Polling for the Duke of Deceit

"Fuck you, we did a good job!"

- Nate Silver

Polling, so the Republican meme goes, fails because the pollsters don’t report on enough White people. They point to the surprises of 2016, and no doubt will trumpet the Duke of Deceit’s outperforming himself in 2020, as evidence that polling is fundamentally flawed exclusively because of liberal bias, and should therefore not be trusted.

The irony in this declaration is stunning, really, when you consider the depths of dishonesty that the GOP itself has sunk to in order to maintain its toehold on power in the face of being the minority party in the United States.* We can trace a straight line from the complete hooey of Reaganomics** to the absolute barrage of bullshit that has emanated from the Duke of Deceit and the Turtle over the past four years. 

The Duke, defeated

Everywhere you turn, whether you look at the income impacts of their economic policies, the global and economic effects of their foreign policies, their pronouncements on the “successes” of their routinely bad presidents, their claims to be upholding “American values,” or (most recently) their bad-faith manipulation of the norms of governance, you see one consistent theme: Republicans will say or do anything — anything — to get elected, even if it is not true, fails to coincide with reality, or even conflicts with something they said or did last year or 20 minutes ago. 

Mitch "The Turtle" McConnell

This may be somewhat less true at the state and local levels (though having lived in a red region of a blue state for more than a decade, I am skeptical even of that!), but one cannot doubt that the Duke of Deceit is not really an aberration in the longer-term scheme of things. Rather, he is the apotheosis of the Republican ethos to lie loudly and long. 

The situation has gotten so bad — and indeed, they have gotten so bad at it — even a few halfway honest Republican candidates (mostly those trying to survive in blue states) have found themselves stepping back from the brink that the D of D is dragging them toward. They find ways to “support the president” even as they mumble some denials of most of what he actually says.

The trouble is, of course, that Consensus Reality cannot be denied forever. What has postponed the Coming Reckoning has mainly been the peculiar slant that the electoral system and the structure of the United States itself can lend to unpopular ideas. Because every state is guaranteed at least one Representative and two Senators, regardless of population, and because there is a huge swath of the country that is relatively sparsely populated, the GOP has been able to maintain a grip on the Congress that outweighs its overall popularity. 

The Framers, in their wisdom, decided that the masses cannot be trusted and have to be balanced by an “upper chamber” that gives equal representation to every state. (So much for “original intent.”) Moreover, at the level of the Chief Executive, the Electoral College puts a thumb on the electoral scales, giving significantly more weight to minority opinions.***

Not the Sun

But in the end, just as we must all be compelled to admit that it is the sun and not the moon that shines in the daytime, so, too must this overly influential minority of Americans eventually come to accept that tax cuts do not pay for themselves, that consumers and not CEO’s are the real “job creators,” that everyone does have a vested interest in everyone else’s health, and that mankind is indeed destroying the environment that it depends upon for survival (and that there is no Planet B).†

So let us return, then, to the subject at hand: The lie that polling cannot be trusted because of blah blah blah. As Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com, the industry standard among polling aggregators, has repeatedly pointed out, the polls in 2016 were not that far off, in fact. Among the last 10 elections, 2016 falls close to the middle (#4 of 10) in terms of accuracy in predicting the final outcome of the election. Prior to 2016, you have to go all the way back to Truman’s “surprising” victory in 1948 to find polling that was actually, strikingly wrong.†† 

Certainly when it came to the popular vote, the polls were largely within their own margin of error in 2016. If anything was a surprise, it was Trump’s dubious “victories” by less than 75k votes in exactly three states (WI, MI and PA — three states that had participated in Kris Kobach’s remarkably anti-democratic Interstate Crosscheck system, which systematically removed hundreds of thousands of voters from the voting rolls…oddly enough, mostly from liberal-leaning voting blocs: Latinx and Black communities in cities). The only “surprise” here is that the “liberal” MSM has been so lax in covering the shenanigans that stole the election for the Duke. 

Indeed, returning to fivethirtyeight again, even as they were giving HRC >80% chance of winning in 2016, they were also pointing out that there were significant numbers of undecided voters in swing states that could tip the scales in the Duke’s favor. And that is (more or less, and ignoring the shenanigans just mentioned) what happened. Even the poll aggregators were pointing out that the Duke did have a path to victory. If you didn’t know that, you weren’t paying attention.

What was true four years ago has proven true again this time round: The polls predicted a Biden popular-vote victory all along, and lo and behold, that is what has happened. And the aggregators were saying all along that FL would be tough for either candidate to win outright. And they were predicting AZ and NV to lean Biden (which they did), and MI and WI to go for Biden (which they did), and that PA was going to be the tipping-point state (which it turned out to be – though Biden holding NV and AZ meant he doesn’t need PA).

Having said all this, it is true that there seems to have been a tiny red neap tide (one hesitates to call it a wave, since it has not put DT into the White House — only lawsuits can do that at this point). It made some of the popular votes closer than expected. What is going on with that?

Well it seems to me that one of the chief problems that pollsters face is that they are dependent upon the honesty of their respondents. If people are not willing to tell you what they really think, you are stuck. And in an environment completely awash in lies and deceit, where one candidate has run the country on complete bullshit and acted in the most shameful ways while promoting a complete disregard for facts and honest assessments of reality, it would not be surprising at all if one found lots and lots of otherwise decent ordinary people who were ashamed to admit publicly that they are Trumpists. Lies beget lies and the bad money drives out the good. (See my blog on that subject, actually....)

Jesus

Think of all the so-called Christians who turned out in droves for him in 2016 and at rallies throughout his presidency — even as he thoroughly trampled upon the most basic principles of Christian conduct (kindness, honesty, humility, respectfulness…). Whatever happened to "by their fruits ye shall know them"? (Matthew 7:15-20)

I don’t know (and I don’t care) how they have been sleeping at night, but I would not be at all surprised to discover that like their hero, they have been willing to lie and claim they are independents when pollsters came knocking. Not all of them, perhaps, but it wouldn’t take many of them to skew the polls in the tiny amounts we are seeing in this election. 

Non-Jesus 
Purveyor of Kool-Ade

By supporting the Duke of Deceit, they have abandoned all rational claim to be following Jesus, for the sake of a chance to impose their wretched beliefs on everyone else. “Sheep become like shepherds, and shepherds like sheep,” wrote Tolkien, and it’s true. 

And “in for a penny, in for a pound,” as the British say.

* Don't believe this statement? Consider: In recent elections, Democrats have earned millions more votes for Congress than Republicans, even when the GOP has taken control of both houses, as they did from 2001 to 2007; in the six presidential elections in the current century, Republicans have garnered a majority of the popular vote exactly once (in 2004, when incumbent W was running during two major wars); on virtually every issue (including abortion), traditional Republican positions are unpopular — often by wide margins. Only the peculiarities of our constitutional system, the Electoral College, and gerrymandering keep them in the game at all.

** www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/business/economy/tax-cuts incomes.html

*** For example, North Dakota has three electors for a population of around 760k (one EC vote for about every 253k people); California, with a population of over 39 million has 55 electors (about 710k people per EC vote).

† https://soundcloud.com/user-56350616/planet-b

†† www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0315-6; fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right/;   www.thecrosstab.com/2017/01/03/history-polling-error-us-uk/.

Picture credits: the conversation.com; howtolivebullshitfree.com; forbes.com.