Democracy in America
Media and elections American politics
Who cares whether momentum is or isn't real?
Oct 26th 2012, 18:48 by M.S.
EFFORTS by Mitt Romney's campaign to claim that he has the momentum, and corresponding reports in some media, have occasioned pushback from political scientists and others who think there is no such thing as momentum in a two-candidate race. Nate Silver writes: "In races for the United States Senate, for instance, my research suggests that a candidate who gains ground in the polls in one month (say, from August to September) is no more likely to do so during the next one (from September to October). If anything, the candidate who gains ground in the polls in one month may be more likely to lose ground the next time around." Jonathan Bernstein writes that momentum is "just a term campaigns use to excite their partisans and to fool gullible reporters into writing stories that create the illusion of momentum that never existed in the first place." John Sides notes Politico reporters first writing that Mr Romney has the momentum and then walking it back, and says journalists need to make sure they're pegging reporting to data rather than creating false narratives:
But I don't really think that Messrs Silver, Bernstein and Sides are indifferent to whether or not Politico writes that a campaign has "momentum". I think they believe that press treatment of whether or not campaigns are rising can create feedback loops to some extent. Mr Bernstein, for example, explains his thinking (my bold):
This certainly creates a debilitating feedback loop, in that the press to some extent determines the media environment which then moves the poll numbers that it reports on. So you could blame the press for feeding this recursivity. On the other hand, voters are just as much to blame. Why do voters all want to read about how many voters are going to vote one way or another? Shouldn't they concentrate on reading about the candidates and their campaigns, and then vote based on their own judgment? Why do they not only allow themselves to be influenced by the choice percentages of fellow voters, but actively seek out and prefer articles about what percentage of other voters are going to vote for whom, rather than articles about the candidates, parties and policies they're about to choose between?
I don't know. People are weird. That said, it seems to me that Mr Bernstein is right to propose that both voters and the media should understand the phenomenon of "momentum" as an effect created by the media itself. It would be more accurate for reporters to write: "Mitt Romney's numbers jumped steadily in the polls after he won the first debate. The favourable coverage from those rising poll numbers may itself continue to win over more voters, unless something happens that leads the press to tack its coverage in the other direction." But it seems unlikely that reporters will ever write this way. On related lines, I think Alec MacGillis is exactly right that the media's chief difficulty in reporting the "truth" is that the media has an overwhelming interest in writing things that are interesting, and more specifically in collaborating to create a joint campaign narrative that structures the themes we can then play off to interest the audience. You know that Adam Smith line about members of the same profession never gathering together but it results in a conspiracy against the public interest? Well, every single time anybody in the media writes anything, we're "gathering together" in a joint conversation to produce a national political narrative, which also happens to be what we make our money off of. And whether or not that conversation is structured in a manner that serves the public interest, as opposed to the interest of harvesting the dwindling advertising revenues that sustain our business model, is often rather doubtful.
When you can’t peg your analysis to any consistent metrics, you end up veering all over the place following the well-known incentive to write interesting stories. On Monday, OBAMA SURGES. On Tuesday, ROMNEY SURGES. Other media repeat the same story because pack journalism lives. And so on. In reality, nothing changed and the polling fluctuations are just sampling error.The question I have is: if there is no such thing as momentum, why does it matter whether or not candidates claim they have momentum? If making it public that your candidate has been gaining vote share (ie "has momentum") does not produce a positive feedback loop of yet more vote share, then whether or not campaigns or the press declare a candidate has momentum should make no difference. It's a question of intellectual interest for those interested in knowing the truth of the matter at this particular moment. But in a couple of weeks we will all know who actually won the 2012 presidential election, and whether or not you were right on October 26th that the Romney campaign was going to continue to gain vote share on October 27th will be a rather trivial issue. If you believe momentum does not exist, you should be uninterested in whether or not candidates are said to have it, since that claim cannot influence voters.
But I don't really think that Messrs Silver, Bernstein and Sides are indifferent to whether or not Politico writes that a campaign has "momentum". I think they believe that press treatment of whether or not campaigns are rising can create feedback loops to some extent. Mr Bernstein, for example, explains his thinking (my bold):
(S)hifts happen when the information environment strongly favors one candidate or the other—such as when a party’s (successful) convention is running, or if a candidate is perceived to have decisively won a debate. The key thing, then, is that "momentum" is only likely to last as long as information favoring one candidate continues to dominate the news. And that almost never happens, because the press usually wants to move on to a new story.I think it's pretty clear that when the press is saying a candidate "has the momentum", that counts as a favourable information environment. You can dispute how strong an effect this storyline has, as compared to event-driven storylines such as debates, speeches, economic plans, gaffes, terrorist attacks and what have you. But to the extent that the press concentrates on horse-race reporting, who has "momentum" really becomes the story. And it seems to me that in the final two weeks of the campaign, the horse-race reporting starts to dominate the campaign news. People are less and less interested in reading again about whether Mitt Romney's tax plan is mathematically impossible, and more and more interested in reading about whether he has any way to win Ohio.
This certainly creates a debilitating feedback loop, in that the press to some extent determines the media environment which then moves the poll numbers that it reports on. So you could blame the press for feeding this recursivity. On the other hand, voters are just as much to blame. Why do voters all want to read about how many voters are going to vote one way or another? Shouldn't they concentrate on reading about the candidates and their campaigns, and then vote based on their own judgment? Why do they not only allow themselves to be influenced by the choice percentages of fellow voters, but actively seek out and prefer articles about what percentage of other voters are going to vote for whom, rather than articles about the candidates, parties and policies they're about to choose between?
I don't know. People are weird. That said, it seems to me that Mr Bernstein is right to propose that both voters and the media should understand the phenomenon of "momentum" as an effect created by the media itself. It would be more accurate for reporters to write: "Mitt Romney's numbers jumped steadily in the polls after he won the first debate. The favourable coverage from those rising poll numbers may itself continue to win over more voters, unless something happens that leads the press to tack its coverage in the other direction." But it seems unlikely that reporters will ever write this way. On related lines, I think Alec MacGillis is exactly right that the media's chief difficulty in reporting the "truth" is that the media has an overwhelming interest in writing things that are interesting, and more specifically in collaborating to create a joint campaign narrative that structures the themes we can then play off to interest the audience. You know that Adam Smith line about members of the same profession never gathering together but it results in a conspiracy against the public interest? Well, every single time anybody in the media writes anything, we're "gathering together" in a joint conversation to produce a national political narrative, which also happens to be what we make our money off of. And whether or not that conversation is structured in a manner that serves the public interest, as opposed to the interest of harvesting the dwindling advertising revenues that sustain our business model, is often rather doubtful.
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