Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Rick Perlstein is out with another interesting piece in the American Prospect today, this time about “undecided voters.” He references the great Chris Hayes piece from 2004 that I’ve often discussed over the years. It had the same effect on me that it had on Perlstein who describes it as “the most important piece of political journalism I have ever encountered.” As he says:

The future MSNBC host’s TNR piece was an account of the lessons he learned canvassing among undecided voters in Wisconsin for John Kerry. It incinerates a basic foundation of how political junkies think: “Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the ‘issues.’ That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs.”

Chris noted that while there were a few people he talked to like that, “such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number … the very concept of the ‘issue’ seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to.”

You would think others among the veritable armadas of mainstream journalists reporting out what undecided voters think would have met with such blank stares themselves. It is a testament to how bad framing narratives and rigid, ossified genre conventions distort perception so much that no mainstream journalist ever admits such a thing. Instead, they ram voters’ responses into their false frame, square-peg-in-round-hole style. They let objective reality take the hindmost.

He asks why are so many people attracted to the simple-minded blatherings of Donald Trump?

Millions of pages have been filled by scholars explaining the psychological appeal of fascism, most converging on the blunt fact that it offers the fantasy of reversion to an infantile state, where nothing can come and harm you, because you will be protected by an all-powerful figure who will always put you first, always put you first. It is simply indisputable that this promise can seduce and transform even intelligent, apparently mature, kind-hearted people formerly committed to liberal politics. I’ve written before in this column about the extraordinary film The Brainwashing of My Dad, in which director Jen Senko describes the transformation of her Kennedy-liberal dad under the influence of right-wing talk radio and Fox News—and also how, after she explained the premise of her film for a Kickstarter campaign, scores of people came out of the woodwork to share similar stories about their own family members.

I’ve learned a lot about the psychological dynamics at work from the X feed of a psychologist named Julie Hotard, who drills down on the techniques Fox uses to trigger infantilization in viewers. The people at Fox who devise these scripts, one imagines, are pretty sophisticated people. Trump’s gift is to be able to grunt out the same stuff just from his gut. Trump’s appeals have become noticeably more infantile in precisely this way. When he addresses women voters, for instance: “I am your protector. I want to be your protector … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger …”

Or when he grunts the other side of the infantilizing promise: that he will be your vengeance. His promise to destroy anything placing you in danger. Like when he recently pledged to respond to “one really violent day” by meeting criminals with “one rough hour—and I mean real rough. The world will get out and it will end immediately.”

Fascism, for all its macho trappings, really does appeal to a certain kind of arrested development, a characteristic of Trumpism that I’ve noted many times in the past. The whole ouvre is puerile. And frankly, so are those undecided voters many of whom don’t really even know what politics are.

Perlstein thinks the “undecided” contingent in today’s electorate is “poised at a threshold.” That “Undecided” is a way station between the final surrender to the Trumpian fantasy, and all the imaginary comforts it offers, and sticking with the rest of us in the reality-based community, despite all the existential terrors the real world affords.”

If that’s true we have to hope they either choose the real world or decide to stay home and watch the “Real Housewives” or “The Bachelor” and leave politics to the grown-ups.

A reader friend by the name of Sean Kelly, a scientist, seeing me flail about trying to deal with polling, offered this explanation and agreed to let me share it with you in case you are feeling the same way. It cleared a few things up for me:

So. Political polling. It is basically experts making data informed guesses, and the reported margins of error are pretty much meaningless in context. Experts making informed guesses are a useful thing, and the best realistic option, but poll results are not scientifically rigorous things. Let me explain some of that context.

The reality of political polling usually involves people that answer their phone when the call is from an unknown number. That skews the sample to older people, as many people avoid scammers and random sales people by not answering calls by unknown numbers. Older people grew up in a society where avoiding callers was impolite, so are more likely to pick up – not certain, but more likely.

Alternatively, a small army of people can buttonhole people on the street, but that skews the poll to shoppers or business people that are out on the street. Other polls might try a combination of sampling techniques in a quest to be more representative, but they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

This problem gets wrapped under the heading ‘representative sample’. The hard math pollsters imply they use by using statistics form and jargon gets reduced to guesswork, with the fudges each pollster applies to their data to make the data conform to that pollsters view of what a representative sample should look like.

Pollsters fudge their sample by ‘correcting’ the results to the population proportions. If the poll includes half the ratio of the young people the population contains, each young persons choice is weighted twice as much. In the last presidential election, young people voted at a lower rate than older people, so a factor is applied to represent that lower likelihood of voting. This is not a slight on pollsters, as, if properly executed, these fudges improve the results, and history shows it’s better than not correcting it.

A weakness is that many pollsters derive those corrections from past polls – comparing the past polls to the actual election results in the same period, and adjusting for changing demographics. 

Older people in past elections were significantly more likely to vote than younger people, but there are reasons to suspect that margin may shrink this election. Particularly with young women, who have obvious concern over healthcare driven by the abortion bans in many states.

It is of note that Covid, statistically, killed more older voters in republican states than in democratic ones. Additionally, the proportion of young people is increasing over other age groups, in part because the baby boomers are inevitably dying off, and in part because the baby boomers had a lot of kids. Those demographic changes should be adjusted for, and the pollsters do that.

No poll of voters ever succeeds in being perfectly random in all respects, or perfectly corrected to reality, at least not without a sample size that approaches the entire voting population. The reported margin of error can understate the real poll error by a lot, depending on how those experts at voting predictions weight their results. 

That is why the polls were so wrong about Hillary Clinton in 2016. The combination of sampling bias and incorrect corrections left the pollsters with egg on their face. The Trump electorate was unlike previous elections, so the model the pollsters used for their adjustments broke. Luckily, a poll that includes the entire voting population is done every few years, with nearly no significant errors. It is called an election.

Pollsters have coalesced on a reported margin of error, or confidence interval, at a 95% certainty (or 19 times out of 20). It is a mathematical construct that assumes a perfect sample. The construct states that a value calculated as 2 standard deviations (or 2 sigma) in a perfectly random poll gives that 95% margin. 

A standard deviation is defined as 1/(square root of n), where n is the total number of people in the poll. Three standard deviations would give a 99.7% margin. One standard deviation gives a 66% margin. Pick your poison. The polling industry standardized on a 95% margin because reasons. Some areas of science like to see 6 or more sigma before declaring something proven, but they have hard data in their data set.

With the particular corrections each pollster makes, the errors added to that mathematically rigorous definition make the reported margin of error nothing of the kind in reality. The reported margin of error is a rigorous value calculated from a non-rigorous data set, full of mushy human responses.

Even if two polls are within that rigorously defined margin of error, it says little about the relative election prospects of the candidates. Additionally, in a rigorously applied situation, the error on each individuals result is actually twice the reported margin of error, so in a close election like this one, the math says whatevs, even if the data set was perfect.

So what use are the polls? They are particularly useful to determine trends. Is a candidates chances increasing or decreasing? If a polling methodology is consistent from one polling event to the next, even with questionable results, the trend lines are likely correct. The direction of the change is likely right, even if the magnitude of the results are less certain.

The other use for polls involves those corrections different pollsters apply. If a great set of social scientists apply perfect corrections that are representative of the voting population in this election, their results might be bang on. But it means a poll is effectively a data informed best guess as to the results from a group of experts. Which poll you are looking at matters.

The trappings of mathematical certainty are used to dress up those guesses, misleading the public about what is really going on. The pollsters are experts in how poll result should be transformed into that informed guess, but the details are much more fuzzy than the trappings imply. Expert opinion is a useful tool, but back to Hillary, it can be completely misleading.

There are reasons to suspect that the balance of error this time biases the democrats low (mostly in that young people thing), so Harris might blow this thing out, as opposed to squeaking it. I think Florida and Texas might be close, so yay! I also really want Trump to lose, so I might be interpreting things to let me sleep at night, but whatevs.

Of course, the world has completely transformed a few times this election, so things may look very different at some later date…or many later dates. It’s been a wild ride so far.

Yes, I’m Canadian, but most of the world really wants Trump to lose, and it matters to us economically (tariffs, world trade), politically (Ukraine war, NATO, Israel), and morally (Trump in general). Canada tends to follow American trends with a few years delay. Trump losing lets Canada correct without going into as dark a hole. Please vote!! (Unless you plan to vote for Trump. Trump voters should stay home)

It’s probably best to just stay away from polls right now. They will make you feel crazy. If you’re into writing postcards, phone banking or canvassing now’s a good time to get offline and do that. If you have to refresh 538 several times a day, just do it knowing that those is all not much more than educated guesswork. And have a drink. It’s going to be a long month.

Representative Mike Collins posted this “perfected” image of JD Vance on his Twitter feed yesterday:

Uhm, no:

Is this Collins’s fantasy? Vance isn’t hot enough for him as he is? What?

And they wonder why people think they’re weird.

I thought this was a BS way to frame the abortion issue last night and because of the rule that the moderators could not fact check Vance’s lies (or even their own questions!) Walz had to just repeat over and over again that it wasn’t true. As TNR reports:

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was asked to respond to Donald Trump’s outlandish abortion talking point during the vice presidential debate Tuesday.

“Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe that abortion ‘in the ninth month is absolutely fine.’ Yes or no, is that what you support?” asked CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell.

“That’s not what the bill says, but look, this issue is what’s on everyone’s mind,” Walz replied, explaining that Trump had made way to destroy national protections for abortion.

During the presidential debate last month, Trump had claimed that Walz supported abortion in the ninth month—and after. Trump claimed that Walz “also says, ‘Execution after birth’—execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born—is OK. And that’s not OK with me.”

This is utter nonsense, nobody believes this, and the CBS moderators shouldn’t have used this as the basis for a question about abortion rights.

The moderators repeatedly asked questions of Walz that were shaped around right-wing talking points. When asking the two candidates to explain their leadership qualities, Walz was asked specifically to respond to reporting Tuesday that suggested he’d lied about being in Tiananmen Square in May 1989—a startlingly specific question, which clearly knocked Walz off his game. Walz took the opportunity to introduce himself to the viewers, and when pushed on the question, said that he “misspoke.”

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance was not asked about admitting to blatantly lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

In fact, Vance wasn’t asked to account for a whole lot of things, in particular extreme views on the status of unmarried and childless people (aka childless cat ladies), his support for the Great Replacement Theory, his close ties to the Project 2025 people, his positive forward to the right wing provocateur Jack Posobiec’s book called “Unhuman” (referring to liberals) or his close association with very wealthy silicon valley weirdos among other things.

But we were able to get to the bottom of Tim Walz’s confusing the dates during a couple of months he spent in China during the Tienanmen uprising almost 40 years ago. Thank God for that.

Give this a moment of your time. It’s odd how often people end up idolizing something satirical. Though it makes sense that folks not smart enough to get the satire are immune to it. They take it literally, and ultimately can’t see that they’re being made fun of. https://t.co/wSco1gDvpz

— Mueller, She Wrote (@MuellerSheWrote) October 1, 2024

I just wanted to check in to give people an update from Tom Sullivan. He’s doing fine. He’s staying at a friend’s house and power came on last night. His own house is still out. They still have no water and are having to bring it in from a creek nearby for flushing and bathing. WiFi is sporadic.

However, there does seem to be a lot of services flowing and local businesses are coming to the rescue with free water and supplies to keep things going. Some grocery stores are open and Jose Andres is in town, so the townsfolk even have some good eats. The airport is letting in some flights but it’s erratic. Lots of helicopters, fire trucks and other rescue vehicles have been going night and day. Lots of people are still missing.

I haven’t had the heart to even ask him about the prospects for the election in his area. I’m not all that hopeful, I’m sorry to say. Asheville is one of the blue cities the Democrats were depending on… But we’ll see. You can be sure if there’s a way to get people out to vote, Tom will be there working to see that it gets done.

Writing about a debate on the morning after always feels more like theater criticism than political analysis. How did they look, how did they sound, did they come off as authentic and real or were they phony and glib? Were they believable to the faceless Real Americans watching who were being asked to decide which of them to vote for? But that’s what these televised debates really are.

The substance is usually secondary because they’ve practiced their lines and have a specific message they want to impart regardless of the topic they’re being asked to address. They’re political rituals which we use to decide if the person appears to be someone we want to watch perform the role of whatever office they are seeking.

The worst debate ritual we’ve all ever witnessed happened last June when President Joe Biden was seen to be doddering and incompetent. It wasn’t that most Democrats disagreed with his policies to the extent that he articulated them or were unhappy with his record, quite the opposite. It was his performance and it resulted in him having to withdraw from the race. One of the best debates of the last few decades was the one after that, when Vice President Kamala Harris wiped the floor with Donald Trump whose performance revealed him as unprepared and incompetent while she was effective and commanding. Trump has retreated into a negative feedback loop ever since.

The interesting thing about both of those debates, as consequential as they were, is that neither of them seem to have moved the polls very much. Biden was behind by about 2-3 points in the polling averages after the debate and today Harris has a 2 point lead in the same averages today, all within the margin of error. It’s mind boggling to me how this race could be so close but if those polls are correct (a dicey assumption) the country is closely divided and nothing seems to change that.

We are cursed with having to re-run the last election because Donald Trump has convinced most Republicans that he has a right to be president because the last election was stolen from him. What he says or does is irrelevant to that question as far as they are concerned. They want a restoration. The rest of us are voting against that. It’s really not more complicated than that.

There are issues at stake, of course. Republicans are obsessed with foreigners being put in their place, whether it’s here at home or overseas (although they do seem to have a soft spot for American adversaries.) They don’t believe everyone should have access to affordable healthcare, that climate change is real, guns should be regulated or that women have a fundamental right to control their own bodies. But they do believe the rule of law only applies to other people. Democrats believe the opposite. In the age of Trump these issues have become proxies for which team you’re on and for the most part those teams can easily be defined as Trump vs Not-Trump.

In light of that it’s very hard to see how a Vice Presidential debate could possibly change any of that and last night’s event between JD Vance and Tim Walz almost assuredly will not. The two men obviously came into the debate with some very specific performance strategies and they both did what they needed to do.

Vance obviously decided that his goal was to shed the intellectual extremist “cat-ladies” persona and portray himself as the smart conservative who wrote “Hillbilly Elegy.” He is very adept at changing roles, having even changed his name several times so this came very natural to him. Walz clearly wanted to highlight his record and show his wonky side with a lot of details about issues. He came across as less polished than Vance but effectively made his points on the issues the campaign wanted him to raise even if his performance wasn’t as slick.

Mostly they were agreeable and collegial, just a couple of Midwestern guys having a friendly disagreement after which, under other circumstances, they would go out and have a beer together. That performance was a bit over the top, in my opinion, certainly Vance’s who has all the charm and warmth of a King Cobra. Walz is a genuinely nice guy but he could have been a little less accommodating to Vance’s shape-shifting.

I suspect that Vance may go viral with some of his answers though. His lies were overwhelming and the fact checks are brutal. Walz got dinged for saying that he was in Hong Kong during the Tienanmen Massacre in 1989 when he was really only there for the demonstrations (and he called himself a knucklehead for saying it). But Vance denied that he had supported a national abortion ban when there is written proof that he did. He whined about the moderators “fact-checking” him — a real beta boy move. He mansplained the female moderators, which is something he just can’t help doing even when he’s really trying not to be a flagrant misogynist. And with Olympian level chutzpah he said that Donald Trump saved Obamacare. That’s just for starters.

And there there was the big one: he refused to answer whether the 2020 election was stolen and it became Tim Walz’s finest moment and the most memorable moment of the debate:

For everyone tonight, and I’m gonna thank Senator Vance, I think this is the conversation they wanted to hear and I think there’s a lot of agreement. This is one that we’re miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say—he is still saying he didn’t lose the election. I will just ask, did he lose the 2020 election?”

Vance responded with his clumsiest evasion of the night with a weird pivot to federal censorship, an issue that has urgency only among the most online right wingers.

Walz: Trump is still saying he didn't lose the election. Did he lose the 2020 election?

Vance: Did Kamala Harris censor Americans?

Walz: That is a damning nonanswer. pic.twitter.com/f59Q8H1BA4

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 2, 2024

And then Walz delivered the coup de grace by bringing up the absence of Mike Pence:

On January 6, Mike Pence had the integrity to do his constitutional duty. That’s why he’s not on this stage tonight. pic.twitter.com/rjzql2tVaQ

— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) October 2, 2024

JD Vance has said in the past that he would have done what Mike Pence refused to do and even with his slick delivery he was unable to finesse that reality. We all know that if he had said anything otherwise, there is an orange man down in Florida who would have flipped his blond lid.

CBS ran a snap poll after the debate and this is what they found:

CBS Poll on Policy Issue Debate Winners

Walz wins on: Abortion and Healthcare
Vance wins on: Immigration
Tie: Conflict in Middle East and Economy pic.twitter.com/AIzcnaDm8A

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) October 2, 2024

Walz and Vance's favorability numbers *among debate watchers* just before and after tonight's VP debate…

They both improved, and for both, it's roughly equally among men and women

More details going up soon https://t.co/HCY2ZT64NY https://t.co/0UsHNyKYnv pic.twitter.com/2G4I6zLPQU

— Kabir K. (@kabir_here) October 2, 2024

It appears they both accomplished what they set out to do when it comes to issues and the debate watchers were happy to see a convivial debate. But while Vance may have been nicer than they expected they still liked Walz more. I suspect that may end up being more important than any single thing either of them said.

Salon

He won’t debate and now he won’t do the traditional 60 Minutes interview:

Former President Donald Trump has backed out of a previously scheduled interview with “60 Minutes,” the most-watched newsmagazine in the United States, CBS News said Tuesday evening.[…]

“For over half a century, 60 Minutes has invited the Democratic and Republican tickets to appear on our broadcast as Americans head to the polls,” the network said in a statement. “This year, both the Harris and Trump campaigns agreed to sit down with 60 Minutes.”

Trump had committed to the interview first, followed by Harris, through campaign spokespeople, CBS said. Veteran CBS anchor and correspondent Scott Pelley was lined up to interview Trump.

“After initially accepting 60 Minutes’ request for an interview with Scott Pelley, former President Trump’s campaign has decided not to participate,” CBS said.

Why? Here’s Trump’s spokesman:

I don’t understand this. If they didn’t do live fact checking they could cut away from the taped interview and fact check with relevant footage and production values like they do with their usual interviews. Would that have been better?

It’s not the “live” fact checking they object to. It’s the fact checking. Trump lies so much they knew it would be overwhelming either way.

I promised to Make America Great Again, this time with crypto. @WorldLibertyFi is planning to help make America the crypto capital of the world! The whitelist for eligible persons is officially open – this is your chance to be part of this historic moment. Join:…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2024

I suspect a lot of the cult members think they will be contributing to his campaign. But no. He’s running a scam while running for president. Never say he didn’t warn people:

Trump had inked a deal with Tony Robbins, the frighteningly upbeat motivational speaker, by which Robbins would pay Trump $1 million to give ten speeches at his seminars around the country. Crucially, Trump had timed his political stops to coincide with Robbins’ seminars, so that he was “making a lot of money” on those campaign stops. “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” Trump said. …

He wasn’t lying for once.

Tom Nichols has a typically tart piece in the Atlantic today about the state of the election. This part of it is one of the most depressing aspects of this whole thing. Harris will win the popular vote by millions of votes, you can bet money on that, but once again the electoral college could favor Trump. What kind of a democracy is this?

I think it’s important to ask why this election, despite everything we now know, could tip to Trump.

Perhaps the most surprising but disconcerting reality is that the election, as a national matter, isn’t really that close. If the United States took a poll and used that to select a president, Trump would lose by millions of votes—just as he would have lost in 2016. Federalism is a wonderful system of government but a lousy way of electing national leaders: The Electoral College system (which I long defended as a way to balance the interests of 50 very different states) is now lopsidedly tilted in favor of real estate over people.

Understandably, this means that pro-democracy efforts are focused on a relative handful of people in a handful of states, but nothing—absolutely nothing—is going to shake loose the faithful MAGA voters who have stayed with Trump for the past eight years. Trump’s mad gibbering at rallies hasn’t done it; the Trump-Harris debate didn’t do it; Trump’s endorsement of people like Robinson didn’t do it. Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. Close enough: He’s now rhapsodized about a night of cops brutalizing people on Fifth Avenue and everywhere else.

For years, I’ve advocated asking fellow citizens who support Trump whether he, and what he says, really represents who they are. After this weekend, there are no more questions to ask.

I think maybe we’re not asking the right question. We talk a lot about saving our democracy but it’s pretty clear that we don’t really have one at least in the sense of one person one vote and majority rules. We never have.

But there have been improvements from the beginning when only white landowning men could vote. So maybe we actually could take the next step and get rid of the anachronistic electoral college. Sadly, I suspect that won’t ever happen until the Republicans lose one in the electoral college whenthey’ve won the popular vote.

You can just imagine the howls. Actually we did. In 2004 when it looked as though that might happen to George W. Bush they had armies of pundits and talkers out there denouncing the illegitimacy of such an outcome. But it didn’t stick for obvious reasons.

This change is long overdue. Rocks and cows should not have more say over the running of this country than the people who live here. It’s undemocratic to its core.