Democratic primary discontents

The Economist's data guy, G. Elliott Morris, is having an argument [paywall, I think] with Dr. Max Barreto of UCLA about whether Democratic primary polls are accurately representing Latinx voters. I'm not qualified to adjudicate who is right, though I'm always sympathetic to complaints that Latinx sentiment is poorly captured in polls. Far more than Anglos, many Latinx voters will try to tell an interviewer (or canvasser!) what they think the questioner wants to hear. Good polling requires getting beyond that, investment in linguistically and ethnically sensitive survey workers, and is expensive and difficult.

But Morris goes on to lay out his general complaints about the Democratic primary process which I think are interesting enough to be worth engaging with.

Polls-based thresholds keep unpopular, but qualified, candidates off the debate stage. Just ask Julían Castro, or Michael Bennett, or Steve Bullock. If they want to win elections and perpetuate good governance, the Democratic Party should incentivize qualifications and electability beyond topline poll numbers 10 months before people are voting.

Come on -- Castro and Bennett did qualify for some early debates and, despite the exposure, failed to catch on. As it happens, I like Castro a lot. But whoever is the Dem candidate has to demonstrate the ability to raise money, organize a campaign, and have enough charisma to be noticed by primary voters. For all their qualifications, these guys haven't done that, so I don't think the DNC would be serving their constituents by keeping them in the mix. Maybe the Dem primary should be more about qualifications and less a popularity contest. U.S. democracy in general is often a popularity contest and the DNC probably can't fix that. Blame we the people.

Polls-based thresholds let popular, but unqualified, candidates on the debate stage. It is not in the Democratic Party’s interest to let unqualified candidates like Tom Steyer, Mike Bloomberg, Marianne Williamson or Andrew Yang on the debate stage. When they do, sometimes it is clear that they are abusing the polling/donor thresholds by (a) spending tens of millions of dollars in select states to shore up support or (b) mobilizing an intense, but small, network of online and social media activists to donate to their campaign; 200k donors is nothing for Mr Yang, for example, who has 1.1m Twitter followers and a Reddit forum of nearly 100k constant posters and activists.

Truth be told, I could do without these candidates as easily as Mr. Morris could, except possibly Yang. (He's got a glimmer and should have the chance to promote his policy idea.) But it is sloppy thinking to label Bloomberg "unqualified." He sure isn't my choice, but a former mayor of New York actually knows a thing or two about fractious democracy and impossible policy choices, even if he also probably missed a lot that's relevant to those of us outside the Big Apple. (Note that Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles was smart enough not to run; he certainly looks plenty qualified to me.) Steyer is just using his billions to buy his way onto the stage -- then seems to have nothing much to offer when he gets there. And there ought to be some way to exclude the Williamsons of the world; despite the antics of the incumbent, the U.S. presidency is a serious job.

Polls-based thresholds magnify the impacts of statistical noise. It is worth stating the obvious: polls are not perfect. Sometimes, they produce errant results—be it via a poor selection of weighting variables, small populations, bad likely voter filters or something else. Polls also tend to jump around a little bit just by random chance; if the “true” support for a candidate is 25%, we should expect an average poll to get a number anywhere between ~20% and ~30% in 19 out of 20 polls. If a candidate is polling at 1, then, there’s a good chance they might meet a 3% threshold by chance alone. Do we really want chance deciding who gets to run for president?

Now here, Morris has a strong point. The difference between 3 percent and 5 percent for a candidate in a poll simply isn't real. It's noise, even if the polls are quality ones.

There has to be a better way. Evidently, the present moment has evoked in an awful lot of people a belief that 1) the presidency might well be uniquely available an outsider candidate and 2) the standard set by the DNC in the interest of trying to be fair are set so low that WHY NOT? Such a combination is not likely to exist in most years -- but now we know that a true free-for-all looks like: kinda ugly, too damn white -- and possibly too much for many voters to sort out.

And for goodness sake, let's move away from Iowa and New Hampshire next time round. These perfectly pleasant places just don't look enough like the Democratic party to have as much influence as they have.

I'm glad the actual voting starts in about a month -- most likely we'll know a whole lot more by the 3rd week of March. Meanwhile -- melodrama and angst.