Reply #39: "opinions differ on shape of earth"

[OnTheOtherHand]

We don't call that "disagreement" in the United States. I have seen no actual disagreements; as far as I can see, you have tacitly conceded every point. The "Urban Legend" simply doesn't hold up, no matter what else one thinks happened in 2004.

Once more, from the Collins article that started it all:

The only way a Bush victory makes sense, given his failure in rural America, is the addition of millions of votes to the urban centers, the impossible phenomenon.... How did the NEP get it so wrong on the urban vote? Was it simple expediency? They had an election to report. They had that 3% problem to handle, you know, the Kerry 51%-48% victory at the end of the day’s polling. There was very little time to handle it. The urban magic that Charles Cook extolled as a sign of Bush campaign genius was invented. It came to be because it was the only way the poll could match the reported results....

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0706/S00165.htm

But the evidence says that, in the table Collins refers to, the "addition of millions of votes to the urban centers" occurred before the table was reweighted -- while it still showed Kerry ahead. See this tabulation from just after 7:30 pm Eastern time (see pages 11-12). It looks like this:



Some folks have contested other folks' commitment to democracy, but no one has contested this table, which demonstrates that there is no relationship between the relative big-city vs. rural vote shares in the table and whether it shows Bush or Kerry to be ahead. For comparison, people can refer to the revised tab posted on your website here -- again, pages 11-12.



Both tables show the same proportion of big-city votes, the same proportion of rural votes -- in fact, all the same proportions except for rounding on the suburban share. The reweighting boosted Bush's vote share in all five categories; it didn't detectably alter the purported big-city turnout. (And, as I've noted, the exaggeration of big-city turnout doesn't "match the reported results" at all. It doesn't even appear to match the state exit poll tables. It's just plain wrong.)

Even the premise of Bush's "failure in rural America" depends, as far as I can tell, on the assumptions that (1) the decline in the rural vote is correct although the increase in the big-city vote is wrong (which verges on mathematical impossibility) and (2) somehow the NEP could only reweight the big-city numbers, not the rural numbers (was one of their abacus rods sticky?!). The whole darn argument is as "rhetorical" as one can imagine.

(Oh, the part about Charlie Cook extolling urban magic is "rhetorical," too.)

So, I don't see disagreement. I see refusal to correct demonstrable error. I can't "agree to disagree" in the absence of disagreement -- that would be mere mystification.