Tag: George W. Bush

Junk Statistics from Bush and Gore Supporters

I keep running across different statistical analyses of the Palm Beach voting and hand re-count that try to make the case that Bush or Gore is trying to steal the election. Unfortunately I have yet to see one that wasn’t just garbage.

A few days ago, for example, Slashdot linked to an MIT statistical analysis that compared the ratio of Buchanan voters to Bush voters by county. Of course the effect of the resulting graph made it look “obvious” that the Buchanan votes had to be in error. The only problem is, as one Slashdotter noted, there is no scientific reason for choosing to compare Buchanan’s votes to Bush’s votes and comparing say Buchanan’s vote to average rainfall or the number of Britney Spears songs played on local radio stations. The Buchanan:Bush ratio appeared to have been chosen because it would produce the most dramatic graph.

Similarly, a statistical analysis of the hand re-count by Bruce Borders on the conservative FrontPage.Com site argues that re-count disproportionately favored Gore. I was very intrigued by this until I read the following paragraph,

In large democratic leaning counties, the percentage change in votes was significantly larger for Al Gore than for George W. Bush. In these counties (Broward, Miami-Dade, Orange, Palm Beach and Pinellas) the percentage increase in votes for Al Gore is approximately 9 times greater than the percentage increase in votes for George W. Bush (0.068% increase for Gore vs 0.0077% for Bush). This is a statistically significant difference at the 0.108 level of probability – this means that we are approximately 90% confident that we are drawing the correct conclusion.

The last sentence is what makes me think this analysis is bunk. Although I have no probability data, for the most part people who report statistically signficant results at 90% confidence level are doing so because they know that if they report results for the 95% confidence level, which is a widely accepted level of confidence, the results no longer are meaningful.

Pharmaceutical companies are notorious for this. Got a drug that doesn’t seem to work all that well when work out the results at a 95% confidence level? No problem — just redo the statistics for a 90% confidence level and hope nobody notices.

A 1 in 10 chance that the results are due entirely to chance is pretty darn high given the seriousness of the claim.

The Gore Campaign’s “War Room” Memo

How far is the Gore campaign willing to go to challenge the election results in Florida and perhaps elsewhere? Salon.Com claims to have obtained a memo from the campaign outlining the formation of a committee to fight the Florida results including raising about $3 million for legal fees.

The Washington Post was speculating the other day that one strategy Gore might adopt is to delay the certification of the Florida election results in any way possible until the Electoral College meets in December. Why? Since Gore has more electoral votes at the moment than Bush, Florida doesn’t necessarily matter — Gore wins if Florida’s electoral votes are still in question.

Of course then the issue becomes whether the Republican Congress would certify the results, and the extremely long shot possibility even that Strom Thurmond, of all people, might become president, even if only for a month or two (he would be second in the succession line if no candidate has been elected by the Electoral College and certified by Congress.)

So far Gore has done a good job of portraying his efforts as simply wanting to ensure the “will of the people” (I really hate that phrase) is followed. If he persists after next Friday’s required certification of Florida’s election results, however, he risks damaging not only his personal reputation but also adding another chapter in the legalistic maneuverings of the Clinton-Gore campaign that might leave a lasting negative impression of the last 8 years.

Al Gore Has Not Won the Popular Vote

CounterCoup is one of a number of left wing groups that wants George Bush to simply step aside if he wins Florida because, “A candidate has won the popular vote but lost the White House.”

But it is false to claim that Al Gore has won the popular vote. In fact there are close to two million outstanding absentee ballots that have to still be counted around the country, and Gore’s slim lead in the popular voting could easily vanish (though aside states such as New Mexico and Florida, the absentee ballots are unlikely to change election results in those states).

The other amazing thing is the claim on CounterCoup that “over 19,000 Gore voters’ ballots were thrown away.” Actually those ballots had more than one person chosen as president and as the media finally reported, similar numbers of ballots had to be discarded in the 1996 presidential election as well. Strange that I don’t remember liberals and leftists calling that election a fraud.

Are High Marginal Taxe Rates a Feminist Issue?

Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore has railed against a proposal by Republican candidate George W. Bush to reduce taxes saying it would benefit only the top one percent of income earners. Writing in the New York Times, however, Virginia Postrel points out that high marginal tax rates at higher income levels encourage married professional women to reduce the number of hours they work, which has strong affects their future promotion potential, or to quit the workforce altogether.

Feminists typically complain that there aren’t enough women at the upper echelons of corporations. While women are more and more represented at mid-level management, they claim, there are not enough women breaking through the “glass ceiling” into executive level positions. As Postrel points out, though, married professional women get screwed by the high marginal taxes if they get promoted too high. Since women are more likely than men to consider not working outside the home, if a woman’s income pushes her family’s income into a higher tax break, there is an economic incentive there not to work.

But does this actually make a difference in the real world? Yes. Postrel cites a 1995 study by University of California at Berkeley economist Nada Eissa on the Tax Reform Act of 1986 which, among other things, reduced the highest tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent. The result, the percentage of married women in the highest tax bracket who worked outside the home jumped from 46 percent to 55 percent, and those who had jobs increased the number of hours they worked by 13 percent. Looking at women in the 75th percentile, who didn’t receive as dramatic a tax cut, the percentage of married women who worked increased by only 7 percent and the number of hours they worked increased by only 9 percent. As Eissa told Postrel, “There is a relationship between taxes and labor-force participation.”

Eissa found similar results when looking at the effects of the earned income tax credit which provides an economic incentive for poor families not too raise their incomes to high since it applies a de facto 21 percent marginal tax rate on all income above about $12,000 for a family of four. Women in that situation were 5 percent less likely to work outside the home if they were in a position where working would bump their family income above that level.

As Postrel notes, however, this is a topic that neither liberal or conservatives want to raise,

Democrats don’t want to admit that the soak-the-rich taxation wallops working wives, lest they split feminists and redistributionists. And Republicans don’t want to admit that cutting taxes will lead more married women to get jobs, lest they split economic libertarians and social conservatives. So everyone stays mum.

But the empirical evidence is pretty clear. Tax rates are a feminist issue.

Personally I tend to think the liberal feminists are the biggest hypocrites here, as they seem committed to maintaining that a professional woman has the right to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy but then is too stupid or too mean spirited to control her own finances, but instead must hand much of it over to the government which presumably knows better than she does. Much of the pro-choice movement has little use for truly giving women (much less men) the ability to make wide ranges of choices over their lives, turning incredibly statist once anything besides the narrow issue of abortion is put on the table.

Source:

Tax System Discourages Married Women from Working. Virginia Postrel, The New York Times, November 2, 2000.

Campaigning Under the Influence

For the life of me I can’t understand why George W. Bush did not reveal his drunk driving arrest a long time ago — given the current state of American politics I’m convinced it would have helped his efforts. All he had to do was wait until he had the Republican nomination wrapped up and then schedule a heart-to-heart interview with one of those insipid network types like Barabara Walters and reveal his pain. People love that stuff for some reason (look at Missouri where the sympathy factor has a dead man beating his opponent for a Senate seat).

Instead it comes as a surprise bombshell right before the election that makes people wonder a) why was he hiding the DUI for so long, and b) more importantly, are there other arrests and/or incidents Bush is hiding?

Bush’s campaign isn’t helping matters by calling the sudden reports of the arrest as Democrat Party dirty tricks, which sounds too much like Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “vast right wing conspiracy” line.

Polling Data

Tracking polls fascinate me and Delan McCullagh’s got a nice feature at Wired on Keeping Track of Tracking Polls. I knew for instance that most polling companies aside from Rasmussen will work for candidates, but I didn’t realize Gallup pushes undecided voters to choose between candidates.

Based on McCullagh’s analysis, the most accurate tracking data seems to be at Rasmussen’s Portrait of America website, and it’s very bad news for Al Gore and Ralph Nader. Gore because he’s losing by 7 points — which isn’t that big given the margin of error but translates into a huge loss in the electoral college. Nader because he’s well below the 5 percent threshold the Green Party needs to get federal matching funds in 2004.