What do "Don't Sleep On Al Gross", my idiotic belief that Jaime Harrison could have beaten Lindsay Graham,people claiming Virginia is competitive this year, and people who consistently talk up the chances Democrats will fail to pass their economic agenda have in common?
You'd be forgiven for not getting it right away - after all, the first two were idiotic impulses of liberals and the latter two are either Beltway conventional wisdom, or close to conventional wisdom, at this point, but all four opinions suffer from the exact same flaw - there's a bias towards intrigue and Things Happening. Democrats Get Along With Democrats is a less compelling news headline than Democrats in Disarray, Blue State On Track To Elect Blue Governor couldn't be more boring, so the narrative takes hold that things might be different than that.
I got Harrison very, very wrong, and I'm not going to sugarcoat that. I believed very bad polling, but much more than that, I believed my own bullshit. I believed that I had the answer to how the world works, and in having it, I could see the map better than everyone else. It barely seems necessary to type this sentence, but I had my head so far up my ass I was very, very wrong. If you want to use that take - or my predictions of Blue Texas - to discredit me moving forward, you won't get very much pushback from me, because I deserve all the admonition for it. It was wrong, and more than just a bad outcome, it was bad process.
I first wrote that Harrison was winning in early October, but what's more important isn't the events in South Carolina which precipitated that column, but the events elsewhere. RBG had died, the polls hadn't moved, and the night I published that column was the night Trump went to Walter Reed, if my memory is correct. In the weeks leading up to me pulling the trigger on that column, we had had Republicans losing a month, because everyone had said all summer that once Labor Day came, the polls would tighten, and then they didn't. I felt the wind at my back, because the polls agreed with my priors, and when I had gone all in on Georgia being a Democratic-leaning state, the polls started getting better for Democrats there. It felt like I was seeing the map really well, so I called my shot on South Carolina, aware both that that piece would drive a metric shitton of traffic, but also that writing the same columns about the same 7 states was boring as all hell.
I got attracted to South Carolina as a flip for the same reason the Blaska truthers did Al Gross - we got bored of looking at the same map, and we started trying to see what else could be in play. We had enough quantitative justification to do so - in my case, all the Quinnipiac polls and the Democratic internals, in the case of others, plenty of polling - and we also had the fact that nothing was happening pushing us as well. Had the Presidential campaign not been one of the most stable, in terms of the polling, I would have had less reason to keep going back to the well of fresh ideas. That the polls were wildly wrong just makes my ideas even stupider.
You see the same thing with those continuously predicting that Manchin and Sinema will break from the Democratic majority on reconciliation, or that House moderates will force a vote on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill now. They could happen, but the breathless tone of much of the discourse is that Democrats have a problem in the here and now, as opposed to a chance of a problem soon. Maybe things will get difficult for the party, maybe they won't. But much of the media is skipping to the part where it does, despite the fact that the legacy of the Biden admin so far has been a sharper political operation than either the press or many Democrats expected. We all remember the breathless panic about how the Recovery Plan was going to get sunk over the Unemployment Insurance boost, because of Roger Wicker's quote that Manchin wasn't talking to the White House or Schumer anymore? A deal was struck two hours later and it passed the Senate the next morning.
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I'm thinking of all of this as I think about the fact that there was yet another GOP-sponsored poll out yesterday in Virginia showing a McAuliffe lead, this time a D+5 from a GOP pollster, paid for by Conservatives for Clean Energy. This is the fourth GOP poll released publicly this cycle, and all four have had Democratic leads, as did the one non-partisan poll of the race (the one with McAuliffe winning Blacks by 41%, remember?), and yet the narrative is that this race is still close for reasons. When Democrats were putting out internals in South Carolina saying they were ahead, Very Wise People said the GOP were still fine. Now, the GOP are showing a consistent (if not growing) McAuliffe lead, and I'm supposed to think Youngkin's got a 30% chance to win?
Those who are claiming Virginia is close are maintaining this fiction for the same reason I wrote the piece headlined Lindsay Graham Is Losing - because I was looking for intrigue. It was a take I had to talk myself into, which should have been the sign that I should have ditched it before I hit publish. These people are not dumb enough to think that a literal Youngkin internal, a poll from Trafalgar, and polls paid for by the American Principles Project (a right wing, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT think tank) and Conservatives for Clean Energy are accurate barometers of the state of play, and yet, we get peddled this fiction from someone who knows better.
Our collective bias towards intrigue and Things Happening is corroding our brains, and making people who ought to know better believe things like that California SurveyUSA poll that Lak showed was demonstrably, quantifiably impossible by their own data. The thing is, I get mocked for my bad 2020, and that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do. I was a cocky bastard and I was an asshole to people, and I deserve every shot that comes my way because of it. What's funny is that many of the same errors that led to my shit 2020 are still cropping up, just in a different form, because the Intrigue Bias is still alive and well.