Reply #57: Melissa, I think there is some confusion here

[Febble]

about the "FFF". It is virtually irrelevant to the current discussion and to Mitofsky's new plot. Actually I think was a bit disingenuous of Steve to use Mitofsky's plot of WPE against Bush's vote share, and not use his plot of FFF against vote share to make one of his points, as he has certainly verbally agreed with me that the FFF is a more valid measure of PLD, than the WPE, but no matter. I think that's water under the bridge. Well maybe not. But it wasn't crucial to Mitofsky's new plot at all. It's only relevant to the argument that PLD was higher in high Bush precincts. And I remain convinced that this is not the case.

But the really critical plot is the new one which you can't very well judge because it isn't posted anywhere yet, although I understand it will be. It does use a version of the FFF, which we have christened Tau. But the result is not particularly sensitive to the measure used. I think Tau is probably the most valid measure we have devised so far however (although a Tau prime is in the works), so it was the one used here. Steve wouldn't have seen it before, so I don't know what he makes of it.

But it shows, as with the ESI plot, that swing from 2000 was not significantly correlated with PLD, as I explain in my response above. This is actually very important.

And while I'm at it: a word about scatterplots. Some people don't like them. I do. The reason I do is that unlike plots of aggregates like means and medians, especially when aggregates are presented with no indication of variance, they show every single damn data point. So when they are presented with a correlation coefficient, it is clear to the naked eye not only what the correlation coefficient means, but also whether the assumptions it is based on are met. I've seen plot after plot in this debate showing aggregated means for various groupings of datapoints. But scatterplots are the real McCoy. Every table, every plot of aggregate values hides a scatterplot. A scatterplot hides nothing. It is the data, warts and all. The "raw" data, in fact, in the case of the scatterplots Mitofsky has presented. Nothing up anyone's sleeve. Scatterplots are your friend. They tell you a heck of a lot if you stare at them hard enough.