Statistical fact checking needed, or, No, Ronald Reagan did not win “overwhelming support from evangelicals”

I was reading this article by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker and noticed something suspicious. Levy was writing about an event in 1979 and then continued:

One year later, Ronald Reagan won the Presidency, with overwhelming support from evangelicals. The evangelical vote has been a serious consideration in every election since.

From Chapter 6 of Red State, Blue State:

fig6.9.png

According to the National Election Study, Reagan did quite a bit worse than Carter among evangelical Protestants than among voters as a whole–no surprise, really, given that Reagan was not particularly religious and Cater was an evangelical himself.

It was 1992, not 1980, when evangelicals really started to vote Republican.

What’s it all about?

I wouldn’t really blame Ariel Levy for this mistake; a glance at her website reveals a lot of experience as a writer and culture reporter but not much on statistics or politics. That’s fine by me: there’s a reason I subscribe to the New Yorker and not the American Political Science Review!

On the other hand, I do think that the numbers are important, and I worry about misconceptions of American politics–for example, the idea that Reagan won “overwhelming support from evangelicals.” A big reason we wrote Red State, Blue State was to show people how all sorts of things they “knew” about politics were actually false.

Perhaps the New Yorker and other similar publications should hire a statistical fact checker or copy editor? Maybe this is the worst time to suggest such a thing, with the collapsing economics of journalism and all that. Still, I think the New Yorker could hire someone at a reasonable rate who could fact check their articles. This would free up their writers to focus on the storytelling that they are good at without having to worry about getting the numbers wrong.

Another option would be to write a letter to the editor, but I don’t think the New Yorker publishes graphs.

P.S. I’ve written before about the need for statistical copy editors (see also here, , and, of course, the notorious “But viewed in retrospect, it is clear that it has been quite predictable”).

P.P.S. I think one of my collaborators made this graph, maybe by combining the National Election Study questions on religious denomination and whether the respondent describes him/herself as born again.

P.P.P.S. Somebody pointed out that Reagan did do well among white evangelicals, so maybe that’s what Levy was talking about.

5 thoughts on “Statistical fact checking needed, or, No, Ronald Reagan did not win “overwhelming support from evangelicals”

  1. I won't argue with your mathematical analysis or graphs. But, I will take issue of your description of Jimmy Carter as an evangelical. While Jimmy Carter is a deeply religious Southern Baptist, he has consistently rejected adjectives such as "evangelical" or "born again" to describe his faith and beliefs. He has used either term to describe himself. In his books and writings he consistently notes that he does not want to be associated with these groups or terms.

    In his autobiography (I apologize, I can't remember the title of the book.) he describes, in great detail, his dismay at the changes in the Souther Baptist Convention and how/why he does not use these terms to describe himself or his beliefs.

  2. I don't think you need to get the New Yorker to publish graphs! Why not write a letter with a brief correction and a reference to your work that shows this is wrong?

  3. They print graphs in cartoons. So all you need to do is recruit Roz Chast as a co-author to draw the graph. That, and make the presentation funny.

  4. Good policing on your part. Unless Ms. Levy made up her "fact" I assume the error came from some other source. This isn't really an error that requires a statistcal fact-checker or even much statistical literacy, just a regular fact-checker.

  5. I think when people write these things, they are thinking about 1984, when Reagan not only won a large percentage of the popular vote, but it was remarkably evenly distributed, so he really did well with just about all groups and in all regions. He fell short only in the coreyist of core Democratic constituencies.

    For example, in 1956, Eisenhower won almost a great a share of the popular vote as Reagan did in 1984 (58% as opposed to 59%), but still lost several states, and managed to lose one state, Missouri, that he had carried in the previous election with a lower national popular vote percentage. The standard deviation of the vote in 1984 seems to have been unusually low.

    Also, evangelicals moved more solidly into the Republican column just a little later. Really, there are tons of bad articles about American politics, and as bad articles about American politics go, this one isn't that bad. The mistakes are at least understandable.

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