Mourinho, Dogmatic Certainty, And 2022
Philosophy, Zealotry, And Bad Psephology
On Sunday, Jose Mourinho - the manager whose Manchester United teams were my first introduction into English soccer - had to play his former club, walking away from a home affair with United the 3-1 loser, a result which warmed my heart not just as a United fan (although it did greatly), but because of my contempt for Mourinho. Again, I used to root for his teams, and now I find him to be a person worthy of great disdain, for a simple reason - everything is the same, nothing has changed.
Mourinho is probably the manager in soccer most connected to an ideology - he is a defensive mastermind, or at least, that's his reputation. A Mourinho team has an identity, a philosophy, a pattern. They're solid in defense, they score a lot on the counterattack, and once they score they park the bus - in other words, they fall back, clog their defensive third, and make the other team scoring as hard as possible. Mourinho teams usually don't blow a lot of leads, but they're also not usually the best at rallying from deficits - it can be done, but it's rarer. Mourinho ball is boring, slow, methodical, because that's how Jose likes it. Soccer, or football to the erudite European elitists who will inevitably yell at me for that, isn't a sport to Mourinho, but a philosophy. There is one way to win, one way to play, one way to build a team, according to Jose. Problem is? He's wrong.
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"All the world's stupidest people are either zealots or atheists. If you want to truly deduce how intelligent someone is, just ask this person how they feel about any issue that doesn't have an answer; the more certainty they express, the less sense they have. This is because certainty only comes from dogma." - Chuck Klosterman
I first read this quote after I bought Klosterman IV, a compilation of his columns, in a used book store in Philly in 2015, and I've long loved it. And then, in 2020, I just totally disregarded this piece of advice, missed how it applied to me, and fell victim to the trap. It's clear with hindsight - and it should have been, but wasn't, clear at the damn time - that I was a zealot in 2020, expressing the supreme confidence I was expressing out of a dogmatic belief I couldn't be wrong. I was expressing certainty about a question without an answer, and I got burned very badly for it.
In much the same way "what is the right style of soccer to play?" has no answer, "what will happen on a determined day, days/weeks/months into the future?" also has no answer, and yet I presented it as if there was one - that Joe Biden would win a landslide. Yes, he won, but my work was still horrendously wrong, and I've owned it. I somehow thought that 2020 was different, that it was knowable, that I - and, amongst public facing analysts, only I - had the secrets. And looking back on it, the answer was right in front of me the entire time, because certainty only comes from dogma.
I'm thinking of Mourinho, and Klosterman, as I think about the 2022 elections. There is a dogmatic certainty that Democrats will lose because Democrats have the White House and ergo Democrats lose. It's not dissimilar to the Mike Debonis tweet saying Democrats needed a "miracle" to win Georgia less than a month out philosophy of elections and elections reporting, which is fundamentally rooted in "if it hasn't happened in the past, it won't happen now" - missing, of course, that that was the logic that led to everyone thinking Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were going blue in 2016. How'd that work out, again?
There are a bunch of mediocre at best, and brain dead at worst, arguments about how Democrats will lose seats in 2022 because that's how this works, none of which reckon with increases in polarization and partisanship, or the fact that the GOP have quite literally never hit their Trump turnout levels without him on the ballot. If you want to get into the weeds of the math, the only group of voters who could plausibly provide the swings you'd need to get a neutral environment are whites with a degree - meaning well-off white social liberals in Southlake and Forsyth and the white parts of Maricopa and Orange County will need to snap back hard to the right. They didn't in Georgia, they didn't in the Orange County Board of Supervisors special election (which saw about 75% of 2018 turnout, so it was meaningful), and there's no logical reason they should.
I'm not saying Democrats are some huge favourites to hold the House - my loosely held prior is they boost their majority to about 225, but that's not based on a whole lot. The GOP could very well get the majority, but there is no reckoning from the vast majority of analysts with the contrary position. Democrats will lose because Democrats will lose might be a fun tautology, but it isn't an argument, and it's just dogmatic certainty.
My contempt for Mourinho stems from the same place that my contempt for the Chris Cillizzas of the world comes from - people unable or unwilling to think about things outside of a singular, prescribed focus. David Axelrod went on CNN the night of the Georgia runoffs pessimistic, because Democrats had never done better in a runoff than the previous general in Georgia, because that really fucking mattered. It's the same shit with Jose - his system is perfect, his players just aren't good enough, as he sort of explicitly, sort of implicitly said after Tottenham blew a lead two Sundays ago.
As the guy who has most recently gotten creamed with bad election takes because I assumed a question with no answer actually had one, here's a suggestion to anyone who also does election predictions - don't assume the outcome already, and actually reckon with the case for a 2022 that goes well for Democrats. If you don't, you'll end up like me - one of the world's stupidest people, a zealot for a cause, not an analyst living in reality.