The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

STOP DOING THIS!

Posted on | September 25, 2024 | No Comments

Look, I don’t want to name any names or call anybody out, but I am sick and tired of the defeatist negativity that crops up in the comments every time I blog about the election. Whenever I point to hopeful signs about November (as I did on Tuesday), the comments fill up with a chorus of doomsayers, declaring that there’s no way that any Republican can ever win anywhere because the Democrats are certain to steal the election. It’s “rigged” to the point of 100% certainty, proclaim the chorus of Eeyores, who always see the glass as half-empty and never let a glint of optimistic sunshine penetrate their preferred gloom of hopelessness. STOP IT!

This struck me when I looked at the comments not only here, but over at my American Spectator column. There are some people who appear to be temperamentally averse to good news, and feel compelled to share their discouragement with everyone — Apostles of Defeatism, so to speak.

What got me about such comments on my American Spectator column is that some of them implied that I had not considered the possibility of Democrats cheating, when in fact I’d included no fewer than three such references, including a specific mention of “ballot harvesting.” What’s the point of writing, if people are not even going to pay attention to what you write? “Oh, here’s a headline suggesting Trump could win — let me jump in the comments to rain on everybody’s parade.”

Do these commenters not realize that, as co-author of Donkey Cons, I wrote an entire chapter about the Democratic Party’s long and sordid history of election fraud? Must I flaunt my credentials as having somewhat more expertise in politics than the average guy on his sofa yelling at the TV news? Or are my rhetorical skills insufficient to convey the impression that I know what I’m talking about?

If you are among the (evidentaly) few who actually bothered to read my American Spectator column in its entirety, you see that it hinges on the predictive value of polling: Examining how closely polls (both individually and collectively) predicted past election results, and using this data to estimate the final result based on the prior track record.

Producing such an analysis is made easier, as I said in my column, with the tools provided by Real Clear Politics. Anyone who really cares enough to investigate this issue can do it, but it does take some effort — apparently more effort than most big-time journalists are willing to do, or they’d be hitting the panic button at CNN and MSNBC by what such research reveals about Kamala Harris’s chances in November.

Let’s take one battleground state, Michigan, as an example. According to the RCP average as of Tuesday, Michigan is Harris +1.8, but on the same date in 2020, Biden was +5.2 in Michigan and, because his final official margin of victory was 2.8 points, this gives us a measurement of predictive value — a 3.4-point swing, so that if the RCP average has Harris +1.8, the predictive value is Trump +1.6.

As I explained in my column, you can do this not only with RCP averages, but with specific pollsters. For example, the Marist poll has Harris +5 in Michigan now. But in September 2020, when Marist was polling for NBC News, they had Biden +8, which is 5.2 points higher than Biden’s final margin, meaning that the Harris +5 result by Marist has the predictive value of a narrow Trump victory in Michigan.

Guess what? If you go back into the 2016 and 2020 results, nationally or state-by-state, you’ll have a hard time finding polls that don’t overstate the Democratic vote, sometimes by mind-boggling margins. Practically all public pollsters err in the same direction, and I don’t think this is a coincidence. They’re not polling to find public opinion; they’re polling to influence public opinion. Most polls are literally political propaganda for Democrats — disinformation! — and Democrats know this as well as anyone, which is why they’re doing their own “internal” polls, which tell a very different story than what most public pollsters are telling us.

Harris’s path to 270 Electoral College is very narrow, primarily because of how badly she’s doing in Pennsylvania. With 19 Electoral College votes, Pennsylvania is the largest battleground state and the RCP average on Tuesday had it Harris +0.6; on the same date in 2020, RCP had Biden +4.3 in Pennsylvania. Because he only won the state by 1.2 points, the current Harris result has the predictive value of Trump +3.1.

DONALD TRUMP IS WINNING PENNSYLVANIA!

Shut up, you damned Eeyores! I can picture you poring over the RCP average trying to find a gray cloud to darken the horizon. “What about this Quinnipiac poll showing Harris +5 in Pennsylvania?” Picture my grin as I tell you that, in 2020, Quinnipiac had Biden +13 in Pennsylvania.

Thirteen points! Any Quinnipiac poll showing Kamala Harris with less than a double-digit lead is, in fact, predicting a Trump victory.

Those of you who are addicted to pessimism — discouragement junkies, seeking your daily fix of gloom — will have to look elsewhere to satify your craving. It’s all sunshine and flowers here, baby.



 

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Category: Election, Polls

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