“The Party Hasn’t Decided, So Anything Goes”

[Aimless]

Haven't read the book in question but stumbled upon this article from a few months ago and thought it was an interesting summary of the situation:

http://www.economist.com/news/books-...-recent-memory

EXCERPT

Pushback

The 2016 campaign is putting the most influential political-science book in recent memory to a stiff test

[...]

For political scientists, The Donald’s success paves the way for a host of new questions. What determines which are the elections where a “party can make up its collective mind”? How far can a party stretch the preferences of its voters before they revolt? Within the academy, no one will suggest that the authors of TPD should be muzzled or ignored just because they failed to foresee Mr Trump’s ascent.

For data journalists, however, the stakes are higher. Mainstream audiences will not be satisfied with excuses or technicalities: the best and the brightest said that Mr Trump could never win, and it looks as if they were wrong. One crucial corrective would be to actually read the original versions of academic political-science texts rather than relying on caveat-free summaries: a close reading of TPD applied to the 2016 Republican race might have been entitled “The Party Hasn’t Decided, So Anything Goes”. Another would be to take a nibble of humble pie and recall that there is a reason “political science” sounds like an oxymoron: there are no iron laws in politics. There is only so much a study of ten primary campaigns between 1980 and 2004 can tell people about a new set of circumstances and candidates in 2016.

Ultimately, however, popular evangelists for political science need to stand their ground. For years, sceptics cited the failure of baseball teams assembled by Billy Beane (the protagonist of Mr Lewis’s book, “Moneyball”) to win a championship as proof that statistics had no place in baseball. Today, virtually all these flat-earthers have been forced into early retirement. Every statistical model has its flaws, but presidential elections are still far easier to predict months in advance than, say, economic growth or the weather. Just like Mr Beane’s Oakland Athletics, Mr Silver’s disciples need to keep offering wagers to the Joe Scarboroughs of the world. In the long run, they—and therefore the voters who depend on them for information and analysis—will win more often than they lose.

[...]

If the view presented in the article is correct, it suggests a "simple" solution to the GOP's idiot-problem for the next election, namely that the party needs to make up its mind about a decent candidate that can get a sufficiently strong endorsement to secure the nomination.

[Loki]

The only reason everyone is obsessed with The Party Decides is because Silver decided to use that book to justify his views about Trump's electability. I'm not saying it's a bad book/theory, but it's far from the only one, and it's certainly not the most influential. To somehow equate it with political science shows a profound lack of understanding of academia, let alone the specific discipline of political science.

As for whether the book itself had enough caveats to suggest Trump isn't an outlier, that's a bit too relativistic for my tastes. No real-life scenario is going to be a perfect replica of a simple model. Trump's rise is a strike against this theory, though I'd be hesitant to dismiss a theory based on one strike.

Lastly, I'm weary of theories that expect policymakers to follow them before their predictions come true. That's not how theory works. Policymakers should do what the theory expects whether they've ever heard of the theory or not.