politics: election 2012

“Hey look! Fox News, American Idol, and Monday Night Football had a threesome and it made a baby named the Southern Republican Presidential Debate!”

That was my first thought, anyway, as I watched my first Republican Primary debate of the season two nights ago. I was really surprised at the opening dramatization of the event on CNN.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you absolutely must watch the first few minutes of the video below (especially :40 to 2:30):

So, what do you think?  Does this smack of sensationalism to you?  Is this just what TV looks like these days?  Without being overly nostalgic, how does this compare to the mood of previous debates?  How might this framing of the debates affect how people think of the presidency, our government, the process?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

We’ve known for a long time that surveys are often very bad at predicting behavior.  To take the example that  Malcom Gladwell uses, if you ask Americans what kind of coffee they want,  most will say “a dark, rich, hearty roast.”  But what they actually prefer to drink is “milky, weak coffee.”

Something that sounds good in the abstract turnsout to be different from the stuff you actually have to drink.

Election polls usually have better luck since indicating your choice to a voting machine isn’t all that different from speaking that choice to a pollster.  But political preference polls as well can run into that abstract-vs.-actual problem.

Real Clear Politics recently printed some poll results that were anything but real clear.  RCP looked at polls matching Obama against the various Republican candidates.  In every case, if you use the average results of the different polls, Obama comes out on top. But in polls that matched Obama against “a Republican,” the Republican wins.

The graph shows only the average of the polls.  RCP also provides the results of the various polls (CNN, Rasmussen, ABCl, etc.)

Apparently, the best strategy for the GOP is nominate a candidate but not tell anyone who it is.

The chart below summarizes the position on 12 rights for gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans held by Barack Obama and 12 candidates for the Republican Presidential Election:

Data collected by Ned Flaherty for Marriage Equality USA.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.