More Analytical Absurdity

While I am pickng on badly analyzed political issues, here's one from the AP: S.F. Mayoral Race Becomes U.S. Barometer

This city's mayoral race is about more than just revenues and public works: It has, by virtue of the two candidates engaged in a tight runoff, turned into a barometer of whether the Democrats have lost touch with their core constituents.

Tuesday's vote features Gavin Newson, a liberal Democrat who has been cast as the establishment candidate next to the Green Party's Matt Gonzalez, seen as the progressive outsider.

Here's the problem: San Francisco hardly qualifies as a mainstream city, or even one populated by solely mainstream Democrats/liberals. Given the blows that the California Democratic Party has suffered of late, I certainly understand why it is important for them to win. However, to cast this vote as a "U.S. Barometer" is ludicrous. It would be like looking at the most traditionalistic and conservative county in Alabama and using it as an indicator of the health of the Republicans in a mayoral race between a hardcore Baptist and a somewhat less conservative Republican. It makes no sense.

Plus, this illustrates a common fallacy in the reasoning seen in the press: that somehow a pattern can be extrapolated from one event.

This race is about San Francisco politics, and to some degree about California Democrats. It isn't about the Democratic Party writ large.