My Cowardly Ways

Time to Revisit My Ambitious and Outrageous Claims

In The Good, the Bad, and the Delusional, How to get Voters, the Gadfly Way, and Just Who is Voting for Who, I made some ambitious claims about how voters think, how they form, and how they line up behind their candidates. Considering this was all thought up when I had too much coffee, I should warn you of what looks suspicious to even me and how I may have gotten it wrong.

My Bad Science

I should not be relying on one source, Real Clear Politics. That it is the most respected poll aggregator instead of a poll gives me some cover, but I should be using other poll aggregator. Well, I don't get paid for this and just don't have that kind of time. Though, I do every now and then spot check the others to see if I'm on the right track.

My Cowardly Qualifications

Now, I have to point out my cowardice. You may have noticed that I peppered those posts with phrases link "usually", "almost", and "often". This is me covering my but.

I'm talking about human nature, and you never want to be absolutist when talking about people. A few well placed "some" and "almost" is completely warranted and in fact, accurate. Of course, they also give me an out when exceptions are pointed out. "I did say almost".

The problem was that I knew I was about to talk about the Trump vs Clinton election, and if anyone was going to make people change their minds about politics, it would be Trump. In particular, he's challenging the ability for people to keep their mindset and not vote Third Party (OK, maybe Clinton has something to do with that last one).

So, as I go into their coalitions, if I seem to be contradicting my previous post, I will hide behind my cowardly qualifications.

In fact, the entire post it one big cowardly qualification.

My Cowardly Correction

I'll let you in on a secret, Sometimes I go back and change posts. Most of the time it's correcting grammar and re-writing clunky or confusing sentences. Often, I make 'marketing' changes, like adding a picture, that make the post more appealing on Twitter or likely to be found in a search engine.

But sometimes, I re-write what I got wrong. And no one will ever know. Oh wait, I just told you. I'm making the assumptions that the posts will live in infamy, and what to make sure I'm disparaged for the best version of my ideas. If I relevant in a future post, I then put an endnote informing the correction for the multitudes that have read the post before the cowardly correction.

And in the future, I'll probably add cowardly corrections to this post, as well.

Thought versus Behavior

By using mindset, I'm trying to infer voting behavior from how the voters think. However, by looking at polling, I'm trying to infer how they think from how they answer polls (behavior). If that seems shady, it is, so just consider this a new cowardly qualification.

But should we define mindset by how the effectively behave or by how we believe they think. We have to do both, In the end, I am trying to guess what arguments and events will sway their vote. By looking at the veracity of the willingness to support a candidate (High and Low points in the polls) we can narrow the mindsets. By looking at the circumstances of when the change, I can narrow the mindset. Note that in this part of the analysis, you are relying on my judgment and ability to do armchair psychology. However, how is that different from anyone else talking about politics.

Once I have an estimates of the what I believe the mindsets are, you will see me redefine them to the effective mindsets (their behavior). In fact, I will often rename them. This gives me a better language to link their behavior.

Third Party Voting

Where I have probably made the most error is on the likelihood of Third Party voting. In my cowardly manner I have retroactively edited these posts, but even still I might be underestimating their impact.

The conflict is that most voters know that voting Third Party is equivalent to not voting, so we can treat them as the same. However, I have not fully considered the psychological component. Even, though they know a Third Party vote might be wasted, but voting that way lets them deal with conflicted feeling of not voting and not having to vote for candidates they don't like.

Changing Mindsets

I've been clear on stating that mindsets don't (usually) change once they form. This appears to be common sense. Changing your view on politics is going to be harder to change than how they feel about an issues or a candidate.

But maybe changing mindsets is easier than I first outlined, especially in a year when political conventions and wisdom are being up ended. A Trump candidacy is likely to lead to some party realignment regardless of whether he wins or not. Party realignment definitely means mindsets are changing. If the realignment is occurring during the election then mindsets are realigning as well.

This is more problematic than just me having to correct a few definitions. If mindsets aren't stable then attempts to proportion them between candidates becomes unreliable. Accuracy can be increased by waiting until later in the election, but that has an adverse affect. Less data decreases data.

And What About the Jebs

Consider disaffected republicans like Jeb Bush. He honestly believes (and I agree with him) that Trump will destroy the Republican party, so with a Partisan mindset he could correctly vote NOT vote for his candidate. However, if he was resolved to his Partisan mindset, he would vote for Clinton, but he still can't go that far. In pure mindset terms, he's a demoralized Republican Partisan that needs to be motivated to vote for the Democratic candidate. How the heck, do I measure something like that?

If Trump could motivate Jeb to vote for him, I could return him back to a Partisan. Yeah, I don't see that happening, and I'm sure Jeb doesn't either.

We could say Jeb's become a Republican Pragmatist or Idealist but that would assume Trump could offer some policy or appointments that could win Jeb's vote. Yeah right.

We could say Jeb's is not part of the electorate any more, but that would assume he remains quiet the rest of the election. So far, he hasn't. Go Jeb.

I'm forced to call him a Clinton Idealist (Excitable), who is very easily demoralized. Well, he is demoralized, and who could blame him. We just have to remember that he's idealistic about non-Democratic goals. This is not completely crazy. Disaffected Republicans like him have voiced hopes since her speech at the DNC that she might offer some policies that could win her vote.

For now, I'm going to refer to these voters as 'Jebs' and treat them as a subgroup of Excitables. I'm adding to my collection of cowardly qualifications and reserve the right to shift Jebs to another group.

Weird huh.

Beware of Labor Day

I've mention before that most political professionals believe the majority of voters don't pay attention until after Labor Day. Polling also changes because more switch to calculating 'likely voters'. All, this means I'll have to make some cowardly corrections eventually. Now you know why I wrote this post. I intend to refer to it, cowardly..

In fact, one point I've entirely missed. As the saying goes, "there's no sign like losing".  I've completed discounted what happens if a candidate starts to clearly lose. Once that starts looking clear, the rationale of all but Delusionals goes away drastically reducing the candidates coalitions. The effect of motivation mostly covers this effect, but in rare cases, like 'Jebs', this could even push Partisans and Partisan-Pragmatics to vote against the candidate. The races has to be towards the end, however, when it looks like the candidate can't recover. So, this would usually happen after Labor Day.

Now we see why there is so much talk about "October surprises". If your campaign as some information that harms your opponent, you wait as long as you can. Otherwise, your opponent could have time to recover.