The signs are there (if you see them)

Iowa for Harris? Trump fellating a microphone? Strange signs indeed.

I’m writing this in the quiet of Sunday morning, and finished it after church. I was going to share it on Monday morning but decided to let it fly earlier—so you’re getting this on Sunday while it’s fresh.

Tuesday is Election Day. I just saw the “shocking” Selzer poll out of Iowa: Harris ahead 47-44 points among likely voters. In Iowa. How can this be? First of all, Ann Selzer is a well-respected pollster. Nate Silver wrote that her releasing this poll “took an incredible amount of guts” not because the results are shocking, but because it’s almost guaranteed to be wrong. But the poll’s existence is a warning sign, one of many, that things might not be as they appear.

Remember, in 2016, at this point in the race, many pollsters and the media, as a herd, believed that Hillary Clinton was a shoe-in for victory. Hillary believed this, and suffered the shock of losing, in a state like Wisconsin, which had warned her—begged the campaign—for support. Overconfidence in polls and momentum is a dangerous path to walk. The race is close, and really impossible to call in any meaningful way. Yet we have a poll from a state that was thought to be a guaranteed Trump win, just two days before Election Day, with a clear danger sign.

When I contributed my prediction of the Electoral College results, which is basically just a shot-in-the-dark for anyone, my reason for going for a Harris big win was not that I feel like the polls indicate that kind of victory. It was that I believe people in the Trump bubble (Fox News, et al) are way underestimating the uncertainty in the polling, and overestimating the value of “momentum.” Elections have a natural swing to them, and polls move as if they are some living thing. But in the end, people cast their ballots based on what they believe, regardless of what they tell pollsters (and many likely voters avoid telling pollsters anything).

My EC electoral contribution

The job of a pollster is to approximate “correct” as much as possible, by identifying and correcting for polling errors, sample errors, and all kinds of other biases. Nate Silver correctly called out most of the 2024 pollsters as “cheating” because they are engaging in “herding” behavior to normalize the crap out of their results, so it fits the national narrative. Outlier polls are not generally considered to be signs, but anomolies. So the data they release smoothly fits the “Trump has a 54 percent chance of winning” scenario.

But that’s not really the case, is it?

It’s a reasonable assumption, within certain parameters, but it’s only true enough not to be horribly wrong—unless all the pollsters are wrong. Most pollsters are fine with being wrong (that’s the reason for margins of error), but they’re not fine if they’re the only ones wrong. Going out on a limb is the mark of a pollster who is confident in their methods and data. Ann Selzer is one of those.

The truth is, there’s plenty of room for massive error, and there’s signs that Republicans might be too sanguine about the narrative. And that narrative might be overthrown by women.

Women, who have been the focus of so much of this campaign, by Harris, and the focus of so many stupid, evil remarks, by Trump, are going to make a big difference in this race. And Black men, who have, in early voting, have underperformed in numbers, are going to make up the rest of the difference. It’s still very possible that Trump will break the Democrats’ “blue wall” in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. But now we see it’s also very possible that Harris will win Iowa, where Trump was ahead double digits just a month or two ago.

Nate Silver’s model showed a 60 percent chance one candidate will sweep all the battleground states, and of that, about 66 percent that if it happened, that candidate will be Trump. That’s a 39.6 percent chance of Trump sweeping the battlegrounds. and a 19.8 percent chance of Harris doing it. But that was like a week ago, which may as well be “a long time ago” in election terms. There may still be a 60 percent chance of a sweep—or more—because of the “herding” in polls. Now, however, with the Iowa poll, which admittedly will be wrong, Ann Selzer had the courage to put the warning sign out there without the requisite massaging.

This, plus some other warning signs. I had not realized that Trump’s rhetoric and manner had been changing over time, with even more pronounced changes recently. That’s because the mainstream media always portrays him as “unhinged.” Then I read Gary Marcus’s latest post: “8 signs that Donald Trump has a progressive form of dementia.” Marcus, for the last several decades, has written on AI—that’s his primary field. But he’s also a trained professor, with a Ph.D. in human psychology, who is now an “emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at NYU.”

Marcus has cited eight separate events (and there’s more) that Trump’s latest behavior, including stuff I hadn’t seen, like Trump simulating fellatio on a microphone, that indicates something is (more) seriously wrong (than usual). Of course, politically, this might not make much of a difference. Millions of people don’t read Gary Marcus, like I do. And the mainstream media has been calling Trump mentally ill, while also calling him an evil genius, when they’re not calling him Adolf Hitler, for nearly ten years.

But people who do see Trump act really off the wall, might not be so inclined to vote for him, or go to the polls, at the last minute. And as much as Kamala Harris is not the most charismatic or likable candidate, her main campaign point is she’s not Donald Trump. Not being Donald Trump, and not being Joe Biden, is what got Harris to this point. Not being offensive to women might make just enough difference to change the race. Small changes in such a tight election can have big effects.

If on Tuesday, turnout is very high, with Republicans generally overperforming in early voting, we might see another sign. This could be a sign that a larger than normal number of voters who had not yet decided whether to vote for Harris, or to vote at all, have decided to vote after all. With days to go, Trump is playing his base. A surge on Election Day is much more likely to be for Harris than for Trump.

When the results come in, if Iowa goes for Harris, we will know the signs were there. If the Blue Wall holds, and Georgia and North Carolina break for Harris, we will know the signs were there.

All the lawsuits and claims of voter fraud, or bad voting systems, “2000 Mules” scenarios, won’t make a dent in the fact that the will of the people was writ large at the ballot box. I’m not saying it will happen that way—it’s just as likely that turnout on Election Day won’t break the 2020 record. It’s just as likely that the Blue Wall will fall, Iowa will stay red, and Trump will win.

But Hillary Clinton ignored the signs and lost. That should be sobering for anyone in the Trump bubble, and quite ironic for the rest of America.

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