Salvation In Simplicity

How People Want Easy Answers To Hard Qs

Last week, I shot a text to Lak about who would, in a vacuum, be a better candidate for the US Senate seat up in 2022 in Wisconsin - Mark Pocan or Ron Kind. It's been eating at me for months now, both because of the specifics of the race and because of the broader lessons. The advantages of Pocan, an openly gay member from Madison, contrasts pretty clearly with the advantages of a Kind candidacy, who hails from the Driftless Area in southwest Wisconsin. What ate at me even more was his response.

"Kind, obviously."

I don't share this to really criticize Lak - I convinced him that he was wrong to be so flippant, and the more he thought about it the more he agreed it was a debate. Where I stand on the question isn't for this column - a full Wisconsin Senate deep dive is coming - but I don't know if there's a right answer to the question, which is why I asked it. I was shocked to see Lak, someone I have the utmost respect for, think a complicated and difficult question had an easy answer. And, as he conceded that night and again the next day, the question was much more difficult than he originally thought it to be. His willingness to acknowledge that, and not just pretend it was actually clear cut in the face of new facts, is why I maintain he's one of the smartest people in or around political analysis.

Lak got caught in a trap - he bought into an easy answer, which once he took a step back and analyzed, didn't hold up as easily as it seemed like it did. He didn't do anything that we haven't all done time and time again, and I'm sure that I will do so at some point in the future. Hell, I have done it before - during the Canadian campaign of 2019, I responded to commentary around a possible Conservative majority by saying the Tories had no chance of a majority because they weren't close to 38.5%, the previous lowest popular vote to result in a Parliamentary majority. The problem? For about half of the 2019 campaign the LeanTossup model projected a Liberal majority with less than 35% of the vote nationally. It was hypocrisy, blatantly so, where I just used the same arguments I maligned so because it was the easiest shorthand.

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I'm thinking of all of this because we have another round of the habitual War Of The Nerds happening in the NBA, where the forces of anti-intellectualism claim they know more about the sport than the nerds, and where, honestly, everyone is just boring and wrong. Yes, the "watch the games" crowd are wrong to dismiss the value of numbers and statistics, and yes, there are no certainties in data. Everything is more complex than that, and nobody wants complexity. Lak didn't want that complexity when he said it was obviously Kind, I didn't want that complexity when I used the reductive "the Tories won't get 38.5%" logic, and most people don't want it the rest of the time.

You see it in political discourse too - will Democrats lose the House in 2022? Apparently, because the average loss in a midterm is two dozen seats or some shit. If I seem like I'm not taking the argument seriously, you're correct - I find it to be vapid nonsense. What happened in 1986 or 1962 isn't fucking relevant to 2022, sorry to tell you, and yet, the argument is prevalent. Why? Because it's easy.

What people want - whether it is Elections Twitter, NBA fans, or golf enthusiasts - is easy answers. Why did Tony Finau lose at the Genesis? Well, he's Tony Finau, he can't win. It doesn't matter that he did exactly what he needed to do on Sunday, no, he sucks and can't close. Why do players put up great stats on bad basketball teams? Either they suck and the stats are meaningless, or he's amazing and everyone else sucks. There's no nuance in these debates, because what people want is clear answers.

One of my most popular pieces in the past was my "Calm Down About Florida" piece where I actively swore at my audience. People loved it, because they loved being told they had nothing to worry about in Florida based on the polling information we had. Those polls ended up being disastrous for Democrats, but that's a secondary issue. People ate that shit up like a baby does milk from his mother, because I gave them what they wanted - an easy answer. I had proof, and it sounded true, or true enough, at least. What it wasn't was actually true.

My favourite quote of all time is an old Chuck Klosterman quote I read in a dreary car ride from Philly to DC in 2015. "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." In 2020, I broke this law, expressing certainty I shouldn't have about an election outcome that hadn't happened. But, even more than that, we all break this law every time we dismiss something as obvious that isn't. What we end up doing is constructing arguments not based on what the evidence says, but finding the evidence that agrees with us. Democratic Doomers love saying we will lose the House, because they think the party will. The historical midterm penalty not being relevant anymore doesn't matter to them - they have their answer and look for the evidence for it afterwards.

There are not right or wrong answers about plenty of questions of an electoral nature. What's the right rating for Wisconsin Senate? Fuck if I know. I have it Lean D, others Lean R, and plenty are at Tossup. I don't think it is a Lean R race but I certainly get the argument for Lean R, and don't think you're crazy. Smart people can disagree in good faith. But what isn't good faith is the search for easy answers. A prominent ET member spent his Thanksgiving night telling me I was wrong to have Ossoff favoured in Georgia, and when I explained why I thought so, referred to my case - about a Blacker and more urban electorate, with bigger turnout drops in the rurals than in the cities - as "wordsalad." His main riposte to me? "I don't know how you can say Ossoff is favoured when he got 100k less votes than Biden and Perdue came within 15k votes of winning outright." That I had already explained why I thought so in multiple columns and to him didn't matter much to him. He had his metrics which justified his pessimism, and so he was happy. Turns out, he was also wrong.

Nuance is hard, and embracing it is harder still. But without it, this is all a waste of time, and all these conversations are pointless. Unless there is a greater willingness to listen to a perspective you think is wrong, and a willingness to change your mind based on that argument, then this is all a waste of time. Instead of beating our heads against the wall in the neverending war between anti-math morons and those who claim to have figured everything out, this phony war, where conversations are merely people talking past each other in sequence, needs to become a real dialogue. Trust me - you'll be smarter at the end of it. And if you still need convincing, just ask Lak.