My daughter came home from school the other day talking about the boys in her current events class who were calling Martha Coakley “crazy.”
When I asked why they thought she was crazy, my daughter told me that Coakley didn’t know what the gas tax was. I wasn’t surprised to learn of their negative opinions–Coakley lost by a 20 point margin in the my conservative, working class town of Granby–but I was interested in their reasoning. Somewhat ironically, every other Democrat won in my town, though Maura Healey and Eric Lesser, my friend and now state senator, just squeaked by with victories. Coakley lost big in my town. My question is, why?
Unskillful campaigning. Coakley has never shown herself to be a skillful campaigner. Neither has Baker. He’s monotone and fairly dull. Still, he made no real mistakes (the fisherman story came too late); on the other hand, Coakley made a major gaffe on the gas tax. As a gaffe, this one was egregious because it made great advertisement fodder. It also revealed a candidate clearly unprepared for a topic that was guaranteed to be discussed. I tend to blame the campaign, however, for this major failure. There was no good reason for her to be unprepared for this issue.
Party Support. Coakley lacked the support of party activists and officials. She had alienated many of us with her poor showing in 2010. Steve Grossman had also sewn up the votes of all the elected officials and party activists he could contact. The degree of separation between Coakley and these folks was evident at the convention where she almost came in third. It may have been a lack of political skill on her part that she didn’t recruit these activists and officials soon enough, but I’m willing to bet that she didn’t have the necessary good will to attract much support.
The Primary. The major reason for Coakley’s loss, I think, is what Bob said: she had to spend too much time and money on a bruising primary. Don Berwick has the heart and soul of good Democrat, but he never had the organization or experience for a successful campaign. (I supported him). Grossman, on the other hand, did serious damage. Not only did he stand between Coakley and the many elected officials and party apparatchiks she needed, but his well-funded campaign and the PAC that spent so much money on him fatally depleted of her campaign coffers. Too many voters were undecided during the primary for his ads to damage her reputation, but she needed the money.
Baker’s supporters picked up where Grossman left off, handing Coakley a pretty serious beating with TV commercials. She didn’t have enough money to defend herself. Her first commercials were pretty weak–failing to counteract her accumulated likability deficit–but she didn’t have enough money to produce others of better quality. Many of us at BMG would like to see a primary before every general election, but the 2014 primary, in my opinion, doomed Coakley’s campaign. Additional, better advertising could have put a serious dent in Baker’s lead and perhaps changed the outcome. As it was, Coakley wasn’t exactly demonized, but she was made to look ridiculous.
UMass actually bothered to conduct an exit poll on the election. Three results seem particularly noteworthy: 1) gender matters. Men voted for Baker by a 17% margin, and women voted for Coakley by a 14% margin. 2) More voters voted against Coakley than against Baker. About the same number of voters in favor each candidate, but only 45% of respondents said they were voting against Baker while 51% said they were voting against Coakley. That six percent may have been the deciding factor in the election. 3) Nine percent of Democratic voters supported Baker. Some of the prominent Democrats seem to have been true supporters. Others may have remained alienated from the 2010 campaign. I have no evidence to support this contention, but I think that Coakley’s gender was also an issue.
A couple of quibbles with other analyses:
David has suggested that perhaps “Massachusetts voters like Republican governors.” George Will used to say that Americans liked divided government because we had different parties dominating the executive and legislative branches. These are what the critic John Ruskin termed pathetic fallacies–attributing human qualities to a natural, non-human thing. It’s not a logical fallacy, and “pathetic” refers to pathos. But the electorate, though made up of hundreds of thousands of individuals, is not an entity. Individual intentions do not add up to a collective intention. Voting only asks one question: which candidate do you choose? It doesn’t ask why.
Another troubling interpretation of the election is the lefty claim that if we had a more progressive candidate, we’d be planning for a Democratic inauguration. This may be true for all I know, but there’s no evidence for it, and it’s worth noting that the tea party uses the same argument when Republican candidates lose. While I do think that many Democratic candidates need to be more staunch in their opinions, I don’t think we can fault Coakley’s loss on ideological purity.
In my opinion, Martha Coakley turned out all right in the end. She wasn’t perfect, and she didn’t execute perfectly. Some of her problems were self-inflicted, some inflicted upon her. Watching her speech the morning after the election, I didn’t know whether she was speaking as the person she always was or the person she had become. Either way, she came across as thoughtful, intelligent, and most of all, real. She choked up when she spoke about her mother. She encouraged women not to give up. A politician, an attorney general, a candidate who did her best and lost, Martha Coakley turned out all right in the end.
Not knowing what the gas tax is makes one ignorant, not crazy.
I’m not sure what else Grossman could have done short of not running himself. He was with Coakley 100% once she won the primary. I didn’t see Baker picking up the Grossman line. The one distinction I remember being drawn was a detail about guns, technically from a SuperPAC, and in the general guns were only mentioned AGAINST Baker, I believe also by a SuperPAC.
I don’t know if a good governor is a walking compendium of statistics. Don’t we have assistants and the Internet for that? Was Baker asked a turnaround question — how much does Massachusetts spend on roads and bridges in a given year?
The gas tax thing was a stupid gotcha question.
the issues. I just finished some inside work on one campaign. Have done the same on two others. Part of the campaign’s job is anticipating those gotcha questions. You do that by making sure the candidate has information. In this last campaign, we prepared for all the ballot questions, not just the casino question, which directly affected the district.
The state just raised the gas tax for the first time in 25 years. All tax issues are potential gotcha questions. This isn’t a Curt Schilling question. It’s a substantive issue that she should have been informed on. That’s the job of a good campaign, not necessarily the candidate who has enough to do. I can’t blame Coakley, but someone dropped the ball.
I get that some gotcha questions are more “gotcha” than others. However, I believe my second point stands — was Charlie asked about the facts and figures of his opponents’ agenda?
.
…is a lot more relevant than “When was the last time you cried?” or “Should Roger Goodell be fired?” Especially since the question was directly on the ballot, both questions about the current rate and current standing should have been anticipated.
Last line should say current spending rather than current standing.
the gun thing. I didn’t see it as a pressing issue. I know Sandy Hook and all, but we’d already had legislation and the issue was forgotten.
Apparently she did not appeal to them. I’ll have to see some analysis to know why not.
“I don’t know why they did what they did, I just know they did it. And I’d have to see analysis — which I don’t need in order to know they did it — only in order to know why they did it.”
Derp.
very adult. Do you think you are scaring me away?
My point is to that maybe it’s just a question of narrowing down where she failed.
But as always your ability to understand the written word is limited, so I can see why you didn’t get that.
In an election lost by 40,361 votes, then any bloc equal to 40,361/2 + 1 votes is a ‘swing bloc’. There is no one swing bloc. That number represents LESS than 1% of the vote. There is no, if-this-then-that, logic that can narrow down a 20182 swing in so close an election. You say ‘suburban mothers’. I say Springfield. You can point, as easily as I can, at any 20k chunk of a population and say “they did it…” Well, yes they did. And no they didn’t.
She did not fail. The CommonWealth failed her.
like some sort of sporting match.
“Springfield” only describes one geographic portion of the state and it would be hard to characterize all residents as a similar group.
“Suburban mothers” however would share numerous characteristics and could be generalized across much of the state. Additionally it was a group she probably expected to win big, but did not.
Really. That is so ridiculous that a response is impossible. Note that at no point have I made any mention about her failures. I actually don’t think she made any obvious ones. Sometimes it’s just not your time.
I guess next time we should ask what the Commonwealth can do for Martha Coakley, rather than what she would do for the Commonwealth?
Half of us were in agreement that her career was over after the Brown debacle, now we can all be in full agreement that it is over. For nearly 8 months she has dominated the conversations on this thread, both from her supporters and opponents, for the sake of everyone let us finally move on and discuss where the movement needs to go, rather than the what if’s of one person’s particular political career.
I suggest you don’t take some too seriously or their sniping too personally.
for a weakness among women voters. According to UMass, women went for Baker at the same rate that men went for Coakley, and there were more women voting. Maybe she could have done better with women. A couple of points might have mattered.
Her real weakness seems to be the difference in people who voted against each candidate. Narrowing that percentage, I think, would have made that difference. My guess is that is where more advertising might have done the trick. It’s also worth noting that the percentage of Democratic defectors was high and probably made up a percentage of the antipathetic voters.
he had against Patrick in 2010. He also had a much smaller gap than Brown v. Warren.
with women candidates. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s sexism, though that term is too broad, particularly since women hold the bias too. Is there something comforting for some people about having a middle-aged, white man in charge? Warren was also hated in a way that I haven’t seen at the state level in Massachusetts. Maybe Dukakis at the end, I don’t know. We hate Scott Brown on here, but not to the Fauxcohantas point. Maybe it’s a class issue.
I don’t have access to discussions with suburban moms about voting. Do you have the in Andover?
On the day of Gomez vs. Markey my wife asked 6 other women she was sitting with at a playground if they had voted. Not one of them even knew there was an election that day.
Andover is a little different than say, Tewksbury (which I consider more of a bellwether) because the civic engagement is higher, as are income, education, but for the most part I think my generalization holds. These women voters (based on my talking to them) are picking an impression (and nothing more) of a candidate.
… It’s also worth noting that a purportedly progressive blog, BMG, wanted the ballot questions to go “NYYY” when, in fact, the questions came back “YNNY”. On the theory that ideas generate a less visceral reaction (dubious) than candidates this might be about as comprehensive an insight we are likely to have into the difference between progressives and the electorate. I would characterize it as a ‘distinct difference’.
At the risk of sounding maudlin, I think your analysis, fine as far as it goes, elides the fact that –in the face of all the very really obstacles she faced — she lost only in a real squeaker: 40K votes, or less than 2% of the turnout. A small change in only a few of the margins and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I think of all the people who self-righteously trumpeted their contempt, thus denying her the chance to be anything but a ‘lousy candidate’ could be, as much as anything, what cost the race. At some point, in a din loud enough about how lousy the candidate is the candidate can’t be anything else and the prophecy is fulfilled before it is fully articulated. There are, it is said, none so blind as those who will not to see. Or it could have been, as you and Bob write, the un-necessarily bruising primary (another commonality between 2010 and 2014) . Everybody, it seems, felt free to take a swing at Coakley: then some took offense at why we would present a candidate so bruised.
You wrote, also, of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ and I think maybe you’re on to something about attribution and anthropomorphism. I’m detecting, if not an actual fallacy some defects in logic, and not just from you… and, to be honest, more of habitual manners of thought, than actual logic… but it’s the incessant drumbeat of what the candidate did, or did not do, or could have done or might’ve or shoulda as though the electorate is just an input/output device with a series of buttons to push and levers to pull — and furthermore, whichever candidate magically alights upon the proper sequence of buttons and levers is the best candidate. I do not think elections work this way.
Furthermore, as I’ve long lamented, thinking in this manner leaves us open to the decidedly faulty logic of the ‘perfect candidate’ with all the right moves. We’ve had that candidate: his name is Barack Obama and his electoral victories notwithstanding he’s been a sad failure of governance; whatever moves got him to the office failed him once there.
of the water, I might have had a different take. I was amazed on campaign night that this didn’t happen. I had made phone calls for the MTA the Thursday before the election. I have no idea how many calls I made. The dialing is all automated and there were a lot of hangups or pre-hangups. I had about 4 MTA members who said they weren’t voting for Coakley. My instincts about how she’d do were wrong. That’s when I was changed my opinion about her. She did, indeed, turn out all right in the end. You can’t complain about a gubernatorial loss of 40,000 votes.
I also think you’re on to something with the perfect candidate thing. There has to be a degree of randomness to elections. Polls control for randomness as best they can, but elections are random. We tend to operate on the assumption that everything matters. Many things matter. Campaigns act like everything matters. We like to think things can be controlled. But there’s quite a bit beyond our ken or control, and often it’s that bit that makes the difference.
I think that, as Mark said, Martha Coakley closed well. Another week, or without Menino’s passing, she’d have pulled it off. Yet…yet. I don’t think a Democratic candidate should have pulled it off.
10% of Massachusetts voters supported sick leave and Democrats up and down the ballot, and not Martha Coakley. Do you think those same voters would have stuck with Charlie Baker over anyone else? I don’t.
of hedging on the campaign’s part that wasn’t very persuasive. The question is, how many votes would she have lost by supporting sick leave?
She DID support sick leave.
I thought Sabutai was telling me something I didn’t know.
The issue and every other Dem on the ballot outperformed Coakley by 10+ points. Coakley might be “pulled it off” with another week, but the Democrat should have done better than just squeaking by and another Democrat would have.
I get this is a nationwide problem — people voted for Democratic issues (minimum wage, pot legalization, access to health care for women) and not Democrats. Same thing happened here. I’m trying to say that if Martha had won every pro-sick leave vote, she would have won. Yet somehow she didn’t.
I maintain it is because she coasted rhetorically and ideologically. She wasn’t afraid of voters like last time, but if someone attentive as Mark can think that perhaps she didn’t support sick leave (even if due to me being unclear), she certainly didn’t run as a progressive.
Her career is over. Arguing about what it’s is a waste of time. I note that petr and I intensely disagreed during the course of this campaign about Martha Coakley but I largely agree with his analysis upthread. This was a sound rejection of progressive policy nationwide and locally. We can’t lie and argue it was not, we can’t blame a particular candidate when progressive concepts like gas tax indexing or the bottle bill were also rejected -alongside our objectives to casinos. We shouldn’t lie about the Deval record which will now be fiscally responsive stewardship in the first term, casinos and blown opportunities for transit in the second.
Those opportunities, along with gutting collective bargaining were done by our people-not Republican boogeyman-and we did little to stop them. As I posted in my own thread, there is a heroin epidemic linked to a permanent economic depression in the Western half of our state. There are ways of life and standards of living working people in our gateway cities once enjoyed that are threatened.
There is educational, health, and income inequity all over our state which is getting more and more expensive to live in without providing the kinda of good jobs and good wages we were accustomed to. Voters elected change and voted out a failed status quo. We should not insult them or second guess our messengers-it’s clear our message itself is broken and in need of serious repair. Time to search our own souls and step outside of our own assumptions and comfort zones to discover why and to craft a message that can win while affirming rather than weakening our principles.
…there was a nationwide rejection of progressive policy. Specific questions often went the progressive direction and Rachel Maddow broke it down the other night.
One example – four states voted to increase the minimum wage, including 69% of Alaska voters.
Yeah, but Coakley is not really that progressive. If she had presented a progressive vision for MA and lost, then maybe we can say this. She didn’t present a progressive vision, or much of a vision at all.
That’s easy. Look to our senior Senator.
As far as the message, I think Coakley’s campaign failed miserably there, and it was evident since early in the primary. It was also something many of us noted here.
Voters supported progressivism.
Democratic candidates did not.
Hence, voters did not support Democratic candidates.
Sure, that leaves out a huge chunk of the electorate, a plurality in many states. But you can win on progressive ideals, but only if you run on them.
not arguing. There’s no insulting to voters either–they choose as they see fit. They are reality though, neither morally right or wrong. What they perceive about issues is in response to the messages we choose and how we present them. That will not change. It can’t. The message can’t be separated from the messenger or the media that disseminate it. And finally the message can only be understood by the people who receive it.
Progressivism didn’t lose. Candidates lost. They didn’t argue progressive causes. The gas tax wasn’t a progressive idea; it was a technocratic idea. The bottle bill may have been progressive, but it was probably outdated. The problem of litter exists; the bill probably would have helped; but people are finding regular recycling a lot easier. I knew a lot of progressives who didn’t like it. The only progressive question actually won: Question 4. We don’t have a progressive in the White House. We didn’t have a progressive running for governor. We know what we need to do and say. We just need to do it.
In my view, if income and wealth concentration had been the centerpiece of her campaign, she would have won. If that had been true, I might even have voted for her. The rub is that if that had been true, Martha Coakley would not be Martha Coakley. She might not even have been our nominee — I would argue that if she and our party were truly concerned about income and wealth inequality — if we were truly the “lunch-bucket Democrats” that we were for so long — then Tim Murray would probably have been our nominee. Of course, in that alternate universe, Bob DeLeo would not be speaker.
Income and wealth concentration was barely even mentioned in the campaign. It was not because income and wealth concentration (and the multitude of terrible problems it creates) was not a priority for her and is not a priority for our party.
Our senior senator did NOT come up through the ranks of our party, and there are more than few dyed-in-the-wall Massachusetts Democratic Party members who still argue that Elizabeth Warren was “anointed” (apparently by some outside cabal).
In my view, the miracle was that Martha Coakley came as close as she did. That says to me that she ran an astonishingly effective campaign, nearly overcoming the significant weaknesses that have always plagued her as both a candidate and as a statewide office holder.
She lost because she is who she is, because our party is what it is, and because Massachusetts voters concluded that Mr. Baker will be a better governor. No more, no less.
….it was in fact the state party itself. The state convention, the highest body of the party that guarantees seats to all state committee members and Dem county and state office holders, gave her 95% of the vote and a avoided a primary. I’m not complaining, just pointing out that it was in fact the party that ultimately gave her such a boost.
As for Coakley, her nomination fight was mostly name recognition from caucuses through convention and right to the primary. I suspect the results would have been similar even if she did articulate those issues.
Warren is a charismatic progressive that says what she thinks. That’s a rarity in politics, excepting wingnuts like Gomert and Bachmann.
This was also a mid-term election. An election we knew would be tough on Democrats. An uphill battle.
This election season was mostly about a very discontented electorate worried about money, and Democrats that didn’t want to talk about it.
“David has suggested that perhaps “Massachusetts voters like Republican governors.” George Will used to say that Americans liked divided government because we had different parties dominating the executive and legislative branches. These are what the critic John Ruskin termed pathetic fallacies–attributing human qualities to a natural, non-human thing. It’s not a logical fallacy, and ‘pathetic’ refers to pathos. But the electorate, though made up of hundreds of thousands of individuals, is not an entity. Individual intentions do not add up to a collective intention. Voting only asks one question: which candidate do you choose? It doesn’t ask why.”
Theorizing about the collective motivations for voters’ choices is not a pathetic fallacy, and anyone who misapplies it here, if that’s indeed the case with John Rustin, has serious misunderstandings.
Elections are not “natural, non-human thing[s].” As made up of human decisions, they’re inherently willful and require human agency to administer, conduct, and to execute.
It’s quite common and understandable for people to prefer divided government, including the reasoning that by having oppositional parties competing for success and to be elected within the same organizations, that each party will be more policed, more likely to strive for moderation, and more likely to be driven to prove themselves against their opponents.
That may or may not have been a significant reason for more voters to select Republican governors over Democratic ones in Massachusetts, but it’s certainly not a fallacy to consider the reasons and motivations for voters’ decisions collectively being perhaps a result of implicit beliefs about the way the world works, situational ethics, social psychology, etc.
… so he hasn’t been applying much since 1900. When alive, however, he did apply the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ to the artists temptation to make use of physically impossible imagery stemming from overt, perhaps even overwhelming, sentimentality. Mark was clear to point out that it was not a logical fallacy.
There was an old Irish song my Nanna’s Nanna used to sing (the name of which escapes me) about a queen so beautiful that “the flowers in the garden would bow to beg her pardon” whenever she passed by… flowers can neither bow at will nor beg anything and so we see this is as an example of pathos (excess sentimentality) meeting fallacy (falseness if not outright defective logic). It is, I believe something of what Mark was getting at: electorates have no will: and being composed of many wills isn’t determinative. Details matter, however much you might be tempted to suss them out as petty.
This is an actual logical fallacy: a defect of logic which invalidates the argument it attempts to support. Consider the instance where people have a preference for a candidate or a partyAND a preference for divided government. How’s that going to work? A preference for a candidate and/or a party pre-supposes that they cannot have a preference for divided government. And a preference for divided government leaves no space for a preference for party and/or candidate. That argument collapses. Suppose, therefore, we say that some of the people have a preference for a candidate and/or a party and the remainder for divided government: the preferences for candidates/party fill out according to, well, the preferences as they are… but the preference for divided government, where does that start? Randomly? Do they flip a coin on the top of the ticket and then ‘criss cross’ the parties downticket? Well, if that’s the case then only randomly will a preference for divided government emerge from the electorate as a whole as it’s more likely to align with the preferences of candidate/party voters unless the portion of the electorate that prefers divided government is many times larger than the portion that prefers specific candidates/parties. What about if they flip a coin for each office? That’s entirely random and we’ve left the realm of preferences of any kind. Suppose it’s not random? How’s that work? Say you have a preference for a candidate/party at the top of the ticket and then do the ‘criss cross’ downticket. Well, then you’ve started with a preference other than a preference for divided government and your argument collapses again.
“This is an actual logical fallacy: a defect of logic which invalidates the argument it attempts to support.”
I’m not sure, but it seems to me that you presented a definition of what logical fallacies are here as you did so after a colon: “a defect of logic which invalidates the argument it attempts to support.” This is a bit tedious as I’m quite familiar with logical fallacies, and if you believe that you’ve spotted a poor argument, it should be relatively easy to explain why you believe it’s incorrect than to introduce definitions of terms that are unnecessary for the explanation. Of course this could be just a style preference that I have, but even your definition here does not illuminate the discussion.
Again, this can be differences of experiences and style, but when we speak of fallacies, we’re generally referring to arguments based on assumptions and poor reasoning that continue to appear. So, given that there are dozens upon dozens of known formal and informal fallacies, with many of them even given their own names,…in the case of the explanation I gave,
“It’s quite common and understandable for people to prefer divided government, including the reasoning that by having oppositional parties competing for success and to be elected within the same organizations, that each party will be more policed, more likely to strive for moderation, and more likely to be driven to prove themselves against their opponents.”
which you’ve expressed you believe to be a fallacy, again, naming the fallacy should be sufficient, or in the case that no name exists for this particular one, or you’re simply not aware of its name, then a proper explanation could include descriptions of how this fallacy works (ex. perhaps with another example), why it shouldn’t be used, or a better way for one to support his/her points w/o falling into the specific trap of the fallacy.
What you wrote though, began with its own logical fallacy (the either-or fallacy, also known as a false dichotomy) and then unfortunately meandered into a discussion which would be more appropriate in a discussion on statistics (coin flipping, random trials – if you could organize it a little better) where it might be a better example of the problem of the pathetic fallacy, but more specifically, the logical one known as the “gambler’s fallacy.”
“Consider the instance where people have a preference for a candidate or a partyAND a preference for divided government. How’s that going to work? A preference for a candidate and/or a party pre-supposes that they cannot have a preference for divided government. And a preference for divided government leaves no space for a preference for party and/or candidate. That argument collapses.”
Yes, I could see how you’d be inclined to believe that an argument collapses, under such assumptions, but that in itself it an either-or fallacy.
“A preference for a candidate and/or a party pre-supposes that they cannot have a preference for divided government.”
No, this is absolutely incorrect. It’s quite possible, and I believe it’s actually more common than many may be willing to admit, that voters (in both Massachusetts and on average across the country) can have a preference for Democrats, yet also have some concerns about corruption and lack of checks and balances under one-party rule and therefore have preference for divided government as well.
The way our minds work is not that our numerous beliefs and views are consistent and line up as would the world in a convenient philosophical thought experiment. Many of our countless biases and assumptions rarely are made explicit much less ever come into contact with each other so that the average person consciously laments our own personal inconsistencies and sets out to find more sophisticated reasoning to correct our own poor thinking and find consistency in our beliefs and views.
And, it’s certainly not the case that when people have assorted beliefs, that they all have equal wait or that we’re even cognizant of them all to the point that we’d both be that contemplative and introspective, yet reach for a quarter in order to make our daily decisions.
A person can have a preference for one thing or another thing, but not both — if those things are different enough . That’s what the word ‘preference’ means: a primary intent that supersedes other intents and you can only have one… else it’s not a preference.
Dichotomies are slightly different: you cannot, for example, intend to lose weight while simultaneously intending to eat all the Black Raspberry ice cream you can carry. That’s not a false dichotomy: it’s a real dichotomy and you must choose: either weight loss or the sweet sweet yummy… but choosing one is explicit preclusion of the other.
In this instance, voting, you cannot walk into a voting booth saying “i prefer candidate X” and “I prefer divided government’ because divided government is at odds with a specific candidacy: you can prefer a candidate of one party for one office and a candidate of another party for another office but that’s an outcome of your preferences for individual candidates and not for divided government. If you go into the voting both specifically with the primary intent of voting for divided government then any individual choices are superseded: each choice for each office must be made upon how it divides government. At which point you’re back to the arguments i’ve lain out previously: how do you start to divide the government without resorting to preferring one candidate or party over another.
try these sentences which followed them:
And um, yeah, it’s a fallacy, pathetic or not. It confuses effect–divided government–with cause. There is no evidence other than the fact that we will have a divided government to support the idea that people prefer divided government. Do some people prefer it? Most likely some do.
“Considering” something is not a fallacy because there is no conclusion made. David said he was arguing with John Walsh about the idea. I said such a conclusion would be a fallacy without evidence to support.
Glad to see you commenting.
and partially here:
It is certainly a known logical fallacy to argue motivations based on results, especially those of complex systems. Just reviewed online here as this is a popular one, but I couldn’t remember all the name for the ones which might apply: false cause, affirming the consequent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent)
, possibly fallacy of the single cause,…
but
I’m not quite sure that voting only asks that one question, and we certainly have exits polls (and daily polls) asking people what beliefs influence their decisions.
you read my post? I feel like we’re misunderstanding each other because I’m not disagreeing with the substance of your argument. I brought up exit polls.
My point is that you can’t make a logical conclusion, such as people prefer divided government, from the vote result. The vote doesn’t, nor can it, provide evidence to support that conclusion.
I’m not arguing that voters don’t have motivations. I’m arguing that the vote doesn’t provide evidence for the conclusion that Massachusetts voters prefer Republican governors. There is no way to validly infer that conclusion from the vote results. Could it be true? Certainly. But it would take evidence other than ballot results to validly infer something.
The ballot does indeed only ask one question. What else could it be asking besides what candidate you choose? You answer is your vote. You seem to be confusing questions and answers with motivation. You can infer a preference from election results, but you can’t infer motivation.
People certainly vote for different reasons.
This thread is a waste of time and energy. Let’s focus on the future, let’s focus on remaking the house into a progressive place, let’s focus in checking the speakers power and holding our legislators to the fire as the Baker term begins.
As glad as you might be to say ‘get thee behind me, Martha‘, there may still be some here who think it was a mistake not to elect her and would prefer to discuss possible aspects of that mistake… which discussion may, shock-horror-gasp (for you)- might include talking about Martha.
These the same folks with the Kerry-Edward stickers on their cars? It’s over and time to move on.
http://vps28478.inmotionhosting.com/~bluema24/2014/11/martha-we-hardly-knew-you-post-election-reflections/#comment-354326
but, I’ve also seen here be argued a few times that it’s the fault of commenters here at BMG that Martha Coakley didn’t win.
Couldn’t possibly be the candidate’s own weaknesses, it must be the failures of others.
Coakley at this point?
Quite a low bar