The Dog Ate My Homework

Justifications for the Republicans’ failure this week have been coming thick and fast, but I think I like this one best of all: their computers weren’t working. Their candidate, ideology, policies, and strategy would all have been fine if it hadn’t been for those darn computers messing things up.

(Of course, as some of the linked commenters have pointed out, the results of an IT project based on the management style of Bain Capital may have been foreseeable.)

3 thoughts on “The Dog Ate My Homework

  1. If this were an important effect, then Nate Silver’s state-by-state prediction accuracy was mere accident. In all of them.

  2. What’s interesting to me is that we’re seeing two substantially different kinds of explanations for the Romney loss: (1) the demographic shift (as reflected in polls; the “unskewing” people were arguing that the basic makeup of the likely voter in the main polls was wrong, demographically (racially but also in terms of D/R breakdown); (2) the quality gap in GOTV operations. Rertled says they’re not related, that is, if the fault lies mostly with #2 then #1 is irrelevant. But I wonder: it seems to me that if your sense of demographics is totally off you will also not be very good at getting out the vote!

    What both the problems have in common, however, is reliance on wishful thinking rather than statistics. But of course I’m a big believer in wishful thinknig more generally!

Comments are closed.