Two Things ...
about the election and our strategies.
Eschew the binary thinking
We all know that we are better off not falling into the trap of worshiping the binary. That is of course not always true, there are perfectly good binaries out there. But there is a kind of binary thinking that many fall into that isn’t recognized as binary thinking but is, and it can be damaging to our collective understanding of politics.
Here are two competing alternative statements. One is true, the other is not true (hey, there’s one of those binaries!):
The polling sucked in 2016, but the polling in 2020 was OK.
The polling in 2016 was OK, but the polling in 2020 sucked.
Most people remember the shock and horror of a Trump victory in 2016, and it is very common for people to claim that the polling was bad that year. Meanwhile, the polling in 2020 seemed to suggest a Biden win, and there was a Biden win, so therefore the polling in 2020 was fine.
This is a pernicious falsehood and this kind of falsehood is based on incorrect binary thinking. The binary in this case is who wins and who loses an election (our candidate won vs our candidate lost). This binary ignores very important numbers and changes in numbers underlying a victory or loss.
Here’s some data:
2016 RCP polling average: Clinton + 3.2; Actual result: Clinton +2.1
2020 RCP poling average: Biden +7.2; Actual results: Biden +4.5
The 2016 polls said one of the two candidates could win, and one did. The polls did not actually pick a winner. If you thought they did, that was you listening to polls filtered through pundits who could not believe Trump could possibly win. The polls were statistically tied. The difference between the polling and the election in 2016 was very small, and it was all within the margin of error. The polls were not wrong in 2016.
Meanwhile, the polling in 2020 was way off. Not only was Biden showing in polls to be way above the margin of error nationally, but also leading by a large margin in several swing states. Biden did in fact win that year, so if you are into binary-only math, then the polls were fine. But polls are not binary and should not be judged that way. The polls showed a Biden trouncing of Trump, but what actually happened was Biden winning, but winning by much less.
Wisconsin is probably cited most often by the professional poll watchers for an example of the polls being off at the state level. The RCP average had Biden ahead by 6.7% on election day, but he squeaked by with less than a percent. The ABC News/WaPo poll, not a poll to ignore, had Biden up 17% in Wisconsin a little while before the election.
So let us review:
The polling sucked in 2016, but the polling in 2020 was OK. PERNICIOUS FALSEHOOD.
The polling in 2016 was OK, but the polling in 2020 sucked. SHOCKINGLY TRUE.
Eschew the binary thinking.
The Memory Hole
Part of our political communications problem is the giant yet quiet sucking sound of the memory hole. Many people who voted for Trump were not voting for the Trump you know and hate, based on your own years of careful and thoughtful (if nauseating) Trump-watching. We need to wait for further analysis, but it is probably fair to say that there are people who voted for Trump who thought the economy was good before because of him, and have even sort of forgotten the Trump-Covid-Inflation triumvirate. It went down the memory hole.
I don’t have an answer to this problem for you, I’m just asking you to think about it. We need to find ways of sealing off the memory hole, or at least making it harder for things to fall into it. Some kind of grate or magnetic force, or sirens singing around its edges in a certain direction, or we put Bugs Bunny down there to fix it, or something.
As I write this, it is the 49th anniversary of a specific event. In order to get you to remember what that event was, all I need to do is say, "The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, on the big lake they call Gitche Gume," and now you remember the Gales of November and will have this song as an ear bug all day. Over 6,000 ships have gone down in the Great Lakes. You can name only one. It has a song.
We must develop these techniques and use them for the good of civilization.
