Worser Angels

 

You probably thought we just went through a national election, but it turns out what really happened was Most Americans were sending a message in a bottle, and for some reason which will go unexplained they were addressing it to David Brooks's information bubble so he could get a better idea of what's going on in Most Americans' lives and share it with his readers ("What the Voters Are Trying to Tell Us"):

Yup, I wanted a grand rebuke, too. I wanted Trump demolished by 10 points. But elections are educational events. Voters are not always wise, but they are usually comprehensible. They know more about their own lives than we in our information bubbles do, and they almost always tell us something important.

The first thing we heard from most Americans — since Joe Biden’s popular vote victory seems all but certain — is that Donald Trump is unacceptable. We live in a divided, dug-in nation, but millions more white evangelicals voted Democratic in 2020 than in 2016. Many people voted against partisan predilections to remove a man who is a unique menace to the foundations of this country. That is no meager accomplishment.

The second thing voters told us is this: Separate church and state. We’ve long had political polarization in this country and we still will. But over the last few years polarization has transmogrified into something worse: a religious war.

Even the worser angels of David Brooks's nature are so much better than ours, it's no surprise that the better angels are totally insufferable.

We don't at the moment know by what percentage Biden has beaten Trump, other than that it wasn't by 10 points, as David Brooks would have wished, but we do know how to interpret it, in a way that David Brooks coincidentally might approve of. It's enough to prove that nobody wants Donald Trump to be president, but not enough to prove that those of us who wanted Donald Trump not to be president were right. I hope that's clear.

Horse race stuff

First horse race in North America, New York 1655, painted sometime in the 1960s by Frederick Elmiger, via George Glazer Galleries.

As the Big Tuesday results started flowing in last night, a thing that happened earlier was starting to take on some iconic experience for me: the pearl clutching when candidate Joe Biden visiting a Detroit auto plant has a run-in with a misinformed young gun nut and tells him he's "full of shit":

It’s almost like liberals hate the working class.

— Heshmat Alavi is a Cop (@Punkrawkpersian) March 10, 2020

It's almost like Berners have never met anybody from the working class in real life, or possibly never met anybody at all. The idea of Joe Biden being some kind of lordly figure unable to repress his contempt for the simple (white) working stiff will not work.

You know to what kind of person you can always say, "You're full of shit"? Your brother.

Horse race update

Edgar Degas, Race Horses, 1885-88, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I never got around to explaining what it was that impressed me so much about Rachel Bitecofer's work, in the interest of talking about the specific predictions she was making,  and I don't want to let it go, because the more I think about it the more important I think it is: it's that she isn't really making predictions in the normal horse race fashion at all, which aims at anticipating the result at all costs, but deliberately making predictions that could easily be wrong.

She's making falsifiable predictions, in fact, in the service of testing a hypothesis, so that there's something to learn from it. When we follow a fivethirtyeight.com prediction through the election, we learn how smart Nate is, and if we're gamblers we may collect some money, but we don't learn anything in particular about how the political system is working. When we follow Bitecofer's prediction, say that Democrats would pick up 43 House seats in the 2018 midterm, we learn whether her particular hypothesis is consistent with reality or not. Bitecofer is putting some science into political science.

The hypothesis is basically that the old arrangement in which elections were decided by the independents no longer applies; it's the polarization that has followed the sorting of liberals and conservatives into the Democratic and Republican parties, and the different degrees of emotional engagement that accompany it:

Horse race stuff

Théodore Géricicault, The Wild Horse Race at Rome, ca. 1817, via Wikiart.

I've been looking at extremely interesting ideas (warning: when I say "extremely interesting" I may really mean "in agreement with my naive expectations that nobody else agrees with or has corroborated", just the way most people do) about the US electorate being developed by a political scientist called Rachel Bitecofer at the Judy Ford Wason Center, Christopher Newport University, in Newport News, Virginia, making election predictions on the hypothesis that the behavior of "independents" isn't especially important, and the effects of what she calls "negative partisanship" are (it's not that simple: it considers a lot of factors, in two separate tiers, and regression analysis).

Which led her to predict last November's Democratic gain of 42 House seats (she said 43) in July 2018, when mainstream forecasters were unsure whether Democrats would win the 23 seats they needed to take the majority, which was a pretty remarkable feat, and is leading her now to predict a very solid Electoral College victory for the Democrats in 2020, without knowing who the candidates are. You'll have to check out the paper to get the details, because that's what I'm running this post to get you to do.

I was especially taken by Bitecofer's analysis of what happened in the 2016 election, because it not only puts to rest the zombie story of the "white working class" as decisive factor but also gives the first precise estimate I've seen (schematic, not numerical) of the influence of the Russian active measures: