Shorthand for Nothing

So, here’s something that probably won’t surprise anyone:

I don’t care what new movies are coming out.

It has nothing to do with whether or not I think they all suck these days. I don’t even know what’s coming out half the time, unless I happen to see a commercial or an ad. Sometimes I will be excited about a new movie, but it’s only because it would interest me regardless. I’d rather it be already out and something I could watch at home with a few friends.

I don’t consume all the new TV shows coming out. I have a hard time keeping up with new episodes on the very few that I do watch on TV as opposed to on Hulu or whatever. I don’t comb bestseller lists for upcoming novels, nor do I really watch new bands in the hopes of finding something to add to my collection. I try, as well as I can, to consume things which are good, whenever they were released. If it’s a band that’s releasing new material, or a movie that might be coming out in theaters soon, that’s a great bonus. But I try to focus on finding things which are good.

The weird thing, to me, is this seems to be outside of mainstream consumption habits. Most people seem to find a way to watch all the new TV series and catch all the new movies and know about all the new music (I have never met someone who knows about all the new books out there, though, which may be why print is dying). It is never so striking, to me, as looking at a music collection several times larger than my own. It is not uncommon to find that they share a few bands with me, but it is uncommon for them to be more than passingly familiar with the work of those bands. They know a song or two, usually the obvious singles, and the rest is a vague, unexplored mystery to them.

I don’t think I could live in this world of constantly being fed what is new, digesting it, and then immediately hungering for more. Does it even last? When I listen to an album enough for it to become one of my favorites, it remains there. I still go back and listen to all of them fairly regularly. I sometimes get the feeling that after someone drops ten dollars on an album, they listen to it once and then never go back again. I couldn’t do that.

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I really should have written this when it was still relevant, but here it goes.

A number of conservatives make no secret about blaming Barack Obama’s victory in the election on media bias. John McCain’s campaign got only negative coverage, where Obama only got positive coverage. I’m not going to dispute their claim, though I disagree with it. Let’s assume it’s true: the press was exceptionally positive towards Obama and exceptionally negative towards McCain. What could this mean/why could this be? The way I see it, there are four options:

• Barack Obama is legitimately better candidate than John McCain, and the media is merely reflecting the realities of the situation.
• Barack Obama is roughly on par with John McCain in terms of his ability to lead the country or win votes, but he ran a better, cleaner campaign.
• Barack Obama is roughly on par with John McCain in terms of his ability to lead the country or win votes, but the media liked him better so he was given a free pass and remained positive in the public perception.
• Barack Obama is a worse candidate than John McCain, but a vast media conspiracy concealed these obvious truths, and tricked the American public into voting for him.

I tend to favor one of the first two options. Though I will acknowledge that Obama was something of a media darling during the summer months, he had already weathered some pretty unpleasant media scandals during the primaries. And let’s face it: he has a compelling narrative.

Obama had people fired up about him irrespective of the media. He had massive support on the internet, and a terrifyingly efficient grassroots political machine.

Those who are inclined to favor the latter two options, I have two words for you: John Kerry. There is no way the media gave Bush more favorable attention than McCain in this election. He was pretty universally reviled at the time.

But even besides that, look at the record turnouts among young voters. If the media is biased, it has always been biased. Something about Barack Obama’s campaign made him popular among a generation of people that is largely disaffected with politics.

And he definitely ran a better campaign to reach these people. He brought technology into politics, in a prominent way. There were internet-based campaigns, and stories written about how internet-based politics were the way of the future. People received updates on text messages. His transition website uses some very web 2.0 technologies. John McCain was not a bad candidate, but his campaign, especially in comparison to that of Barack Obama, made him unelectable. It ruined his brand. It made him look like a bad candidate. He did it to himself, and the electorate responded.

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I’m not a statistician, or even a math student. But a number of people seem to not know how to read polls, or how to understand them. Some of this is due to a lack of understanding about methodology–some of it due to paying more attention to the headlines than the polling data itself. So here is a friendly guide.

First: a poll usually contains somewhere between 1000 and 3000 respondents, randomly selected so they can get a representative sample. Pollsters work very hard to try to remove any sort of systemic bias, both from their methodology and their results. For politics, they will often assign a party weighting system–that is, if more Americans identify as liberal than conservative, they will weight the results so it gives a reflection of that.

I don’t know the actual details behind this–that is what the pollsters are for. But let’s look at what I do know.

1. 1000-3000 is not the entirety of the American population. There will be errors. Some places have a house effect towards one candidate–this is not because the pollsters are biased, it is because their methodology isn’t working.
2. Nevertheless, the results are remarkably stable and show clear trending over the course of an election. The pollsters are evidently doing something right.
3. This is true despite the fact you occasionally end up with an outlier.

But let’s look more into how to read the polls. It is generally not the best idea to simply pick a pollster and rely exclusively on that one. So the first step in reading the polls is to read a number of them. Gallup is good, Rasmussen is good, they are both showing different numbers. Instead of assuming one of them is wrong and the other is right, perhaps you should consider taking them both into consideration? The more data, the better. If there is a legitimate trend, it will be reflected in multiple polls. CNN even conducts a “poll of polls” to get a better idea of the overall mood. And of course, fivethirtyeight.com, pollster.com, and realclearpolitics.com also perform poll aggregations (and include state polls).

But it’s also really tempting to assume, based on a poll’s numbers, that it is because of something your beloved candidate did or didn’t do. Guessing the motivations of the American public is tricky at best, so I recommend against this, but if you really want to see why there’s a change, look at some of the other numbers, and compare them to what they were earlier. Many pollsters report on a number of factors. They might ask if you feel confident or content that the economy will get back on the right track if this candidate wins. They might ask if you feel he is knowledgeable, or ready to lead, or understands your needs. They might ask if you feel confident that if he is elected the nation will have a good, capable leader.

These numbers are not reflected in the topline “Obama is up by eight points” data–but it can give you a good indication of a number of things. Are the people afraid of Obama? Is he likely to lose supporters? Is McCain’s negative campaigning having the desired effect? Is the race tightening because of that? Is the candidate improving his positive view among the American public, or are they increasingly worried about him?

These numbers make up the difference between a hesitant “I support John McCain” and an enthusiastic “I support John McCain.” You have been seeing the race tighten in the past few days, but the public doesn’t seem more optimistic about John McCain as president. I suspect what you’re seeing is a number of undecideds seeing that McCain is about to lose and deciding they are going to support him. They just aren’t happy about it.

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MSNBC has an article about how Barack Obama misrepresented some of Sarah Palin’s comments about negative campaigning. The very first comment: “You people are ridiculous with your headlines. Palin clearly criticized the robo-calls.” The poster’s name is “MSM is biased.” This confuses me. I’m used to accusations of bias, of course–Fox is conservative, MSNBC is liberal, and as some people would have it, everyone that isn’t Fox is liberal–but I’m not sure I ever expected to see someone accuse MSNBC of conservative bias.

Perhaps this is just a case of the hostile media effect. But that is most prominent in a controlled study–and by and large the media is pretty friendly with Obama. What I think this is about, really, is the danger of getting your news from Daily Kos or Huffington Post (or, on the other hand, WorldNetDaily or all those other fun Republican places). Research your news, please.

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