The Last Postmortem

 

Screen Capture from Save Daddy Trump on Steam.

A popular postmortem sentiment is the idea that what happened in the US in this month's election is what has happened all over the place in developed democracies, in the wake of the inflation that accompanied the recovery from the Covid pandemic all over the world, when angered voters punished the ruling parties in a frustration with the way democracy is seen to be failing: 

“There’s an overall sense of frustration with political elites, viewing them as out of touch, that cuts across ideological lines,” said Richard Wike, director of global attitudes research at the Pew Research Center.

He noted that a Pew poll of 24 countries found that the appeal of democracy itself was slipping as voters reported increasing economic distress and a sense that no political faction truly represents them.

and even though inflation in the US wasn't nearly as bad as in some of those other countries, our voters just did the same thing.

I wanted to check that hypothesis out for the flood of big elections between 2021 and 2024, and found evidence for a much more nuanced picture: a bad time for a few ruling parties, but not so great either for Trumpies and like-minded individuals on the nationalist, anti-immigrant, authoritarian side of the right (loosely characterized as "fascist" below, sue me if you don't like it):

Another Day, Another Annoying Poll

 

Seeing some terror in the ranks over this poll of six battleground states issued by Washington Post (with the assistance of the Schar School of Government at George Mason University), particularly this result:

Even though these same respondents also seem to think Trump is a serious threat to democracy himself; a huge majority predicts that he will refuse to accept the results of the upcoming election, and a very substantial plurality believe Trump will "try to rule as a dictator" (while just a fifth, well within the crazification factor, suspect that Biden will do that).

I'm not going to be able to tell you what's going on here, because I'm stuck on a still more insane feature, which is what it's a poll of—it's a poll of particularly unlikely voters, designated as "The Deciders" for a fairly good but confusing reason, because they're in fact people who find it particularly difficult to make up their minds, don't know for sure whom they are going to support, and are just as likely to decide not to vote at all. Assuming, though, that the electorate is extremely tightly polarized to the point where the likely voters are almost equally divided, which is not an unreasonable interpretation of the normal polling data, it's the unlikely voters who will actually make the decision, for better or for worse or at random, by the way they sort themselves out in November. That's insane as a fact, that the decision is going to be made by the people with the least ability to even think about it, but it is a kind of a fact, and I ought to feel kind of flattered by the Washington Post for working on it, because, as I wrote for the first time in 2017,

In the Unlikely Event

5/27: Updated version at the Substack

I hate the hypercorrect "whom" in that headline: a headline is a truncated sentence, and surely the truncated question it's answering is "Who is the presidential candidate voters say they'll support?", not "Whom do voters say they'll support as a presidential candidate?"

It's something from the Other Nate (Cohn, at The Times) that I'm taking a personal interest in, because I've been asking somebody with the resources to do it for a long time: going in search of the unlikely voter. Except he doesn't know that's what he's doing.

That is, when he was looking into the factors that might be associated with voter preference for Biden, he found that people who were otherwise likely to vote for Biden—self-identified Democrats, people who voted for Biden in 2020, minority members, the relatively young—it was those who didn't vote at all in the 2022 midterms, who were more likely to express a preference for Trump or no preference at all:

Likely Story

RKO, 1947.

I've got what may be one of those big ideas, that I've been nursing since Election Night and the Red Wave that never broke in spite of the handicappers, which is that there's something defective about the pollsters' traditional collection of data for adults, registered voters, and likely voters—they really need to be collecting data for unlikely voters, because they're the ones who make the difference.

This is just another way of putting a claim I've made before. What I normally say is that the normal pollsters' picture, where the electorate is made up of partisan voters who know what they want and swing voters who have trouble making up their minds whom to vote for, is wrong; the unpredictable part is really the people who have trouble making up their minds whether to vote at all.  

Those who get engaged enough to do it can be the ones, in principle, who decide the winner, if there are enough of them, as just happened on November 8, when the officially likely voters seemed to be red-waving as predicted, but the winning edge came from younger women fired up by the Dobbs decision, actually the most committed to voting, but counted as unlikely because they hadn't voted that regularly (or ever) before. Then again there was Florida, where the opposite happened, and unlikely Democratic voters disappeared altogether, in terrible turnout: