Disconcerting States #8

Sunday, November 10, 2024.

By John Dean

Before the 2020 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump, I worked with a group of people that prepared a public program to be given soon after that election. That program was to be about: “Successful Women in US Politics”. Boy did we get that wrong.

So we scrambled hard at our late-November moment and finally gave a vaguely specific program entitled and kind-of, sort-of, to-some-extent focused on: “Twenty-twenty Vision. Major Issues in US Civilization”.

But the harder, realer issue was why did we get our expectations for the current election so wrong? Fast forward to 2024 and what’s changed? What’s happened?

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics,” as either Mark Twain, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, or English scholar & politician Leonard H. Courtney said. The hoary “lies, damned lies and statistics” has its own Wikipedia-go-search page. Its origin disappears in foggy dim regions of time past. As thus the art, craft and superstition of prophecy.

A common question everyone concerned with the current election now asks here — specially people in the mainstream to left stream — how did we get our idea of what was going to happen with this 2024 election so wrong?

Isn’t it funny-strange how stupid the polls were and can be? Isn’t it peculiar how they got it so wrong redux this time in the 2024 US presidential election between Harris and Trump? How they so often sometimes do? Why?

What I hear now Stateside is the polls were as biased as the media that preferred Kamala Harris — or were bent on developing a dramatic story.

Media makes news. It needs to create a coherent account — even if the reality is incoherent.

Hey, how about a hot narrative like a 2024 Insurrection! It’d be led by right wing, Easy Rider guys like that small motorcycle group I saw in DC yesterday flying three-meter square “Trump Forever!” flags off the fat rear end of their chrome bright and fire-engine loud Harley Davidsons.

They are opposition troops for whom there is now no need. And for which there was really not enough traction to begin with. The Man From Queens won by a landslide so many of us were blind to. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

Nary a week ago polls existed to “prove” — within a margin of three percent or a little bit more — that Harris or Trump would be elected. It’ll be a darn close call, folks

Well, not exactly.

As The Economist columnist Lexington wrote a few years ago: “In politics everything is a weapon with which to club the opposition. Why should facts be different?”

For the first time in about five decades of public US polling the average survey in every single US state under estimated Donald J. Trump. This is the third successive underestimate of Trump; 2016, ’20, and ’24. What’s happening? As one editorial said today: “Pollsters appear to be walking down the up escalator.”

The polls in some way shilled the public. They promoted the cause of a super-tight race, in an extravagant, misleading way. The election polls catered to, consciously or unconsciously, and tried to shape, audience expectations.

(Yet this was not how the bookies — the hardcore “turf accountant” in an organization that accepts and pays out bets on sporting and other events at agreed-upon odds — saw it. They generally got it right. Follow the money.)

One thing we see here is the law of minimal consequences in the society-mass media relation. The media is a report, yes. But it’s a reflection. You look in the mirror to put your make up on neatly or to shave correctly and you expect to see what’s there. You seek a desired reflection; and that’s what you get and that’s what it gives.

The US media polls delivered a promise of change that many people dreamed of. It was a happy product, even if it was unrealistic. And doesn’t a successful product in a capitalistic democracy have to please the consumer to sell well? Sam Walton of WallMart fame said: “There is only one boss. The customer.” The polls pleased.

Or to put this matter another way…

Donald J. Trump has a pal and political consultant called Kellyanne Conway, still part of the new-old president’s inner circle. At one point back in January 2017 she said to a CNN reporter live on TV — while the two argued about her information concerning the Trump inauguration turnout versus his information — that CNN offered ”alternative facts”. They gave theirs, she gave hers.

Shocked, the CNN corresponded went ballistic. He responded: “Alternative facts aren’t facts! They’re falsehoods!”

“Alternative facts“, Kellyanne unpolitely insisted.

What were the polls this time? What did they get right and wrong and why? Didn’t many of them supply a Liberal, happy-ending story. They developed a dramatic-story-even-if-it’s-not-true version of reality?

Rumor has it that the great old original fountain of predictions the Delphic Oracle not only said “Know thyself” to everyone who asked its guidance — but “Think for yourself”.

On reflection, hard to do in our anxious, walled-in, media environment world.