The Time After Now

(Back to politics this week. I hear there is an election or something going on. I think one of the most important results of the vote this year will be the insights into the efficacy of polling. The profession has pretty much blown things in the most recent elections, and I’m hearing the business is no longer sustainable because of issues caused by wireless technology, which is examined a bit in this week’s piece. Reminder to share, subscribe if you haven’t, paid or free, and spread the word about my weekly missives. Please note the addition of a tip jar at the end of the piece, in case one is suitably inspired. - JM)

I suppose it was just coincidence, but it has always felt a little strange. Political activist and filmmaker Michael Moore and I grew up not too many miles apart in the suburbs of Flint, Michigan, once one of the world’s greatest automotive manufacturing centers. We are not related, but our fathers both worked in the same factory; his dad was a foreman and mine a laborer. I, too, briefly had a job on the assembly line but it lasted no longer than my first paycheck, which was used to buy a motorcycle and point it west.

Michael’s international career, which, I suspect, has as many haters as fans, began with his takedown of Flint’s car culture management in Roger and Me. While our politics tended toward a similar sentiment, our expressions of opinion were differently communicated. We had never met in Michigan (I am four years his elder) but our paths crossed when he began production of his documentary Fahrenheit 911. His production company flew me to New York to tape an interview, excerpts of which were included in the film and were based on my first two books, Bush’s Brain, and Bush’s War for Reelection.

I bring up Moore because he has often had a sensibility regarding the political climate that has evaded pollsters and analysts. He spent a great deal of time in 2016 warning Americans that Donald Trump was likely to win because there was a disaffected electorate that wanted revenge for the election of Barack Obama. Not even Trump’s family had the confidence regarding the outcome Moore was proffering. When his prediction turned out to be correct, a tremor rolled through the political chattering class in Washington.

I am a bit disinclined to look to Michael Moore for hope in 2022 but darkness has been hovering over the news and making all of us feel desperate. Instead, the famous “Flinstone” says Democrats can very soon begin making a joyful electoral noise. In an interview on MSNBC’s “The Beat,” with Ari Melber, Moore insisted the stories about a “red wave” of Republican voters is nonsensical because of the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. His spidey sense is that women will vote in numbers that are unprecedented to protect their personal rights, and, in the process, save America from accumulating authoritarianism.

“To believe that we’re going to lose on Tuesday and that they’re going to take over,” he told Melber, “you have to accept certain assumptions. For instance, you have to assume that since the Roe decision, women were very upset back in June when the decision came down, but now, they’ve kind of collected themselves, and they’re not so upset because they’re thinking more about the price of a gallon of gas. It’s so condescending. Do you really think that women are just over it? Over Roe?”

Moore says women are already showing up in record numbers and that come Tuesday they will make a profound statement. Political news reports, and, yes, polling results, however, are indicating that voters, especially independents, are veering Republican. If this is the case, women will have decided GOP ads about inflation and crime have identified two issues of which to be more fearful than losing control of personal health decisions regarding their bodies. The confidence Michael Moore expresses (and this Moore wants to embrace) is that women are done with their lives being ordered by conservatives, especially white males, and religiopolitical organizations trying to affect a handmaid’s hell in America.

Increasingly, too, in recent years, polling’s inexact science has become absurdly inaccurate. In fact, during the last two elections there has been at least a 2.5 percentage point error in swing states, which are closely competitive, and in the predictably blue states. Sam Wang, a professor who founded the Princeton Election Consortium, was so confident of Hillary Clinton’s victory in 2016 that he offered to eat a live cricket if Trump won, which he did, live on CNN. Data did not exactly improve in 2020, either. Polls that had Biden comfortably ahead in a state ended up being wrong to the point of extremis and were won by Trump with a margin of 2.6 additional percentage points. Trump did even better in Republican states than polls had predicted, and he won by a wide margin of 6.4 points, unforeseen by polling.

In a 2020 interview with Scientific American, Wang cited the work of analyst David Shor, the former head of political data science at Civis Analytics. Shor and Wang have concluded that the people who respond to polls tend to not be representative samples.

“They're pretty weird,” Wang said, “in the sense that they’re willing to pick up the phone and stay on the phone with a pollster. He (Shor) gave evidence that people are more likely to pick up the phone if they’re Democrats, more likely to pick up under the conditions of a pandemic and more likely to pick up the phone if they score high in the domain of social trust. It’s fascinating. The idea is that poll respondents score higher on social trust than the general population, and because of that, they’re not a representative sample of the population. That could be skewing the results.”

Wang’s conclusion was that polls should not be used to formulate probabilities and that “at some level, we should stop expecting too much out of the polling data.” Keir Murray, a Houston pollster of KLM Public Affairs, LLC, and political consultant, has an opinion that comports with Wang’s. During a podcast interview with our Texas Outlaw Writers group, Murray essentially described the polling business as no longer sustainable or viable. According to Murray, surveyors in his call centers are getting a .14 percent response rate to their calls seeking voters. This fact alone is likely to mean the end of any real scientific polling because he said it takes 3-4 hours to acquire a single interview. The cost of doing that is not sustainable as a business. Further, it will only get worse as more people screen out and refuse to answer unknown inbound phone numbers.

Murray seems to lament his own profession’s failure to do more than feed into the media’s lazy reporting on elections and providing little more than updates on the “horse race.” Polls, especially if they end up being in error, are contributing to the dissembling of the American electoral process.

“Who's up, who's down, who's raising money, who's not?” Murray asked. “Who has a scandal, who doesn't? Who had the verbal gaffe, who is or isn't getting canceled? And so much of the energy and attention is devoted to what I would call superficial, the game aspects of the political process at the expense of substantive discussions on policy and the direction of the country or the direction of the state. The latter is not sexy to talk about. It's more complicated, It's more difficult. But essentially my view is we're infantilizing the public, right? With the focus, endless focus on the superficial and the inane, it is to the detriment of our country. And we see it, it contributes to the polarization”

Murray strains to find a reason to be optimistic about our campaign process or the people seeking public office. Candidates have become more overt about their ambitions, and they are less focused on public service and building a political consensus to improve lives among their constituents. Money and celebrity are becoming the prime motives for getting into politics.

"Having worked in the business for the last 2-plus decades,” Murray said, “I see too many people now running for office just to become social media personalities. Generate income from becoming celebrities, move on to some other money-making venture after they leave office or even while they're in office."

Murray is more realist than cynic, and it’s hard for any of us to get a true picture when the media finds a narrative thread and pulls it until the whole cloth of information is unraveled and unrecognizable. There is reliable information to refute the media’s overriding notions that a red wave is rolling over America. The first, and most basic data point, is turnout. The New Democrat Network (NDN), a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C., has been modeling early voter turnout through the last week and has found Democrats comfortably ahead when compared to the last two national elections with a 3.4 million turnout edge over Republicans, which represents a 50-40 margin. (See below).

Simon Rosenberg, President of NDN, tweeted on Friday that there is reason for Democrats to be hopeful and enthusiastic.

“What I'm seeing: Ds continue to overperform in polls/early vote in the Senate battlegrounds - Early vote remains very encouraging for Ds. Marist polls another problem for red wave narrative. These polls continue the pattern of respected independent polls being 4-8 pts. more Dem than the recent flood of bullshit GOP polls.”

On Friday, Marist dropped three Senate polls that run distinctly counter to the mainstream media’s dire predictions for Democrats. The surveyors of Marist are historically quite accurate and they show Fetterman leading Oz in Pennsylvania by 51-45, Kelly up in Arizona 50-47, and Warnock and Walker tied in Georgia at 48 but the Democrat’s numbers increasing 4 points with registered voters over the past week.

Rosenberg considers the early vote data a “repudiation” of the red wave narrative and that its embrace was “wildly premature.” He points out that it did not show up in the 5 house special elections this year, certainly did not even appear pink in the Kansas abortion vote, in post Dobbs voter registration, and is not present in the early vote or the Senate battleground states. The only place the red wave has manifested, Rosenberg insists, is in “BS GOP polls, some national tracks, and right-wing Twitter.”

The unanswered question for this election is how significant the Dobbs abortion ruling will be for voters. In the wake of the high court’s decision, there was a surge in women registering, especially younger female voters, and their numbers have the potential to determine winners. In most issues research, inflation and abortion are the top concerns among women, and the economy seemingly becomes a secondary matter when a woman cannot make personal decisions about their bodies and, consequently, their futures. Cecile Richards and Rosenberg discuss these dynamics on the Deep State Radio podcast and make the case that “things are better off than we had feared.”

As is often the case, Texas is different. Turnout is down, and, in many locations, way down. The top 30 counties in the state with the most registered voters have recorded only 2.7 million ballots cast, which is a turnout rate of 19 percent. The first 8 days of early voting in 2018, another midterm election, produced a 3.3 million turnout of 27 percent of registered voters. Even though those counties have added 1.6 million new voters in the past four years, the turnout is off by 8 points.

Lower numbers were predictable for several reasons. The Greg Abbott conservative legislature passed numerous voting reforms to constrain mail-in voting with increased and unnecessary qualifying standards. Further, counties were limited in terms of ballot drop boxes. Loving County, Texas, which has a population of 57, has a single drop box. Harris County, with Houston as the county seat, also has only one drop box for 4.8 million residents. Conservatives seemed to have not understood that increasing voter restrictions would impact turnout to support their candidates.

Two other factors are suppressing the Texas vote. The former president is urging Republicans to not vote with mail-ins because they make it easier to cheat, an allegation that has been disproved countless times by audits and investigations. Meanwhile, broadcast airwaves and Internet sites are saturated with negative ads, mostly from the right, which are almost certain to disincentivize the electorate, which tends to advantage the GOP. Mail ballots through the first 8 days in the top 30 counties numbered about 125,000 less than in 2018.

As usual, there are just too many electoral elements in flux to make accurate predictions. There is some certainty, however, in what comes next regardless of the outcomes. A potential Republican U.S. House will begin retaliatory investigations of the Biden administration, shut down the January 6th committee, contemplate articles of impeachment of the president, and even begin discussions about sunsetting social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. These actions will follow consistent claims from various GOP election officials and candidates that there was voter fraud by Democrats, and when Trump is indicted, as he must be, after announcing his third run for president, there will be a level of disruption and violence that will threaten further our already fragile democracy.

And we will have no one to blame but ourselves.