Sarah Palin’s Academic Vindication

Talk about going against the grain: A pair of political scientists from Bradley University actually found that Sarah Palin helped John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.

“We find that using marginal effects, as is appropriate for cross-sectional data, shows that Palin had a positive effect on McCain vote choice, and based on our model specification, may have had a positive, conditional relationship for independent voters,” Edward M. Burmilla and Josh M. Ryan wrote in an article which appeared in the Political Research Quarterly.

They go on to conclude that, “when confidence intervals are included, Palin’s effect was not necessarily the largest among the nominees [for vice-president] since 1972.”

Their work runs counter to not only the collective wisdom of Democratic as well as Republican talking heads whose domes have dominated the airwaves over the past five years but also that of a quartet of other political science profs and researchers whose analyses have been more widely publicized including:

• University of Central Florida professor Jonathan Knuckey
• Roy Ellis of Stanford
• D. Sunshine Hillygus and
• Norman H. Nie, both of Duke.

 

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
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