> I'm forbidden to forward, but a crusty old pollster says that anyone who
> believes Curtis Gans is headed for trouble - like Drew Pearson, 100%
> right 10% of the time.
>
> Doug
March 22, 2004 Volume 230, Issue 10 CONTESTED SELECTION
This week, THE NEW YORK TIMES and THE BOSTON GLOBE claimed to have struck a blow against the conventional wisdom. After each early primary, political reporters and Democratic Party flacks had hailed heavy voter turnout as a good omen for November. But, now that the TIMES and GLOBE had hard numbers in hand, they forcefully knocked down those claims. As the TIMES headline blared, "democratic primaries' turnout is said not to have been strong." Close observers of politics, however, should have immediately recognized a flaw in the story: The reporters cited a study that originated with Curtis Gans , director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. Gans has made a career of publishing reports decrying the decline in voter turnout and the decrepit condition of our democracy. And, sure enough, analyzing this political season, Gans argued that "disinterest in these primaries ... augurs ill for the American political system."
Fortunately for the Republic, Gans can only make such dire predictions because he uses bunk numbers. In 2001, for instance, the political scientists Michael McDonald and Samuel Popkin published a decisive refutation of Gans 's analyses, arguing that his statistics rely on sleight of hand. The base population Gans uses includes a growing population of unnaturalized immigrants and felons who can't legally cast ballots. When McDonald and Popkin removed these noneligibles from the model, they found that turnout has hardly spiraled downward in the postwar era. "[T]he turnout rate is not in free fall," they argued in a WASHINGTON POST op-ed in 2000. This year, again, Gans 's claims are full of holes. For starters, his study doesn't include the Iowa caucuses, where 125,000 voters showed up, tying the 1988 turnout. And, in the TIMES, he dismissed the high turnouts in Arizona, Delaware, and South Carolina as not significant. Those states haven't had many primaries, he argued, so there's no good basis for comparison. But that's culling the evidence rather selectively. South Carolina's turnout rate, for instance, more than doubled from the contested 1992 primary. True, voter turnout was lower in states that held later primaries, but it's also true that, after the February 3 contests, a Kerry nomination was pretty much inevitable. So, unfortunately, was Gans 's doom-and-gloom analysis.
-- Michael Pugliese