{"id":3957,"date":"2012-01-31T14:09:46","date_gmt":"2012-01-31T19:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=3957"},"modified":"2012-01-31T14:09:46","modified_gmt":"2012-01-31T19:09:46","slug":"my-bad-attempt-at-handicapping-the-republican-presidential-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2012\/01\/31\/my-bad-attempt-at-handicapping-the-republican-presidential-race\/","title":{"rendered":"My Bad Attempt at Handicapping the Republican Presidential Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes we political scientists can get a bit too sure of ourselves. I went around telling everyone I knew (including my classes) that Mitt Romney was going to be the nominee of the party and all this mishigas<\/em> about 9-9-9<\/a> and racist named hunting sites<\/a> and whatnot was the opening act for the big show… the coronation of the former Massachusetts governor by a Republican establishment that usually gets what it wants from the nominating process. <\/p>\n

That may still happen. But I wonder if we haven’t entered a time in our political life where novelty matters as much as predictability… an era where the “noise” in our statistical models begin to carry more weight than the models themselves? <\/p>\n

There are certain times where the social and political world are in such upheaval and parties are so fragmented that party establishments can’t control the process (see Goldwater ’64<\/a> or McGovern ’72<\/a>). But I’m starting to wonder whether we’re simply living in an age where novelty and newness have a cultural currency they didn’t previously have. <\/p>\n

As an Internet scholar, I naturally draw things back to the Internet, particularly Facebook in my case. On Facebook, the lingua franca of political talk is the sharing of a link. Shared links on Facebook tend to gather more likes if they carry “high negative or positive valence”<\/a> in that they elicit strong emotions. As such, the ability of a political campaign to surge or fall because of a “rupture” in the normal operation of a campaign is not created, but exacerbated by social media.<\/p>\n

Newt Gingrich’s chiding of Juan Williams and John King in successive South Carolina debates was the very high valence clip that spreads through Facebook and other social media like wildfire. <\/p>\n