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Five Wrong Lessons From the Vox’s “11 Political Lessons From Eric Cantor’s Loss”

Political punditry – the art of expressing instant commentary on political events in an authoritative manner – has never been for the faint of heart. But the task has grown both more competitive and more public with the growth of the interverse and the proliferation of political blogs and online media. These developments have increased pundits’ access to political events and related information, which in turn makes it easier to produce informed punditry. That is all for the good. But these changes have also ratcheted up the pressure for pundits to present their punditry quickly, in interesting and easily accessible form, in order to attract and keep an audience. This sometimes comes at the cost of accuracy. That, in turn, has made it easier for smug political scientists like me, safely ensconced on a deck nestled in the hills of Vermont and protected by rabid woodchucks to, with scotch in hand, blast the latest punditry for its misreading of data/unclear logic/ faulty methodology/all-of-the-above.

Which I am about to do again.

Those of you in the twitterverse will remember that I sent out several tweets on Tuesday night, during the Cantor election implosion, criticizing what I thought were some incorrect conclusions Ezra Klein was drawing in his “11 political lessons from Eric Cantor’s loss”. Now lest anyone accuse me of hating on Ezra and The Vox, rest assured that I think he and his minions do wonderful work at their site, and under difficult circumstances, given that their stated mission is to “explain everything you need to know, in two minutes.” Moreover, he is among the best of the punditocracy at drawing on political science research as much as his available time warrants. Finally, Klein notes at the outset of this particular column that his are “provisional” thoughts. So we should cut him some slack at the outset.

With those caveats, let me direct my ire at five of Ezra’s 11 lessons, roughly in the order in which they were presented.

Lesson two is that “Republicans” are not the same as “Republican primary voters.” Klein writes, “It’s possible and even likely that the vast majority of Republicans in Virginia’s 7th District liked Cantor just fine.” Klein’s point, which he develops in a later column, is that Cantor ran a horrible campaign and failed to turn out these sympathetic Republican voters, thus sealing his loss. The problem with this claim is that, according to this PPP poll, Cantor was in fact deeply unpopular among most Republicans in the district. Keeping in mind that Tuesday’s Republican primary turnout was up by some 20,000 over when Cantor won his primary challenge two years earlier, it is not clear that his loss was because he ran a poor campaign and that the “right” voters did not come out. Clearly he had deeper problems rooted in the perception that he was out of touch with his district that a clever campaign was not going to overcome.

2:04 UPDATE. This “day after” poll of Republican voters in Cantor’s district is completely consistent with what I wrote above, and with my initial post on this issue taking Chuck Todd, Chris Cilliza and others to task for focusing on immigration as the key to Cantor’s defeat. The key finding is that “Immigration was not a major factor in Rep. Cantor’s defeat. Among those who voted for David Brat, 22% cite immigration as the main reason for their vote, while 77% cite other factors. Chief among those other factors cited by Brat voters were the idea that Cantor ‘was too focused on national politics instead of local needs,’ and that Cantor had ‘lost touch with voters.’”

Lesson three is that “Immigration reform is dead and Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes are so, so alive.” Lesson six makes a similar point: that the likelihood of a Democrat winning the presidency in 2016 went up because of Cantor’s defeat. I hope I’ve persuaded you in my previous post that, based in part on the same PPP poll, that support for immigration reform did not cause Cantor’s defeat, and that it is not clear how Republicans will interpret his loss, given that other candidates who support immigration reform, like Senator Lindsay Graham, easily fought off primary challenges. (Moreover, for what it is worth, New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer is claiming that Cantor’s ouster has made immigration reform more likely, not less.)

Similarly, the idea that an upset in one Republican House primary with 12% turnout has somehow improved Democrats presidential hopes in 2016 seems to me to be a very big reach. The logic seems to be that the more moderate Republican candidates like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush (assuming they run) will find it much harder in the aftermath of Cantor’s loss to win their party’s nomination unless they move Right by, for example, opposing immigration reform, which in turn will then make them less likely to win the general election. Or something like that. That presumes, however, that Republican candidates, their consultants, party activists and the media all draw the lesson from Cantor’s defeat that Klein and other media pundits want us to draw, which is that it was all due to immigration, and their response come 2016 will be conditioned on that one belief. But it is not clear to me that Cantor’s loss changed many priors – those who oppose immigration reform will swear he lost because he was on the fence on this issue. Others who support reform will say immigration didn’t cause Cantor’s loss. In short, I don’t see a huge shift in beliefs based on this one electoral result, once the media chatter dies down and pundits move on to other controversies. Party activists with strong partisan priors, like those who participate in primaries, tend to interpret events through their existing predispositions rather than change attitudes to conform to those events.

Klein’s lesson ten is that Cantor’s defeat by a Tea Party-backed candidate indicates that so-called “reform conservatism doesn’t have much of a constituency, even among Republican primary voters.” There is a prevailing tendency among pundits to describe the Tea Party as either the dominant force in Republican Party politics or a fringe element of looney ‘toons with dwindling influence. As I’ve written extensively before, they are neither. While the number of voters who are active in Tea Party politics is quite small, many of the movement’s core beliefs, particularly those dealing with the budget politics and the deficit, resonate with fully a quarter or more of American voters. So the Tea Party will wield some influence in the Republican nominating process, but not enough to dictate the party’s results. It probably bears repeating that in both 2008 and 2012 the Republicans chose the more moderate candidate who in both cases overcame strong challenges from the party’s Right.

The final one of Klein’s lessons I want to discuss is that Cantor’s defeat, alongside the losses suffered by other prominent Republicans in recent years like Dick Lugar and Mike Castle, “mean no Republican is safe. And that means that as rare as successful Tea Party challenges are, every elected Republican needs to guard against them.” Well, yes – but rest assured that most Republicans did not need Cantor’s loss to teach them this lesson.

Years ago, while a junior faculty member at The World’s Greatest University, a senior colleague informed me that a Ph.D. candidate had just failed his oral defense – a shocking outcome both because this student was extremely smart and because graduate students almost never failed their orals. I asked my senior colleague what the student had said when informed that he had failed. The senior colleague paused, smiled, and then replied, “He said, “I thought no one ever failed these!’ This, of course, is exactly the point.”

And that’s the real lesson here. House reelection rates are high – 95% or more – not because the incumbents don’t worry about losing. They are high because all most of them do is worry about losing. In this respect, Cantor’s loss doesn’t tell them anything new, and is not likely to change behavior that is already premised on the belief that House incumbents are, as Tom Mann puts it, “unsafe at any margin”.

Ok. Cue the woodchuck.

No, That’s Not Why Cantor Lost, and That’s Not What It Signifies

No, that’s probably not why Eric Cantor lost, and no, that’s not what we should conclude from his loss.

To all of you who were lurking in the twitterverse last night, I apologize if I seemed to take a bit too much pleasure in pushing back on the instant analysis issued by everyone from Chuck Todd to Chuck Wagon. But let me ask you: since no name-brand pundit that I know of saw Cantor’s loss coming (on this point, see Jaime Fuller’s wonderful “Holy Crap” summary!), why should you believe them when they then try to explain what it means? The answer? In the absence of actual data regarding who voted (more on that in a moment), you probably shouldn’t. Of course, that’s not going to stop pundits from trying to glean the national implications of Cantor’s loss.

So, at the risk of piling on, let me explain in a bit more detail why you should view most of the Cantor post-mortems with a great deal of skepticism. Let me begin by addressing some of the more popular but empirically vacuous bits of punditry.

1. Cantor’s loss means immigration reform is dead.

This was the initial reaction from pundits like Todd, and it is being repeated today by the Washington Post’s Chris Cilliza and others. The logic seems to be that since Cantor expressed a willingness to discuss amnesty for the children of illegal immigrants as part of an overall immigration package – a position his opponent David Brat attacked – then Cantor’s loss shows that immigration reform is a non-starter. There’s a couple of problems with this interpretation. First, it presumes that immigration reform wasn’t already dead, or at least on life support, even with Cantor in the House. Second, it’s not clear how much opposition to immigration reform in Cantor’s district had to do with Cantor’s loss. In fact, a Public Policy poll indicates that 72% of those surveyed in Cantor’s district strongly or somewhat support the elements of a bipartisan immigration reform bill. That support includes 70% of Republicans who responded to the survey, and 73% of independents.

2. Cantor’s loss is good news for Hillary Clinton/bad news for Marco Rubio/Jeb Bush/fill in the name of moderate Republican presidential candidate.

Ezra Klein, among many others, is pushing this line as one of his 11 lessons to draw from Cantor’s defeat. (Note: as I tweeted at length last night, my view is that at least 5 of Klein’s lessons are of dubious empirical validity.) But it is extremely misleading to draw national implications from one House primary race. We might just as well conclude that Lindsey (I support immigration reform) Graham’s Senate primary win suggests moderate Republicans are poised to do well in 2016. The fact is that you shouldn’t draw any implications regarding the 2016 presidential race from an outcome based on about 12% turnout in a single House district.

3. Cantor’s loss shows money can’t buy elections.

It is true that Cantor vastly outraised and outspent Brat by some 5-to1. But about 39% of Cantor’s money came from PACs, which is not unusual for someone occupying a leadership position, and only 2% (about $95,000) from small contributors. In contrast, Brat received no PAC money, but drew 33% ($65,000) of his contributions from small donors. As my colleague Bert Johnson is fond of pointing out, small contributors tend to be activists with strong partisan preferences. In addition, David Levinthal, using financial disclosure forms, indicates that only 12% of Cantor’s money came from within his district. So, the effective disparity in campaign contributions may not be as great as the gross spending numbers suggest.

4. Cantor’s loss means all Republican establishment candidates, particular in leadership positions, are vulnerable to Tea Party challengers.

As Klein asserts, “These losses mean no Republican is safe.” Presumably the pundits are referring to people like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, or Senator Lindsay (I support immigration reform) Graham, who both easily beat back Tea Party challenges? Keep in mind as well that two weeks ago these same pundits were explaining how the Republican establishment had figured out how to beat Tea Party-backed candidates!

I could go on, but I hope you see my point. What all these instant analyses have in common is a desire to draw national implications from a local race that, in the absence of data to the contrary, likely turned primarily on local constituent concerns. This tendency to draw sweeping conclusions from limited data is an unfortunate characteristic of today’s social-media driven punditry. That strategy may increase readership, but often at the expense of getting the story right.

So why did Cantor lose? We know from the PPP poll I cited above that he was not very popular in his district; only 43% of Republicans and 23% of independents approved of him, compared to 49% and 66% expressing disapproval, respectively. It is also the case that the House Republican leadership was not very popular (41% approval among Republicans, and only 16% among independents). Finally, we know turnout was up from the Republican primary in 2012 (a presidential election year) by about 20,000 voters according to Martina Berger, in an open-primary state in which there was no Democratic primary in Cantor’s district, so it is likely that independents participated in the Republican primary to a greater degree than might be expected. I hesitate to say much more about the composition of yesterday’s electorate without more data, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Cantor lost primarily because many voters viewed him as too concerned with leadership issues and thus out of touch with local district concerns. That’s not very earthshattering, and it is disappointing to those seeking some deeper meaning in Cantor’s defeat. But sometimes the simplest explanations are the best. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, and until more data comes in, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Update 1:16. The WashingtonPost is doubling down on the immigration angle here and dismissing the polling data I cited by saying that the poll doesn’t survey only Republicans. Of course, it does have results for Republicans but to find them you have to actually read the poll which, evidently, the WaPo writers find too time consuming. And, of course, the Virginia primary is open to anyone regardless of partisan affiliation, so it’s useful to know the opinions of non-Republicans as well. Now, it may be, as the writer would have us believe, that turnout was dominated by the 23% who opposed immigration reform rather than the 70+% who supported it. But you can’t simply assert that this was the case without supporting evidence.

Update 1:56. I haven’t said much about whether crossover voting by Democrats along with independents contributed to Cantor’s defeat (but see this!) However, an initial analysis by Michael McDonald and by Scott Clement suggests the evidence doesn’t support the crossover voting thesis, although in the absence of exit polls it is hard to tell conclusively.

In Defense of Nate Silver (Sort Of)

Nate Silver’s new 538 website opened last week to generally lackluster reviews. “It just isn’t working,” according to Tyler Cowens. Paul Krugman agrees: “I’m sorry to say that I had the same reaction. Here’s hoping that Nate Silver and company up their game, soon.” Ryan Cooper is more blunt: “To summarize: it’s terrible.” What do all these critics find so objectionable?

One major criticism is that the problems and related questions that dominate the news, particularly in the political arena, are not always amenable to the type of unrelenting statistical analysis that Silver and his minions emphasize. As the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier puts it, “Many of the issues that we debate are not issues of fact but issues of value. There is no numerical answer to the question of whether men should be allowed to marry men, and the question of whether the government should help the weak, and the question of whether we should intervene against genocide.”

Related to this is a fear that Silver’s claim that he just does analysis, and not advocacy, masks the truth that his punditry is no more bias free than that of any other pundit. As Cooper puts it, “In an attempt to focus solely on objective analysis, Silver is ignoring one of the hardest-won journalistic lessons of the last decade — there is no such thing as ideology-free journalism.”

I confess that I find both objections less than compelling. To begin, no political scientist that I know would disagree with Wieseltier’s observation regarding the fact-value distinction. Indeed, in his classic study of decisionmaking in organizations, the late, great Herbert Simon (he won a Nobel Prize for his study of decisionmaking) observed, “It is a fundamental premise of this study that ethical terms are not completely reducible to factual terms.” But, Simon cautioned, to assert that there may be an ethical component to an administrator’s decisions is not to say that those decisions involve only ethical elements. Put another way, political scientists may not be able to tell voters whether electing Barack Obama over Mitt Romney is a better (or worse) outcome for the nation, or the world. But we can say something about what the determinants of the presidential vote are likely to be, and what election outcome it is likely to produce. If I understand Silver correctly, that’s all he and his team are trying to do at this new website. Should government help the weak? I doubt Silver knows the answer. But he might be able to tell us if government can help the weak.

Similarly, I doubt that Silver believes he views his analyses through a value-free ideological lens. Anyone who read his FiveThirtyEight column at the New York Times understands what Silver’s political views are. But rather than compensating for one’s implicit biases, political or otherwise, by – as Cooper advocates – “wear[ing] your ideology on your sleeve” I’d argue instead that there is merit in trying very hard to prevent those biases from contaminating one’s analysis. One way to do so is to be explicit about the theoretical and methodological assumptions built into one’s analysis. This approach differs from, and is more useful, than analysis that is explicitly harnessed to the cause of advocacy. There is something to be said for disciplined thinking designed to discover underlying truths, no matter how inconvenient. And that means not only clarifying the assumptions built into one’s analysis – it also means trying to specify how certain one is about one’s conclusions. How confident am I in my prediction that Obama will beat Romney?

It is on this last point, I think, that I come closest to agreeing with Silver’s critics like Krugman, who worry that without explicit theorizing, Silver’s data-driven research may tell us less than we think. As Krugman writes: “But you can’t be an effective fox just by letting the data speak for itself — because it never does. You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking. If you think the data are speaking for themselves, what you’re really doing is implicit theorizing, which is a really bad idea (because you can’t test your assumptions if you don’t even know what you’re assuming.)”

Krugman echoes a point I’ve made before about Silver’s work: that unlike political scientists, he is not fully transparent about what goes into his analyses, such as his presidential forecast models. Without a glimpse at the moving parts, we can’t be sure what we are learning. It is one thing to say that Obama will win the Electoral College vote, but we need a theory to understand why he won that vote. In Silver’s defense, however, he is not pretending to be a political scientist – and why should he? He has a wider audience and (presumably) earns more money, than any political scientist I know. If he wants to hide the ingredients that go into his “special” forecast brew in order to make it appear more satisfying (and more original!), I say more power to him. As a career move, it certainly has served him well to this point.

I confess that I believe some of the carping by pundits regarding Silver’s website is a reaction to his contrarian and what some perceive to be condescending attitude toward the work of mainstream journalists whose writings grace the major newspaper op-ed pages. In that vein, here Silver is describing how his new site differs from the work of the best known columnists: “Uhhhh, you know … the op-ed columnists at the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are probably the most hedgehog-like people. They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can kind of auto-script it, basically.”

It is true that Silver has always presented his work with a certain “Look Ma, no hands!” flair that in some cases overstates the novelty, and effectiveness, of what he is doing. (See, for instance, how his model stacks up to political scientists’ when it comes to forecasting the last midterm elections.) He has made a living by accentuating – exaggerating? – the difference between his data-driven analyses and what he sees as the hedgehog-like tendencies of more conventional columnists. I understand why columnists resent Silver’s tone. (I confess that my tone when criticizing pundits has sometimes crossed that line as well!) But I also think that he’s not entirely incorrect in his criticisms of conventional punditry. Too often it does harness data – if it uses data at all – to the cause of advocacy.

The bottom line? If you want a data-based take on the likely outcome of political events, like the upcoming midterm elections, Silver’s site is probably as good as any. (And here I would recommend the work of Harry Enten at Silver’s site). But if you want to understand why those outcomes occur, there are better places to start.

Of course, if you want your political analysis spiced up with a dose of the plucky, in-your-face speak-truth-to-power attitude exemplified by this young analyst, then you’ve come to the right place:

Kristof, Gerrymandering and Polarization: The Limits of Public Intellectuals

Not surprisingly, a number of scholars pushed back against the Nick Kristof column that I blogged about in my previous post, echoing many of the points that I made (see here and here and here and here and this Instagram and, of course, this wonderful parody). The general consensus (but see here!) is that Kristof doesn’t fully appreciate the growing frequency with which political scientists are using social media, in addition to more traditional news outlets, to make their research much more accessible to journalists, pundits and, for that matter, the general public. This Presidential Power blog is case in point! At the same time, he is perhaps less sensitive to how the professional incentives that motivate political scientists’ choice of research topics and methods differ from those that influence how Kristof’s “public intellectuals” go about their jobs. Most notably, political scientists are engaged in a collective enterprise in which their research must pass muster with their peers through, ideally, a process of blind review. That means the research must be thorough, theoretically explicit and empirically grounded. This process of research and review often takes considerable time – months or years in the case of a book. Moreover, it is not enough to assert that our research helps explain some pattern of behavior or political outcome. It should also be clear about how confident we are that we understand that relationship or outcome. In short, political scientists live in a probabilistic world, in which what we think we know is usually conditional and is often revised in light of additional research.

This means by nature we tend to recoil from the hyperconfident and often more entertaining assertions that are the pundits and bloggers’ stock in trade. Moreover, we are usually better at rejecting pundits’ sweeping assertions than we are in replacing them with our own equally sweeping (and empirically validated we hope!) generalizations. To illustrate, consider what political scientists think they know about the relationship between gerrymandering and partisan polarization in Congress, compared to what I think many (most?) journalists believe. In my last post, while listing several assumptions embedded in conventional media reporting that I believe do not have strong empirical support, I noted that political scientists have not found persuasive evidence that gerrymandering causes polarization. In response, Blake Hounshell (who is Politico Magazine’s deputy editor)* tweeted: “I’m by no means anti-intellectual but am unpersuaded by many of these alleged ‘debunkings’….I mean gerrymandering doesn’t lead to polarization? Defies all logic.”

And, in Blake’s defense, it does make intuitive sense that gerrymandering by state legislatures in the process of redrawing congressional district lines should contribute to partisan polarization. If a state legislature controlled by a party is successful in redrawing district lines to reward fellow partisans running for Congress, then there will be less competitive elections, which lead to a more partisan outcome which translates into a more polarized Congress. For political scientists, however, having an intuitively plausible theory is only the first step in the research process. As it turns out when they look at the empirical evidence, political scientists generally find that gerrymandering of this type contributes very little to the polarization we see in Congress today. Rather than summarize a body of research, a couple of brief counterfactuals will help illustrate the broader findings. First, in states that encompass a single House district, like my home state of Vermont, gerrymandering is obviously not a factor, and yet we find that the voting records of representatives in these states are becoming more ideologically extreme as well. To illustrate, compare the House voting records of Jim Jeffords, who represented Vermont in the House from 1975-89 with that of Bernie Sanders, who took office in 1992! Second, as this graph shows, it is clear that voting in the Senate has become as polarized as the House across the same time period, even though redistricting doesn’t affect Senate representation.

These two examples suggest that gerrymandering may not be the primary cause of partisan polarization. When empirical findings don’t comport with theory, it is makes sense to revisit the assumptions underlying that theory. In this vein, upon further reflection it becomes clear that there are geographic and political limits to the ability and willingness of partisan legislators to draw district lines in ways that contribute to their partisan advantage in the House. First, court rulings mandating that congressional districts must adhere to some admittedly ambiguous standards of contiguity and compactness, in addition to having the same population size, eliminate some of the more extreme shapes these districts might take in the name of partisan advantage. Second, residential patterns show that Democrats are more likely to be bunched up in urban areas, in contrast to the more widely dispersed Republican voters, which again limits how far one can go to advantage one party by drawing partisan districts of equal population size. Third, efforts to maximize a party’s number of likely seats through gerrymandering may also create opposition-party controlled districts that are less competitive and thus that strengthen the incumbency advantage of the opposition legislators. This also means that the majority party can be more susceptible to getting swamped in electoral waves – something party leaders must keep in mind when pushing redistricting plans. For all these reasons (and others), we need to be careful in assuming that gerrymandering is the primary cause, or even an important cause, of political polarization in Congress today.

Note that, if accurate, this line of research suggests that some common reform proposals floated by pundits and bloggers, such as placing “neutral” commissions, judges or even computers in charge of redistricting, are not likely to make a huge dent in the degree of polarization afflicting Congress today. Of course, to say that pundits overstate the impact of gerrymandering on polarization is not to say the two have no relation. Sean Theriault estimates, if I recall correctly, that redistricting may contribute about 10% to the level of polarization in the House since 1973, primarily through the creation of new congressional districts. However, the prevailing view among political scientists is that when it comes to explaining partisan polarization in Congress, other factors are likely much more important.

I should add that I am by no means the first to suggest that gerrymandering is not a significant cause of partisan polarization – by my count it has been the subject of at least a half a dozen blogs posts just in the last year by my professional colleagues, and yet despite these efforts it remains a staple of mainstream punditry. This is another reason why I am skeptical of the benefits that will accrue by heeding Kristof’s call for political scientists to become more active in mainstream punditry. In cases when political scientists have engaged in public discussions, such as trying to debunk efforts to link gerrymandering and polarization, it is not clear we have had much impact. And that may say more about the incentives motivating what journalists report than it does about any failure of political scientists to engage them.

*My apologies – an earlier version of this post misspelled Blake Hounshell’s last name, and didn’t fully identify where he works.

Why Nicholas Kristof Is Wrong About Political Science

It took Nick Kristof’s latest New York Times screed….er… op-ed piece to get me to break my self-imposed blogging hiatus. In yesterday’s column, Kristof rehashed some by now all-too-familiar critiques of the political science profession. (Full disclosure: I am a card-carrying member of that profession!) Kristof’s main point is to lament the declining influence of the “public intellectual” within the political realm – a decline he attributes in part to political scientists’ increasing reliance on quantitative methods as a tool for conducting research. If prediction is the sine qua non of a real science, then political science, despite (or because of!) the use of quantitative methods, is a miserable failure according to Kristof. Witness the discipline’s conspicuous failure to anticipate the recent “Arab spring”. More generally, Kristof argues that the discipline’s increasing reliance on statistics makes its research much less accessible to the layperson, which again contributes to the declining role of the public intellectual. Kristof also decries the decline in the number of articles in the discipline’s flagship journal the American Political Science Review that contain policy prescriptions.

I’ve dealt with some of these critiques before, focusing in particular on the role of forecasting as a means of assessing the credibility of the discipline, so I won’t rehash my comments here. (My basic point in the previous post is that political scientists are, in fact, pretty good forecasters, and getting better.) But it seems to me that Kristof is completely wrong about the decline of the “public intellectual” – if anything, the increasing use of social media, including numerous blogs and twitter feeds, has raised political scientists’ public profile to its highest level ever, a point that Erik Voeten also makes over at the Monkey Cage website. (That website, not incidentally, is a prime example of political scientists’ disseminating their research in easily accessible terms to a very wide readership.) Indeed, I could point to a dozen such sites that I routinely access to find out what my colleagues’ research says about current events. It was the reason I started this blog more than five years ago – to expose readers to what scholars have learned about the exercise of presidential power in all its manifestations.

As for the decline in policy prescription – I would argue that this is a sign of the discipline’s maturity. As we’ve developed a better understanding of the complexity of the political world we are less prone to jumping in with policy prescriptions that may be premised on faulty assumptions, incomplete testing or little-to-no data. This caution is, in my view, to be preferred to the type of almost daily and often questionable policy prescriptions one finds in op ed columns by individuals like columnist Paul Krugman, who Kristof cites as an exemplar of a public intellectual. How often have we heard columnists proclaim, for instance, that gerrymandering leads to polarized politics? Or that campaign contributions can buy votes? Or that Americans are increasingly polarized along cultural issues? Or that Romney’s gaffes cost him the 2012 presidential election? These are all claims commonly made by Kristof’s “public intellectuals” but which political scientists have spent considerable time debunking.

In my view, the biggest mistake Kristof makes in his column is to characterize academics as falling within one of two categories – those public intellectuals ( or “rebels”!) who can speak to the masses about large, important issues, and the stats geeks who publish articles in obscure journals, written in indecipherable language and based on overly complex methods that few people can understand. Contrary to Kristof’s claim that “academics seeking tenure must encode their insights into turgid prose”, the tenure process with which I am familiar rewards those academics who demonstrate clear thinking and accessible research methods. Similarly, the very best doctoral programs within political science expose Ph.D. candidates to a range of methods, both quantitative and qualitative, so that these students understand not only what these methods can and cannot do, but also how to interpret and present their results in ways that are accessible to others. And it is not just academics who benefit from this training. Here at Middlebury College at the undergraduate level, we are exposing an increasing number of our political science majors to methods training, including but not limited to basic statistics, so that when they go into the real world, they are prepared to think critically about the findings, claims and counterclaims pushed forward not just by political scientists in blogs and journal articles, but also the opinions proclaimed by columnists like Krugman and Kristof.

And now, I have to go edit my piece on the 2012 presidential election, which argues – drawing in part on basic statistics – that Obama won reelection because of the economy, and not despite it. Take that, Nick Kristof!