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Posts Tagged ‘2008 election’

What's That Database Worth?

Laura Meckler of the Wall Street Journal investigates the value and possible future uses of President Obama’s massive “data trove.”  Here’s a quick rundown of the data at stake:

Mr. Obama’s campaign collected 13.5 million email addresses in the 2008 election, according to people who worked on the effort. Officials say the list has grown since then, but officials won’t say by how much.

The campaign also has lists of volunteers, including the names of neighborhood team leaders who were the most active supporters. A donor database has names of millions of people who made small campaign contributions. Campaigns aren’t legally required to report the names of people who give less than $200 total, and these donors haven’t been made public.

Meckler reports that Obama’s staff plans to enlist supporters’ help in getting the President’s agenda passed, but is still debating what to do with the data over the long-term.


Did Racism Cost Obama Votes in 2008?

A new paper (PDF here) by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a Harvard Ph.D. economics student, attempts to measure whether “racial animus” cost Barack Obama votes in 2008. Using location-specific Google searches for racial epithets collected on Google Insights, and comparing Obama’s 2008 performance to John Kerry‘s in 2004, the study concludes that racism cost Obama 3 to 5 percentage points in the popular vote.


Overstatement of the Day?

| From a New York Times review of an art exhibit by Shepard Fairey, the street artist best known for creating the Obama “hope” poster: “Before the Saks campaign makes it painful even to think about this artist, who did more than any other to get our current president elected …” If that is remotely true, expect the salaries of . . .


Got Six Words to Inspire America?

If Barack Obama‘s inaugural address could be just six words long, how would it read? Back in February, we ran a contest asking for a new six-word motto for the U.S. (The winner: “Our worst critics prefer to stay.”) We were riffing off of a then-new book, Not Quite What I Was Planning, which contained six-word memoirs by people from . . .


Economists Infiltrate the White House; Now What?

Last week, President-elect Obama dominated the news — and perhaps moved the markets — by spending the three days before Thanksgiving introducing one economist after another to the American public. There were Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, and Austan Goolsbee; and don’t forget Tim Geithner and Paul Volcker, neither of whom are Ph.D. economists, but neither of whom are . . .


Will Obama Reduce the Chance That You Are Called for Jury Duty?

Photo: Tom Lemo One of the changes that the “Yes We Can” movement has already wrought is a substantial increase in voter registration — particularly in swing states. In Virginia, for example, the number of registered voters increased by almost 10 percent. Since voter-registration lists are also used to construct juror lists, a possible benefit of this registration boost is . . .


Ron Paul Answers Your Questions, Part Two

Ron Paul When we solicited your questions for Congressman Ron Paul shortly after the election, so many questions came in that we split Paul’s answers into two batches, the first of which was published last week. Here is the second. Like the first batch, they are well-considered and interesting throughout; they will surely make many readers continue to wish fervently . . .


Eric Oliver on the “Bigot Belt”

Eric Oliver is a colleague of mine at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the absolutely fantastic book Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic. He has some new and interesting insights on the “Bigot Belt,” which he has generously written up for the Freakonomics blog. The Bigot Belt By Eric Oliver A Guest Post . . .


Ron Paul Answers Your Questions: Part One

Do you love the smell of libertarianism in the morning? If so, today is a good day for you. Ron Paul Last week we solicited your questions for Congressman Ron Paul. There was such a big response (more than 400 comments) that we have split Paul’s answers into two batches, the first of which is posted below. Thanks to Paul . . .


The Numbers on Teen Pregnancy

It is amazing to me that in the several days after it was announced that the second-ever woman was nominated for a major-party vice-president slot, so much of the news has concerned her and her daughter’s reproductive activities. Part of the reason to have a female candidate in the first place is presumably to be an advocate for women’s rights, . . .


Presidentonomics

Continuing his push for a gas-tax holiday, Sen. John McCain told a town-hall session last week that he “trust[s] the people and not the so-called economists to give the American people a little relief.” So who do “the people” trust to give them economic relief? By a margin of 50 percent to 44 percent, it’s Sen. Barack Obama, according to . . .


If at First You Don’t Succeed

As the average price of gasoline nationwide topped $4 a gallon this week, Sen. John McCain said he would renew his call for a summer gas tax holiday. The idea was roundly panned by economists (including the ones on this blog) when McCain and Sen. Hillary Clinton first raised it in May. This time around, McCain says he won’t “pretend . . .


Can E-Mail Persuade You to Vote?

If an e-mail message from a campaign or non-profit group were to pop up in your inbox on election day asking you to please go down to your polling place and cast your vote, would you do it? Probably not, if the results of a study by Notre Dame political scientist David Nickerson are any indication. Nickerson conducted 13 field . . .


Was There a ‘Bush Doctrine’?

That is the question asked by the economists Barry Eichengreen (Berkeley) and Douglas A. Irwin (Dartmouth) in an NBER working paper called “International Economic Policy: Was There a Bush Doctrine?” When it comes to foreign economic policy, their answer is an emphatic “no.” From their abstract: While many political scientists and diplomatic historians see the Bush presidency as a distinctive . . .


Will ‘Telling On Your Neighbors’ Get Them to Vote?

The American Political Science Review‘s Feb. 2008 issue has a new study by Alan Gerber, Donald Green, and Christopher Larimer testing the accuracy of voter turnout theories based on “rational self-interested behavior.” The researchers sought to “distinguish between two aspects of this type of utility, intrinsic satisfaction from behaving in accordance with a norm and extrinsic incentives to comply.” To . . .


Watching the Democratic Races

The political aficionados in Freakonomics Nation are probably doing the same thing that I’m doing right now — continually reloading the major news pages, in the hopes of finding some useful information. There won’t be any hard data for a few hours yet, and even then, it looks like there may be a long night of vote-counting ahead of us. . . .


A Poll Tax on Selfishness

On a wintry night a few weeks ago, I was walking with Aaron Edlin across the Harvard campus when he casually claimed that the “voter’s paradox” wasn’t generally true — that it could be rational for people to vote for purely instrumental reasons. I did a double take, because the chance that my vote will change the result of any . . .


Barack’s Prosody Problem: A Guest Post

Justin Wolfers‘s recent post on “sounding presidential” reminded me that there is another sense in which a candidate might sound presidential. It turns out that almost all presidents have had first names with stressed first syllables – think WILL-iam, or RICH-ard. One-syllable names are also stressed when you say the candidate’s entire name – think BILL CLIN-ton or GEORGE BUSH. . . .


Does Campaign Spending Matter? Ask Mitt Romney

In Freakonomics, we argued that campaign spending matters a lot less than people think. Mitt Romney‘s presidential campaign would seem to offer a fresh bit of evidence in favor of our theory. Viewed in this light, Hillary Clinton‘s decision to loan her campaign $5 million looks like the wrong move. It isn’t the money that is boosting Obama. Rather, it’s . . .


Super Tuesday Viewer’s Guide: A Guest Post

I have heard from plenty of nervous friends around the country, anticipating the results from Super Tuesday. Truth is, I haven’t a clue who will win. But I thought it worth offering up my own forecast: My key forecast for tonight is that the televised pundits will reveal all sorts of confusion. Tracking results across more than twenty states, and . . .


What’s the Probability That Romney Is Leading in California? A Guest Post

A new Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby Poll has Mitt Romney ahead of John McCain by 37 percent to 34 percent in a poll of 1185 likely Republican voters in California (2.9 percent margin of error). But what is the probability that more likely voters in the state actually support Romney? Given the 2.9 percent margin of error, it’s possible that Romney just got . . .


How Super Will Super Tuesday Really Be?

The odds are pretty good that if you are a reader of this blog, you’ll have the opportunity to vote today in one of the Super (Duper) Tuesday primaries. Here are today’s Democratic primaries and here are the Republican primaries. Two Novembers ago, we wrote a column headlined “Why Vote?” that discussed the rationality of voting. One point we made . . .


Has This Been the Best Primary Season Ever?

Coming into this very long, harried, and intensely reordered presidential primary season, there was a lot of talk about how poorly the nominating process serves the electorate. The common argument seemed to be that the acceleration and clustering of states’ primaries would create a chaos from which no electoral good would come. I’d like to suggest an opposing view: this . . .


What’s Been Missing From This Presidential Campaign?

In earlier posts here and here, I wrote that I was going on TV to talk about an issue that’s been missing from the presidential campaign. And that issue is … Crime. A lot of you guessed correctly; a lot of you named other issues that have also been very quiet. I think the fact that the candidates aren’t spending . . .


Answer Interruptus

Yesterday, I wrote here that I was scheduled to appear on Good Morning America today to talk about an issue that’s virtually absent from the presidential campaign. You responded in force with guesses about what the issue is, and several of you guessed right. But there is a reason I used that phrase, “scheduled to appear” — because with TV, . . .


What’s the One Issue That None of the Presidential Candidates Are Talking About?

I am scheduled to appear on Good Morning America tomorrow (Wednesday, Jan. 16) at about 8:30 EST to talk about one issue that is, almost bizarrely, missing from all the campaign talk. It’s a subject that has figured prominently in past campaigns. Any guesses? (Addendum: I’ll post the answer sometime tomorrow late a.m./early afternoon.)


How to Rig an Election? Ask the Author

We’ve covered the history of dirty politics in the U.S. here at Freakonomics. But what about the modern state of affairs? Allen Raymond knows a thing or two about bending the rules in the electoral process. A former G.O.P. political operative who served as chief of staff to a co-chairman of the Republican National Committee and supervised numerous election victories, . . .


The FREAK-est Links

Are stressed out teachers more likely to expel students? Is the mafia involved in tennis match rigging? (Earlier) Is grass the best source of ethanol? (Earlier) Is Rock, Paper, Scissors the best way to pick a president?


The FREAK-est Links

Did Obama lose, or did Hillary just win? Are the 2008 candidates “anti-business”? The stock market may fare better when it’s not in session. How does charity in the U.S. compare to that of the U.K.? (Earlier)