Gaps, more gaps, and does any of this matter?

I agree with Professor Tofias that gaps are not good political science. In hard science, physicists are trying to create a unified theory of everything, something to explain both the subatomic world as well as macro. They might actually accomplish this in time since the laws that they base their theories on do not change. Political scientists must be envious of this to such a degree that they think that an universal voting truth must exist. In the process of this “discovery” gaps were discovered, and thus we have a problem.
As we drudged through the gaps, we told stories (as in the words of Professor Tofias) of why they exist. The problem is that they are stories and have little predictability. So when we looked at the slide of women support of Democrats slipping in 2000 and 2004, we are supposed to infer that this trend will continue and that Democrats need to change their strategy. Well that sounds nice, but I’ll spin my own story. In 1992 a charming young southern Democrat ran for office and got elected and reelected in 1996. Then in 2000 the Democrats put into the running a boring, stiff, plain southerner that attracted little attention; however the Republicans ran their own charming young southern candidate that won and got reelected. From this , I could say that in order to win the Presidency one needs to be young, charming, and it helps to be from the South. To back this up, every other opponent has been the opposite of Clinton and Bush—namely not charming and/or young (yes, Kerry is young but he’s gross). This theory of course puts aside any other factors including that George H. Bush rose taxes after promising not to, Al Gore was obsessed about Global Warming, and John Kerry couldn’t run an effective campaign (I’m not up to date on the Clinton/Dole race). That’s the problem of the gaps, the only affective predications political scientists can make are ones that have a long run of data, short term data leads to strange stories. Another problem of the gaps is that they expect people to vote according one of the many voting methods we explored in class. The story of the gender gap I explained would suggest that women do not care about anything else than valiance issues. The urban/rural gap tells the story of poor rural communities getting brainwashed into voting republican because there is no way that other issues matter more to them than how much money is in their wallet (or isn’t). Here’s the funny thing this might be right—only in the opposite way, they might be voting with their wallet and it might be full-not empty! Stories of gaps are fun to make up, but they can only explain a data point or two, not a larger picture and certainly not predict the future. In hard science an exception to the rule puts that rule into question, in political science the exception is either ignored or made into the rule (the growth of women’s support of Democrats spiked during the Clinton years, but the drop during the Bush years is still within the growth trend). While I don’t propose stopping to adjust theory to every anomaly (some really are worth ignoring), political scientists do need to consider if an anomaly is worth adjusting theory or if it is worthless (like “those crazy Milwaukeeans don’t fit any rules”). Gaps might only be worth studying if and only if the difference is huge, like around 90 percent always (for many decades/presidential cycles) vote one way. If the gap is smaller and appears recently (within a decade and a half), then we do not have clear data and we could be looking at the start of a new trend or an anomaly. In that case findings should be reported with caution and should not be reported as the start of something new.