Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't by John Jr. (books that read to you TXT) 📕

Carter’s defenders countered that Reagan’s landslide ensured that these Democratic candidates would have lost anyway. His supporters also cast doubt on surveys showing that Democratic voters were discouraged by the early concession, arguing that fellow Democrats wanted to blame the party’s losses on a tactical mistake by Carter.

When Bob Dole challenged Bill Clinton for the presidency in 1996, it was the Republicans’ turn to suffer from an early election call. Citing exit polls, the networks called the election for Clinton before the polls on the West Coast had closed. Republicans blamed the media for discouraging their West Coast supporters from voting, while Democrats insisted that Republican candidates would have lost anyway.

What impact do early media calls actually have on voting? It is hard to estimate their impact in the 1980 and 1996 elections because they affected all the races in the Western states—it is difficult to determine whether it was the early election call or something unique to those states that caused the drop off in voting. Fortunately, the 2000 election was different: polling had ended in most of Florida, but was still ongoing in the state’s ten western Panhandle counties, when the media declared that the Democrats had won the presidential race as well as the Florida Senate races.76

Florida’s polls were open until 8:00 p.m. on election day. But Florida’s heavily Republican Panhandle counties are on central, not eastern, time, so they stayed open for an additional hour. Yet, beginning at 8:00 p.m. EST, all the major networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and NBC) incorrectly and repeatedly announced that the polls were closed in the entire state. CBS national news alone made eighteen statements indicating that the polls had closed.

Even for the western Panhandle voters who knew that their polls were actually still open, they still had to consider the media claims that the races’ outcomes had already been determined. The Florida Senate race was called for the Democrats fifty-eight minutes before the polls closed in the western Panhandle, while the presidential race was called for Al Gore twelve minutes before the polls closed. Even before the presidential race was called, the media offered numerous reports indicating that Gore appeared likely to win.77

After the election, surveys showed that the early media call and the perception of Democratic victories had discouraged voters in the western Panhandle. Two-thirds of voters in that region voted Republican, so even if the early call discouraged voters from both parties at the same rate, more Republicans ended up not voting. According to Democratic strategist Bob Beckel, George W. Bush suffered a net loss of up to 8,000 votes due to the early media call. Another survey of western Panhandle voters by John McLaughlin & Associates, a Republican polling company, estimated 10,000 lost votes for Bush. But both surveys suffer from the same problem afflicting the polls done after Carter’s defeat: respondents may have let their political interests color their answers. In this case, disgruntled Republicans may have been more likely to exaggerate the effect of the early call.78

That voting dropped, at least to some degree, after the early call is confirmed in the sworn statements from many election clerks and poll workers. According to a Clerk for Elections in Okaloosa County, for example, “We had over 1300 people turn out with an average of about one hundred voters per hour until the last hour. When the doors were open, there were quite a number of people waiting in line to vote. There was a heavy flow throughout the day....Soon after 7:00 p.m., I noticed that the volume dropped to almost zero.”79

Statistical evidence supports this, too. During the 2000 election, the western Panhandle counties suffered a drop in turnout not only relative to their past turnout rates, but also compared to the rest of Florida. Comparing how each county’s turnout changed during the day, the western Panhandle counties also suffered a drop relative to the rest of the states.80 The evidence indicates that the early call cost Bush a net loss of at least 7,500 votes.81

The early call in Florida probably also affected other races across the country because it made it appear as if Gore had won the election before the polls closed in many other states. But it is much more difficult to estimate the effect outside of Florida, since only that state has data to allow for a comparison between polling stations that remained open after the early call and polling stations that were closed. However, a simple look indicates that if the results for Florida are correct, the early call most likely affected some other races. For example, Democrat Maria Cantwell won a Senate seat in Washington state by just 2,200 votes. If the early call’s effect in Washington was 1/24th of the smallest estimated effect of the early call in Florida, then Cantwell would have lost to Republican Slade Gordon. This outcome alone may have significantly changed U.S. political history, as Gordon’s victory would have meant that the Republicans would not have lost control of the Senate when Vermont’s Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party in 2001.

The presidential race was ultimately decided by Bush’s victory in Florida by just 537 votes. The turmoil that engulfed the nation after the vote would probably have been avoided had there not been the early media call, as Republicans would likely have won Florida by a larger, indisputable margin.

Incentives matter in voting, just as they do in determining so many other kinds of behavior. And early media calls can reduce the incentive to vote. In the 2000 election, this caused Americans a lot of sleepless nights.

Felon Voting

Michael Milken, Martha Stewart, and Leona Helmsley share something in common besides being convicted felons—they are all Democrats.82 While their wealth sets them apart from the typical felon, their party registration is the same as most former convicts. Ever since the razor-thin outcome of the 2000 presidential