Election polling and the hobgoblin of little minds

Partisan lies threaten the Union

One of the problems with the platform formerly known as Twitter is that its algorithm serves up stuff that I don’t want to see. The app often switches away from content that I’m “following” and toward content that the platform recommends “for you.” To some extent, I don’t mind because I’m a big boy and don’t have problems with high blood pressure. I can tolerate disagreeing viewpoints and sometimes it even gives me fodder for columns.

That was the case recently when I stumbled upon a post by Scott Adams, the disgraced “Dilbert” cartoonist. I used to follow Adams because I like “Dilbert.” I watched him become progressively more right-wing and conspiracy-minded (pun intended). In 2023, most newspapers dropped “Dilbert” and Adams lost a book deal after a racist tirade in his online show in which he said, “The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people, just get the f**k away… because there is no fixing this.”

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

At some point, I unfollowed Adams, but the platform still recommends some of his posts “for you.” A few days ago, I stumbled across an online poll that he had posted when the platform formerly known as Twitter plopped it into my feed.

Assuming that you want a real result, one of the first rules of polling is to ask the question in a neutral manner rather than as a leading question. Another top rule is to find a truly random sample that reflects the electorate. Of course, an internet poll posted by a right-wing conspiracy nut is going to violate both of these because the poster usually wants an echo chamber rather than real data, but the question itself is what really drew my interest.

In his post, Adams wrote, “I plan to be a 2024 election denier if Dementia McDemonface miraculously beats Trump. Unless something big changes. Are you thinking the same?”

You won’t be surprised to learn that 95 percent of the 12,320 votes agreed so I won’t spend much time on that. I’m also not going to spend much time on the childish name-calling and dehumanization of President Biden. The problem that I have is with Adams’s presuppositions.

First, polls are not predictive. They are a snapshot rather than a prognostication. That’s especially true when the election is still six months away. There is a lot of time for the polling to change.

Second, the polling isn’t as good for Trump as Adams seems to think. It’s true that Trump does lead Biden in most polls of the battleground states, but it’s also true that many of those polls are near or within the margin of error. It’s a race that could shift suddenly and I still expect it to do so as it dawns on progressive Democrats that even though Biden is not their perfect candidate, he’s vastly preferable to Trump and isn’t going away. That applies to those Palestinian supporters concerned about Biden’s support of Israel in the Gaza war as well.

Another truth bomb is that Donald Trump and MAGA candidates have a history of underperforming their polling. This is another aspect of polling error, but the voters just don’t like MAGA, especially in swing states. Even winnable races in red states have been lost because of the poor quality of MAGA candidates.

Polling is not a perfect science and there are many assumptions that go into developing the mix of prospective voters that pollsters believe will show up to vote. As I’ve pointed out in the past, trends are more important than raw polling numbers, and polling averages are better than individual polls. This doesn’t mean that the current polls are all wrong, but it does mean that widespread polling error is not an impossibility.

It’s ironic that Adams and many on the right tend to be very skeptical of polling except when the polls show Donald Trump in the lead. Most Republicans would pooh-pooh a poll showing Joe Biden in the lead (as they did in 2020) but polls showing Trump up by two points are so dependable that if Biden beats the odds then the fix must be in. There is nothing new about these foolish inconsistencies when it comes to partisan politics, but they become more incendiary when mixed into the current political stew.

This sort of talk is dangerous to our democracy and there has been more and more of it since 2020. Donald Trump’s and the Republican lies about massive fraud in the 2020 elections have been incredibly damaging already. We saw how those lies (unsupported by evidence that would stand up in court) incited a mob to attack Congress and the Capitol Police as well as more generally being destructive to faith in the electoral process.

Words have meaning, and a large part of the Republican Party has lost touch with reality because politicians and pundits that they trust are lying to them. Somehow, the party has come to the conclusion that a habitual liar is a truth-teller and must be believed despite all the evidence to the contrary.

All this ultimately leads to one conclusion: If Donald Trump loses, it isn’t because he was rejected by the voters (again), it will have been because of shenanigans, even if there is no evidence of shenanigans. Adams says this explicitly.

And if there are shenanigans but the courts won’t correct the problem, where does that leave the True Believers? The obvious answer is that it contributes to the MAGA feeling that a “national divorce” or another civil war is necessary and unavoidable (although a lot of the ones I hear talk about it don’t seem to want to avoid it).

A recent Marist poll found that 47 percent believe another civil war is likely. Republicans were slightly more likely to hold this belief at 53 percent, but Democrats and independents were close behind at 41 and 40 percent respectively.

I’ll say this again: You don’t make America great by destroying the Union or by killing your fellow Americans. That’s especially true if you are tearing America apart based on an ideology of lies.

But Trump’s army sees itself as a band of patriots rather than lackeys for a would-be authoritarian. As Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review back in 2021, “Every Timothy McVeigh thinks he is Paul Revere.”

From time to time, the veil is parted on the curtain of lies surrounding the new MAGA Republican Party. One example was when Speaker Mike Johnson tacitly admitted earlier this month that there is no evidence for Republican claims that illegal immigrants are voting in national elections.

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that — it will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states,” Johnson said.

In other words, Johnson wants to pass a law that will prevent something from happening for which there is no evidence of a problem except his intuition. It’s an attempt to legislate an answer to a crisis that does not exist.

Another recent example relates to the claims that the FBI was trying to kill Donald Trump when they raided Mar-a-Lago in 2022. The outlandish claim was based on documents that noted that deadly force was authorized in the raid. As it turns out, deadly force is always authorized in FBI search warrants. I’ve been critical of Erick Erickson on numerous occasions so I want to give him credit for retweeting the revelation that the search warrants of the Biden properties also included the same deadly force authorization to his followers.

That didn’t stop Trump from claiming, “I nearly escaped death” in a fundraising email despite the fact that he was not even present for the raid. Aside from the fact that Trump apparently did escape death rather than nearly doing so, the claim is cynical, inflammatory, and extremely dangerous. It falsely makes his supporters believe that the Biden Adminstration is trying to kill him when it is not (and even if it was, presidents have “total immunity” according to Trump.)

As Ronald Reagan said, it “is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.”

And in this case, what they know that isn’t so can start a war and get a lot of people killed.

Donald Trump and his underlings and the hangers-on in the Republican media don’t seem to care about this. In fact, considering the escalated level of the rhetoric coming from Trump and his supporters, I have to wonder if they actually want to start a war. The only alternatives I can see are that they are so idiotically out of touch that they are not aware of the effect that their words are having or else it’s a giant game of geopolitical chicken in which they are willing to risk a civil war for the YUGE payoff of control of the country. Maybe it’s the Sidney Powell defense that “no reasonable person” should believe such outlandish claims. In any case, their actions do not demonstrate love for America. Just the opposite.

It’s all about regaining power and getting the Democrats out. It’s a case of the end justifying the means in their minds, even if the means end up needlessly destroying the country. It’s a modern political equivalent of the Vietnam War trope about destroying the village in order to save it.

I’m one of the people who thinks that it is becoming more and more likely that America will be embroiled in a new civil war and I place most of the blame on MAGA and its culture of lies, but honestly, the Republican revolutionary fervor predates Donald Trump. With Republicans doubling down on MAGA over and over again and being rejected over and over again as they ratchet up tensions and anger, I’m not sure how we can avoid it. There have been off-ramps, but we’ve careened right past them in large part because Republican officeholders can’t bring themselves to hold Trump accountable or admit that he is more dangerous than the Democrats.

If Biden wins, I expect violence from MAGA. I also won’t rule out violence from the left if Trump wins, but the left does not have the same violent, revolutionary culture that I see on the right. Sure, the left has protesters and occupiers (many of whom are anarchists rather than leftists), but it has few if any armed militia groups ready to challenge federal authority. That sort of culture has been growing on the right for decades.

I think this culture has a lot to do with why MAGA was so angry at the Capitol Police after January 6. MAGA expected the police and the military to rise up and join them rather than fight them and stop them (although some were sympathizers of the insurrection). Like communist revolutionaries, MAGA viewed the failure to change sides and fight with “the people” as a betrayal.

I sincerely hope that I am wrong, but I fear that war is coming. And not a war on foreign shores, but a war the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1860s when Americans fought Americans.

These days, the population isn’t as neatly divided as it was in 1861. Even reliable red and blue states have large opposition blocs. This is why a national divorce can’t work. Seceding red states would still have blue cities. Do those blue cities then secede from the state? Would they be allowed to go? Or would state authorities expect anti-secession citizens to self-deport to a blue state?

And war here might well lead to wars elsewhere. Without America’s arsenal of democracy, other authoritarian and imperialist regimes from Russia to China and on down the line would probably think that the time was ripe to act on their territorial ambitions. An end to the Pax Americana might well usher in a new dark age of war and despotism.

The only way that I can see for us to change course is for Republicans to man up and start telling their voters the truth. The 2020 election was not stolen. Donald Trump is lawless, incompetent, and unpopular outside the GOP. Trump is not the victim of “lawfare,” he just has a disregard for the law and is being held accountable for his actions. Democrats are not inherently evil people who are bent on destroying America. Not every Republican is filled with sweetness and light. Republicans have to say these things because the base won’t listen to anyone else.

And to my Republican friends who are flirting with the idea of a “national divorce” or war of secession, let me warn you, despite your belief that Joe Biden is weak, he has shown great resolve in Ukraine and Israel. He will not allow the Union to be broken on his watch. A “national divorce” means war. To think otherwise would repeat the mistake of the Confederate secessionists.

And war means the destruction of the Republican Party and the MAGA movement. Learn from January 6 and past elections. Most military and law enforcement will be loyal to the Constitution rather than Donald Trump or the Republican Party. And if you can’t persuade people to vote for you, why should you expect them to fight, kill, and die for you?

CLOSING ARGUMENTS IN TRUMP TRIAL: Trump’s New York trial is ending. I am not optimistic for a conviction in this case, not because Trump was falsely accused, but because the legal bar was so high as Steve Berman recently explained.

NETANYAHU ACKNOWLEDGES ERROR: The Israeli prime minister acknowledged a “tragic error” in an Israeli strike in Rafah that killed 45 civilians. With opposition to the war in Gaza growing abroad and opposition to Netanyahu festering at home, it is questionable how much longer Israel will be able to sustain the war effort. This is especially true since Hamas’s resurgence in parts of Gaza that were previously cleared call Israel’s entire strategy into question.

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