Yesterday morning, the number crunchers at FiveThirtyEight predicted the ten GOP candidates who would appear in the first prime-time debate on Thursday night; seven remaining candidates will be relegated to an afternoon forum. Later in the day, the political unit at NBC came up with a matching list of the top ten candidates. Still later in the day, Fox News announced their actual lineup, and it matched the lineup predicted by both FiveThirtyEight and NBC. No surprises, all was well with the world.
Until the evening news, that is, when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow flipped right the eff out over the final lineup, accusing Fox News of arbitrarily ignoring a certain NBC/WSJ news poll in order to slightly move the bottom-tier numbers and thereby create a marginally stronger impression of legitimacy with respect to the gap between the undercard and the main event.
Though I’m generally quite the fan of Rachel Maddow, the purported difference between the headliner act and the opening band is not nearly as significant she claims, for at least three reasons. Firstly, those who are planning to watch hours of policy debate this early in the election cycle are most likely political junkies who will take the effort to DVR both events. Secondly, both events will be primarily disseminated to low-information voters through (old and new) media via viral soundbites; it won’t matter whether these were uttered at the prime-time event or the warm-up. Finally, and most vitally, the lineup would have been exactly the same had Fox News included only the five polls which FiveThirtyEight and NBC thought that they would. The perceived percentage difference between Kasich and Perry (or any other adjacent second-tier candidates) was bound to be a fraction of the relevant 95% confidence interval for point estimates from any given poll.
Fox News: Did not rig the debate.
MSNBC: Extinguish your flaming hair and get back to work.
