Obama's 2011 State of the Union

The 2011 State of the Union Address was given by United States President Barack Obama on January 25, 2011, to a joint session of Congress. It was aired on all the major networks starting at 9 PM ET. It was Obama's second State of the Union Address.

The speech was delivered on the floor of the United States House of Representatives in the United States Capitol. Among the topics that Obama covered in his speech were proposals for job creation and federal deficit reduction.

This is another in a series of major public speechs by Obama, beginning during the campaign. They have generally correlated with substantial deviations, and while this speech, like last year's was given after a turbulent year in which the Democrats lost 60 seats or so, and hence their majority in the House of Representatives, it shows a positive deviation that approaches the 5% significance level.

The GCP event was set for 9:00 pm ET to 11:00, and the speech started at about 9:10 (marked in the figure below). The outcome is 7384.486 on 7200 df, for p = 0.063 and Z = 1.530

Obama's 2011 State of the Union

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.


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