No One Knows What is Gonna Happen
Yes, and that means you, too
Happy election day!
The great German romantic poet and critic Fredrich Schlegel once said that a historian is a prophet looking backward. I always thought that was kinda stupid because the whole point of a prophet is that he can see forward. I know I can’t.
I sometimes rankle when people call me a pundit, as I associate the name with bowtied twits that appear on TV and make baseless prognostications in the most confident of tones. In my experience, making predictions is the fastest way to look like a total idiot: people will never let you forget that you once got it wrong. On the other hand, many people in the profession of political commentary have been consistently wrong for years but have long and healthy careers. Go figure!
There’s a ton of polling and forecasts out there. What does it all amount to? A bunch of bullshit if you ask me. What the Really Smart Data Guys are saying is “The polls are very close, 50-50, but that doesn’t mean the election is close, we’re a normal polling error from a blowout either way.” So it could go either way and the polls might not even be capturing that the election is, in fact, close. So, what are they telling us exactly? Because that sounds like nothing. If I knew nothing about the election I’d say something like, “could go either way and may be either close or not close.” That’s a literal lack of information. Now, I’m sure one of these dudes is gonna roll his eyes and explain how I don’t understand Bayesian whatever, but I don’t care anymore. I’ve had it with this nonsense. It’s just punditry with scientific pretensions. The polls could be right. Or they could be wrong. There are reasonable-sounding theories about why both might be the case.
But speaking purely qualitatively, I can’t do much better. As you know, I was quite worried a few weeks ago, but feel a little better now. Why? Because Harris closed out pretty strong and Trump seems a bit listless and deflated. There are stories about his Get Out the Vote Operation and Campaign that sound shambolic. I also think people are fed up with his whole deal and legitimately find him hateful and repulsive. But we know for a fact a lot of people are into it: they elected him once, almost twice, and are not happy with the way things are and may opt for him again. Because of the electoral college there may just be enough morons out there to put him back in office. And the media elite has famously failed to even informally model the electorate well in the past.
As a person who has researched and thought about this, I can only offer something that at this point I think most people should already understand: Trump’s movement has deep roots, a wide enough appeal, and makes unexpected, dramatic advances from time to time, but it also has serious intrinsic limitations like his overall unpopularity and his lack of discipline and focus. He is almost always just as likely to completely fuck up as to win. Those who have a bad feeling and those who are feeling optimistic both have good reasons to back up those intuitions. We just don’t know! Gun to my head, have to say something: I feel like he might be finally out of gas this time. But I’m not betting money on it.
Have…fun? Good luck, anyway.
As both a Ganz head and a Silver head, I want to offer a partial defense of polling nerdery.
What it CAN tell you is that the whole thing comes down to 7 out of the 50 states (with maybe a couple more on the outer margin on either side, but very unlikely), that the margins in those states will be relatively small, and underratedly that this state of play has been very very stable since Harris entered the race (and improved markedly on Biden's standing).
That's not an answer of who is going to win (though in, say, 2008 the same information absolutely was that answer), but it puts boundaries around the conversation and narrows the focus of what we're talking about.
I think the extent to which that represents an improvement on the Cilizza-core fanciful bullshit that made up election punditry before the nerds arrived is underappreciated. Kamala as LBJ, Trump's gonna win New York, Black voters are Republicans now, totally innumerate nonsense used to get taken seriously.
Two cheers for Nate Silver.
We don't know what's going to happen.
But I hope to be in DC some time in January for a big march, whether in celebration or in defiance. I was at the Women's March in 2017, and it made a big difference, not only to my own resolve and courage, but also to setting the tone for Trump's first reign. The second reign will doubtless be worse, if it happens. But we are not entirely passive actors. We can speak, we can vote, we can agitate, and we can march. Marching is not a substitute for more effective political actions, but mass protest has its place in the toolbox.
(And I say all of this while setting aside the lamentable fate of the "Women's March" as a name-brand movement, which died of its own excesses. Too bad that the leaders turned out to be a mess. The march itself was grand, and it made a difference.)