andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-143 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I was reading this article by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker and noticed something suspicious. Levy was writing about an event in 1979 and then continued: One year later, Ronald Reagan won the Presidency, with overwhelming support from evangelicals. The evangelical vote has been a serious consideration in every election since. From Chapter 6 of Red State, Blue State : According to the National Election Study, Reagan did quite a bit worse than Carter among evangelical Protestants than among voters as a whole–no surprise, really, given that Reagan was not particularly religious and Cater was an evangelical himself. It was 1992, not 1980, when evangelicals really started to vote Republican. What’s it all about? I wouldn’t really blame Ariel Levy for this mistake; a glance at her website reveals a lot of experience as a writer and culture reporter but not much on statistics or politics. That’s fine by me: there’s a reason I subscribe to the New Yorker and not
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1 Levy was writing about an event in 1979 and then continued: One year later, Ronald Reagan won the Presidency, with overwhelming support from evangelicals. [sent-2, score-0.291]
2 The evangelical vote has been a serious consideration in every election since. [sent-3, score-0.569]
3 It was 1992, not 1980, when evangelicals really started to vote Republican. [sent-5, score-0.314]
4 I wouldn’t really blame Ariel Levy for this mistake; a glance at her website reveals a lot of experience as a writer and culture reporter but not much on statistics or politics. [sent-7, score-0.144]
5 That’s fine by me: there’s a reason I subscribe to the New Yorker and not the American Political Science Review! [sent-8, score-0.158]
6 On the other hand, I do think that the numbers are important, and I worry about misconceptions of American politics–for example, the idea that Reagan won “overwhelming support from evangelicals. [sent-9, score-0.404]
7 ” A big reason we wrote Red State, Blue State was to show people how all sorts of things they “knew” about politics were actually false. [sent-10, score-0.151]
8 Perhaps the New Yorker and other similar publications should hire a statistical fact checker or copy editor? [sent-11, score-0.402]
9 Maybe this is the worst time to suggest such a thing, with the collapsing economics of journalism and all that. [sent-12, score-0.164]
10 Still, I think the New Yorker could hire someone at a reasonable rate who could fact check their articles. [sent-13, score-0.193]
11 This would free up their writers to focus on the storytelling that they are good at without having to worry about getting the numbers wrong. [sent-14, score-0.245]
12 Another option would be to write a letter to the editor, but I don’t think the New Yorker publishes graphs. [sent-15, score-0.075]
13 I’ve written before about the need for statistical copy editors (see also here , here , and, of course, the notorious “But viewed in retrospect, it is clear that it has been quite predictable”). [sent-18, score-0.243]
14 I think one of my collaborators made this graph, maybe by combining the National Election Study questions on religious denomination and whether the respondent describes him/herself as born again. [sent-22, score-0.393]
15 Somebody pointed out that Reagan did do well among white evangelicals, so maybe that’s what Levy was talking about. [sent-27, score-0.172]
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Introduction: I was reading this article by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker and noticed something suspicious. Levy was writing about an event in 1979 and then continued: One year later, Ronald Reagan won the Presidency, with overwhelming support from evangelicals. The evangelical vote has been a serious consideration in every election since. From Chapter 6 of Red State, Blue State : According to the National Election Study, Reagan did quite a bit worse than Carter among evangelical Protestants than among voters as a whole–no surprise, really, given that Reagan was not particularly religious and Cater was an evangelical himself. It was 1992, not 1980, when evangelicals really started to vote Republican. What’s it all about? I wouldn’t really blame Ariel Levy for this mistake; a glance at her website reveals a lot of experience as a writer and culture reporter but not much on statistics or politics. That’s fine by me: there’s a reason I subscribe to the New Yorker and not
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