Rajiv Sethi: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and the Iowa Caucus
A few days ago Nate Silver made the following intriguing comments on the Iowa Caucus (emphasis added):
There are extremely strong incentives for supporters of Mrs. Bachmann, Mr. Santorum and Mr. Perry to behave tactically, throwing their weight behind whichever one appears to have the best chance of finishing in the top two. What that means is that if any of these candidates appear to have any momentum at all during the final week of the campaign, their support could grow quite quickly as other voters jump on the bandwagon.
This is also a case in which the polling may actually influence voter behavior. In particular, if one of these candidates does well in the highly influential Des Moines Register poll that should be published on New Year’s Eve or thereabouts, that candidate might be a pretty good bet to overperform polling as voters use that as a cue on caucus night to determine which one is most viable…
I’m not sure that this theory actually makes any sense… But it may not matter if the theory is true. If voters are looking for anything to break the logjam between these candidates, mere speculation that one of them has momentum could prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What’s most interesting about this is the possibility that even a methodologically flawed or misleading poll, provided that it is given credence, could coordinate expectations on one of these three candidates and result in a surge of support.
In fact, this seems to be precisely what has happened. A CNN/Time poll covering the period December 21-27 revealed Santorum to be in third place with 16% of the vote. This was an outlier at the time, and was sharply criticized by Tom Jensen of PPP and by Nate himself for surveying only registered Republicans:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/rajiv-sethi-self-fulfilling-prophecies-and-the-iowa-caucus.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
