Please Don't Tell Me What the MA Special Election "Means"
Let me lightly revise and expand my post from just before the NJ and VA gubernatorial elections in 2009.
Be prepared. You will see the pundits hold forth on what the Massachusetts special election “means” for the Republicans, the Democrats, Obama, Curt Schilling, and Lord knows what else.
The correct answer will be: I don’t know. This election could turn on national politics. It could turn on local factors and issues. It could turn on both, although we won’t know how important each was. Who wins can’t tell us why they won. And there won’t be an exit poll, which would give us only the most tentative interpretation anyway.
This is why I’ve struggled to write something lucid about this campaign. Yes, there’s been a striking trend in Brown’s favor. But we have no conclusive evidence as to what is driving this trend, just as we will not have any evidence about why he or Coakley won. My rank speculation is no better than anyone else’s.
The problem with speculating about the meaning of elections is that such speculation often devolves into a discussion of “optics,” “narrative” and other woolly terms. But the “narrative” only exists when commentators construct it. It’s not some independent entity that is magically affected by election outcomes. To talk about how the MA election affects some “narrative” is like saying, “The MA election affects how I am talking about the effect of the MA election.” Nor is it clear if changes in narrative have tangible consequences for things that actually matter — like presidential approval, upcoming elections, etc.
There is only one truly significant potential consequence of the MA race, and that’s what having 59 as opposed to 60 Senators will do to the prospects for certain pieces of legislation, notably health care reform.
Comments
The coefficients on the three dummy variables “not knowing who Kurt Schilling is,” “mocking the idea of shaking hands outside of Fenway Park,” and “misspelling Massachusetts in one of your TV ads,” have to be negative. But we have very little idea of their magnitudes.
Posted by: Jonathan Ladd | January 19, 2010 03:10 PM
Special elections make me glad I don’t watch TV for my news. I can’t afford to buy a new TV because I threw my remote at the last one in anger over a fantastically stupid analysis on CNN.
Posted by: Matt Jarvis | January 19, 2010 03:10 PM
John, aren’t these “narratives” simply hypotheses? Fishing around without evidence for possible explanation We are in the hypothesis generation phase. Bad campaigning (my preferred hypothesis), appealing Republican, anti-obama sentiment etc. The problem is when a particular unsupported hypothesis become THE narrative
Posted by: Daniel Ziblatt | January 19, 2010 03:53 PM
And, Jon, we ding you for not being able to spell “Curt Schilling.” Please send your family’s season tickets to a real fan. :)
Posted by: Adam Berinsky | January 19, 2010 07:34 PM
Daniel: I agree that narratives are hypotheses. See my post here on that point:
http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/01/is_marc_ambinder_a_hater.html
But you hit on the problem: hypotheses quickly crystallize into conventional wisdom, without the benefit of actual evidence.
Posted by: John Sides | January 19, 2010 09:41 PM
Adam, wow, that’s bad. I guess I won’t be running for Senate from MA anytime soon.
Posted by: Jonathan Ladd | January 19, 2010 11:18 PM
For those of us who are interested in policy, the last meaning you suggest is not only the only one that is clearly measurable, but also the only one that really matters in the end. (Perhaps that’s why I’m interested in policy?) We still don’t know what it is — but we’re going to find out in very short order.
Posted by: Julie Lynch | January 20, 2010 08:04 AM
It’s true that the commentators are talking about the narrative without taking responsibility for being part of its construction, which is maddening. The press typically tries to avoid responsibility in this way, often resorting to the passive voice, e.g. “questions are being asked…”
Yet that doesn’t mean it’s not very consequential what “lessons” political elites take away from events like this, whether or not we believe they are valid ones.
Much of what Obama and the Democratic leaders did in the past year is based on a certain reading of the failure of the Clinton health care plan and the alleged political consequences thereof. The Democrats have basically backed off of gun control, b/c of a contestable view that it’s a bad issue and hurt Al Gore in 2000 etc.
So if we think the Massachusetts result is really a product of the economy and a differential in candidate quality and the narrative says “the people want to cut the deficit and leave health care alone” that is very consequential. There is actually a small literature about the interpretation of elections. I recommend a dated JOP article by Marjorie Hershey and the Myth of the Mandate by Dahl (which is more normative).
Posted by: David Karol | January 20, 2010 01:26 PM