The obsession among people like this with polling and data stems from the same self defeating impulse that leads them to believe that policy can’t be good unless it’s complicated and abstruse and shows off just how darn *smart* the boys wonder who devised it are. Nothing simple can be good; if people who aren’t in the club can comprehend it, it must be naive and dumb and childish.
Liberalism is dead in the water until people like this kill the teacher in their heads that they’re trying to impress for an A+ on their report card.
The implication of this, which I think is the absolute truth, is that a more durable, successful and broadly appealing left-of-center politics needs to be, to put a fine point on it, genuinely just objectively dumber and worse.
We, politics-knowers of the world, will reject it when it comes, MUST reject it when it comes, the disgust of the politics-knowers (Ganz and Levitz alike) will act as its fuel.
I know that's a trollish thing to say, but I really do believe it's true.
As someone who works in data science (bioinformatics), I couldn’t agree more. Even in technical fields, analysis is never just mechanical number-crunching—it’s shaped by human discernment: which variables to include, how to frame the question, what assumptions to privilege. At its core, data science is as much an art of judgment as it is a science of measurement. Unlike the physical sciences, where controlled experiments and natural laws provide a stable foundation, data science deals with messy, contingent, and socially constructed data. In practice, this means models are always provisional, interpretive, and deeply dependent on human choices. In theory, too, the field was never purely positivist: it emerged as a hybrid discipline precisely because it had to combine rigorous statistical methods with the softer skills of inference, domain knowledge, and interpretive judgment. That’s what makes it powerful—but also what demands humility, a quality often missing in political data analysis.
There is an underpants gnomes aspect to the whole Popularism thing, where it is tautological that political candidates seen as more "moderate", or closer to the views of the responding voter (a more valuable way of asking the question IMO) will be more successful, but Popularism lacks a method of HOW to accomplish that beyond an endless procession of Heidi's Heitkamp being fed into a wood chipper every cycle, forever. It's a Moneyball of losing 100 games every year by being ever more dedicated to the crusty old scouts.
The signal polling result of our age was Donald Trump being rated as significantly more "moderate" than Hillary Clinton by 2016 voters. That breaks the model that Popularism purports to offer, and I think identifying rhetoric and an ability to form a public opinion rather than merely forensically chase its shadow gets us closer to understanding why.
The question going forward for the Democratic Party isn't what should it say and do, it's how can it even be heard in the first place?
The focus on polling changes not only how news events are covered, but what events get covered in the first place. A lot of this is reflected in criticism of how horserace vs stakes-based priorities shape political news media coverage and not just in what the parties do, though they are related.
The discussion of “the vulgar positivism of the center right” captures what grates me about Matt Yglesias, his substack Slow Boring, and the discussion there. Thank you parsing it.
Somehow the techy numbers side of the purported center left got tons of political capital. And they are boring, unappealing and unpopular a lot of the time. It makes sense this could be a solid chunk of why the left is losing the culture war and national elections. Trump made Fauci into a reality tv show character of this stereotype after all …as a foil to contrast against himself. Being technically correct, *actually*, in politics, means so little without defining the context, laying out vision.
And that is what, imo, the left is missing, a unifying , widely appealing vision (preferably coming from an inspirational leader)
Issue polling has always struck me as one of those cases where the very act of measurement disturbs and distorts the object (public opinion) being measured. The subjective experience of being interrogated on a series of explicitly political ‘issues’ is so completely alien to how normal people engage with politics that I can’t help but think it’s unhelpful. Using them to say that a majority of people think this or that is insane - no, a majority of people have not been asked the question, will never be asked the question and probably don’t even conceive of it as being a choice they can or should make. In that sense horse-race polling is more justifiable, since at the very least the public will really be asked to put themselves in one box or the other at some point.
It definitely seems as if poll respondents are getting more sophisticated at understanding that basically everything they are being asked is being done for the purpose of sorting them into the tribal political binary and will be analyzed that way, so they answer accordingly.
So much was made of Republicans changing their opinions on the state of the economy based on which party controls the White House, but since wonks consider economic polling to be so rigidly determinative of electoral outcomes, who is fooling who there exactly?
"𝑉𝑢𝑙𝑔𝑎𝑟" positivism? Is there any *other* kind of positivism than "𝑉𝑢𝑙𝑔𝑎𝑟"? I think not. Your response hits all the right notes, most especially (to speak pro-speak) on the topic of "𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐲-𝐥𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐨𝐛𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧" discussed most thoroughly by philosopher of science and fighter pilot N. R. Hanson. To wit, there are no 𝒑𝒖𝒓𝒆 empirical observations, all perception is mitigated by theoretical frameworks.
Or to put it clearly and simply, we need only remember the 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗨𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗲𝘀: Ump 1: "I call 'em the way they ARE." Ump 2: "I call 'em the way I see 'em." Ump 3: "They are what I call 'em."
Eric, Ump 1, basically accuses you of being Ump 3, but of course, any reasonable (!) person can see that you're Ump 2 in actual fact.
Once upon a time I was paid by a rocket company to do stat for the USAF. Then I taught stat, logic, and physics at an R2 for 43 years. I *love* this kind of stuff.
While the right continually agitate to drag the Overton window* to the right, the centrists respond with "triangulation" - i.e. let's hippie punch down to our left and trail along rightwards following the window and never fighting it's rightward drift. These motherfuckers would triangulate us all onto the cattle trucks, if we let them. Screw their political cowardice. And above all screw their "it's not ideology, we're just following the data" bullshit. The ideology that poses as being above ideology is the most dishonest of all (as you rightly said). They're not following the data, they're following the people (and media) dragging the window to the right.
This is another reason why one of my pet peeves is the evisceration of the word "performativity" to just another synonym for play-acting. J L Austin's original distinction between language that was merely constative - registering or describing the "is" - and that which is about bringing about the change it wants to see in the world - the "ought" is vital for understanding the basics of political militancy in the field of rhetoric. Was Marc Anthony really come to bury Caesar? Was he hell. That's the point of rhetoric. To MOVE people. To change their opinions. To sway them to see the same facts from a different perspective, a different set of values. Lincoln didn't write the Gettysburg Address on the back of the goddam polls. And certainly at the start of the Civil War, had their been polls, they would definitely have indicated that a majority of white voters in the North were not in favour of liberating the slaves. Does that mean Jefferson Davies was "following the data"? Seriously, fuck these guys. And the hobby horse they rode in on.
----
* Named after an American RW PR guy who dedicated his life to doing just that (dragging the window of centrist "common sense" to the right). Although, as a political strategy, the AF cognoscenti will know that the first FR figure to articulate this strategy for power publicly, was the Austrian neo-nazi Jörg Haider
i really like your thoughtful musings and learned a lot from your book. But i find these replies to your critics boring and not very useful. I've almost cancelled my subscription several times because of them--there's a kind of vanity on display that's neither attractive nor interesting.
Responding to critics is important for advancing the discourse, elaborating a point, evolving a position etc. and I thought this piece did that well. I have thought for some of John’s past critical response pieces, he has focused too much on the rhetoric used to attack him rather than the substance, which can come across as vain, but this piece has me reconsidering that distaste. For example, consider the belittling rhetoric some have used against John accusing him of being “alarmist” about fascism, and his typically fiery responses. His opponent there can hide behind rhetoric of “reasonableness” that disguises political apathy as good sense. Similar to (and tied up in) the polling-brained politics he’s objecting to here. Note that someone taking that tact is able to put down their opponent without nearly the distaste someone like John gets in reply. It’s a fine line, but I think some of what I (and perhaps you) have learned to read as petty vanity is an attempt to unveil real problems in rhetoric that centrist types disavow in themselves.
I'm always reminded of Lasch's Agony of the Left when I run into these crossfires and grateful if I even know and recognize the target and think it deserving of the broadside, but also cringe a little with you if I don't recognize the target for fear the wrathful critique might smear or somehow insult me. The vanity thing cuts both ways with writers and readers. Thankfully, in this instance I know the Vox policy wonk numbers people and without resorting to a bunch of name-calling this articulates exquisitely my nagging sense that their liberal commitments are not so much to liberal human rights, labor rights, workers, protecting the social safety net or protecting the environment but their libertarian liberal commitments are to free capital and the pursuit of monopoly rents. Their polling popularism is a cudgel to reinforce austerity and efficiency tradeoffs defined by billionaires.The Kochs et al. And their never-talk-about-taxing-the-rich "moderation" further fuels the underclass reaction and revolt against liberal elites. Although, for that matter, so does almost any historically literate writing about politics. It's all CRT to the hoi polloi. But some liberal elite needs to speak up against this plutocratic BS. Glad you have.
I’ve always found it interesting that the one thing the polling/data guys appear to have no curiosity about whatever is looking at or trying to measure the corrosive impact they themselves have had on political processes and outcomes.
I am very much not a scientist or a statistician, but what you are saying is a political interpretation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, isn’t it? A way of knowing is also a way of not knowing. We cannot help being part of observation, and we can’t see everything. It suggests to me that we, all of us, should approach “knowledge” with a great deal of humility. MAGA takes this to mean they might be right since nothing can be known, but I’m not sure they’re thinkers so much as hucksters.
I'm gonna be honest: this comes across as smug sophism. The crux of the argument in both this and the previous piece lies in asserting that your opponents believe in a caricatured view of their arguments, and debating against that; that being the case there's really not a lot of useful back and forth to be had, as you basically seem to recognize while patting yourself on the back for it.
This sucks, because there is an actual interesting conversation adjacent to this to be had (essentially, what is the communicative universe in which voters are currently forming their perceptions of parties and candidates, how does it differ from the equivalent 20 years ago, how is Trump succeeding/his opponents failing at operating in the current reality, and how can Democrats of both the left and center effectively operate in this world) but your piece detracted from the prospects of a useful conversation about that, which is a shitty thing to do with a hefty dose of intelligence and writing talent.
My core objection was that you spent all your time attacking a strawman so the piece was a waste of time. My more meta objection is that I do have some arguments with the popularism people, and your piece gestured in the direction of some of them, but if everyone's arguing about a rhetorically clever filleting of a strawman we're unlikely to proceed to more interesting critiques.
It seems that progressives like polling just fine when it jibes with their preferred policies. As someone who is a polling skeptic, I would have more respect for polling skepticism from the left if they applied it to the polling results they believe supports their policy agenda. The same epistemological problems you identify in this piece, like what does the pollster mean by the terms used in their questions and how do we know the respondents understand them in the same way, exist when the poll is showing support for universal health care or any other social democratic policies.
Exit polling seems to me one of the best gauges we have as to why people voted how they did, because you are talking to people immediately after they voted and asking them for their reasoning. It seems like an inconvenient fact for progressives that swing voters who opted for Trump thought of Harris as too far to the left. This seems like a potent argument in favor of more moderation, not less, regardless of the finer points of what people think Real Leftism™ is.
The obsession among people like this with polling and data stems from the same self defeating impulse that leads them to believe that policy can’t be good unless it’s complicated and abstruse and shows off just how darn *smart* the boys wonder who devised it are. Nothing simple can be good; if people who aren’t in the club can comprehend it, it must be naive and dumb and childish.
Liberalism is dead in the water until people like this kill the teacher in their heads that they’re trying to impress for an A+ on their report card.
The implication of this, which I think is the absolute truth, is that a more durable, successful and broadly appealing left-of-center politics needs to be, to put a fine point on it, genuinely just objectively dumber and worse.
We, politics-knowers of the world, will reject it when it comes, MUST reject it when it comes, the disgust of the politics-knowers (Ganz and Levitz alike) will act as its fuel.
I know that's a trollish thing to say, but I really do believe it's true.
As someone who works in data science (bioinformatics), I couldn’t agree more. Even in technical fields, analysis is never just mechanical number-crunching—it’s shaped by human discernment: which variables to include, how to frame the question, what assumptions to privilege. At its core, data science is as much an art of judgment as it is a science of measurement. Unlike the physical sciences, where controlled experiments and natural laws provide a stable foundation, data science deals with messy, contingent, and socially constructed data. In practice, this means models are always provisional, interpretive, and deeply dependent on human choices. In theory, too, the field was never purely positivist: it emerged as a hybrid discipline precisely because it had to combine rigorous statistical methods with the softer skills of inference, domain knowledge, and interpretive judgment. That’s what makes it powerful—but also what demands humility, a quality often missing in political data analysis.
There is an underpants gnomes aspect to the whole Popularism thing, where it is tautological that political candidates seen as more "moderate", or closer to the views of the responding voter (a more valuable way of asking the question IMO) will be more successful, but Popularism lacks a method of HOW to accomplish that beyond an endless procession of Heidi's Heitkamp being fed into a wood chipper every cycle, forever. It's a Moneyball of losing 100 games every year by being ever more dedicated to the crusty old scouts.
The signal polling result of our age was Donald Trump being rated as significantly more "moderate" than Hillary Clinton by 2016 voters. That breaks the model that Popularism purports to offer, and I think identifying rhetoric and an ability to form a public opinion rather than merely forensically chase its shadow gets us closer to understanding why.
The question going forward for the Democratic Party isn't what should it say and do, it's how can it even be heard in the first place?
The focus on polling changes not only how news events are covered, but what events get covered in the first place. A lot of this is reflected in criticism of how horserace vs stakes-based priorities shape political news media coverage and not just in what the parties do, though they are related.
The discussion of “the vulgar positivism of the center right” captures what grates me about Matt Yglesias, his substack Slow Boring, and the discussion there. Thank you parsing it.
Somehow the techy numbers side of the purported center left got tons of political capital. And they are boring, unappealing and unpopular a lot of the time. It makes sense this could be a solid chunk of why the left is losing the culture war and national elections. Trump made Fauci into a reality tv show character of this stereotype after all …as a foil to contrast against himself. Being technically correct, *actually*, in politics, means so little without defining the context, laying out vision.
And that is what, imo, the left is missing, a unifying , widely appealing vision (preferably coming from an inspirational leader)
Issue polling has always struck me as one of those cases where the very act of measurement disturbs and distorts the object (public opinion) being measured. The subjective experience of being interrogated on a series of explicitly political ‘issues’ is so completely alien to how normal people engage with politics that I can’t help but think it’s unhelpful. Using them to say that a majority of people think this or that is insane - no, a majority of people have not been asked the question, will never be asked the question and probably don’t even conceive of it as being a choice they can or should make. In that sense horse-race polling is more justifiable, since at the very least the public will really be asked to put themselves in one box or the other at some point.
It definitely seems as if poll respondents are getting more sophisticated at understanding that basically everything they are being asked is being done for the purpose of sorting them into the tribal political binary and will be analyzed that way, so they answer accordingly.
So much was made of Republicans changing their opinions on the state of the economy based on which party controls the White House, but since wonks consider economic polling to be so rigidly determinative of electoral outcomes, who is fooling who there exactly?
Thank you for pointing out the insidious use of the term "prior" to mean belief. This has been a real pet peeve of mine.
"𝑉𝑢𝑙𝑔𝑎𝑟" positivism? Is there any *other* kind of positivism than "𝑉𝑢𝑙𝑔𝑎𝑟"? I think not. Your response hits all the right notes, most especially (to speak pro-speak) on the topic of "𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐲-𝐥𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐨𝐛𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧" discussed most thoroughly by philosopher of science and fighter pilot N. R. Hanson. To wit, there are no 𝒑𝒖𝒓𝒆 empirical observations, all perception is mitigated by theoretical frameworks.
Or to put it clearly and simply, we need only remember the 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗨𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗲𝘀: Ump 1: "I call 'em the way they ARE." Ump 2: "I call 'em the way I see 'em." Ump 3: "They are what I call 'em."
Eric, Ump 1, basically accuses you of being Ump 3, but of course, any reasonable (!) person can see that you're Ump 2 in actual fact.
Once upon a time I was paid by a rocket company to do stat for the USAF. Then I taught stat, logic, and physics at an R2 for 43 years. I *love* this kind of stuff.
Onward!
An indulgence in polling has delivered us a politics from which the ideas of originality or counter-intuition are absent.
While the right continually agitate to drag the Overton window* to the right, the centrists respond with "triangulation" - i.e. let's hippie punch down to our left and trail along rightwards following the window and never fighting it's rightward drift. These motherfuckers would triangulate us all onto the cattle trucks, if we let them. Screw their political cowardice. And above all screw their "it's not ideology, we're just following the data" bullshit. The ideology that poses as being above ideology is the most dishonest of all (as you rightly said). They're not following the data, they're following the people (and media) dragging the window to the right.
This is another reason why one of my pet peeves is the evisceration of the word "performativity" to just another synonym for play-acting. J L Austin's original distinction between language that was merely constative - registering or describing the "is" - and that which is about bringing about the change it wants to see in the world - the "ought" is vital for understanding the basics of political militancy in the field of rhetoric. Was Marc Anthony really come to bury Caesar? Was he hell. That's the point of rhetoric. To MOVE people. To change their opinions. To sway them to see the same facts from a different perspective, a different set of values. Lincoln didn't write the Gettysburg Address on the back of the goddam polls. And certainly at the start of the Civil War, had their been polls, they would definitely have indicated that a majority of white voters in the North were not in favour of liberating the slaves. Does that mean Jefferson Davies was "following the data"? Seriously, fuck these guys. And the hobby horse they rode in on.
----
* Named after an American RW PR guy who dedicated his life to doing just that (dragging the window of centrist "common sense" to the right). Although, as a political strategy, the AF cognoscenti will know that the first FR figure to articulate this strategy for power publicly, was the Austrian neo-nazi Jörg Haider
i really like your thoughtful musings and learned a lot from your book. But i find these replies to your critics boring and not very useful. I've almost cancelled my subscription several times because of them--there's a kind of vanity on display that's neither attractive nor interesting.
I thought this one was pretty tame and friendly.
I’m here for both the petty and the tame and friendly!
I liked this one. I thought you kept your ego on the polite side of the line. Your self awareness seems intact to
me.
I for one thoroughly enjoy when you respond to your critics. It is some of your most fun writing in my opinion
Responding to critics is important for advancing the discourse, elaborating a point, evolving a position etc. and I thought this piece did that well. I have thought for some of John’s past critical response pieces, he has focused too much on the rhetoric used to attack him rather than the substance, which can come across as vain, but this piece has me reconsidering that distaste. For example, consider the belittling rhetoric some have used against John accusing him of being “alarmist” about fascism, and his typically fiery responses. His opponent there can hide behind rhetoric of “reasonableness” that disguises political apathy as good sense. Similar to (and tied up in) the polling-brained politics he’s objecting to here. Note that someone taking that tact is able to put down their opponent without nearly the distaste someone like John gets in reply. It’s a fine line, but I think some of what I (and perhaps you) have learned to read as petty vanity is an attempt to unveil real problems in rhetoric that centrist types disavow in themselves.
I'm always reminded of Lasch's Agony of the Left when I run into these crossfires and grateful if I even know and recognize the target and think it deserving of the broadside, but also cringe a little with you if I don't recognize the target for fear the wrathful critique might smear or somehow insult me. The vanity thing cuts both ways with writers and readers. Thankfully, in this instance I know the Vox policy wonk numbers people and without resorting to a bunch of name-calling this articulates exquisitely my nagging sense that their liberal commitments are not so much to liberal human rights, labor rights, workers, protecting the social safety net or protecting the environment but their libertarian liberal commitments are to free capital and the pursuit of monopoly rents. Their polling popularism is a cudgel to reinforce austerity and efficiency tradeoffs defined by billionaires.The Kochs et al. And their never-talk-about-taxing-the-rich "moderation" further fuels the underclass reaction and revolt against liberal elites. Although, for that matter, so does almost any historically literate writing about politics. It's all CRT to the hoi polloi. But some liberal elite needs to speak up against this plutocratic BS. Glad you have.
I’ve always found it interesting that the one thing the polling/data guys appear to have no curiosity about whatever is looking at or trying to measure the corrosive impact they themselves have had on political processes and outcomes.
I am very much not a scientist or a statistician, but what you are saying is a political interpretation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, isn’t it? A way of knowing is also a way of not knowing. We cannot help being part of observation, and we can’t see everything. It suggests to me that we, all of us, should approach “knowledge” with a great deal of humility. MAGA takes this to mean they might be right since nothing can be known, but I’m not sure they’re thinkers so much as hucksters.
I'm gonna be honest: this comes across as smug sophism. The crux of the argument in both this and the previous piece lies in asserting that your opponents believe in a caricatured view of their arguments, and debating against that; that being the case there's really not a lot of useful back and forth to be had, as you basically seem to recognize while patting yourself on the back for it.
This sucks, because there is an actual interesting conversation adjacent to this to be had (essentially, what is the communicative universe in which voters are currently forming their perceptions of parties and candidates, how does it differ from the equivalent 20 years ago, how is Trump succeeding/his opponents failing at operating in the current reality, and how can Democrats of both the left and center effectively operate in this world) but your piece detracted from the prospects of a useful conversation about that, which is a shitty thing to do with a hefty dose of intelligence and writing talent.
I don't really understand your objection? I'm not talking about what you think I should talk about?
My core objection was that you spent all your time attacking a strawman so the piece was a waste of time. My more meta objection is that I do have some arguments with the popularism people, and your piece gestured in the direction of some of them, but if everyone's arguing about a rhetorically clever filleting of a strawman we're unlikely to proceed to more interesting critiques.
Well, I'm sorry I didn't meet your standards of rigor but I think I raised some substantive issues with polling on an epistemological level.
It seems that progressives like polling just fine when it jibes with their preferred policies. As someone who is a polling skeptic, I would have more respect for polling skepticism from the left if they applied it to the polling results they believe supports their policy agenda. The same epistemological problems you identify in this piece, like what does the pollster mean by the terms used in their questions and how do we know the respondents understand them in the same way, exist when the poll is showing support for universal health care or any other social democratic policies.
Exit polling seems to me one of the best gauges we have as to why people voted how they did, because you are talking to people immediately after they voted and asking them for their reasoning. It seems like an inconvenient fact for progressives that swing voters who opted for Trump thought of Harris as too far to the left. This seems like a potent argument in favor of more moderation, not less, regardless of the finer points of what people think Real Leftism™ is.