Tyler Cowen links to Matt Yglesias linking to a quote from Frans De Waal, who’s writing about a method of evaluating conversations using low-frequency voice patterns. Anyway, here’s the relevant paragraph from De Waal:

The same spectral analysis has been applied to televised debates between U.S. presidential candidates. In all eight elections between 1960 and 2000 the popular vote matched the voice analysis: the majority of people voted for the candidate who held his own timbre rather than the one who adjusted.

But the elections of 1960, 1968, 1976, and 2000 were essentially tied. You get no credit for predicting the “winner” in any of these, any more than you would get credit for correctly predicting the outcome of a coin flip. (This is a point I made back in 1992 in my review of a book on forecasting elections.)

Anyway, I’m not trying to criticize (or evaluate in any way) what De Waal is doing–let’s just not ovestate the evidence here.