The explanation takes on the form where Clinton won the white, rural vote and Obama won the blacks and the educated. They claim that their divisions are critical for understanding by pointing out that if only the loser had gotten so much more in these categores he or she would have won.
There is something about this type of explanation that bothered me for some time. Today I found out why when I read Crispin Sartwell's article, Polling Fuzzy Math" in the L.A.Times. His point is that regardless of how you slice up the electorate, you will be able to show that it is pivotal to the results:
But notice that the vote of any like-sized segment is equally explanatory. If most "soccer moms" or most "people ages 35 to 44" or most people "with annual incomes between $50,000 and $70,000" or most "people in the southeast corner of the state" voted for Clinton, we can say that had they voted for Obama, he would have won...... It would be nearly as scientific to rig up any segment of the population and regard it as decisive: blue-collar women, black and white, under 35; black men plus Latino women; left-handed divorcees.
Come to think of it, why do we not take the slice of "left-handed divorcees"?
Sartwell is a philosopher and knows his logic. All this slicing and dicing that news programs perform are worthless. These pundits do not use good logic. They call it demographics. It's dumb demographics.
Comment here.
