No, Call Me "Jay": All this talk of erosion and the Obama coalition is about the same as it was on the day he became Prez

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July 17, 2009

All this talk of erosion and the Obama coalition is about the same as it was on the day he became Prez

Good Empirical Analysis of Obama's Support

Of course data doesn't matter as much as bland assertion on Fox "News." :(

On a similar matter, everyone who like politics should look at 538.com. It is run by Nate Silver, who is also a baseball statistician working for the wonderful Baseball Prospectus, and is a numbers-geek who makes love to a high R-squared every night. (Well, the nights he is not wet-dreaming to Rachel Maddow.) He clearly has center-left beliefs, but he is pretty bound by his empirical tests, and Nate is certainly not as knee-jerk liberal as the folks at TPM or Huffington.

And, Baseball Prospectus is a really cool page that embraces the Billy Beene/Bill James/MoneyBall/FireJoeMorgan approach to baseball analysis. (Called "Sabremetrics" or some shit like that.) BP will explain why "batting average" is a dumb stat, and OBP and SLG are much better indicators of the how valuable a player is.

Anyway, I am not a quant-toid, but I respect nice empirical analysis.

Posted at 09:48 AM in Current Affairs, Political Science, Sports, Weblogs | Permalink