To understand the emotive part of voters’ decisions, you need numbers

At the end of The Washington Post’s review of the book “Double Down” by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, Peter Hamby fires a shot across the bow of the “Nate Silver wing of the Internet” …. For Hamby, the fact that voters care about “the human side of these strange and wily people” somehow indicates the limits of number-crunching, as if those more emotive influences on voting decision-making are beyond the reach of statistics.

I’d argue precisely the opposite: it’s on those parts of voter decision-making that are more emotive and expressive that experiments and number-crunching are especially important. After all, voters are unlikely to tell an interviewer that they voted for the more attractive candidate, or the candidate whose advertisements had more evocative music or images. More than 125 million Americans voted in 2012. Whatever motives you think shaped their decisions, you are going to need some number-crunching to evaluate their relative importance. CONT.

Dan Hopkins (Georgetown), The Monkey Cage

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