessarily due to McDonnell’s thesis, of course. However, some other evidence suggests that it might. This leads to a second lesson: identify which groups are changing their minds.
Who is most likely to be turned off by conservative social attitudes, particularly with regard to gender rights and responsibilities? Probably swing voters who do not share these attitudes. And in today’s Washington Post, Anita Kumar and WaPo pollster Jon Cohen provide some evidence for this hypothesis. Compared to an August poll, the most recent WaPo poll found particularly significant losses for McDonnell among Northern Virginians and independent women.
The third lesson is: pin down the corollary attitudes that should be affected by the event in question. The Post did just that. (See here). Northern Virginians and independent women are more likely than other groups to identify McDonnell as “too conservative,” to say that his thesis makes them less likely to vote for him, and to oppose traditional gender roles.
Taken together, this evidence is still circumstantial, but it’s far better than what often exists amidst cable-newsy speculations about campaign effects.
Comments
What I want to know is how any “university,” even Regent, granted a degree based on a thesis that’s nothing more than a political party manifesto.
It’s worth a read — the assertions about the breakdown of the family and so forth are so totally undefended that I would hesitate to pass an undergrad who turned in an appropriately-sized section as a term paper.
Posted by: Paul Gowder | September 20, 2009 05:37 PM
Just a heads up: McConnell—>McDonnell.
Posted by: Jonathan | September 20, 2009 07:44 PM
John,
Do you have Mitch McConnell on the brain? He’s near by in Washington, but Bob McDonnell is running for governor in Virginia.
I’ll echo your sentiments here. The early polling in the first two weeks after this thesis story broke, indicated no change. It was only in the last week that there was any discernible tightening. And yeah, while the margin is closing, McDonnell only lost three points relative to his position in last month’s WaPo survey. This is not so much McDonnell losing ground as it is undecideds removing that tag and moving toward Deeds.
For those interested, I’ve been looking at the polling in this race since the June primary over at Frontloading HQ.
Posted by: Josh Putnam | September 20, 2009 07:45 PM
Fixed! Must have had Mitch on the mind.
Posted by: John Sides | September 20, 2009 08:29 PM
Semantic note—I don’t think you mean inflection point (there’s one of those in early July, but for September 1, your’re probably talking about a local maximum).
Posted by: Jeff M. | September 20, 2009 11:16 PM
Slightly off the topic of campaign FX, I loved this line from the Post article: “He also released a list of women who support his campaign.” I imagine this means “prominent women” or “female community leaders” but the wag in me thought, “if you can list them, maybe you are just proving their point.”
Posted by: Greg Koger | September 23, 2009 12:08 PM