There is your basic “wrong”. Like last week, when all the sports guys predicted the Packers would beat the Vikings by two touchdowns. Ha! What a botch! But then there’s World Class, Never to be Forgiven-or-Forgotten-Etched-in-Granite-for-All-the-School-Children-to-See-Wrong … like, for example, America’s professional pollsters’ and pundits’ whiplash-inducing botch of last night’s election.
Holy Jesus, most of these boys and girls are going to need new identities and applications for the lunch shift at Chick-fil-A.
As someone who consumed waay too much pollster/pundit blather over the past year, I have no problem telling you that no one I heard — not your Nate Silvers, your David Plouffes, your David Axelrods, your Nate Cohns, your John Heilemans, your Rick Wilsons, your Steve Schmidts, your Amy Walters or your Dave Wassermans laid out a scenario remotely resembling what we’re looking at today. (All of them will be spinning the meaning of the word, “remotely” in the weeks, months and years to come.)
All along, the key ingredient for 2020 was what was described as your “shy Trump voter”, basically another, previously untapped layer of under-educated white males (and some females) that Trump could both find and fire up enough for them to show up and vote, maybe for the first time ever. And — what I kept hearing from “the experts” — was that that voter was a myth. They didn’t exist. Word was that the new, modern, far more sophisticated post-2016 polling, weighted to properly account for hard-to-get ahold of under-educated white males had their non-existence covered.
Well, obviously not, as those voters poured out of wherever they were hiding and voted in record numbers to reelect Donald Trump, the man who has ended the pandemic and got everybody back to work and drinking at their favorite bar.
My old “Same Rowdy Crowd” compadre, Jon Austin, (i.e. “The Great and Powerful”), has done lots of homework on the last pre-election polling data. Here I cut and paste from him unapologetically.
” … much of my thinking [says Austin] is driven by the assessments of the three election-prediction sites that use polling and other factors to assign a percentage probability of which way each state will vote. Again, those sites are:
• DecisionDesk (https://forecast.decisiondeskhq.com/president). As of October 30th, it gives Biden an 87 percent chance of winning the election.
• The Economist (https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president). As of October 30th, it gives Biden a 96 percent chance of winning.
• FiveThirtyEight (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/). As of October 29th, it gives Biden an 89 percent chance of winning.”
Now obviously, as of Wednesday afternoon Biden may still win, in which all of these particular sites will no doubt claim they “got it right”. But the picture they painted in their live cable TV interviews and in quotes to reporters was of something far different. And beyond them, in state polls, the product emits an even worse smell.
I eagerly await hearing from the professional pollster who had Lindsey Graham beating Jaime Harrison by 12%. Or Susan Collins over Sara Gideon by 9%. Or Joni Ernst over Theresa Greenfield in Iowa by 7% Or even Trump in Ohio by a fat 8%.
Conventional wisdom and pervasive chatter in veteran-operative liberal circles, after inhaling double secret probation “internal polling” and the junk above was that Biden had it comfortably in the bag, with a Democratic Senate “leaning” to “likely.” Hell, remember all that fantasizing about Texas? 5.5% may be better than the 9% Hillary lost by, but it’s nobody’s idea of “in the hunt.”
What we’re left with, while the pro pollsters scurry off to get emergency collagen injections for their reputations, is one very stark reality.
Far … far … from Donald Trump and the election of 2020 marking the death knell of the Republican party, supposedly destroyed by Trump’s malignant incompetence and vulgarity, the oppooisite is true. The astonishing, previously undetected number of votes Trump pulled out of the hills, hollers and exurbs of America, means that with or without him, Trumpism — grievance-driven, anti-science and fully isolated from reality by “alternative facts” — is now more powerful than ever. More powerful than any expert data geek or veteran pundit ever imagined.
To put a blunt point on it, that means no Republican candidate at any level, much less anyone running for national office, will dare step a rat’s whisker away from authoritarian/racist Trumpist messaging. Or in other words, things are looking good for Donny Jr. and Tucker Carlson in 2024.
Or hell, even my gal the QAnon Queen, freshly-elected Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Greene.
You’re right. And we have to figure out how to live with this in a constructive way.
“To put a blunt point on it, that means no Republican candidate at any level, much less anyone running for national office, will dare step a rat’s whisker away from authoritarian/racist Trumpist messaging. ”
Yes. That means that the GOP is frozen in time, and simply cannot change from its 2016 version. The problem for them is that they will never have as perfect a candidate for that message ever again. With the perfect candidate (someone with high television ratings and star power far beyond that of any politician) they barely won in 2016 (despite losing the overall vote), and lost in 2020 despite having the power of incumbency AND a TV star with millions of twitter followers. The GOP will never have those advantages again, and they are stuck with a declining, narrow base that will be immensely difficult to expand, and even more difficult to motivate to the same level of participation in 2024.
But you are right, we are stuck with the reality that some 40+% of our population think that it is OK to grab women by the p*ssy and be an authoritarian asshole. Or, perhaps, that they aspire to be someone who can do those things. And that is pretty disheartening. But that is our country, and it is time that we stop pretending otherwise.
Who can disagree that we have to stop pretending things are otherwise? I’ve been stewing over the crowd that still admonishes liberals — liberal journalists in particular (which is to say any professional news person who isn’t a MAGA warrior) — to “understand” TrumpNation. The fault always being how badly liberal elites treat Trump conservatives, and how the solution is for us to try to “see things from their point of view”. As well and good as that is in theory, I have yet to hear anyone suggest the opposite; that Trump conservatives stop, collect their wits for a moment and “try to understand” why liberals aren’t so cool with ignoring science, encouraging racists and profligate lying. In my twisted head that reluctance to demand/suggest Trump conservatives also behave like adults is patronizing of the first order. It’s as though no critic of liberals can imagine Trumpers acting as anything other than thoughtless children.
Thought experiment time: what role will Donald play over the next 4 years? A defeated candidate who is also a reality TV star with a huge Twitter following and a rabid group of supporters (who generally support the GOP, but are not really committed to the GOP) is not likely to be a stabilizing force within the party.
Add to that his legal troubles, which are likely to paint him as a crook and a fraud (from the time before he was elected President), and his likely continued racist/nativist ramblings (which will grow less and less coherent over time), and he likely becomes an embarrassment to the GOP, but also still a kingmaker. He will probably control about 30 to 50% of the party, and will be unlikely to want to share that power and influence with anyone other than his direct family (because that is how you run a family business). How long before he and Mitch McConnell are fighting about what the legislative priorities of the Senate should be?
I expect that Trump will become a liability to the GOP before too long, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him leading a splinter group/faction. He has no long term commitment to the Party, and will probably decide that he would have won if the GOP establishment had not stabbed him in the back .
Donny’s game now is … money. And being the victim of “the worst fraud in election history” is not a bad place to start harvesting fresh dollars from The Grievance Bloc. I have to think NewsMax or OANN are his for the taking, if he decides to abandon Fox. And while I seestories about Fox execs are thus far resisting Trump’s demands to jump on the martyr train. They’ve got to play it slick and cynical with the Trump base. They can’t drop him like a smallpox-laced blanket. It’s got to be quiet erosion. Internally, trouble for Fox comes in the form of a mutiny among their primetime hosts. They’re all locked into lucrative contracts. But is Fox going to risk muzzling them if they beat the war drums for Trump? My guess is they let Tucker et al “do their thing” but order the news folks into supportive coverage for Tom Cotton, Haley … and Tucker.
Brian:
as you predicted:
A Spicy Nate Silver Tells Critics: ‘F*ck You, We Did A Good Job!’
FiveThirtyEight publisher and top election prognosticator Nate Silver found himself on the defensive in the wake of yet another election that shattered many Democrats expectations of a sweeping victory.
“If they’re coming after FiveThirtyEight, then the answer is ‘Fuck you, we did a good job!’” Silver said on the publication’s podcast (timestamp 13:20). “Look, we’re here to provide guidance on how accurate the polls might or might not be, and the whole premise of why Joe Biden was a fairly heavy favorite is that he could withstand a 2016-style polling error or a bit larger.”
And according to the pollster, y’all were warned.
“We told you this kind of thing is what happens. It’s not out of bounds,” he said. “People have false impressions about how accurate polls are.”
That’s not super likely to placate Silver’s critics, some of whom have taken to calling him Nate Bronze.
Nate’s playing cute. He’s smart enough to point out all the deft caveats baked into his calculations. But the fact remains the picture/scenario he and many others painted was of an election FAR DIFFERENT than what we’re seeing.