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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: US Politics 2021
« on: January 23, 2021, 07:19:57 PM »
Jubal might be interested in this one: an interview with a statistician who works for Democratic campaigns in the USA lamenting that "effect sizes are dropping" and that in today's media environment it is hard to learn by experience which actions win votes and which lose them (transcript and audio). He has a suspicion that politicians who campaigned in the 1980s and 1990s have more practical wisdom than ones who entered politics in the smartphone era because it was easier to see what effects a speech or an ad had on the people and media in their district. He mentions Vi Hart's Internet Votes problem without naming it; also context collapse (old and new media draw on everything someone from the Other Party says or does for its attack ads, so its hard to campaign one one set of issues and policies in Big Coastal City while members of your party campaign on different issues and policies in Ruritania, OK).
He does not go into the deep problems with self-reported data ("how did you vote last election?" and "if the election was held today, who would you vote for as Senator?" are self-reported data) and the questions whether its plausible that substantial amounts of voters change parties based on headline news
He talks about the paradox of 20-something universitied campaign workers and active party members typically in their 40s and 50s and 60s (and in the case of the Democrats more varied in skin tone than those workers), he does not talk about the party leadership of rich white people over 70. He also talks about the trouble that individual donors are no longer representative of the party's voting base, so policies which win donations don't always translate into votes. This helps me understand why Maciej Ceglowski shifted his focus from getting tech workers to organize to getting tech workers to donate to Democrats.
He does not go into the deep problems with self-reported data ("how did you vote last election?" and "if the election was held today, who would you vote for as Senator?" are self-reported data) and the questions whether its plausible that substantial amounts of voters change parties based on headline news
