Brendan Nyhan

I have to admit I’m both fascinated and repulsed by the upcoming Fox show “The Moment of Truth,” which asks participants awkward personal questions while they are hooked up to a lie detector:

After ordering the pilot, Mr. Darnell made some changes. He increased the prize money and made the questions “more aggressive.”

“There’s no, ‘Is your favorite color blue?’” he said. “Some people are freaked out by that. They get to question three and they’re like, ‘What the hell is going on?’”

He also added a button where the contestant’s friends and family sit that they can use once during the game to “rescue” the player from a difficult question. Except, Mr. Darnell said, the friends and family never seem to use the button for its intended purpose. When one contestant was asked if she would be more attracted to her husband if he lost 20 pounds—which is considered a relatively easy query—her husband lunged for the button.

“What ends up happening is they use it to help themselves because they don’t want to hear something revealed about themselves,” Mr. Darnell said. “Or they don’t use it [because they really want to hear the answer].”

But as even TV Week points out, the evidence supporting the accuracy of polygraphs is dubious (see also here). The problem is that the show will likely increase perceptions that polygraphs are reliable, further increasing their use and perceptions of their validity in criminal trials. We already saw this happen with the so-called “CSI effect” in which jurors expect definitive scientific evidence from crime scenes and may be more skeptical about cases in which that evidence is lacking. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.

(On the other hand, it would be fantastic if someone could go on the show, beat the lie detector, and take Fox’s money. That example alone would do more to kill the polygraph than any article pointing out the lack of scientific evidence.)

Via the Hillary ’08 Fact Hub blog, here is John Edwards dismissing concerns last week about the constitutionality of his questionable proposal to strip health insurance from members of Congress if they don’t create universal coverage (see here and here):

[CNN’S WOLF] BLITZER: You’ve also suggested that if the Congress doesn’t pass universal health care, you would, as president, take away health care insurance, health care privileges for members of Congress, to which the Clinton campaign issued a statement saying: ”Senator Edwards is proposing unconstitutional gimmickry to pass universal health care.” Would this be constitutional or unconstitutional simply to strip members of Congress of their health care given the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches?

EDWARDS: Well, first of all, when I talk about shaking up Washington and making this place actually work for the American people, it is an interesting thing to watch that the people who are inside Washington, including Senator Clinton and her campaign, they circle the wagons and start protecting Washington politicians.

Who cares? I mean, what this is — the answer to the question is, yes, the president of the United States has enormous power. He has the veto power over the budget. The president of the United States has the bully pulpit to make this proposal to America and to the Congress and to go around America — by the way, every Democrat would vote for universal health care. So it would not be an issue for Democrats.
But if you go across this country and say, “Your Congressman or your Congresswoman is for their own health care and their family’s health care but they’re not for health care for you” — the whole point of this is to shake the place up.

And it’s fascinating to watch how quickly Washington insiders, including the Clinton campaign, rally the forces and circle the wagons to protect politicians instead of talking about what we can do together to bring universal health care to the country. I will be the first to tell you, I’m going in there to shake the place up and make it work for America.

Did Edwards really say “Who cares?” about the constitutionality of his proposal? I don’t know what his inflection sounded like in the video, but it certainly looks bad in print. As far as substance, his answer makes no sense. Even if his proposal were to be found to be constitutional, Congress would have to pass it into law. The president’s veto power is irrelevant.

I have nothing to say about Al Gore’s awkward White House visit except that he is really looking like Chris Cooper these days…

Over at TNR’s The Plank, Josh Patashnik notes that Mitt Romney is offering a “holiday package” for a $250 contribution that includes a “downloadable phone message of Mitt answering your voicemail using your name.”

Patashnik then asks “Can you imagine what kind of great holiday gift package Dennis Kucinich or Fred Thompson could put together??”

In fact, Kucinich has apparently been quite available by phone for free for some time (by contrast, the Mitt message is only available if your name is on the master list). Back in June, my friend Ben Fritz reported on an email a Hollywood character actress sent to her friends and acquaintances that included this offer:

Dennis has asked me to give him phone numbers of my pals, so that he can make a personal call to you, in order to hear your concerns, and answer your questions. Forty years in politics, and being in touch with his feminine side, gives Dennis a distinct advantage to truly change direction in our beloved country…

If you are interested in participating in the 2008 elections, and wish to talk with Dennis personally, please send me one of your phone numbers, and I will pass it on to him.

Anyone want to see if they can get him on the phone? I bet an inquisitive caller could do it in less than 24 hours…

Bumper sticker sighted in western North Carolina: “Clinton 2008 Obama 2016”

While I was out of town for Thanksgiving, I was amused to see Rudy Giuliani trying to form a coalition of convenience with Barack Obama:

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Tuesday told high school students that when he was their age he was hardly a model student, experimenting with illegal drugs and drinking alcohol.

…During a campaign stop in Chicago, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani was asked if he thought Obama’s comments to the students were appropriate.

“I respect his honesty,” Giuliani said.

“One of the things that we need from our people that are running for office is not this pretense of perfection,” said Giuliani, who has faced questions about his own personal life marked by three marriages and estrangement from his two children. He said of the candidates, “we’re all human beings.”

“If we haven’t made mistakes, don’t vote for us,” Giuliani said.

Someone’s trying desperately to inoculate himself against the inevitable attacks on his personal life and character. (If you missed the message, Giuliani’s first two ads both include him admitting he’s not perfect.)

Ironically, with Giuliani looking weak in early primary states, he could use some help from Hillary too. If she won in Iowa, it would strengthen his argument that he’s the candidate best-positioned to beat her in the general election.

Drudge is touting a new Zogby poll showing Hillary trailing top Republicans, but the Reuters article admits in the last paragraph that it’s based on an unusual sample:

The poll of 9,355 people had a margin of error of plus or minus one percentage point. The interactive poll surveys individuals who have registered to take part in online polls.

Absent further details, it’s not clear why we would believe this to be a useful finding. Zogby’s summary and defense of its approach is here, but let’s just say that the jury is still out. Here’s some past coverage in which a political scientist expresses skepticism:

When reached by phone last week, Cliff Zukin, a political science professor and polling expert at Rutgers University, suggests that journalists should generally be wary of any Zogby interactive poll.

“The Zogby stuff, on scientific grounds, is quite questionable,” says Zukin. “Online, Internet, opt-in polling, where people volunteer to be respondents, doesn’t really have a basis in scientific validity. There are two kinds of samples in the world. There are probability samples, and there are non-probability samples.”

The Zogby interactive polls, says Zukin, clearly fall into the latter camp. “With probability samples, when everybody has a known chance of being selected, you can make pretty valid inferences about the population from which it is drawn,” says Zukin. “You can’t do that at all with self-selected surveys. That’s a problem.”

Another problem with Internet-based polling, says Zukin, is that, in general, Web and email-based surveys tend to overvalue the opinions of young people. A group that is notoriously lousy at showing up to actually vote.

“Internet coverage is now about two-thirds of the population,” says Zukin. “But it’s really age-skewed and, to a lesser extent, education-skewed, in the wrong way for voters. It’s younger people who are online. It’s older people who are not online. It’s older people who vote. And younger people who don’t.”

“It’s certainly not the gold standard,” says Zukin.

In short, without further confirmation from more traditional polling, don’t take the Drudge headline too seriously.

Update 11/27 10:01 AM: The University of Wisconsin’s Charles Franklin has a detailed post showing that the Zogby results are way out of whack with more traditional estimates:

The hugely surprising result is that the Zogby poll finds Sen. Hillary Clinton losing to all four top Republicans in head-to-head trial heats. What makes that surprising is that Clinton LEADS all four of those Republicans in the trend estimates based on all other polling by between 3.8 and 11.6 points.

…What is immediately clear is that the Zogby Clinton numbers are well below the estimated trend for Clinton in each of the four comparisons. Clinton is consistently 8-10 points below her trend estimate based on other polling.

Meanwhile, Hillary’s Fact Hub blog points out that a more traditional Gallup poll was also released yesterday and it found results more in line with previous findings:

A new Gallup Poll finds Sen. Hillary Clinton with a slim but not statistically significant advantage over both former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain in head-to-head matchups for the 2008 general election for president. Clinton has much more substantial leads over former Sen. Fred Thompson and former Gov. Mitt Romney. Sen. Barack Obama also has significant leads over Thompson and Romney, but essentially ties with Giuliani and McCain.

…The results for Obama matched up against the Republican candidates are largely similar to those for Clinton. He has substantial leads over both Thompson and Romney, and is highly competitive with McCain and Giuliani. Though Clinton’s margins of support over McCain (six points) and Giuliani (five points) are larger than Obama’s margins of support against the same candidates (three points and zero points, respectively), the differences are not large enough to be considered meaningful from a statistical perspective.

Update 11/28 11:18 PM: Via Kos, an analysis of Zogby Interactive’s track record provides further corroboration of my suspicions:

I looked at five pollsters that were among the most prolific: Rasmussen, SurveyUSA, Zogby (which releases separate telephone and online polls) and Washington, D.C.-based Mason-Dixon. For all but the latter, I used the numbers posted on the organizations’ own Web sites. For Mason-Dixon, which keeps some of its poll data behind a subscriber wall, I used Pollster.com to find polls from the two weeks before the election. I checked the results against vote counts as of this Tuesday.

…In the Senate races, the average error on the margin of victory was tightly bunched for all the phone polls. Rasmussen (25 races) and Mason-Dixon (15) each were off by an average of fewer than four points on the margin. Zogby’s phone polls (10) and SurveyUSA (18) each missed by slightly more than four points. Just four of the 68 phone polls missed by 10 points or more, with the widest miss at 18 points.

But the performance of Zogby Interactive, the unit that conducts surveys online, demonstrates the dubious value of judging polls only by whether they pick winners correctly. As Zogby noted in a press release, its online polls identified 18 of 19 Senate winners correctly. But its predictions missed by an average of 8.6 percentage points in those polls — at least twice the average miss of four other polling operations I examined. Zogby predicted a nine-point win for Democrat Herb Kohl in Wisconsin; he won by 37 points. Democrat Maria Cantwell was expected to win by four points in Washington; she won by 17. (Zogby cooperated with WSJ.com on an online polling project that tracked some Senate and gubernatorial races.)

The picture was similar in the gubernatorial races (where Zogby polled only online, not by phone). Mason-Dixon’s average error was under 3.4 points in 14 races. Rasmussen missed by an average of 3.8 points in 30 races; SurveyUSA was off by 4.4 points, on average, in 18 races. But Zogby’s online poll missed by an average of 8.3 points, erring on six races by more than 15 points.

For those of you who thought tacky Christmas marketing had hit rock bottom, think again (via Drudge/Wired):

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Discover the new TASER C2.

According to the New York Times, Fred Thompson has repeated the false claim that tax cuts increase revenue:

An analysis by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, which looked into the kind of plan Mr. Thompson proposed, found that the federal government would stand to lose at least $2.5 trillion in revenue over 10 years.

But Mr. Thompson, a former senator from Tennessee, said in an interview yesterday on “Fox News Sunday” that such studies “always overestimate the losses to the government” and that tax cuts would spur the economy, leading eventually to greater revenues.

Thompson made a similar claim back in April. And he’s not the only one — Giuliani (here and here), Mitt Romney, and John McCain are all on the supply-side bandwagon. Who cares that even Bush administration economists think it’s nonsense?

The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund makes a claim about the 2000 election that is only partially true:

Democratic partisans still argue that the 2000 presidential contest was decided by a single vote in the U.S. Supreme Court, even though media recounts of Florida ballots showed that the outcome would not have been changed if Bush v. Gore had gone the other way.

While it’s true that the outcome would probably not have changed if all the undervotes had been counted, the judge supervising the recount said he might have counted the overvotes as well, a decision that would have tipped the outcome to Gore.