Unwarranted Faith

The GOP's Benefit Of The Electoral Doubt

I think a lot about the concept of trust, both in terms of politics but also in life. My fiction writing is littered with reflections on trust - how hard it can be to trust, what a betrayal of that looks like, and trying to win it back. Obviously, the concept of lost faith sits with me a bit, as the guy who spent all of 2020 crowing about how I was some genius who had figured out politics and knew that the 413 map was going to happen - and everything I’ve done since November 2020 has been an act to get back some of the lost trust.

The question of why I have a platform is one I wrestle with, because while I know I’m good at this - and to argue I’m not good at political prediction would be insanity, given the track record of success I’ve had this year with my betting columns for TheLines, let alone the fact I beat the supposed king of seat forecasters PJ Fournier in Canada last month - but it’s one with a slightly depressing answer. Who gets platforms, and audiences, and attention are not meritorious discussions, necessarily. Morons get newspaper columns and smart people frequently languish in obscurity, and it sucks. I have a platform because I’m bold, and people like that about me. It’s an act of faith, trusting someone to tell you the truth and to predict the future, which is what political prognostication is, and it’s something that weighs on me. I hurt when Biden barely won not because it was some professional problem for me, but because I felt like I had misled people who trusted me, and that feeling fucking sucks.

The thing is, having done this once, it’s really starting to feel like many people are about to go down the same path again in 2022.

…

Why did everyone get 2020 wrong? We thought we knew the answer already, and it turned out we didn’t.

At a basic level, the 2020 miss from a forecaster’s perspective - and I’m including Crystal Ball and others who had “good” Presidential forecasts and garbage ones down ballot here - came because we thought there was no way that the American people could elect someone who everyone of us thinks is a dangerous lunatic. Ask everyone who works at Cook or Crystal Ball or any of the news organizations and they’ll all say privately that Trump’s a fascist, and that he’s dangerously unfit for office. That knowledge made all our analysis worse, because the basic instinct that there was a “right” answer in that election - whether it be because of COVID, the tax cut, trying to take health care away, his authoritarianism, whatever - made us all worse. And then we were all wrong.

Now, in terms of 2022 what we’re seeing is an inversion of that - we’re now seeing the arguments for why the GOP will have a good year given a benefit of the doubt they don’t deserve, almost entirely because everyone got burned by 2020. Would an outlier Quinnipiac poll with an R+3 generic ballot number be taken as this disaster sign for Democrats if the 2020 polls hadn’t been wrong? Of course not, we’d be laughing at it as the outlier it obviously is. Would these hilariously bad Virginia polls be taken seriously? Of course not. We are living in the shadow of past errors, and they’re making us worse for it.

I’ve never admitted this in public, but I almost just made David Perdue the favourite in the Georgia runoffs so that I could buy back some public credibility. Would it have been honest? Of course not, but honesty wasn’t my priority then, preservation was. I was being called a Democratic hack and an idiot, and I thought about just getting rid of the analysis and going for a self-preservationist move. I decided against it, because I thought then, as I did in Canada, that my value stems from the idea that my mind is worth something. If I think something, there is some value in other people knowing it - at least, that’s the basic premise this site is built on, and enough of you read me consistently for me to believe that that premise isn’t totally fucked. I called my shot, I went all in on Georgia, and got it right.

Right now, we are seeing all this deference to historical priors about the House of Reps despite the fact that everything everybody has expected up to now hasn’t happened. The GOP haven’t outperformed in specials, California wasn’t close, the suburbs aren’t reverting, the GOP haven’t made any effort, substantive or otherwise, to moderate, Trump is still the leader of that party, for good or for ill, and yet for some reason the conventional wisdom is still the House is going red. I mean, maybe they’ll be right, but as the guy who ignored much less data that suggested I could be wrong in 2020, take a hit - things they have changed in a permanent way, to quote The Strokes. (Did I almost credit that line to The Smiths? Yes. Am I drinking a bit as I finish this column? Also yes.)

The thing that we know we’re seeing is pollsters overreacting to the 2020 polling miss, with almost every pollster in Virginia getting overly Trumpy samples compared to reality, and they will miss low on Democrats like they did in California, for that reason. We know this is happening, and yet, we somehow have to indulge fiction, but we actually don’t. Democrats have had a much better political year than anyone expected, and yet the conventional wisdom didn’t change. People may be predicting electoral doom, but they’re wrong, and giving unwarranted faith to the GOP. Good thing I don’t have to.