Neither Hillary Nor John Came Back from Anywhere

Neither Clinton nor McCain have comeback from anywhere. Neither of their wins in NH was a surprise. And the earlier result in Iowa was not an indicator of Hillary’s imminent political demise.

The Iowa election was one election: its results collectively constitute a “single datapoint” in any analysis of relative voter preference for candidates. A single datapoint does not a trend make, nor a generalization support – in politics or any field.

Anybody with high-school statistics knows that one electoral result represents a single “sample” of a “population” (and a political election is literally a sampling of a population) and that a single sample says nothing about the underlying population with any certainty.

It may be that Hillary’s tear increased her support between Iowa and New Hampshire, but the two election results alone do not give us enough information to know.

Do we really believe that a tear – or anything else that happened between Iowa and New Hampshire, increased Hilary’s percentage support in the country by approximately one third (from 29.5% in IA to 39.1% in NH)? Or that this same tear caused her support among women to rise by approximately a half (from 30% of female voters in IA to 46% of female voters in NH). Either is indeed a theoretical possibility but – in the absence of factual evidence to the contrary – with an actual probability similar to that of a Biden victory.

Please. If a tear could do that, no candidate in their right mind would half kill themselves to raise billions of dollars to buy ad time and all the rest of it. Other causes have been suggested – that Hillary’s policies began to resonate, that her debate performance showed theretofore unseen passion, that she connected with the young. All are possible; most are reasonable, but none is known. And if any is even a necessary part of an explanation, how did McCain manage to almost triple his support on the Republican side between Iowa (13%) and New Hampshire (37%)? Obviously, he didn’t really triple anything (or cry about anything, or find a new voice or whatever). New Hampshire and Iowa are simply different. They have different demographics, different cultures and different histories, different electoral procedures and even, for goodness’ sake, different weather…

I don’t know what factors govern the difference between the two election results, but nor does anyone else. I do know that whatever they are, they are far more myriad and complex than has been elucidated in any analysis over the last couple of days.

None of this would matter except for the fact that, for most people, the media are the only source of information about any of the candidates, and so we can reasonably expect that the media’s post-hoc rationalizations, bad guesses and hype, must have a significant impact on who becomes the next president. We require lawyers to go through rigorous certification because of the importance of the outcomes that they affect in the lives of other people; similarly doctors, financial advisers and even, to a lesser extent, real estate agents!

Now, what do we demand from our political commentators?

(Robin Koerner publishes Watching America.com, which presents foreign coverage of the U.S. elections)