Florida Prof. at HuffPo Draws Logical Fallacies in Virginia Election. In other news, the sun rose in the East this morning. A Florida professor, Michael Mcdonald (i.e. someone unfamiliar with Virginia) analyzed the voting patterns in the Sturtevant-Gecker race and concluded that had Democrats voted at the same rate of Republicans Gecker would have won. He might be right, but his analysis is faulty as it is based on two improper presumptions. His conclusion is that “Democrats Lose Virginia Senate Control Because They Don’t Vote.”
The first fallacy is that any person who voted for President Obama is a “Democrat.” I’m sure there are self described independents and even Republicans who do not consider themselves Democrats who voted for Obama. These folks have no guarantee of voting along party lines in state or local races.
Second, people who vote for Democrats are not the same as “Democrats.” The Democrats who lost the Virginia Senate are the actual Democratic candidates and party officials. Everyone else who normally votes Democratic did not “lose” or “win” they simply voted at a lower perceivable rate.
Was there any comparison to 2014? What about 2013? Professor McDonald chooses a point in time, and creates a headline grabbing discussion with some lies, damn lies, statistics to back it up. Should we even care?
As of the time of this post Prof. McDonald’s HuffPo piece has over 6,000 Facebook likes, and almost 1500 Facebook shares…
4 comments
Michael McDonald was a professor at George Mason up until a year or two ago before going to Florida. He knows about VA politics.
So…if I understand this college professors argument, the key to winning elections is getting the most votes, and in order to get these votes, voters must vote? I should go take one of his classes. This man is a freaking genius. He had a scatter-plot chart and everything.
But he did nominally touch on a good point though: For all the Democrats crowing about their superior, data-driven GOTV machine, if you don’t give voters something to vote for, they won’t vote.
Now, he’d really be showing his stuff if he’d made the argument: if you give voters something onerous enough to vote against, they will show up, as Powhatan voters did in response to Bloomberg’s meddling. The “Bloomberg Effect” is the kiss-of-death for any candidate outside of a Blue Bastion, as the data would indicate.
Good rule of thumb: critique the argument; don’t attack the speaker.
Case in point:
Here, where McDonald is actually an elections guy who’s taught at George Mason, published and done a lot of elections statistical work, and has prior experience with elections in Virginia in particular. See, e.g., http://www.electproject.org/dr-mcdonald-bio
Your criticisms of his argument have some merit. (Although it’s an easy counterpoint to say that in a state without party registration, you largely do identify Democrats/Republicans by who they vote for.) But you’ve undermined them greatly by leading with the erroneous idea that he’s some clueless out-of-stater.
Your critique is completely legitimate. He was in the Commonwealth teaching at GMU until 2014. I should have stuck with “liberal Prof.” rather than focusing on location. My argument stands undermined.