Election Season’s Dumb Statistics
Today I saw my first “dumb election statistics” article of the season, with AP News offering this dramatically titled story:
Kamala Harris’ election would defy history. Just 1 sitting VP has been elected president since 1836.
We are bound to see tons of headlines and stories like this during the next several weeks. It brought to mind the dumbest one I ever saw during the days of Hillary Clinton:
No presidential candidate has secured a major party nomination after an FBI investigation into her use of a private email server. ( New York Times, August 8, 2016)
Reporters dig up a random correlations and data to make their pronouncements sound dramatic, scientific, and driven by a deep analysis of data.
It turns out that every presidential winner since 1788 has crushed at least one force of history, as cartoonist Randall Munroe reminds us with this cartoon he created several years ago:
Here are just a few of his choice “statistics” from recent elections:
No Democrat has won without a majority of the Catholic vote (until Clinton did)
No Democrat can win without Missouri (until Obama did)
No Republican has won without Vermont (until Bush did)
No Republican has won without winning the house or senate (until Eisenhower did)
No nominee whose first name contains a “k” has lost (fingers crossed on this one)
All of these “statistics” are absurd, and while I laugh at them, really I should not laugh too hard. They all point to the power of numbers, data, and probabilities to tell a story. Journalists (and readers like us) crave numbers to help us make sense of complexities and probabilities and seemingly endless possibilities.
But if you really want to turn your data into stories, it will take more thought and more skill than citing random strings of mostly meaningless numbers. It takes some skill developed through years of practice and perspective. Give us a call when you’re ready to do that, and we’ll show you how.
