Damnedest of them all (Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?)

Sunday, 6 June 2004

Damnedest of them all

Professor Bainbridge roots for the Redskins to win one for a very idiosyncratic reason:

A 72-year streak links the victory or defeat of the Washington Redskins on the eve of election day with the presidential race. If the Redskins go down to defeat or tie, the sitting president’s party loses the White House. That leaves the fate of President Bush squarely on the shoulders of Redskins head coach Joe Gibbs. Hometown hero Gibbs, who led the team to three Super Bowl titles, retired after the 1992 season and now has returned to the team’s helm.

The Redskins face off against the Green Bay Packers at FedEx Field on Oct. 31 — the last game before the election Nov. 2. ...

The Redskins’ performance has aligned with the presidential outcome in the last 18 elections — a probability of 1 in 263.5 million, according to Dave Dolan, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Bainbridge at least acknowledges that this result “is a spurious correlation generated by data mining.” No such luck for someone else who should know better (quoted by Steven Jens):

From UVa poli-sci prof Larry Sabato comes word that no incumbent president with a four-letter last name has ever won (I’m avoiding using the term “re-elect” so as not to exclude Ford).

Sabato deserves his own personal category here at Signifying Nothing—particularly considering that I’m stuck with using his god-awful American government text in the fall. Even “Burns, Peltason, and 17 other dead people” would be better.

4 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.

1. Brian J. wrote @ Sun, 6 Jun 2004, 2:58 pm CDT:

Well, Chris, since that’s the Green Bay/Washington game, I’m willing to deal with a Kerry presidency and the return to American decline if that’s the preordained result of a Packer victory.

2. Hei Lun Chan wrote @ Sun, 6 Jun 2004, 7:32 pm CDT:

What makes Sabato’s use of his statistic espcially egregious is that there are only 3 data points total (Taft, Ford, Bush). The odds of something like that happening is 1 in 4, not impressive at all. Any idiot can come up with a correlation with only 3 data points. The Redskins coincidence is equally useless, but at least it’s interesting.