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by Gargamel Sat Sep 05, 2020 8:21 pmizvol'te.
The many tribes of 2020 election worriers: An ethnographic report
Cards on the table: I think if the presidential election were held today, Joe Biden would win by an undisputed margin. I further think that very little between now and November will change this supposition. Possible game-changers include: the presidential debates, gaffes by either candidate, changes in the economy or the pandemic, more social unrest and maybe some tell-all book. The Trump team’s plan to paint Biden as senile will probably backfire during the debates. President Trump is far more likely to commit a gaffe than Biden. And, as I noted in April, the fundamentals are likely to trend against Trump as the school year begins. Bad things happening tend to hurt the incumbent.
I say all this in the spirit of full transparency, but also because it cuts against the general feeling among the many political tribes paying manic attention to the state of the race.
In many ways, this week will be their golden moment to worry. There have not been many high-quality polls conducted in the past few weeks. This is in part because both conventions were held, injecting temporary volatility into the race. This kind of uncertainty allows imaginations to run free. And, interestingly enough, most people’s imaginations are telling them that Trump is closing the gap on Biden.
For reasons I will get into below, I don’t find this terribly convincing. But it is worth mapping out the multiple tribes who think the race is narrowing, why they think that and how seriously to take their arguments.
1) The #MAGA crowd. Trump’s true believers have been convinced all along that the president will be reelected. In July, Politico’s David Siders wrote a great story looking at GOP officials at the state and local level: “According to this view, the coronavirus is on its way out and the economy is coming back. Polls are unreliable, Joe Biden is too frail to last, and the media still doesn’t get it.” Similarly, last week, the New York Times’s Jason Zengerle wrote, “At the White House and inside the Trump campaign, there remains a stubborn, almost defiant sense of optimism — born, they believe, out of experience — that the president will win in November.”
This crowd can be easily dismissed for a bunch of reasons. First, even the higher-ups within Team Trump think he’s losing right now. According to Zengerle, Donald Trump Jr.’s mind-set is: “We’re losing, dude, and we’re going to get really hurt when we lose.” But perhaps the best single anecdote demonstrating the state of denial within the #MAGA crowd comes from Olivia Nuzzi’s recent look at the Trump campaign’s ground game. Spoiler alert: It does not come close to living up to the hype. One of Trump’s senior advisers best encapsulates the state of unreality within that tribe right now:
2) The maybe-Trumpers. There are conservatives who genuinely dislike Trump and feel he has coarsened the nation. They are not crazy about a Democrat winning, however, and so will also look for any sign that Biden is weakening. Sometimes it’s looking at truly useless metrics like prediction markets:
And sometimes it’s just feels:
To put it gently, prediction markets are a lousy indicator, and feelings are … well, just that. But this group has an outsize influence because they are intelligent conservatives who have not gone full #MAGA or full #NeverTrump. Still, unless they are slinging better data, they too can be safely ignored.
3) The Gen X demographic. Lewis’s feeling, echoed by many over the weekend, is that the chaos in Kenosha, Wis., Portland, Ore., and elsewhere will take the focus off the coronavirus and play into Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric. Methinks this is tied up in a Generation X phenomenon from the 1980s and 1990s, in which rising crime rates caused politicians on both sides of the aisle to evoke such rhetoric to ensure their electoral survival. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton used the same tactic. One could argue that George H.W. Bush used it the most effectively. Those of us who came of political age during these decades probably assume that it would work again right now.
The evidence for this fear is pretty feeble, to be honest. The last time social unrest displaced the pandemic as the country’s leading story was in June, and during that month, Biden widened his lead. As for right now, Josh Barro noted that by Gallup’s data, only 4 percent of Americans believed that crime was the most important problem facing the country today. By contrast, 35 percent said it was the pandemic.
What has changed between the 1990s and now is the growing recognition that racism affects policing. Unless Biden starts calling for riots — which is the exact opposite of what he’s done — then unrest is far more likely to hurt Trump than not.
4) The media-narrative pushers. Never forget that the most important media bias during an election year is that the media wants a competitive race. And so campaign coverage will always raise the specter of a close race or frame it as such.
For example, consider this Associated Press story titled “Uncertainty dominates presidential campaign’s final stretch.” The reporters say, “As the candidates move beyond trouble-free conventions and into the final phase of the 2020 election season, both sides acknowledge the contest is tightening.” That seems pretty darn definitive!
Except that the story features a lot of claims to this effect by the Trump campaign. The Biden campaign’s contribution is limited to Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn saying, “This campaign has always known that it’s going to be a close race, it’s going to be a tough race. … It’s a polarized nation and we expect this kind of tightening.” That is the Crash Davis of campaign-cliche quotes.
5) The progressive left. This group is much less important than the others listed above, but a slice of former Bernie Sanders boosters are keen to latch on to any poll showing that the race is narrowing. This is usually followed by a suggestion that Biden fire up the progressive base and give up on his broad unity themes. This is less real concern and more political opportunism.
6) The 2016 PTSD crowd. Everyone else who does not want Trump to win and has not been listed above falls into this category. Trump seemed to defy the odds in 2016, and Democrats fear he will again. TPM’s Josh Marshall notes, “Regardless of the objective realities, Democrats will consistently anticipate loss or worry about loss while Republicans will consistently be confident of victory.” That jibes with my experience, too.
The standard narrative is that if the race tightens, swing-state polls cannot be trusted because of shy Trump voters and Trump administration efforts to suppress mail-in ballots. These people are so scarred by getting it wrong last time that they are prepping themselves for a similar shock this time around. In a worst-case scenario, at least they are prepared; in a best-case scenario, they experience a pleasant surprise.
Paradoxically, this very paranoia on the part of this group undercuts their worry. If they take nothing for granted, if they vote early, if they mobilize others to vote, then a nasty surprise becomes much less likely.
So there are a lot of disparate tribes with little in common but a belief that Trump will defeat Biden. They can point to minor drops in the prediction odds from FiveThirtyEight and the Economist as signs that it is all about to fall apart, or the occasional poll that shows a tight race.
I feel their pain, but I see a different picture. Neither the one legit tracking poll nor the polling on Trump’s favorability nor polls of key swing districts nor polls of third-party voters from 2016 shows any hint of Biden losing his lead. Even if the polls narrow a bit this week, standard convention dynamics suggest that will be ephemeral.
The surprising thing about the 2020 election so far has not been the fluctuations, but the constancy. Biden has had a steady lead for quite some time. I suspect that will persist. The problem is that an awful lot of people have a partisan, professional or psychological stake in a more exciting narrative.
The many tribes of 2020 election worriers: An ethnographic report
Cards on the table: I think if the presidential election were held today, Joe Biden would win by an undisputed margin. I further think that very little between now and November will change this supposition. Possible game-changers include: the presidential debates, gaffes by either candidate, changes in the economy or the pandemic, more social unrest and maybe some tell-all book. The Trump team’s plan to paint Biden as senile will probably backfire during the debates. President Trump is far more likely to commit a gaffe than Biden. And, as I noted in April, the fundamentals are likely to trend against Trump as the school year begins. Bad things happening tend to hurt the incumbent.
I say all this in the spirit of full transparency, but also because it cuts against the general feeling among the many political tribes paying manic attention to the state of the race.
In many ways, this week will be their golden moment to worry. There have not been many high-quality polls conducted in the past few weeks. This is in part because both conventions were held, injecting temporary volatility into the race. This kind of uncertainty allows imaginations to run free. And, interestingly enough, most people’s imaginations are telling them that Trump is closing the gap on Biden.
For reasons I will get into below, I don’t find this terribly convincing. But it is worth mapping out the multiple tribes who think the race is narrowing, why they think that and how seriously to take their arguments.
1) The #MAGA crowd. Trump’s true believers have been convinced all along that the president will be reelected. In July, Politico’s David Siders wrote a great story looking at GOP officials at the state and local level: “According to this view, the coronavirus is on its way out and the economy is coming back. Polls are unreliable, Joe Biden is too frail to last, and the media still doesn’t get it.” Similarly, last week, the New York Times’s Jason Zengerle wrote, “At the White House and inside the Trump campaign, there remains a stubborn, almost defiant sense of optimism — born, they believe, out of experience — that the president will win in November.”
This crowd can be easily dismissed for a bunch of reasons. First, even the higher-ups within Team Trump think he’s losing right now. According to Zengerle, Donald Trump Jr.’s mind-set is: “We’re losing, dude, and we’re going to get really hurt when we lose.” But perhaps the best single anecdote demonstrating the state of denial within the #MAGA crowd comes from Olivia Nuzzi’s recent look at the Trump campaign’s ground game. Spoiler alert: It does not come close to living up to the hype. One of Trump’s senior advisers best encapsulates the state of unreality within that tribe right now:
This paragraph from @Olivianuzzi's state-of-the-Trump-campaign piece is quietly hilarious. https://t.co/JPImtT3dmm pic.twitter.com/C3cVU6m0gr
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) August 16, 2020
2) The maybe-Trumpers. There are conservatives who genuinely dislike Trump and feel he has coarsened the nation. They are not crazy about a Democrat winning, however, and so will also look for any sign that Biden is weakening. Sometimes it’s looking at truly useless metrics like prediction markets:
Betting odds are now virtually tied for the 2020 presidential election.
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) August 30, 2020
• Biden: 50.6%
• Trump: 49.1%
Biden was leading 61-37 just one month ago.https://t.co/ad6tOK1BHj pic.twitter.com/fYdjHK9iRi
And sometimes it’s just feels:
It feels like the pendulum is swinging away from Biden—that he would have been better off if Election Day were in July. The one thing to keep in mind is that things could look very different in November, too. Will we still be talking about riots—or about COVID closing schools?
— Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) August 30, 2020
To put it gently, prediction markets are a lousy indicator, and feelings are … well, just that. But this group has an outsize influence because they are intelligent conservatives who have not gone full #MAGA or full #NeverTrump. Still, unless they are slinging better data, they too can be safely ignored.
3) The Gen X demographic. Lewis’s feeling, echoed by many over the weekend, is that the chaos in Kenosha, Wis., Portland, Ore., and elsewhere will take the focus off the coronavirus and play into Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric. Methinks this is tied up in a Generation X phenomenon from the 1980s and 1990s, in which rising crime rates caused politicians on both sides of the aisle to evoke such rhetoric to ensure their electoral survival. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton used the same tactic. One could argue that George H.W. Bush used it the most effectively. Those of us who came of political age during these decades probably assume that it would work again right now.
The evidence for this fear is pretty feeble, to be honest. The last time social unrest displaced the pandemic as the country’s leading story was in June, and during that month, Biden widened his lead. As for right now, Josh Barro noted that by Gallup’s data, only 4 percent of Americans believed that crime was the most important problem facing the country today. By contrast, 35 percent said it was the pandemic.
What has changed between the 1990s and now is the growing recognition that racism affects policing. Unless Biden starts calling for riots — which is the exact opposite of what he’s done — then unrest is far more likely to hurt Trump than not.
4) The media-narrative pushers. Never forget that the most important media bias during an election year is that the media wants a competitive race. And so campaign coverage will always raise the specter of a close race or frame it as such.
For example, consider this Associated Press story titled “Uncertainty dominates presidential campaign’s final stretch.” The reporters say, “As the candidates move beyond trouble-free conventions and into the final phase of the 2020 election season, both sides acknowledge the contest is tightening.” That seems pretty darn definitive!
Except that the story features a lot of claims to this effect by the Trump campaign. The Biden campaign’s contribution is limited to Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn saying, “This campaign has always known that it’s going to be a close race, it’s going to be a tough race. … It’s a polarized nation and we expect this kind of tightening.” That is the Crash Davis of campaign-cliche quotes.
5) The progressive left. This group is much less important than the others listed above, but a slice of former Bernie Sanders boosters are keen to latch on to any poll showing that the race is narrowing. This is usually followed by a suggestion that Biden fire up the progressive base and give up on his broad unity themes. This is less real concern and more political opportunism.
6) The 2016 PTSD crowd. Everyone else who does not want Trump to win and has not been listed above falls into this category. Trump seemed to defy the odds in 2016, and Democrats fear he will again. TPM’s Josh Marshall notes, “Regardless of the objective realities, Democrats will consistently anticipate loss or worry about loss while Republicans will consistently be confident of victory.” That jibes with my experience, too.
The standard narrative is that if the race tightens, swing-state polls cannot be trusted because of shy Trump voters and Trump administration efforts to suppress mail-in ballots. These people are so scarred by getting it wrong last time that they are prepping themselves for a similar shock this time around. In a worst-case scenario, at least they are prepared; in a best-case scenario, they experience a pleasant surprise.
Paradoxically, this very paranoia on the part of this group undercuts their worry. If they take nothing for granted, if they vote early, if they mobilize others to vote, then a nasty surprise becomes much less likely.
So there are a lot of disparate tribes with little in common but a belief that Trump will defeat Biden. They can point to minor drops in the prediction odds from FiveThirtyEight and the Economist as signs that it is all about to fall apart, or the occasional poll that shows a tight race.
I feel their pain, but I see a different picture. Neither the one legit tracking poll nor the polling on Trump’s favorability nor polls of key swing districts nor polls of third-party voters from 2016 shows any hint of Biden losing his lead. Even if the polls narrow a bit this week, standard convention dynamics suggest that will be ephemeral.
The surprising thing about the 2020 election so far has not been the fluctuations, but the constancy. Biden has had a steady lead for quite some time. I suspect that will persist. The problem is that an awful lot of people have a partisan, professional or psychological stake in a more exciting narrative.
Janko Suvar
