Shira is basically talking about votes shifting between the two main parties though.
Why? We are in a two party dominated system, but we also have third party spoilers.
She was talking about one party gaining 6% in one state while losing 6% in another. No mention of taking it all from the other major party.
When you do comparison analysis, you have to eliminate aberrations like Perot, Nader and Buchanan (to a lesser extend). You have to decide what would had been the results without these ‘aberrations’. In the case of Nader and Buchanan it is very simple.
They are not abberations, they are candidates. Their level of success indicates a change in the mood and preferences of he electorate, not statistical noise.
If the US army wants to compare casualties from war to war should they decide there are only 2 categories, killed and alive? Since all the people who were wounded are not dead we can call them alive and pretend our casualty rate is much, much lower. Sure the data will be useless for what we were supposed to be comparing, but it makes us look good.
When I grade a multiple choice test I should only accept two of the four possible answers. I'll assume the other two incorrect ones are abberations and give the kids credit for the right answer. They may love me for it, but their education won't benefit from it.
I bet scientists would love it if they could decalre the search for the Grand Unification Theory over and done with and ignore all the remaining ununified forces by calling them abberations.
Life would be great if we could just ignore all those little abberations tht come up and pretend they don't exist. Sadly, we can't. To ignore the third party candidates and say they are nothing more than stasticial abberations is to discount the people who voted for them whether out of protest or out of genuine belief in their views. Every vote for Ralph Nader was a vote that did not go to John Kerry, Al Gore, George W. Bush, Michael Badnarik or any other candidate who appeared on a ballot anywhere in this nation this year or four years ago.