A Lesson on How I Should Read the Political News, &

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-11-09 We

FOCUS: A Lesson on How I Should Read the Political News:

After this just-past election, I double-down on my resolution to pay more attention to information sources that (a) crunch numbers, (b) read reports, or (c ) think for themselves on their own SubStacks, and less attention to information sources that (d) traffic in their “access”, usually to sources that remain anonymous:

The final election forecast from number-cruncher Nate Silver and company <http://fivethirtyeight.com> at Monday-Tuesday midnight was:

“Republicans are slightly favored to win the Senate” by a very small margin. And “Repubicans are favored to win the House” with a a likely result of fifteen more seats than needed for a bare majority.

That is what the polls showed. Perhaps there was some reason to suspect a systematic polling error, but Nate Silver and company think about that and try to factor it in. There was reason to think that if there were substantial polling errors that it would understate Republican support—and thus that a “red wave” was not beyond the bounds of possibility. But the atmospheric factors for such a wave were not obvious, and it seemed to me to be a possibility, not a likelihood.

And yet, and yet, and yet, that was not the access-journalism “vibe” last week…

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Last weekend I read an article that seemed to me not an uncommon one for the moment, but still bizarre. I stuck a pin in. It was the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells (who wrote many very good articles at New York and elsewhere), writing as the midterm election got down to the wire that a blowout, indeed a Democratic bloodbath, was not a possibility but a likelihood:

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Why Republican Insiders Think the G.O.P. Is Poised for a Blowout: The consensus among pollsters and consultants is this Tuesday’s election will be a “bloodbath” for the Democratic Party…

The article starts with unclarity: (a) does the “Republican” adjective in the headline continue to modify the “pollsters and consultants”, who are thus subclasses of “Republican insiders”, or (b) are the “pollsters and consultants” a broader group who agree with the “Republican insiders”? Since many consultants are not true insiders, and since pollsters are in general not insiders, I read the sub-head as telling me that the grouips that expects a “bloodbath” with high probability is a broader one. But I agree you can read it either way.

But let us go on to the text, which, I believe, names none of its sources other than Stan Greenberg. The text opens:

On Wednesday afternoon, I spoke with a leading Republican political consultant about the Senate campaign in Georgia…. The Republican consultant told me that Warnock’s prospects were even bleaker than many recent public polls suggest. “There isn’t a single private poll in America that has Herschel Walker anything but ahead,” the Republican consultant told me. “Not one.” The consensus among a number of G.O.P. pollsters and operatives I spoke to this week is that in the Senate races that are thought to be competitive, Republican candidates are heading for a clean sweep: Mehmet Oz will beat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and not just by a point or two; Adam Laxalt looks pretty certain to defeat the incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada; even less regarded candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona will be carried into office by a predicted wave…. High-profile races in which G.O.P. candidates were already favored now look like potential blowouts—Kari Lake’s campaign for governor in Arizona, J. D. Vance’s for Senate in Ohio. And some races that seemed out of reach, such as the Senate campaign, in New Hampshire, of the election denier Don Bolduc, now look like possible wins. The word that kept coming up in these conversations was “bloodbath”…

At this point my reaction was: that is what they say, but is there any reason to take what they say to be what they believe, rather than them simply talking their book? Wallace-Wells answers my question in the next paragraph. It is what they believe—for I spoke to Democrats as well “to provide a check”:

My interest… was… to collect prediction… [and] hear the G.O.P.’s story of the election. (I… spoke with… Democratic peers… to provide a check…

So Wallace-Wells dove into answering the question his headline asks: Why did they believe in a likely “bloodbath” for the Democrats? The answer was straightforward:

I wanted to know what they thought earlier polls had missed, and how a race that had seemed like a tossup for much of the year could turn into a Republican rout…. The… overturn[ing of]… Roe v. Wade… changed polling…. [A] Republican strategist told me. “Answering a political poll itself became a kind of expression of political identity.”… As much as sixty per cent of Democratic poll respondents this summer were… super voters… who vote in every single election, even though such voters normally compose about a third of the general electorate…. “This created an informational doom loop, where Democratic candidates get told, You should talk about January 6th, democracy being on the ballot, trans rights,’ ” he said, “because their primary super voters are picking up the phone and telling them this is what they care about.”… At the same time, the polls were likely underrepresenting certain segments of the electorate…. One of the most visible groups in politics… especially energized by… Dobbs… had shifted toward Democrats…. One of the least visible… toward Republicans. “The fastest-moving portion of the electorate is Hispanic men, and the second-fastest-moving portion of the electorate is Black men,” the Republican consultant told me. You want to get them on the phone? “Good fucking luck.”

But, once again, is this just Republican pollsters and consultants talking their book—what they say, not what they believe? Wallace-Wells says: no. It is what they believe—and it is also true:

A Democratic pollster told me, “Arizona is, I think, like ground zero for that trend. I think you’re [also] seeing a lot of Hispanic drift toward Laxalt”…

Why were the Democrats leaking support? Because, Wallace-Wells says, while:

Republicans couldn’t wait to get away from the major social issues…. Democrats continued to focus on them…. The Republican strategist told me, “The reason that Democrats have fucked this up is that they won’t stop talking about abortion. And the reason that they screwed it up with Blacks is they won’t stop talking about abortion. . . . It’s like they’re a two-issue party. It’s this and Trump. They can’t stop. I don’t think they have anything else”…

By contrast:

Republicans have tended to emphasize a simple story about inflation…. As the Republican strategist put it to me, “Inflation is the big federal story, and a lot of blame belongs on the White House, because the White House just wished this would go”…. Republicans also moved to capitalize on the flailing economy with declarations that the country was descending into chaos…

And, Wallace-Wells says, there is a non-partisan judgment that the Republican message worked:

Democratic consultant Stanley Greenberg wrote…. Candidates “faced a barrage of ads on crime starting in September and early October, a barrage aided by Fox News dramatically increasing its crime reporting.” This offensive seems to have worked: when Greenberg asked voters what they most feared about Democratic control of Congress, their top pick was “crime and homelessness out of control in cities and police coming under attack,” which ran thirteen points ahead of concerns about illegal immigration…. By October… Democrats were too trapped in issues—abortion and the threat to democracy—that appealed to their most devoted and best-educated supporters, and had not done enough to reassure voters that they were addressing material concerns…

And at the end of the story Wallace-Wells sums up:

The economy is not good, and the President is both a Democrat and unpopular. If you looked only at those factors you might expect a result not unlike the Republican wave that these G.O.P. insiders have predicted. Maybe the race was simple enough that it could be sketched on a napkin. “I can show you the trajectory of all our races,” the Republican pollster told me…. Once we finally got to October, we have enough money, the electorate becomes more fully engaged, and then the other side of the ‘V’ is straight back up. I can show you the same story in probably twenty-five races.”

The thing about Wallace-Wells’s article is that today, five days after its pre-election weekend publication, it is obvious that none of this is true:

• Mehmet Oz did not win over John Fetterman “and not just by a point or two”: he lost.

• Adam Laxalt was not “pretty certain to defeat” Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada: he is behind.

• Blake Masters in Arizona was not “carried into office by a… wave”: she lost by five percentage points.

• Kari Lake in Arizona was not a “potential blowout”: she is behind Katie Hobbs by a narrow but durable margin.

• Don Bolduc in New Hampshire was not a “possible win”: he lost by ten percentage points.

• Of the six Republicans whom Wallace-Wells had anointed as winners, only J.D. Vance managed a win—albeit not a “blowout”: a six percentage-point margin.

What is Wallace-Wells’s reaction to the now-obvious fact that his article of five days ago was bilgewater—that he was either tricked by Republicans talking their book, and trying to use a media echo chamber to create a last-minute enthusiasm wave, or high on their own supply? What is his reaction to the now-obvious fact that he spun a false story of Democrats massively losing the election talking too much about abortion and too little about controlling inflation, deporting illegal immigrants, and putting trans people in their proper place?

He starts by interpreting his pre-election recital of Republican spin—the thing I did, remember, think somewhat bizarre last weekend—as not him being spun into a fantasyworld, but as a bipartisan consensus expectation that was validated by the first several hours of the vote count:

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: The Midterm Elections Deliver a Stunning Return to the Status Quo: The red wave never materialized, Trump’s handpicked candidates underperformed, some new faces emerged—but the country appears as evenly divided as ever: As the first polls closed… Republicans and Democrats shared an expectation that the basic structure of U.S. politics was about to change, probably in a red wave, if not a tsunami. The night’s first meaningful results… suggested that might be happening… [as] Ron DeSantis won his race for governor by twenty points… not just in rural Florida but in… Tampa… Miami-Dade…. [That] alone suggested that a tidal change was under way.

But then, he writes, as the evening went on:

That early breakthrough quickly gave way to uncertainty…. Where, exactly, was the wave?… Not even in rural Pennsylvania, a symbolic heart of Trump country, where… Fetterman… was declared the winner early Wednesday morning. As midnight passed… control of the Senate was still up for grabs...

And so he spins the failure of his own previous camping-out in Republican-spin fantasyworld to reflect reality as a great mystery. That Senate control was not decided decisively for Republicans on election night, and that the Republicans do not have a large House majority:

qualifies as a medium-sized stunner…. Democrats lost sixty-three House seats in Barack Obama’s first midterm, and fifty-two in Bill Clinton’s…. The public broadly disapproves of the job that Joe Biden is doing…. Inflation is running at eight per cent…. The economy, broadly, is teetering…. How could it be that the turn away from Biden was not more decisive than this?…

Was there a turn away from Biden at all? The Democrats look to be more likely than not to be gaining a Senate seat, no?

Well, Wallace-Wells starts by saying that a bunch of things are true that are very different from the things he said were true five days before:

The Republican plan had been to run on the economy, and to offer themselves as an alternative to a status quo that the public seemed ready to reject. But that is harder when a conservative Supreme Court has just… [overturned] Roe v. Wade… [and] Trump is still integral to the political news, saying crazy things… like drug dealers ought to be summarily executed. If Americans broadly think things are going badly, then conservatives are still part of the reason…

And then he stresses the closeness of results:

Many elections remained very close…. No one could conclusively say where many of the highest-profile races stood…. In the contested Western states that may decide control of the Senate (Arizona, Nevada), the results were too tentative to say much…

That lowballs how much we know. John Fetterman flipped the Pennsylvania Senate seat to the Democrats. For the Republicans to gain control of the Senate, they would have to win the not-yet-counted votes in Arizona by enough to overcome a Democratic lead, and then get enough more of their supporters to turn out for the Georgia runoff to overcome a Democratic lead. That looks to me like a 25% shot. It is not the case that we cannot say much. We can say that you shouldn’t bet on Republican control of the Senate at less than 3-1 odds.

And Wallace-Wells concludes with the observation that there has, perhaps, been a generational shift:

Biden himself cut a diminished figure during this campaign…

And:

A sitting Republican senator told Politico’s Jonathan Martin that no more than five of his party’s fifty senators actually wanted to see Trump run…. The ex-President went out of his way to undercut DeSantis…. “I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering—I know more about him than anybody, other than, perhaps, his wife,” Trump said. “I think if he runs, he could hurt himself very badly.”… In building his margin of twenty points, DeSantis swept the state of Florida…. DeSantis rather than Trump’s handpicked candidates… delivered the signature Republican victory…

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Back when I worked for the US Treasury, I learned many things from Bob Rubin. Among them were three questions that a group of which I was a part should always be asking themselves:

1. [At the end of a meeting:] What else will we, in one, three, or ten years, wish we had done today?

2. [After we win:] Were we smart—did we make the right decisions along the way that led us here—or were we just lucky?

3. [After we lose:] Were we unlucky—did we just take risks and have the dice fall the wrong way—or did we make analytical mistakes?

Am I wrong in wishing that the New Yorker would have its staff clued-in to ask these questions as well?

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A much better day-after take comes from the SubStack of Matt Yglesias:

Matt Yglesias: Democrats pulled off one of the best midterms ever: I was wrong…. Democrats’ best issue was clearly abortion when the Supreme Court hung an albatross around Republicans’ necks. Democrats ran lots of ads about abortion. Lots and lots and lots of ads. To the point where a lot of people on both sides thought they were really fucking up by not doing more to be visibly addressing the crime and inflation issues that voters said was more important. I always thought the abortion-centric ad strategy was the right choice among the choices available, but I still didn’t really think it would work. Yet looking around, I think you have to conclude that it did…

Then comes the one sentence Matt wrote that annoyed me:

Democrats… didn’t wildly outperform the polls or anything. But they did outperform the vibes….

In Matt’s expressed view, the “vibes” consist of (a) the history of in-party midterm performances, (b) the belief that Biden is unpopular and that the election would be a referendum on Biden, and (c) skepticism that pollsters know how to obtain a sample. But (a) and (b) are things that work through the polls—not reasons to disbelieve them. And (c) was, as I said, a possibility, not a likelihood. But I think he suppresses the most important part of “vibes”: the media echo-chamber as generated by those who do not crunch numbers or read reports or think for themselves but who instead traffic in their “access”. That was, mostly, where the vibes were coming from. And there is no reason to believe in what you get from access journalism—after all, were Jared and Ivanka really horrified by what the Trump presidency was doing, and trying to save us all?

But this is more-than-balanced by the best line in the piece—the one that made me laugh out loud:

Democrats outperformed a factional battle in which both moderates and progressives spent Tuesday morning “explaining” why Democrats did so badly (it was the other faction’s fault) only to need to pivot once the results came in….

And so he reaches his main conclusion:

People don’t like having their rights taken away…. A critical swathe of the public prefers not to be represented in office by kooks and insurrectionists…. While there was polling error in 2022 , it was random and uncorrelated, which is how it’s supposed to work. I didn’t believe the polls could possibly be right, because they suggested Democrats would do amazingly well in historical context, which felt impossible given that Biden isn’t super-popular. But I was wrong…

And Matt has two other points that I see as exceptionally smart. First:

I… think that abortion is important to… Florida Exceptionalism…. There very much was a hard red break… in… Florida…. Florida has a GOP trifecta that took up abortion legislation, passed a 15-week ban, and then went no further. Fifteen-week ban is popular… protects the overwhelming majority of abortions that actually take place… show[s]… pro-choice Florida voters that they could be trusted with political power… [which] GOP politicians elsewhere in the country couldn’t demonstrate…

Second:

We have tentative evidence that the public rewarded the robust jobs growth under Biden more than the tenor of media commentary might lead you to believe…. The idea that people would regard the 2022 economy as actually worse than the 2010 economy seemed extremely bleak… and I now think they just didn’t. But having restored full employment, the central task continues to be not so much “curbing inflation” (which would be achieved through massive unemployment) but unlocking abundance and delivering on the promise of ARP, IRA, IIJA, and the CHIPS Act with regulatory followthrough…

And Matt concludes:

I was wrong about the 2022 midterms, and I’ve never been so glad to be wrong…

Remember: Competent number crunchers, people who read reports, and people who think for themselves. Those who traffic in their “access” to anonymous sources—especially those who are not immediately on the horn to their sources asking them “why do you think you were so wrong?”—not so much.

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Amy Castor: Crypto collapse: J. Pierpont Moneygone—FTX rekt, bought by Binance: ‘Bankman-Fried runs… Alameda Research, his crypto hedge fund; FTX, his unregulated offshore crypto casino…. FTX US, his exchange for US customers that purports to operate under US law and accepts actual dollars…. Ian Allison posted an explosive story on a partially leaked balance sheet for Alameda… super cashed-up… if you account for FTX’s own FTT token at mark-to-market, and not what you could actually get for that much of their private illiquid altcoin…

• Damian Cave: The World’s Democracies Ask: Why Can’t America Fix Itself?: ‘Conversations across continents reveal alarm over the United States’ direction, as it slides away from ideals it once pressed other nations to adopt…

• Steve Randy Waldmann: Real inflation cycle theory: ‘Until February of this year, team transitory was right. In 2022, the fiscal impulse of the COVID era was going to collapse as quickly as it had arisen (and it has). That, and some monetary tightening, and unsnarling some temporary supply-side SNAFUs, would have ended the inflation…. Then shit happened. February and early Spring brought… the Ukraine War… Omicron… [in] COVID-Zero China… accelerating mistrust and hostility between China and the West…. Patterns of sustainable specialization and trade that we have long depended upon are likely to be, well, no longer sustainable…

• Matthew Downhour: In defense of entitlement: ‘Every voter wants the government’s help to make a living. Insisting that that help not be structured as an entitlement, however, drags the entire economy down…

• Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer: Twitter, Cut in Half’: ‘Eight days into Musk’s ownership of Twitter, many pundits have begun to predict that this is the beginning of the end. No one can quite imagine a world without Twitter, but no one can quite imagine this version of Twitter surviving, either…

¶s:

Charlie Warzel: Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, explained in 19 Elon Musk tweets: ‘I hope… you lead a richer, more spiritually fulfilling life than I do…. But for those who want to catch up…. “October 27: The Bird Is Freed…. October 28: Time to Form an Independent Committee… a content moderation council…. October 28 and 29: Rejoice! Comedy Is Now Legal!…. October 30: Conspiracy Theory Sunday…. October 30 (continued): Never Apologize…. Wow, Still October 30: Brainstorming… a good example of Elon Musk and his Twitter advisers (like the investor Jason Calacanis) conducting market research via the internet’s least scientific tool: Twitter polls…. Brief Interlude: “Halloween with my Mom”…. November 1: Power to the Peasants: Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.   Power to the people! Blue for $8/month…. November 2: More Twitter-Poll Market Research…. November 3: The Very Big Idea: Because it consists of billions of bidirectional interactions per day, Twitter can be thought of as a collective, cybernetic super-intelligence…. November 6: Beyond Parody: Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended…. Surround Yourself With Yes-Men….”

Yesterday began the second workweek of Musk’s tenure. He celebrated it in the traditional way, by tweeting an image of a Nazi soldier in a meme about birds…. Followed by two separate masturbation jokes… an endorsement of the Republican Party….

What fresh hell will tomorrow bring? Beyond more chaos, who can say?…