Tag Archives: polls

A Rising Resistance

It isn’t just the courts–including, at least provisionally, the Supreme Court, which refused to lift a restraining order on a Trump firing. Other elements of the resistance are also emerging.

Critics of Trump’s claim to a “mandate” point out that more people voted for someone else than voted for Trump. Now, declining polls offer further evidence that his coup is massively unpopular. He took office with the lowest approval ratings of any President since polling began, and he has continued to decline.

As Heather Cox Richardson, among others, recently reported:

Only 45% approve of the “the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president,” while 53% disapprove. Forty-three percent of Americans say they support what Trump has done since he took office; 48% oppose his actions. The number of people who strongly support his actions sits at 27%; the number who strongly oppose them is twelve points higher, at 39%. Fifty-seven percent of Americans think Trump has gone beyond his authority as president.

Opinions on his “signature” actions are even more negative.

Americans especially dislike his attempts to end USAID, his tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and his firing of large numbers of government workers. Even Trump’s signature issue of deporting undocumented immigrants receives 51% approval only if respondents think those deported are “criminals.” Fifty-seven percent opposed deporting those who are not accused of crimes, 70% oppose deporting those brought to the U.S. as children, and 66% oppose deporting those who have children who are U.S. citizens. Eighty-three percent of Americans oppose Trump’s pardon of the violent offenders convicted for their behavior during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent.

Opinions are one thing; actions are another. The media continues to report that phone calls are swamping congressional switchboards, while citizens are descending in mass on town halls, demanding that their representatives take a stand against Musk’s unconstitutional slashing of the federal government and illegal access to Americans’ personal data. In one Oregon district that Trump won by 68%, constituents shouted at their Representative, calling on Congress to “tax Elon,” “tax the wealthy,” and “tax the billionaires.” Similar protests have been reported in other deep-Red districts.

Perhaps the most positive signs have come from elected officials. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker was eloquent in his State of the State address, reminding listeners that America doesn’t have kings, and itemizing the idiocies:

“it’s in fashion at the federal level right now to just indiscriminately slash school funding, healthcare coverage, support for farmers, and veterans’ services. They say they’re doing it to eliminate inefficiencies. But only an idiot would think we should eliminate emergency response in a natural disaster, education and healthcare for disabled children, gang crime investigations, clean air and water programs, monitoring of nursing home abuse, nuclear reactor regulation, and cancer research.”

Pritzker also reminded listeners that it had taken the Nazis “one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”

And Maine’s Governor faced off with Trump personally, in a meeting between our would-be monarch and the nation’s governors. As Richardson reported,

Today, Maine governor Janet Mills took the fight against Trump’s overreach directly to him. At a meeting of the nation’s governors, in a rambling speech in which he was wandering through his false campaign stories about transgender athletes, Trump turned to his notes and suddenly appeared to remember his executive order banning transgender student athletes from playing on girls sports teams.

The body that governs sports in Maine, the Maine Principals’ Association, ruled that it would continue to allow transgender students to compete despite Trump’s executive order because the Maine state Human Rights Law prohibits discrimination on the grounds of gender identity.

Trump asked the governor of Maine whether she would comply with his order.  “I’m complying with state and federal laws,” she said. Trump then threatened to punish Maine by withholding “all funding” from the state; the Governor responded “We’ll see you in court.”

The aftermath of Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center has been especially gratifying. Multiple artists have resigned from the staff and/or cancelled scheduled programs. The president’s takeover of the Kennedy Center is a pathetic effort to seize control of a respected cultural institution whose honorees have shunned him in the past. Real artists are having none of it.

The resistance is growing.

Don’t forget to stop all economic activity from midnight tonight through midnight tomorrow.

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Who Drinks The Kool-Aid?

There’s a thread running through my political conversations. (Granted, those conversations are with friends and family, all of whom detest MAGA and Trump.)  Why do all the indicators point to a close election? Why isn’t Harris easily eclipsing Trump?

Think about it. Even voters who don’t particularly like Harris surely understand that she is a normal politician, infinitely preferable to a senile narcissist with a third-grade vocabulary and a raft of “policies” that would plunge America into a recession (or worse) and threaten world peace.

Hundreds of members of former Republican administrations–including his own–warn that he is a fascist, a dangerous lunatic, a self-regarding autocrat who should not be allowed anywhere near power, let alone the Oval Office.

Trump is a convicted felon, an admitted sexual predator, a congenital liar, a six-times bankrupt “titan of industry”…I could go on, but readers of this blog are well aware of the extent of his depravity.

How, then, is he at all competitive for the Presidency?

It certainly isn’t due to his “policies.” To the extent that he even has them, those policies are anything but the conservative political positions traditionally held by the bygone GOP. The striking departures from those traditional positions means it also can’t be loyalty to the ideology that once characterized the GOP.

As Heather Cox Richardson recently reminded us, Trump has boasted that he had “taken the Republican Party and made [it] into an entirely different party…The Republican Party is a very big, powerful party. Before, it was an elitist party with real stiffs running it.” As Richardson put it, the GOP

had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn’t like civil rights.

Once in office, Trump put that racist and sexist base in the driver’s seat. He attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people of color, and promised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence.

In the following years, Trump’s hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024 he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him.

As Richardson explained, establishment Republicans had wanted a largely unregulated market-driven economy. MAGA Republicans, however,

want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies—another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ+ rights, for example.

Support for MAGA and Trump isn’t motivated by admiration for his character, intellect or personality. It isn’t motivated by his economic plans, which even conservative economists warn would severely damage the economy, or by loyalty to the GOP, which he has remade into a cult dominated by what used to be its disreputable fringe.

So–What explains his support?

I recently had a discussion with a local philanthropist who served in a state Republican administration, and I agree with his analysis. He ticked off three reasons he believes people support Trump.

  • Some subset of wealthy individuals care more about promised tax cuts for the rich than for the health and wellbeing of the country.
  • Some people are truly ignorant. Perhaps they get all their “news” from Fox and its clones, or they lack the intellectual capacity to understand what is at stake, or to evaluate competing political claims.
  • True MAGA movement folks–by far the largest group of Trump supporters, the ones who’ve “drunk the Kool-Aid”– are disproportionately people who are unhappy with their lives. They haven’t achieved the status or security or love or whatever else they believe they were entitled to, and they’re convinced it couldn’t be their fault; it must be the fault of “those people.” Trump gives them permission to point fingers and give voice to their bigotries: it’s those immigrants, those gay people, those uppity women and/or Blacks.

If the polls are right that the election is close, there are a lot more people in those three categories than I ever imagined…

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Polls, Political Realities, And The New York Times

During a recent lunch with my sister and a good friend, the topic (unsurprisingly) turned to politics. The three of us are, as the kids used to say, “in sync,” so it was more a session of “who in the world looks at Donald Trump and sees someone presidential?” But at the end, my sister voiced what has become a common complaint-cum-question: what is going on at the  New York Times? 

We’ve all noticed it; the Times seems intent upon highlighting anything that could be considered negative about the Biden campaign, while essentially ignoring Trump’s increasing dementia. When I say we’ve all noticed it, I have evidence; the day after our lunch, both Robert Hubbell’s newsletter and Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo addressed the Time’s obvious bias.

Hubbell’s analysis was well worth reading.

He began by addressing the Times-sponsored poll that showed Biden currently trailing Trump. “The Times covered its own poll as front-page news for three days, ignoring three other polls from reputable organizations that showed Biden leading (slightly in one poll) or tied (in two polls).”

If the Times mentioned the three recent polls that contradicted the breathless coverage of its poll, I can’t find that story. What I can find is another front-page story about Joe Biden’s age. (NYTimes: Amid Age Concerns, the White House Tries a New Strategy: Let Joe Be Joe.) At the New York Times, “No news is good news”—because if there is good news about Biden, it’s not news at the Times.

Hubbell then reported on Trump’s most recent word-salad.

The gratuitous dig at Biden’s age was published on Super Tuesday—and after a weekend during which Trump melted into incoherence while he promoted anti-immigrant hate and election denialism, called the country of Argentina “a great guy,” was defeated in his attempt to pronounce “Venezuela,”  confused former President Obama and current President Biden, and asked the crowd to look at the back of his head because “I am like an artist.” (See Newsweek, Donald Trump’s String of Gaffes Over Weekend Raises Eyebrows.)

Calling those statements “gaffes” should be considered a campaign contribution. 

As Hubbell reported, the Times’ bias has become so noticeable, it is prompting coverage by other media outlets. He also shared an observation by another Substack author to the effect that polls are manufactured news events and  shouldn’t be considered “news events” at all–that Journalists “should not be in the business of creating news, especially in ways that they have the power to control.”

Hubbell quotes a commentary from Salon, There is something wrong at the New York Times | Salon.com

Two things…check that…three things appear to have gone off the rails at the paper we used to call the Gray Lady.  First, whoever is in charge of the paper’s polls is not doing their job.  Second, whoever is choosing what to emphasize in the Times coverage of the campaign for the presidency is showing bias.  Third, the Times is obsessed with Joe Biden’s age at the same time they’re leaving evidence of Donald Trump’s mental and verbal stumbles completely out of the news.

Hubbell noted that he’d watched Trump’s Super Tuesday victory speech, and that (in addition to appearing sedated) he was rambling, confused, and detached from reality.

Trump repeated an internet rumor that Biden “flew in 325,000 immigrants” into our country (a grotesque misrepresentation of how the CPB processes asylum applicants fleeing their home country). He descended into incomprehensible comments about Venezuelan oil being “tar” that is refined in the US and “goes up into the air” (complete with whirly-gig hand gestures). He repeated a dozen easily disprovable lies. Even though Melania was noticeably absent, he thanked his ”family” for being present.

Finally, Hubbell turned his attention to the polling, and shared numbers showing that Trump has continued to significantly under-perform FiveThirtyEight.com’s averages. In Virginia, he underperformed by 20 points, in Tennessee, by 10, Massachusetts by 14.

Many states did not have enough polls to qualify for a FiveThirtyEight average, but in Vermont, the most recent poll had Trump winning by 30%. In fact, Haley won by 4%, an underperformance by Trump of -34.

Trump over-performed in one state—North Carolina—by +5.

Like my sister, and many of you, I have been frustrated–and worried–by the mainstream media’s coverage of the polling and the candidates.

In the wake of Super Tuesday, Americans are facing an almost-certain choice between two candidates, both of whom are older than the candidates we’re used to. One of those candidates is a good, decent man who has drawn on his experience and wisdom to power a transformational–and very much under-rated–Presidency. The other is a morally-repulsive, intellectually-vacant ignoramus rapidly descending into dementia.

That’s the choice. The New York Times isn’t covering it. 

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A History Of Prognosticating

Given the overwhelmingly negative press about Biden’s approval ratings, I was impressed (and persuaded) by a recent essay in the American Prospect titled You Are Entering The Infernal Triangle: Authoritarian Republicans, ineffectual Democrats, and a clueless media,”

The essay began by considering how often pollsters blow their most confident—and consequential—calls.

Ronald Reagan’s landslide was preceded by a near-universal consensus that the election was tied. The pollster who called it correctly, Lou Harris, was the only one who thought to factor into his models a variable that hadn’t been accounted for in previous elections, because it did not yet really exist: the Christian right.

Polling is systematically biased in just that way: toward variables that were evident in the last election, which may or may not be salient for this election.

Former punditry was worse.

I have probably read thousands of newspaper opinion column prognostications going back to the 1950s. Their track record is too embarrassing for me to take the exercise seriously, let alone practice it myself. Like bad polls, pundits’ predictions are most useful when they are wrong. They provide an invaluable record of the unspoken collective assumptions of America’s journalistic elite, one of the most hierarchical, conformist groups of people you’ll ever run across. Unfortunately, they help shape our world nearly as much, and sometimes more, than the politicians they comment about. So their collective mistakes land hard.

Examples? In 1964: When Lyndon Johnson, defeated Barry Goldwater, one of the most distinguished liberal newspaper editors in the South pronounced that all future American elections would be decided “on issues other than civil rights” and affirmed what was then conventional wisdom– in the future, whichever party took the Black vote would be “no more predictable than who would win “freckle-faced redheads and one-armed shortstops.”

In 1976, when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, pundits overwhelmingly proclaimed that the GOP was “in a weaker position than any major party of the U.S. since the Civil War.” That was right before 1978, when “New Right Republicans and conservative Democrats upset many of the longest-serving and beloved liberals in Washington.”

There were several other examples, culminating with the following;

And in 2012, when Michael Lind wrote of Barack Obama’s re-election victory, “No doubt some Reaganite conservatives will continue to fight the old battles, like the Japanese soldiers who hid on Pacific islands for decades, fighting a war that had long before been lost … Any competitive Republican Party in the future will be to the left of today’s Republican Party, on both social and economic issues.”

The author uses these examples to point out that the “conceptual tools, metaphors, habits, and technologies that we understand as political journalism” are thoroughly inadequate to understanding what politics now is.

According to polls (which, yes, have their uses, in moderation), something around half of likely voters would like to see as our next president a man who thinks of the law as an extension of his superior will, who talks about race like a Nazi, wants to put journalistic organizations whose coverage he doesn’t like in the dock for “treason,” and who promises that anyone violating standards of good order as he defines them—shoplifters, for instance—will be summarily shot dead by officers of the state who serve only at his pleasure. A fascist, in other words. We find ourselves on the brink of an astonishing watershed, in this 2024 presidential year: a live possibility that government of the people, by the people, and for the people could conceivably perish from these United States, and ordinary people—you, me—may have to make the kind of moral choices about resistance that mid-20th-century existentialist philosophers once wrote about. That’s the case if Trump wins. But it’s just as likely, or even more likely, if he loses, then claims he wins. That’s one prediction I feel comfortable with.

Journalistically, this crisis could not strike more deeply. The tools we have for making sense of how politicians seek to accumulate power focus on the whys and wherefores of attracting votes. But the Republican Party and its associated institutions of movement conservatism, at least since George and Jeb Bush stole the 2000 election in Florida, has been ratcheting remorselessly toward an understanding of the accumulation of political power, to which they believe themselves ineluctably entitled as the only truly legitimate Americans, as a question of will—up to and including the projection of will by the force of arms.

Ain’t no poll predicting who soccer moms will vote for in November that can make much headway in understanding that.

The article proceeded to consider the way mainstream American political journalism has built in a structural bias toward Republicans. I will share some of those insights tomorrow, but you really should click through and read the entire essay.

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There Are Polls…And The Polls

I get just as worried as anyone else over those polls that our media outlets obsess over–the ones that find more Americans voting for Mr. Mental Case than for President Biden. But I know I shouldn’t.

Over the past several years, in election cycle after election cycle, even opinion polls produced by highly credible sources have proved to be wrong, and not by just a little. There are a lot of reasons for the misses–ever since cell phones replaced land lines, efforts by those conducting the surveys to compensate, to adjust in order to ensure they are surveying representative groups of voters, have proven inadequate.

A recent post to Daily Kos reminded me why we should take all polls–with the exception of actual voting at the election polls–with a heaping measure of salt.

The post began by reminding readers of Congress’ abysmal polling–and the fact that, despite overwhelming disapproval, incumbent representatives get re-elected more than 90% of the time. (We used to refer to this as the “I hate Congress but love my own Congressperson” problem.)

It is difficult to square these high reelection rates with Americans’ overall low opinion of Congress. Gallup tracking polls of Americans’ opinions of Congress over the past twenty years reveal that rarely do more than 25 percent of Americans approve of Congress and frequently their approval is down in the 14-20 percent range. In one recent Gallup survey, as few as 9 percent of people approved of the way Congress was handling its job.

The post– written by someone who is himself a political pollster–went on to explain:

There is a lot of bad data out there, mostly because of the fact that it is almost impossible to collect it.  So when I tell you there is a lot of bad polling, almost all of it, it does not mean I think the polling is intentionally bad, or done with a purpose of propaganda.  It just means that Republicans are much, much easier to reach than Democrats.  I have spoken about this before.  It is one of the biggest reasons I saw the 2022 election going differently than most.

What the pollsters did not figure out, however, is that this is not a problem that can be fixed with weighting.  As I have said, a young person that talks on the phone, is more conservative than one that likes to text.  Generally, this cuts across all demographics.  Republicans are more likely to participate…

As Michael Podhorzer has demonstrated, pollsters influence outcomes by letting their own biases and intuitions tilt poll results by deciding who to include in the sample. A month before its late-October 2022 poll showing a four-point deficit, the Times/Siena showed Dems up by two points. In the October story, the Times/Siena showed Biden losing ground among independents and women. But as Podhorzer writes, “What the paper didn’t disclose was this: Independent voters hadn’t changed their minds; the New York Times changed its mind about which Independents would vote.”

Perhaps the most significant insight in this particular post is this: support doesn’t change. Turnout does. Political preferences tend to be stable; in today’s highly polarized political environment, self-identified Republicans and Democrats are highly unlikely to go to the polls and cast a vote for a candidate of the other party.

The motivation to go to the polls–the motivation to cast that vote–is another matter.

The number one thing to remember about polling, is that after about 2000, for the most part, bases solidified and voters do not often change their minds.  Partisanship has hardened.  All elections are about turnout.  While independents may be in a sour mood, they are also displaying nihilistic tendencies, and my research suggests the most likely scenario is one that makes 2024 a base election.

Permit me to repeat the most important insight in that paragraph: All elections are about turnout. 

Democrats did extremely well this November, because they turned out. Thanks to the Dobbs decision and the unremitting MAGA attacks on democracy and the rule of law, Democrats have been motivated to turn out in much higher numbers than usual. That motivation is likely to persist into 2024.

If there is a moral to this story, it’s this: don’t try to “get through” to your bigoted uncle at Thanksgiving. Don’t try to explain to your co-worker why his vote for the GOP is really a vote for cutting Social Security. Instead, make sure your college-age children, your live-and-let-live bowling buddy, and your pro-choice aunt are registered and that they have rides to the polls.

You know–those polls that (contrary to the Big Lie) are actually accurate and meaningful.

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