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The only polls that matter

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 21, 2023

Remember the “red tsunami”?

If you’re like me, you don’t answer the phone if you don’t recognize the number or, lately, the spoofed names. Which begs the question: Who does? People willing to speak with pollsters, I’d wager. Pollsters themselves will explain how they control for this bias, to be sure, but polling itself seems more and more a sucker’s game. Remember predictions last fall of a “red tsunami”?

Chris Hayes made that point on Wednesday that the only polls that really matter are the ones voters participate in when they vote.

What special elections around the country tell us is that the GOP is in a hole. And they’re still digging.

What people tell themselves, telephone polls, or guys with microphones are a crude measure of the kind of country most Americans really want to live in.

Heather Cox Richardson dishes on a new program just launched by that “unpopular” Biden administration:

The fight over how we conceive of our federal government was on full display today.

The Biden administration announced the creation of the American Climate Corps. This will be a group of more than 20,000 young Americans who will learn to work in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience while also earning good wages and addressing climate change. 

This ACC looks a great deal like the Civilian Conservation Corps established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1933, during the New Deal. The CCC was designed to provide jobs for unemployed young men (prompting critics to ask, “Where’s the She, She, She?”) while they worked to build fire towers, bridges, and foot trails, plant trees to stop soil erosion, stock fish, dig ditches, build dams, and so on. 

While the CCC was segregated, the ACC will prioritize hiring within communities traditionally left behind, as well as addressing the needs of those communities that have borne the brunt of climate change. If the administration’s rules for it become finalized, the corps will also create a streamlined pathway into federal service for those who participated in the program. 

In January, a poll showed that a climate corps is popular. Data for Progress found that voters supported such a corps by a margin of 39 points. Voters under 45 supported it by a margin of 51 points. 

While the Biden administration is establishing a modern version of a popular New Deal program, extremists in the Republican Party are shutting down the government to try to stop it from precisely this sort of action. They want to roll the government back to the days before the New Deal, ending government regulation, provision of a basic social safety net, investment in infrastructure, and protection of civil rights.

Republican leaders and their billionaire backers loathe the New Deal. They loathe the middle class America it created. They loathe their supporters for taking it for granted (like Medicare Veteran above) even while decrying it as socialism. Take it away and you’ll pay. Republicans know that too. At least those not fully embracing burning it all down.

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