Nobody Knows Anything About This Election

I voted yesterday. It was a lovely day. The Jones-Lawler House race in my district is very close, I understand. I finally found some polls that say Republican Mike Lawler is ahead by a couple of points. Republicans have been running ads that paint Mondale Jones as a wild-eyed defund-the-police radical. Democrats have run ads reminding voters that Lawler’s voting record is anti-abortion rights. So we’ll see next week what worked.

At his Sunday night Nazi Nostalgia Rally in Madison Square Garden, Trump revealed he shared a “little secret” with House Speaker Mike Johnson. “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a little secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over.” Johnson, of course, refuses to talk about it.

At The Nation, Elie Mystal explains the two different ways Trump could become president again by having the election decided by the House of Representatives, which he assumes is “the secret.” The most likely plan, Mystal says, is to delay certification of votes in enough states to deny Kamala Harris 270 electoral votes. Josh Kovinsky at Talking Points Memo talked to some Trump electors in swing states who suggest they will “show up” to stall certification of the vote in their states if Trump loses. So, yes, Trump definitely has a plan and at least some people in place to carry out that plan.

I’ve read a couple of analyses recently that said it’s unlikely Trump could pull this off. I’m sure the Democrats are preparing for this. I would also like to point out that most of the infamous swing states have Democratic governors who might be able to intervene if something hinky were going on with certification. And the Republican governor of Georgia is already on record as being unwilling to break laws on Trump’s behalf.

There is a lot of speculation going on that Trump’s internal polling shows him losing, which is why he’s putting so much effort into sowing chaos after the election. But then it’s often been said of Trump that he’d rather succeed by cheating than by, you know, actually succeeding.

It’s also the case that the polls could be wrong. Josh Marshall discusses “herding,” or the tendency of polling companies to try to stay in line with what the other polling companies are reporting.

If you’re watching the latest polls, make a note of something called “herding.” It could be relevant for discussions of polling after the election. The concept is straightforward. In the final days of an election, poll results tend to trend toward consensus. One possibility is that everyone is finally making up their mind and the picture and reality is coming into focus. But that’s not the only possibility. For a mix of good faith and maybe less than good faith reasons, pollsters can become increasingly leery of publishing an outlier poll. There’s a tendency to “herd” together for extra-statistical reasons.

Let’s say you’re five days out from the election and the polling averages say candidate Jones is up 2 points and you’ve got a poll which says candidate Smith is up 3 points. (Pardon my defaulting to anglo surnames.) Everyone has an outlier result sometimes. But do you really want your final poll to be a weird outlier? In the modern era with aggregators, pollsters are often graded on the predictive accuracy of their final polls. So it kind of matters. If you’re a bit shady maybe you just tweak your numbers and get them closer to the average. If you’re more on the level maybe you take a closer look at the data and find something that really looks like it needs adjusting. Maybe you just decide that you’re going to hold this one poll back.

The weird consistensy of the polling over the past few weeks may be pointing to herding, or it may just be telling us people aren’t changing their minds. It’s also the case that a normal polling error might cause the polls to be wrong by as much as eight percentage points, and one or the other candidate could win decisively. So there’s really no point wringing our hands over the polls.

See also David Kurtz’s Morning Memo at TPM, Major News Media Fall For Fake GOP Outrage Yet Again.

10 thoughts on “Nobody Knows Anything About This Election

  1. "And the Republican governor of Georgia is already on record as being unwilling to break laws on Trump’s behalf."

    I don't believe one word that comes out of a Republican politicians mouth. They all lie and they all eventually bend the knee to Stump. I have absolutely no doubt that diaper don and his magat doormat's in the house and senate as well as the state houses will try to steal the election, why wouldn't they they tried last time and nobody but a few low level election workers went to jail. Me thinks it's going to get ugly and now that the lousy Yankees collapsed in five games I have nothing to watch on the tee-vee machine!

    • Someone has to be the second-best team money can buy.  Not much to hang your hat on but at least you don-t have to clean up after that messy parade. I sympathize with you and again this year and with all the Cubs fans.  Good those Yankees took out those Royals.  At least we go to see a match-up of this year's best IMO.

      • I'm not sure the Yankees were the best, the dodgers certainly played well but I think the Yankees might have had a hard time beating the worst team in the history of baseball, the Chicago White Sox! I'm pretty sure my cubbies would have wiped the floor with the Yankees. I didn't watch much of the AL playoffs but the Yankees sure played bad in the series I couldn't believe they actually made it?

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  2. Trump wants Kemp's head on a platter – has for four years. Trump has overtly campaigned against Kemp and insulted Kemp this year. (They have appeared together since but I don't think Kemp believes for a minute that he's only a couple of lines down on Trump's enemies list from the former VP. If Trump wins GA, Kemp will certify it, I think. But if Trump loses and the MAGA mob appears, I think Kemp will call out the National Guard.

    I'm not mistaking Kemp for a liberal – he's not. But he knows Trump wants to ruin him and I do not think he will bend a knee. Someday, some former GOP leaders who didn't sell out to Trump may want to form a legitimate conservative party. I will never trust Chris Christie because he DID bend a knee (and Trump let Christie kiss his ring before giving him the back of his hand.) For now, I think Kemp will play the cards straight.

    If Harris wins PA, she probably has the election. If she also sweeps NC, AZ, and NV, it's likely Trump can't prevent Harris from taking office on J6. If Republicans lose the House, they are also screwed.

    • If the election goes to the House, each state delegation gets a vote. It's not a vote of all the members. I can't do math well enough to figure out how that would work. 

      • I've heard it reported that the Republicans control 26 of the 50 house delegations. I don't know if there's even one state where the members are split close to 50-50 and a Republican or two could vote with the Dems to save the Republic. 

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  3. Boy was I wrong.  Just when you think a crazy person is doing something you can count upon, they go south on you. Not long ago I commented that Trump omitted Liz Cheney on his 'enemies within' list for some reason I assumed he was operating upon.  Well, he blew that with his firing squad imagery, I assume straight from his infallible intuition, at Liz Cheney.  The one thing you can count on about a crazy person is that you can't count on anything when dealing with a crazy person. Silly me. 

    • Yeah, I expect to hear yakkers on the pundit panel shows calling for BOTH SIDES to tone down the rhetoric.

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