Really? Biden wins Georgia and Arizona? The conventional wisdom became the conventional wisdom because of polls!
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Why are we giving so much credit for free Bingo squares? It reminds me of that pitch the MLBUA makes against replay: they claim MLB umps get 99.5% of the calls correct. That is dumb though because anyone could accurately make a large majority of those calls. On reviewed plays, umpires were cumulatively worse than 50% at one point (and perhaps they still are).
Whoops. But also nah it was worse than that.
No one is saying anyone is saying […]. But these bros always just shrug this shit off like it’s all the same. Meow the polls are off by Y% in an average year. Right, but that offness is (mostly) not due to chance, and the fact they’re averaging a bunch of polls means the bias should be greatly reduced. It implies non-sampling error is the prime suspect, so what grand theories have been pitched to explain what’s happening? That shy Trump voters are lying to pollsters–but apparently only in states that matter like Wisconsin and Ohio, whereas Maine Trump voters are very honest with pollsters because [reasons]. So like, I dunno, maybe the EXPERT POLLS GUY is someone you’d expect to unpack that, decompose the error structure, develop some novel theories that actually explain what’s happening instead of tossing CA and NY onto the scales and claiming victory.
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The votes are still being counted, give it a bit of time. Nate has already said they’re going to analyze what went wrong with the polls and publish some pieces. After 2016, pollsters did reflect on what went wrong, and started weighting by education more. And their adjustments apparently worked for 2018 because the polls were really good in 2018.
For 2020, there have already been theories beyond shy Trump proposed (link), but there’s a lot of data to gather and process, and the error was weird, so it’s gonna take a deep dive to come up with something that explains it.
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I also want to push back on the stupid notion that we just magically would have known public opinion without polls and called more states correctly. Like a good example was the first debate where people itf were melting down, Biden looks weak, Trump is steamrolling, waaf, but then polls came out showing large majorities saying Biden won, and everybody forgets about it.
Without polling, it’s not clear why we don’t expect the rust belt to go for Trump again. Incumbent Presidents almost always win, and everybody here thought Biden was a terrible candidate. So my guess is not only would people here have called more states wrong, they would have called the election wrong and predicted a Trump win. The “intelligent” betting markets certainly would have predicted a Trump win if polls didn’t exist. Obviously the BLM protests would doom Biden in the rust belt.
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As cheese said, polls are the biggest reason ppl itt made a collective ~6 figures on the election. Are we just upset it was a sweat?
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Something that people in our party say a lot is, “The problem with Democrats is they talk too much about issues and they don’t talk enough about values.” And I think that’s actually exactly backward. I think the problem is that fundamentally, swing voters generally don’t share our values and only and mainly vote for us because they agree with us on issues.
Yeah this kind of crystallises my thinking on this. I cringe whenever Dems (or progressives in general) lead with values because it’s such bad politics.
One simple and clear example is healthcare. I frequently see people lead with “healthcare is a human right”. I think this is a dumb and meaningless proposition because “healthcare” is a collection of many disparate things, some of which (insulin for diabetics) are arguably a human right and some of which (million-dollar experimental treatments that might extend a terminally ill person’s life by a couple weeks) no government in their right mind should pay for. Saying “healthcare is a human right” doesn’t help at all with the question of what should and shouldn’t be publicly funded.
The larger problem, though, is that it’s a terrible way to convince people that M4A is a good idea. Telling people that “healthcare is a human right” amounts to badgering them about their values and morals. If you’re not a vegan, think about how you would react if a vegan was to lecture you about being a bad person for eating animal products. I don’t know about you, but my reaction is “fuck off”. If anything, the fact that I think they have good points about the ethical treatment of animals makes me less, not more, receptive to an attack on my values. I might well support a whole range of policies which lead to more ethical treatment of animals, but arguing that my values are inadequate makes me instantly hostile. It’s the same with any political issue.
It would be one thing if moralizing was the only way to argue for M4A, but in reality it’s easy to argue for M4A on simple grounds of cost, efficiency and so forth, given the particular pathologies of the American healthcare sector. To make it your mission to convert other people to your values is to be a slave to a pointless middleman. Just advocate for policy. I don’t give a shit whether other people’s values accord with mine or not if they’re willing to support the policies I want.
The way the Democratic party builds its coalition around shared values is the enemy of class politics (because class politics is supposed to involve shared material conditions, not shared values) and is a major driving force behind the Democrats becoming the party of educated city-dwellers. I’ve used Joe Rogan as an example of someone not welcome in the Democratic coalition a number of times because I think it’s illustrative. While I’m sure there are a number of concrete Democratic policies he would oppose, it’s noteworthy that all the actual complaints about him are values complaints. That is, he has bad men on his show, he says problematic things about trans people, and (unspoken but a major driving force imo) he is a dumbass who doesn’t really value intellectual rigour.
The Democrats are constantly on the attack on values and have very little to show for it, for example the line for four years of Trump was “racism racism racism white supremacy” and the result was that in 2020 he peeled off a substantial chunk of Latino voters and got, if anything, a higher share of Black voters than Republicans typically do. I mean Jesus, even attacking people on THEIR OWN VALUES clearly doesn’t fucking work, look at Evangelicals and Trump. It’s not that Evangelicals are uniquely hypocritical among human beings, it’s that people are just generally willing to compromise their values if they don’t like the conclusions they lead to (recall my veganism example earlier) and that everyone hates being lectured on their values. Despite this, I still see people leading with values in political arguments on a daily basis. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the point of this is that they enjoy lecturing people and feeling superior to them, rather than that it’s a serious attempt to change minds or build coalitions.
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My beef is with the pollsters. They had 4 years to fix their shit and they were just as far off with the same Trump-no bias in 2020 as they were in 2016. Biden +17 in Wisconsin with a +/- 4 margin of error. That’s not even close. Biden with consistent leads in Florida, gets destroyed. Etc. I had my hopes up for a blue wave based on the polls but it turns out 70 million people voted for Trump and Biden is gonna be president because he won like ~4-5 swing states by ~1% or less margins
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“Healthcare is a human right” immediately sends you down a boring philosophical rabbithole. Like, I had to cut you off right there because I got bored with what you were saying. IDGAF is healthcare is technically a Constitutional “right” or not, I want the people I care about to have healthcare. Campaign on giving me and my family access to healthcare, I don’t don’t give flying fuck if it’s categorically defined as a right or whatnot as long as I have it.
One of the better moments from Joe Biden’s campaign was him pointing out that millions of Americans now have pre-existing conditions due to COVID. Fuck me, I don’t have strong opinions on the natural rights of man, I just want to be able to afford health insurance if I get pozzed out.
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Right. Also as kind of an addendum, the idea that the way you convince people to support policy is to change their values is just a fallacy. At least as often, it works in the opposite direction. The reason “socialist” institutions like fire departments, public trash collection, public roads, public education, Medicare etc etc are very widely supported in America is not that people were philosophically convinced that trash collection is a government responsibility. It’s because that is just the way things work and people see that it functions well and so they support it. That’s also why people in countries with public healthcare are much more likely to see that as the natural way of things. People’s values are determined by what works in their experience, only fringe politics nerds change their values based on logical argument. Similarly, people in cities support immigration and multiculturalism because that’s their experience of the world, it’s not that they’re just genetically better people than those in all-white rural areas panicking about MS-13.
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People fucking love free shit from the government. Everyone loves that. I love libraries and fire departments and all that great socialist shit that makes my life better. I don’t care if libraries are “a human right” or not or whatever, I just want to be able to check out free books and DVDs of Foyle’s War. I’m not a beard-stroking 17th century philosopher fretting about the fundamental rights of man, I just want books and healthcare and DVDs of cozy murder mysteries.
If you are running for president, you should just promise to give everyone access to healthcare and complete boxed sets of David Suchet’s Poiroit mysteries.
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It’s funny how this wasn’t/isn’t obvious to everyone here. We actually had to have a “Is health care a human right” thread to demonstrate this. I think we got there relatively quickly, but it still had to be done.
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This guy seems to be one of the relatively few people who thinks seriously about the big picture regarding elections and campaigns and structural issues with the electorate.
Matt Yglesias has been beating this drum for at least a year, maybe a decade.
It’s not the pollsters fault that a historically high number of educated people were stuck at home, were highly engaged, and were answering their phones at ahistorical rates.
That seems like a plausible explanation for the systemic miss, though I know many pollsters were paranoid about missing on education so they oversampled noncollege whites, including Nate Cohen. Gonna have to reread his explanation for the miss.
Jeez, this thread got so substantive over the last 20 posts. Good stuff.
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Trump won the rust belt by the tiniest margin. Trump is a historically bad president. The economy is in the toilet and hundreds of thousands of Americans have been dying of Covid. It’s not a huge stretch to question his reelection chances.
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I agree, but I think that in retrospect, once again, we were likely underestimating the stupidity/simplicity of so many people.
I think there is a good reason to think that many many many people simply never saw it this way. They bought Trump’s line that the economy was cooking before COVID, and the media did little to dissuade anyone of that notion. In fact, the mainstream media often conceded that point with little to no explanation.
The COVID part will take a bit longer to figure out for sure, but it certainly seems like tons of people bought one or more of the following:
- It wasn’t Trump’s fault; it was China’s.
- Trump did the best he could even though the science was unclear and the media was against him
- Trump wanted to open schools and football and the economy and others wanted to just oppress.
Plus, he told them that it would be fine and that’s about all they wanted to hear on it.
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Nailed it.
Now we have to pray like god that those people don’t stick around and keep voting Republican.
I think @ChrisV hit the nail on the head. I’m a salesman and if I’m using values to sell you something it’s because I know an insanely large amount about you already. What’s in it for you is the standard tool of persuasion.
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This is all well argued and I generally agree. However, I think it’s a bit naive to think people will shift their political identities based on policy.
Florida just overwhelmingly voted for $15 minimum wage and the person who is strongly opposed to that policy! Tribal identify won over policy.
Here is an interesting summary of some, admittedly, lab based research into changing minds.
But here is some other research that suggests the barrier to changing minds isn’t policy or values, it’s very deep seated self identify rooted in biology. Intuitively, I think this supports your general point as I’d assume value-based confrontations are more likely to cause us to trigger that part of the brain wired to reinforce our political self identify.
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