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.
In this era of incredibly stable, polarized partisanship where the polls barely move, absolutely. And people using it to peacock with an above-it-all pretension of savviness has become an absolute sickness.
It's a busy box for educated high information liberals to work through their neuroticism, that's why it's so lucrative. Count your blessings, the fascism debate might be even worse if that anxiety weren't being vented off elsewhere.
(I personally just enjoy election forecasting in the same way I enjoy, like, fantasy baseball. It's a topic I find interesting and it rewards the enthusiastic dilettante)
It tells you way more than this though. Things they say have an 80% chance of happening actually occur ~80% of the time. Fivethirtyeight did a nice summary a few years ago https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/
It’s just that the specific 50-50 case is annoying!
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.)
I like the Schlegel quote. I take a structuralist approach to historical analysis, and I teach it to my students. But I also remind them that when put in the hands of simplistic, vulgar thinkers who would add "only", it runs the risk, as Barrington Moore's unduly dismissive critics liked to say, of “predicting the past.”
Yes, good luck to Kamala, Tim and us all. We did the best we could.
Oops — Here's what I really meant to write: I like the Schlegel quote. I take a structuralist approach to historical analysis, and I teach it to my students. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx) — that sort of thing. But I also remind them that when put in the hands of simplistic, vulgar thinkers who would add "only", it runs the risk, as Barrington Moore's unduly dismissive critics liked to say, of “predicting the past.”
Yes, good luck to Kamala, Tim and us all. We did the best we could.
Another thought while the outcome is still unknown:
I have no regrets about having agitated to replace Biden with Harris.
She has done an excellent job. Win or lose, she will bring Dem voters to the polls to support Dem candidates up and down the ballot.
I love Joe Biden -- I'm almost his age -- and I think he has been an excellent president. But he was a lousy candidate, and if he were still on the ticket, our prospects would be much, much worse.
Win or lose, Kamala, you gave us hope and did us proud. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
What the polls are saying is that we're going to spend at least the next decade fighting fascism in this country. They can taste the power already and figured out how easy it is to provide enough plausible deniability about their intentions to the masses who either blindly vote R since the dawn of time or simply vote against the "current guy" every cycle — Trump/Vance are the darkest they've ever been but their public support is obviously high.
Harris' win would be an immense gift to the US, a capital letter Opportunity, but the headwinds are as strong as ever — one branch of the federal government is fascist-aligned for our lifetime, another looks to be split and useless for years to come, and Democrat administrations would still be hold up to the impossible standards in the world where there are barely any win-win moves left.
Just hoping the Pennsylvania Puerto Ricans are going to save our asses. Sort of like the Lamda Lamda Lamda fraternity at the end of Revenge of the Nerds.
Your book does a fantastic job explaining the roots of his rise, even if not explicitly. What’s interesting, however, is the degree the paleocon set, who were once so excited by the promise of his administration, have sort of faded as a more dumb and crankish set of uneducated conspiracy theorists have emerged as the “intellectual core” of the MAGA movement.
It's silly to be embarrassed at this point, but I am: ours is now a country in which Marjorie Taylor Green ––she of the Gazpacho Police––is now a leading political voice, and a seriously mentally ill Kennedy may soon set policy on food, medicine, and health.
That said, those cranks may turn out to the be kabuki show for what really does become the intellectual core behind MAGA: Vance, Thiel, and the high priests of the Claremont Institute.
Strangely the most optimistic thing I’ve read in the last two days, minus the usual rah-rah crap from deep partisans. Thankful for your book and its timing.
Polls, as well as the poll aggregation models, just reflect the subjective judgments of whoever makes them. The poll or model is a form of rhetoric.
However by convention there are a lot of constraints on the form. The pollsters are required to survey a decent number of real people and their reweighting decisions have to be based on plausible demographics. The modelers have to take polls as input, justify their weighting of polls based on some kind of track record, obey the laws of probability, model correlation between states in a sensible way. Within these constraints they tweak things until they feel solid.
But sticking to these constraints is a very good discipline and if people broadly work in good faith, the results can be informative. If you believe Nate Silver's self-interested complaints about "herding", the problem is that some pollsters are afraid to express their views forthrightly, not so much something going wrong methodologically.
John - I think you're saying you have a smidgen of hope...that sounds good to me! There have been a number of positive developments over the past couple weeks that offer that much. At some point in the future I'd love to hear your thoughts on what separates the true believers from the "Eggs used to be cheap and that guy dancing on stage is clearly the way to bring that back" . I sort of grasp the true believers but the folks who vote for him and aren't hard-core MAGA are baffling to me. For the MAGA folks I know I keep getting the impulse to take a picture of Trump in all his glory with the garbage truck and tell them "Bow before your God".
Back in August, I took a road trip from SW Ohio to western VA. Stopped in Jackson, OH, little town between Columbus and Huntington, WV. In a gas station bathroom scrawled above a urinal were the words “lock the lying convicted criminal up.” At a truck stop in West Virginia were several homophobic slurs about Trump.
Cherry-picking? Yes. Borderline Thomas Friedmanning? Yeah, fine. But this has shaped my understanding more than any polls—out of gas.
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.
That's a reasonable argument. But it gets wayyyy more attention than is deserves on this interpretation.
In this era of incredibly stable, polarized partisanship where the polls barely move, absolutely. And people using it to peacock with an above-it-all pretension of savviness has become an absolute sickness.
It's a busy box for educated high information liberals to work through their neuroticism, that's why it's so lucrative. Count your blessings, the fascism debate might be even worse if that anxiety weren't being vented off elsewhere.
(I personally just enjoy election forecasting in the same way I enjoy, like, fantasy baseball. It's a topic I find interesting and it rewards the enthusiastic dilettante)
It tells you way more than this though. Things they say have an 80% chance of happening actually occur ~80% of the time. Fivethirtyeight did a nice summary a few years ago https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/
It’s just that the specific 50-50 case is annoying!
For his forecast to have landed on exactly 50/50 is extremely funny.
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.)
I like the Schlegel quote. I take a structuralist approach to historical analysis, and I teach it to my students. But I also remind them that when put in the hands of simplistic, vulgar thinkers who would add "only", it runs the risk, as Barrington Moore's unduly dismissive critics liked to say, of “predicting the past.”
Yes, good luck to Kamala, Tim and us all. We did the best we could.
Oops — Here's what I really meant to write: I like the Schlegel quote. I take a structuralist approach to historical analysis, and I teach it to my students. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx) — that sort of thing. But I also remind them that when put in the hands of simplistic, vulgar thinkers who would add "only", it runs the risk, as Barrington Moore's unduly dismissive critics liked to say, of “predicting the past.”
Yes, good luck to Kamala, Tim and us all. We did the best we could.
Another thought while the outcome is still unknown:
I have no regrets about having agitated to replace Biden with Harris.
She has done an excellent job. Win or lose, she will bring Dem voters to the polls to support Dem candidates up and down the ballot.
I love Joe Biden -- I'm almost his age -- and I think he has been an excellent president. But he was a lousy candidate, and if he were still on the ticket, our prospects would be much, much worse.
Win or lose, Kamala, you gave us hope and did us proud. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
What the polls are saying is that we're going to spend at least the next decade fighting fascism in this country. They can taste the power already and figured out how easy it is to provide enough plausible deniability about their intentions to the masses who either blindly vote R since the dawn of time or simply vote against the "current guy" every cycle — Trump/Vance are the darkest they've ever been but their public support is obviously high.
Harris' win would be an immense gift to the US, a capital letter Opportunity, but the headwinds are as strong as ever — one branch of the federal government is fascist-aligned for our lifetime, another looks to be split and useless for years to come, and Democrat administrations would still be hold up to the impossible standards in the world where there are barely any win-win moves left.
Just hoping the Pennsylvania Puerto Ricans are going to save our asses. Sort of like the Lamda Lamda Lamda fraternity at the end of Revenge of the Nerds.
Your book does a fantastic job explaining the roots of his rise, even if not explicitly. What’s interesting, however, is the degree the paleocon set, who were once so excited by the promise of his administration, have sort of faded as a more dumb and crankish set of uneducated conspiracy theorists have emerged as the “intellectual core” of the MAGA movement.
It's silly to be embarrassed at this point, but I am: ours is now a country in which Marjorie Taylor Green ––she of the Gazpacho Police––is now a leading political voice, and a seriously mentally ill Kennedy may soon set policy on food, medicine, and health.
That said, those cranks may turn out to the be kabuki show for what really does become the intellectual core behind MAGA: Vance, Thiel, and the high priests of the Claremont Institute.
When you could take something to the bank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JR-d9N4GNk
Strangely the most optimistic thing I’ve read in the last two days, minus the usual rah-rah crap from deep partisans. Thankful for your book and its timing.
My best defense of the data people is this:
Polls, as well as the poll aggregation models, just reflect the subjective judgments of whoever makes them. The poll or model is a form of rhetoric.
However by convention there are a lot of constraints on the form. The pollsters are required to survey a decent number of real people and their reweighting decisions have to be based on plausible demographics. The modelers have to take polls as input, justify their weighting of polls based on some kind of track record, obey the laws of probability, model correlation between states in a sensible way. Within these constraints they tweak things until they feel solid.
But sticking to these constraints is a very good discipline and if people broadly work in good faith, the results can be informative. If you believe Nate Silver's self-interested complaints about "herding", the problem is that some pollsters are afraid to express their views forthrightly, not so much something going wrong methodologically.
John - I think you're saying you have a smidgen of hope...that sounds good to me! There have been a number of positive developments over the past couple weeks that offer that much. At some point in the future I'd love to hear your thoughts on what separates the true believers from the "Eggs used to be cheap and that guy dancing on stage is clearly the way to bring that back" . I sort of grasp the true believers but the folks who vote for him and aren't hard-core MAGA are baffling to me. For the MAGA folks I know I keep getting the impulse to take a picture of Trump in all his glory with the garbage truck and tell them "Bow before your God".
Back in August, I took a road trip from SW Ohio to western VA. Stopped in Jackson, OH, little town between Columbus and Huntington, WV. In a gas station bathroom scrawled above a urinal were the words “lock the lying convicted criminal up.” At a truck stop in West Virginia were several homophobic slurs about Trump.
Cherry-picking? Yes. Borderline Thomas Friedmanning? Yeah, fine. But this has shaped my understanding more than any polls—out of gas.