Scoop Dupes

Well, we’re safe, comfortable — and trapped. I don’t know if you can drive across a downed power line that’s stretched right across your driveway, but I guess no point in trying. I hope PSE&G doesn’t take too many days to at least remove the line, never mind actually restoring power..

Limited blogging due to limited bandwidth (and don’t be surprised if comment moderation lags, since both here and at the Times conditions are, shall we say, not ideal). But I thought I’d weigh in on this post by Brad DeLong.

Brad has fun with Jonathan Martin of Politico, who thinks that liberals will be deeply disheartened to learn that Nate Silver “admits” that he’s mainly relying on public polls for his forecast. Of course, Nate has been clear about that all along — and what should he be doing? And look: the message from the polls is very clear: national surveys show a tight race or a slight Romney lead, but state polls — which are telling us about the electoral vote — show a clear if narrow Obama advantage in enough states to win the electoral college. Those polls would have to be off, systematically, by about 2 percent for Romney to win. So the odds are in Obama’s favor.

Oh, and don’t quote some poll or other that seems to say different. Polls have a margin of error (duh). This means that if there are a lot of polls, say of Ohio, sheer luck of the draw will produce a couple of polls seeming to tell a different story. That’s why all the serious analysts rely on poll averages, and stick to those averages rather than picking and choosing.

But Martin’s tweet also reveals a broader issue in reporting, which I’ve commented on before, I think (no time to search): the unhealthy cult of the inside scoop.

A lot of political journalism, and even reporting on policy issues, is dominated by the search for the “secret sauce”, as Martin puts it: the insider who knows What’s Really Going On. Background interviews with top officials are regarded as gold, and the desire to get those interviews often induces reporters to spin on demand.

But such inside scoops are rarely — I won’t say never, but rarely — worth a thing. My experience has been that careful analysis of publicly available information almost always trumps the insider approach.

This is sort of obviously true in election season: in a vast, diverse country, no amount of talking with big shots (who are pushing an agenda) — or for that matter hanging out at campaign events and trying to assess the mood — is a substitute for polls that collectively sample tens of thousands of voters.

It’s even more obviously true on economic matters, where top officials basically work from the same data everyone else has, and a smart economist is almost always a better guide than the Minister of Silly Walks.

Remarkably, it has even been true for national security. Reporters with top-level access got completely snookered by the lies about Iraq, while many ordinary concerned citizens, looking at what we actually seemed to know, figured out early on that the Bush administration was cooking up a false case for war.

Now obviously there are some personal stakes here. If the right way to assess an election is by parsing the polls, this elevates nerds from nowhere at the expense of political reporters who spend their lives cultivating contacts, and really aren’t comfortable with numbers. And no doubt my own tribalism makes me especially sympathetic to nerds like me.

But I don’t think that’s all there is to what I’m saying. The truth is that anyone who understands numbers and has access to polling data is in a position to make a very informed judgment about the state of the race; and nobody who doesn’t understand numbers is in a position to do the same, no matter who he knows.

NYT