Is Realignment Real?

November 4, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

What will the Democratic victory today mean for political alignment?*

At our one-week-to-go colloquium on the election last Tuesday, political scientist Dan Cassino talked about realignment. Some Presidential elections seem to turn the political map inside out. When Dan flashed from the election map of 1928 to the map of 1932, it looked almost like a magic trick. Watch closely – with a click of a mouse, the country goes from nearly all red to nearly all blue.



He repeated the effect with 1964 and 1968.


Did these elections crystallize a long-term realignment in US politics? The 1932 election was the first of five straight Presidential victories for the Democrats. The Republicans, starting in 1968 won five out of six.

But is realignment real? Certainly the realignment Karl Rove predicted – a permanent Republican majority – didn’t happen, despite the efforts of the Bush administration to turn every government department and agency into a wholly owned subsidiary of the RNC.

Now, in reading around in Brendan Nyhan’s blog , I discover that realignment itself may be a myth, existing more in the eye of the beholder than in political reality.

David Mayhew’s Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre . . . argues convincingly that so-called realignments are a product of statistical naivete and the human penchant for hyperactive pattern detection rather than a real phenomenon of American politics.

Those periods of Democratic and Republican dominance might just be the result of random variation.

In the sequence of presidential elections from 1856 through 1980, the distribution of victory “runs” by party . . . did not differ significantly from the runs of heads and tails that would be expected from coin flips. Also, in the absence of repeat major-party candidates (such as Reagan in 1984 or Bryan in 1900), a presidential election four years ago holds virtually zero predictive value for this year's election—either in predicting this year’s victorious party or this year’s party shares of the vote

Why do I find this idea so hard to accept? In sports, I’ve always scoffed at the idea “momentum.” The sports announcer saying that “after that interception in the third quarter, the Jets had the momentum” is like a roulette player talking about red gaining the momentum from black.

But voting is not a random event. Voters aren’t flipping coins. They are making choices based on their perceptions of the candidates and the current situation. People may change their ideas when circumstances change. And newer generations of voters may see the world and politics differently from older voters.

So realignment may be real, just not as sudden as the maps make it appear. Our two-party system and winner-take-all allocation of each state’s electoral vote magnify differences. Two states may differ by a fraction of a percentage point, but one will be all blue and the other all red. Maps that allowed for shades of purple would show a much more gradual shift.

*I’m writing this well before the votes have been tallied, in fact before most votes have been cast.

The Bars of a Cell

November 3, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has some information on a question I’ve been wondering about for some time:

• What are pollsters doing about sampling cell phone users
• Does it make a difference whether they are sampled?

The answers:

• It depends on the pollster
• Yes

The polls in the Cingular-y orange color include cellphones in their samples; the polls in gray do not. The cellphone polls have Obama ahead by an average of 9.4 points; the landline-only polls, 5.1 points.

I did a radio hit the other afternoon with Mark DeCamillo of California's vaunted Field Poll, which does include cellphones in their samples. He suggested to me that it was much easier to get the cooperation of cellphone users on the weekend than during the week. How come? Because most cellphone plans include free weekend minutes. Conversely, one might expect that young people are particularly difficult to reach on their landlines over the weekend, since they tend to be away from home more (especially on a weekend when some nontrivial number of them are out volunteering for Obama). So, while I haven't tried to verify this, it wouldn't surprise me if the "cellphone gap" expands over the weekend, and contracts during the week.
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Subprime Wine

November 2, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If Wall Street gives you a recession, take the subprime cabernet you wouldn’t dare sell under your usual label, call it Recession Red, and price it so that retailers can sell it for four dollars.

They also have a Recession White (chardonnay) and of course, in honor of Miles Raymond, a Merlot.

Racism Without Racists (LAPD version)

October 31, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Can you have racially discriminatory outcomes without racist motives or intent?

Los Angeles police are much more likely to stop blacks and Latinos than they are to stop whites. And when they stop someone, they are more likely to frisk or search minorities than whites. Here’s a graph from the ACLU report that collected the data. The principle author is Ian Ayres. (The full report and data set are here.)



William Bratton, chief of the LAPD says flatly, “This department does not engage in racial profiling, has not. We have significant safeguards built in to protect against that.”

I believe him. But then how do you explain the data?

One commenter at the Freakonomics blog, where Ayres aired his findings, suggests that the crucial variable is not the racism of the police but the demeanor of the suspect. Maybe minorities, especially young males, act in a way that sets off the warning bells. That’s also what the police union president seems to mean when he says that the ACLU study is “an exercise that might work on a spreadsheet at Yale, but doesn’t work on the streets of Los Angeles.”

Ah yes, the streets.  The standard cop argument is that number-crunchers don’t know what’s really going down on the street. Cops know. Cops have that sixth sense, born out of years of street experience. It tells them whether someone is “clean” or “dirty.” Maybe they can’t put it into words, maybe they can’t lay it out so that lawyers in expensive three-piece suits and judges in black robes will recognize it as probable cause. But the cops know. They know who to stop, and they know who to search.

At least, that is the conventional wisdom . . . in the precinct and to a great extent in the media. (Do we ever see a movie where a cop’s strong but intuitive suspicions are wrong?) If cops are stopping and searching more minorities, it must be because minorities are more likely to be carrying illegal drugs and weapons. And the cops can tell.

Or can they? The data also show that the police searched a lot more innocent minorities than innocent whites. Cops searching blacks were about 40% less likely to find weapons than when searching whites.


This discrepancy certainly suggests that cops, wittingly or not, are discriminating against minorities. Ayres himself seems to favor that explanation.

The department should require that all existing and new officers take the Implicit Association Test (IAT) . . It produces a measure of unconscious bias . . . . For example, the black/white IAT produces a measure of whether an individual has unconscious negative associations with photographs of African-Americans relative to photographs of whites.

But I have different explanation. Mine is also race-based, but it doesn’t assume that police are racists or that they are, consciously or unconsciously, biased against blacks and Latinos. It’s just that the cops’ street sense, their ability to read people, doesn’t work so well across racial lines. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. We know that eyewitnesses are far more reliable in identifying people of their own race than people of another race. And just as we have trouble reading faces across race lines, we may also have trouble reading behavior.

If I’m right, then same-race searches should have a higher “hit rate.” And they do, regardless of the race of the suspect.

the racial disparities in the likelihood of arrest were substantially lower when at least one of the stopping officers was the same race as the suspect.

I picture a scene where a pair of cops, one black, one white, stop a young black suspect. They question him briefly. The white cop wants to throw the kid up against the car and search him, but the black cop restrains him. If I’m writing the dialogue, I don’t have the black cop warn about racism (“Watch it, Harry. We don’t want any Rodney Kings here,”). I have him say calmly but assuredly, “Take it easy, Harry. This kid’s clean.”