Washington Post responds to Weinschenk column/research

On Monday, the The Washington Post published a piece co-written by UW-Green Bay Associate Prof. Aaron Weinschenk: Did James Comey cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election? Today the Post followed up with analysis on the column. Here is an excerpt:

A pair of political science professors are out with a seemingly significant study: Despite Hillary Clinton saying she would be president if not for James B. Comey — and FiveThirtyEight, among others, lending credence to that claim — “We don’t think so,” declare Costas Panagopoulos and Aaron Weinschenk, who wrote up their study for the Monkey Cage.

It would seem a pretty big counterpoint to a popular bit of emerging conventional wisdom on the left. But in reality, it’s not all that contradictory. Their conclusions may be different in tone, but their research largely confirms that Comey may have indeed tipped the scales — with the key phrase there being ‘may have.’

While FiveThirtyEight and others have said it’s likely that Comey did, Panagopoulos and Weinschenk were basically unable to prove that he did. They were looking for a statistically significant impact late in the 2016 election, and they didn’t find it. But by that standard, basically nothing in the final month-plus of the campaign truly mattered, because nothing moved the needle that much.”


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