Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Who's Who in the Horse Race

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, December 01, 2011

As we continue to watch the gaudy show that we call the primaries, we need to keep all the factors in mind.
Inductive arguments are not valid or invalid, but are rather strong or weak. In an inductive argument, you are reasoning from the particular to the general. If you say that you saw a crow once, and it was black, and that therefore all crows are black, that is an inductive argument -- a weak one. If you are getting your doctorate in crows, and have observed 100,000 of them on five continents, and they were all black, and therefore all crows are black, that is a strong inductive argument. It still may be wrong, because you missed all the white Antarctica crows, which is easy to do, what with the snow and all.

We have to remember that polling is a form of inductive argumentation, and that formally most of the arguments presented to us are weak.
We have specialists who call up 300 Americans, and they, on the basis of that, tell us what 300 million Americans are thinking. Most of these polls are allowed to stand. If they tell us that Cain or Gingrich is 10 or 15 points up or down at this point in time, when the real voting starts, we don't usually take this authoritative input as a correction of the polls -- as the time when we actually gathered up all the crows and checked their actual color. Rather (so that we may keep our faith in the polls) we treat the whole thing as a horse race. A week before the election was the third lap, two weeks before the election was the second lap, and so on. If the candidate who was way down in the polls wins the election, we conclude that he caught up in the backstretch. It doesn't really occur to us that we are not actually watching a race.

Pretend for a moment that there were no polls, or that nobody paid attention to them. What would the cable networks talk about? What would they do with their time?

We should remember that we have had three, or four, or five "leaders" so far in the Republican race, and we have managed to do this without any actual voting. We are chasing the shadows of ephemera with butterfly nets. But, and I will admit this much, it is a lot of fun.