The fallacy of reading off-year results?
Just had a chance to look at a piece from yesterday in Columbia Journalism Review. You know that 24/7 coverage from the national press on the New York Congressional District 23 race? The political press has to cover something, I guess, but the CJR offers food for thought below on what assessments we can make from the off-year election results:
On Tuesday, November 3, voters around the country will go to the polls to elect officials in a variety of races. These campaigns, known as the “off-year elections” because of the absence of regularly scheduled federal contests, are mostly obscure. But a few of them—the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and (especially) Virginia, and the House race in New York’s Twenty-third Congressional District—have been endowed with broader significance; the outcomes there will be analyzed and interpreted as symbols of the national political mood and tests of “the Obama agenda.” For reasons John Sides lays out briefly here, these analyses will be mostly meaningless. The sample is too small, the factors that drive election outcomes are too complex, local conditions are too variable, and our knowledge about voters’ motivations is too limited to draw any real conclusions.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that the political press is eager to assign meaning here where none may be warranted. But what’s aggravating about this situation is that reporters will frequently acknowledge the limitations of what these off-year elections tell us about national politics—and then happily speculate about their meaning nonetheless.
