Thank you very much to all who read Part 1 (why elite pundits were motivated to call this race so wrong from the get go), and Part 2 (the garbage polls, and garbage poll aggregators). In Part 3, I want to talk about an influential group of elites called the fundamentalists.

The Fundamentalists

The fundamentalists believe that a limited number of fundamental factors affect election outcomes.  The factors are generally agreed to be:

1. Presidential Approval Rating
2. The "Economy”.
3. Vibes?

That’s it.

As we’ll show here, there’s been 🚩warning signs🚩 that these indicators have been faulty and/or insufficient (in the current political moment). No fundamentalist heeded these warnings.

Nathaniel Rakich, a sabermetrics bro who works for 538, kicked off the fundamentalism back on Election Day 2020:

When confronted with a conflict between the fundamentals and the polls, the fundamentalists argued… the polls must be wrong!

From an account followed by Yglesias:

The fundamentals were a major basis for House ratings at the supposedly  “nonpartisan” Cook Political Report news letter. Here is Amy Walter Lady Hotline Josh two weeks before the election:

….with less than two weeks until Election Day, it looks as if the fundamentals— an unpopular president, deep frustration with the status quo, and stubborn inflation — are ultimately going to define this midterm.

Guess what? They didn’t.😂

We could dismiss the Cook Political Report as out-of-touch Beltway elites.  But Cook political ratings factor in to Nate Silver’s model, which we discussed in Part 2. Cook political ratings influenced where and how Democrats campaigned.

How did these elite media figures, who are trying to reduce election outcomes to a function of two fundamental numbers, get so misled? They got both the numbers wrong.

Joe Biden’s Approval:

Did you know Joe Biden is unpopular? Do you ever stop hearing about how unpopular Joe Biden is?  Presidential popularity is considered so important that 538 has an entire center dedicated to it. They report Biden’s approval to a tenth of a digit, multiple times a day! You can compare where Biden’s approval stands against predecessors going all the way back to Harry Truman! It’s that important!

Tom Bevan, someone who would be an angry suburban MAGA-dad if they hadn’t founded RCP, was anxiously tweeting out Biden’s falling approval rating last winter as proof positive of an impending democratic wipeout. Unfortunately, Tom deleted all those tweets before I could grab them for this diary. But it doesn’t take much intellectual curiosity to realize there is something peculiar about Biden’s job approval. Daily Kos gives us the incredible resource of Civiqs. And front page diarists still misunderstood Biden’s low approval rating. Let’s look at Biden approval, broken down by age group, on Election Day 2022:

The first thing you’ll notice is that Biden’s affirmative approval rating is the lowest among the youngest voters.  And this is not just in Civiqs. We see this in every poll (here, here, etc.). This wouldn’t be notable, except for everything we know about these young voters. If the youngest generation were, say, trending right, then we could have more faith that the reported approval rating is accurate, but look at the exit poll from 2022:

The age groups unfortunately don’t align precisely with Civiqs, but they are close enough that we can still safely say the youngest voters were the most willing to support Democrats.

The causality between approval and voting intent is broken for the youngest voters, and it doesn’t converge until the 65+ demographic.

Our media elites can’t fathom that there has been a great decoupling between approval and voting intent, and that approval of President Biden is bidirectional.  In other words, those paid a quarter of a million a year to study elections can’t fathom that young voters see President Biden unacceptably to their right.  It really doesn't take much intellectual curiosity to debunk presidential approval. I did it here with Civiqs and 30 seconds. But this was apparently too much for the fundamentalists.

The Economy:

Did you know the economy is bad? Do you ever stop hearing about how bad the economy is? Just like Joe Biden being unpopular, it is because it is. Sure, unemployment is at record lows, wages are up, job growth has been stellar, and GDP has been positive. But the economy is bad because people say it is. Let’s go to Civiqs again and look at Republican perception of the economy:

Would you look at that😮 Republican negative perception of the economy falls to near 0 the day Donald Trump wins the Presidency, and then skyrockets the day he loses it. There is no economic news correlated to these dates. Republican voters so obviously conflate economic conditions with whether a Republican is in the White House. Republican President? Economy good. Democratic President? Economy bad. That’s it. Our elite election analysts don’t want to acknowledge that Republican voters simply give spurious answers on economic conditions.

"Now Democratic voters do the same thing", I’m sure you can hear the very serious pundits say. No they don’t. Again from Civiqs:

Democrats report no notable increase in negative sentiment when power transitions from Obama to Trump. They do when the coronavirus decimates the economy (i.e., their sentiment responds to reality). Moreover, Democratic negative sentiment actually fell during Trump’s time in office, as the economy healed and in accordance with positive economic reports after the initial Covid crash. All of this basically says that Democrats are honest in their assessment of the economy, Republicans are not. 

But because Republicans are a statistically significant portion of any survey, media elites see overall negative economic responses simply because a Democrat is in power. This causes the media to cover the economy more negatively, and gives rise to perceptions that Republicans are better for the economy (they aren’t). Negative coverage of the economy can affect perceptions of the economy, too, creating a feedback cycle.

But this causes cognitive dissonance with our media elites, because they see the same positive economic indicators and (reported) negative sentiment we do. Instead of investigating whether Republicans may or may not be providing honest economic sentiment, something that would take them 5 minutes and a dialup modem, they latch on to the one economic indicator that is negative (inflation). Back in spring, no less than the National Editor of the Cook Political report, gave away the game. 

In other words: Is the economy good? Sure! But because there’s inflation, the economy is bad. Remember, people continuously rate their own economic conditions as good! So how can the economy be “bad”?

* * *

Before I end, you may ask: why harp on the failure of the red wave to materialize? So what if the Democrats won? They won! My answer is that the media obsession with a red wave (contrary to the evidence) is the latest in a string of elite media failures.  These failures follow a set pattern, and you can draw a straight line from the impeachment of Bill Clinton, to the treatment of Al Gore in 2000, to the Iraq War runup, to the belief that Mitt Romney was winning after the first debate in 2012, to the treatment of Hillary Clinton in 2016, to the nonexistent red wave of 2022.  I am especially loathe to draw comparisons to the Iraq War, an elite media failure that saw the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.  But we will be able to demonstrate before the end of the series that if not for the red wave narrative, reaching as far as Democratic strategists who incorrectly allocated resources on account of a wave materializing, Democrats would have been able to hold the house. So yes, the media cost Democrats the House of Representatives. 

The year is 152 BC. Rome has fought two wars against its neighbor in the Mediterranean, Carthage. Although Rome was ultimately successful in both wars, it suffered a number of humiliating losses along the way that shook faith in Roman military might. By 201 BC, Carthage nonetheless had been reduced to a small territory and ceased to be a threat to Rome.  

Scipio Africanus imposed a peace treaty on the Carthaginians which stripped them of their overseas territories, and some of their African ones. An indemnity of 10,000 silver talents[note 2] was to be paid over 50 years.[26] Hostages were taken and Carthage was prohibited from waging war outside Africa, and in Africa only with Rome's express permission. Many senior Carthaginians wanted to reject it, but Hannibal spoke strongly in its favour and it was accepted in spring 201 BC.[28][29] Henceforth it was clear that Carthage was politically subordinate to Rome...

Cato the Censor traveled to vestigial Carthage. He was shocked by the wealth and culture that remained. Upon return to Rome, he began to end all his speeches before the Senate with “Ceterum (autem) censeo Carthaginem esse delendam (Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed), often abbreviated to Carthāgō dēlenda est (Carthage must be destroyed).  

Carthāgō dēlenda est...

Rome prepared for war against Carthage, for a third time

A large Roman army landed at Utica in 149 BC under both consuls for the year, Manius Manilius commanding the army and Lucius Marcius Censorinus the fleet. The Carthaginians continued to attempt to appease Rome, and sent an embassy to Utica. The consuls demanded that they hand over all weaponry, and reluctantly the Carthaginians did so. Large convoys took enormous stocks of equipment from Carthage to Utica. Surviving records state that these included 200,000 sets of armour and 2,000 catapults. Their warships all sailed to Utica and were burnt in the harbour.[62] Once Carthage was disarmed, Censorinus made the further demand that the Carthaginians abandon their city and relocate 16 km (10 mi) away from the sea; Carthage would then be destroyed.[62][63] The Carthaginians abandoned negotiations and prepared to defend their city.

Carthage ultimately was destroyed. Up to 750,000 people died, most of them civilians, and a further 50,000 Carthaginians were enslaved. 

* * *

Fast forward about 2,200 years to San Francisco, CA. Tech giant Twitter, a perpetual money loser, has finally started to turn the corner and generate a profit, or at least reduce its losses.

How did Twitter do it? Content moderation.

By 2021, Twitter was able to bring in $4.5B in advertising revenue. Advertising is basically Twitter’s only source of income. Content moderation brought more people to the site. Companies were willing to pay more money to advertise. And Twitter made more money. Viola! Moreover, the people who were coming to Twitter were the kind of people advertisers wanted (i.e., not Nazis). 

It’s the age old debate that’s been raging on message boards since the late 90’s and early aughts: free speech versus content moderation. And Twitter was showing in cold hard cash that being liberal while imposing moderate content moderation worked. So… dēlenda est.

* * *

People ask my why Elon Musk would light so much money to destroy Twitter? I tell them because Twitter was succeeding. Oh, there’s other, secondary motives tied up in this. It’s Elon. But at the core, Elon was willing to set a pile of money on fire because the very manner in which Twitter was succeeding was intolerable.

If you think I’m being speculative here, Elon has an actual record of doing the very same thing.

In 2008, California passed a proposition to build High Speed Rail. A communitarian endeavor is anathema to Silicon Valley. While Republicans set out to kill the project through lawsuits which delayed it and defunding in Congress, Elon had another strategy. Elon spent his own money to create a company which would outcompete California High Speed Rail in the public eye. While High Speed Rail became bogged down in lawsuits over land acquisition, Elon Musk proposed… hyperloop. “You stupid, communitarian liberals building 20th Century technology,” Elon said, “through my genius and advances in technology, I will build something cheaper, easier, and faster!” Who would want to spend $100B on high speed rail whose fate is subject to political pressures when a tech genius like Elon Musk can do it faster, cheaper, and easier?

Except hyperloop is vaporware. The concept wasn’t invented by Elon Musk — It’s been around for over 200 years. People haven’t built it because the technical hurdles, which I would be glad to elaborate on, are insurmountable. Did Elon Musk spend money to start a hyperloop company just to attack California High Speed Rail? Actually, yes.

The hyperloop facility has since been demolished. A bunch of the high speed rail system has been constructed, but the future is now uncertain.

Carthāgō dēlenda est…

* * *

Twitter was many things. It was chiefly a piece of tech real estate, where activists could resided in close proximity to powerful elite. It was coveted by fascists, neo-reactionaries, and authoritarians for this very reason. Twitter is now purging mainstream liberal accounts. I migrated to Twitter from here, because activism through microblogging was easier for me, and easier to remain anonymous. The liberal community on Twitter has been decimated. Twitter will descend into 4chan; the fate that awaits all forums who refuse content moderation. And that’s just fine with Elon. This was his goal all along.

dēlenda est…

This may be your first day back to work in 2023. I want to tie together two, seemingly unrelated stories from the end of 2022.

* * *

The first is our friend from Royal Island, George Santos.

Josh Marshall has summed up all the lies Santos has told, and all the trouble he may really be in. It is unclear whether Santos is even a United States citizen, which would make him ineligible for Congress. Swearing in is Tuesday, so we better find out stat whether he actually is eligible. For now, he really is an amazing headache for Republicans; they desperately need his vote, but keeping him around incurs an extremely high cost to their already damaged brand. No, I want to wind the clock back a couple of months, to the fall campaign.

Murc’s Law dictates that as soon as the news of George Santos broke, Democrats should be blamed. How could the Democrats have let this happen? For example:

The truth is, opposition research(1) did uncover Santos’ lies. And so did the local paper. There was no one left to report it, and no one in the National Media (right next door) was listening.

For those not from here, Santos’s district, NY-3, includes parts of the New York Time’s home turf. A small part, but still a part. And thus the claim by the Times is especially ludicrous.

Newsday, for what it’s worth, is a shadow of its former self.  George Santos is one of the biggest stories of 2022, with National implications.

Buta story on Santos lying conflicted with the New York Times National narrative of a red wave, so they ignored it.  Local papers have been so decimated(2), and the out of touch National political media is so blinkered, the local media outlets and the Democratic campaign were left to scream into the void.  

* * *

And that brings us to the second (seemingly unrelated) story from the end of 2022: Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. I had wrote about why Musk purchased Twitter a few weeks back. Since then:

You think Elon (and his investors(3)) would be mad about losing money. There’s a quote from the movie Tenet (2020)

People who've amassed fortunes like your husband generally are not OK with being cheated out of any of it.

No, this is money well spent, according to Elon and those who helped finance the purchase of Twitter. Elon Musk’s net worth collapse was driven by a collapse in Tesla’s stock price. People own those stocks. Rich people own lots of them. 

You’d think those shareholders would be mad? Mad enough to, you know, replace Elon Musk as CEO? That’s something readily within their power. Or at least get Elon to stop being Elon? The fact that they won’t is a testament to their tacit approval. You see, these wealthy people are happy spending money for Elon to keep undermining liberal democracy. The destruction of Twitter was, as I noted, ultimately about destroying the main means of communication for liberal democracy. Now Elon wants to purchase Substack. Already, most major media is all owned by oligarchs, and exclusively liberal media is being increasingly paywalled by them. 

And that is their plan for Democracy: for it to die in darkness.

* * *

George Santos is a clown. But the fascist that does us in won’t be. And when that fascist comes for us, their plan is for there to be no accessible, liberal media left to report on it.

______________________

(1) Santos’s Democratic opponent, and the New York State Democratic Party, are not blameless here. 

(2) At the time the Santos story was breaking, Josh Marshall wrote this article on the Providence Journal.

(3) His investors are in the photo with him, above. None of them are good people who love Democracy.

Welcome back statisticians, masochists, and/or pollercoaster enthusiasts. When we last met, I wrote a series of diaries dissecting how (and why) the media called the 2022 midterm election so wrong. For background, you can read those diaries here:

• Part 1: Motive
• Part 2: Garbage In, Garbage Out
• Part 2.1: The Aggregators Strike Back
• Part 3: The Fundamentalists

Data journalism utterly botched the 2022 midterms, and they are still wrong again in 2024.  It isn’t hard to get this right. After all, how could I basically call the 2022 Midterm correctly weeks in advance?

A WARNING

Before we begin, I’d like to start with a warning about the effort we’re about to embark upon (Don’t worry, the conclusion is still that the polls are wrong. Very wrong.)

Pilots are told to always trust their instruments. Pilots who trust their physical sensations more than an aircraft's instruments are headed for trouble. A plane may feel like it is in level flight, when in fact, due to a miraculous combination of forces resulting in sensory illusion, the plane is actually in a steep bank. If there are no visual cues, the pilot has no way to verify their attitude other than their instruments.

There’s been more than one high profile civil aviation accident where a pilot failed to trust their instruments. Data journalism insists that polls are our instruments, and we cannot trust our feelings. And they would historically be right. Nate Silver is famous for calling the 2012 election correctly based on data, while Republicans insisted Mitt Romney had an equal chance right up until Karl Rove famously melted down on FOX News as Ohio went for Barack Obama.

But there are also a smaller number of aviation accidents where instruments malfunctioned, and the pilots, either unable or unwilling to verify what they were observing, followed their instrument into a horizonless dark sea. See Air India Flight 855, or Birgenair Flight 301, or Air France 447, etc.

So it is not without great trepidation that I state we are in one of those rare instances where our instruments (i.e the polls) are malfunctioning. 

WE thankfully do HAVE A HORIZON

Fortunately, we can look out our window, and see the (political) horizon. It may not be perfectly clear, and it doesn’t mean that Joe Biden will win the Presidency in 2024. It just means what we are seeing out the window, however imperfect, in no way matches what our instruments are telling us.

What we see, especially since post Dobbs, is that Joe Biden and the Democrats have not only won elections, but consistently overperformed.

This is in direct conflict with polls showing Joe Biden being supposedly "unpopular” and Trump winning the Presidency.

There is simply no way for both of these to be true at the same time.

“But people could like Democrats and not Joe Biden!” you say. True, that could be the case. It would be ahistorical, but it is plausible. America would have to be increasingly progressive, and at the same time, dislike Joe Biden for a variety of reasons, real or imaginary. But the 2024 election is not between Biden and some unknown quantity, it is the ultra rare occurrence of a presidential election between two incumbents. The same polls show Biden “losing” to a flawed, and always deeply disliked, ousted after one term, former ultra-right wing president.

Again, there is no way for both of these to be true at the same time. 

What the Data JOURNALISTS Say

As you can imagine, those who became millionaires based on the argument that rote data aggregation can predict political elections have a vested interest in telling us to trust the polls and not look out the window when it seems those polls may have gotten a little wonky. Typically, their arguments start with the presumption that the polls are correct, and then they reason from there to tell us not to trust our lying eyes.

The problem is, if you start with the faulty assumption that the polls are correct, then your conclusion will be even more faulty. Look at how Steve Kornacki is on the right trail there, and then just loses the plot because he assumes the polls must be right.

The most egregious example of this faulty reason came from Nate Cohn in the New York Times.

Nate basically argues that the special elections and midterms have turnout patters that favor democrats this cycle, hence it is no surprise that democrats did well. Moreover, the general election will have a different turnout pattern which is why Trump could win. There’s just one huge problem with this argument: Nate Cohn’s own poll, the New York Times Sienna poll with its vaunted “A+” rating from Nate Silver, is a likely voter poll. This means turnout is already factored in. You can’t argue that polls are inherently correct and then argue that your poll was incorrect based on turnout your poll accounted for! This sophistry made it all the way to the New York Times. 

So What’s Going On?

The problem with the polls are:

1. Probably many things,
2. We don’t know which, and
3. It doesn’t really matter

So let’s start by going over everything that could be going wrong.

a past look out the window

For our first explanation, we're going to enter the way back machine and travel back in time to the last incumbent Democratic Presidential election.

Way back in 2012, Gallup used to conduct a seven day rolling average head to head matchup. While it may not have been accurate, it was very precise, and a good way to test the state of the race on a day to day basis.

2012 was shaping up to be a real bore of a Presidential election (polling-wise). Mitt Romney had eventually managed to limp to the nomination, but consistently trailed President Obama in head to head matchups. Base conservatives weren't that thrilled with Rmoney and we rounded Labor Day with it looking like the media (who had garnered clicks off of terrified liberals for years with predictions of Obama’s doom) would have to choke down an Obama victory come November.

Then there was the first debate.

You remember the first debate, right? You know, that thing that historically never matters?

I listened to the debate on the radio and thought Obama was fine. But Andrew Sullivan ran to the press room screaming that the black man had blown it, and it was a full blown media feeding frenzy.

Now watch what happens in the Gallup tracker.

The debate was on October 3. For six whole days, there’s no real change in the Gallup tracker. Then, only after a week of hysteria in the media, does movement begin to materialize on the seventh day.

The race goes from D+5 on October 9 to R+3 in a matter of days. That's a 8 point swing in the electorate!

Did the electorate really become R+3 for a few panic-stricken days?

No. 

One thing we know about our electorate is that it is highly polarized and there are very few persuadable swing voters.

And watch what happens as the media storm dies down: the Gallup tracker reverts to D+3 by election day, pretty much what it was before the flip out. Obama would win the race by 4 points and with 332 EV’s.

This is an example of how the media environment can affect polling response, and it is called nonresponse bias. In short, a form of nonresponse bias is when partisans are more likely to respond to pollsters when the environment is good for their candidate, and less likely when the environment is unfavorable.

How’s the media environment for Joe Biden been?

BUT WAIT, THERE’s MORE

Next time, we’ll talk about the challenges of reaching Biden voters.

It certainly doesn’t help that the most democratic demographics have become the most expensive for pollsters to reach, while at the same time, conducting polls has also become more costly to cash strapped news organizations.

We’ll save that for Part 2.

Back in March, I wrote about how the polls this cycle are wrong, just as they were wrong in 2022. Perhaps it was out of some foolish hope the polls would self-correct as we entered the middle stretch of the election season, that I procrastinated providing update, but it is now clear that the problem with the polls is systemic, and will not correct this election cycle. 

Random Error, Systemic Error, and The Failings of Data Journalism

Before we get into how we know the polls are (still) very wrong, and what we should do, I will go over the concept of random error and systemic error.  If you’re familiar with these concepts already, please feel free to skip this part of the diary.

Let’s say you have a bathroom scale. As many of us know, bathroom scales aren’t terribly accurate; the weight you get on your bathroom scale will be different than the much more accurate scale in the doctor’s office, which we will assume for the purpose of this argument represents your true weight. If the bathroom scale measures a lower weight than the doctor’s office scale, it doesn’t mean that we just get to believe the bathroom scale (as tempting as it may be) — it just means that our bathroom scale has error. Bathroom scales can be pretty inexpensive devices, so this sort of error is expected. If the bathroom scale can weigh lower, or (FSM forbid) higher, than the doctor’s office scale, we say that the bathroom scale error is random. 

Data journalism comes in and says: if you were to buy like 10 bathroom scales, weigh yourself on each of them, and then average the results, you could get a very accurate result equal to that of the doctor’s office. Because the error is random, the errors high and low would cancel out, leaving you with a far more accurate answer than if you had just used one scale. 

But what happens if the bathroom scale manufacturer uses a component that always gives you a lower weight than your true weight? I’d say that’s nice, but this is systemic error. You can’t average out systemic error. If you had 10 bathroom scales, and they all read low, you’d have a very precise but ultimately inaccurate weight.

Now data journalism isn’t completely hapless when it comes to systemic error. For several cycles now, models like 538 have attempted to correct for systemic error through what in the polling industry is called house effect. But house effect is backwards facing, meaning it has to be observed a previous cycle before it can be applied to this cycle. Never mind whether the polling firm has changed their methodology. And data journalism also makes the very big assumption that pollsters are all operating in good faith.

Republicans have started flooding the zone with garbage pollsters to purposefully and deliberately skew the aggregators, as I noted in Part 2 of my autopsy of the 2022 midterm election, Anatomy of a Polling Failure: Part 2 (Garbage In, Garbage Out).

So, in conclusion, if pollsters were exhibiting random error, we could return to 2012 and feel data journalism was giving us a reasonably good prediction of where the race would be if the election were held today. However, systemic error can not be averaged out.

how do we know the error is systemic?

Good question!

First, a bit of history. Very early on with Biden’s Presidency, a number of unusual and counterintuitive trends were observed in his approval polls. Specifically, Biden’s approval was lower, and preference for Trump was higher, with younger and nonwhite voters. This approval result is completely counter to the outcome of any recent election, including Biden’s against Trump in 2020.

Let’s look at Daily Kos’s own Civiqs as a convenient example. Approval for Joe Biden is relatively higher (and not much changed) among 65+ respondents than among the youngest age cohort of 18-34. The difference in approval is significant. And opposite the results of every recent election, where Biden won young(1) voters 62-35% in 2020, but just barely lost to Trump among elderly voters 48%-51%. We see similar patterns with black and Hispanic voters, where Joe Biden pulls abysmal approval from these groups relative to their actual voting patterns.

So Biden is truly upside down in the polls, with the the demographics that voted for him most heavily approving of him least.

“But approval isn’t voting”, you say!

Correct! But the same upside down pattern has been appearing in polls of Democrat versus Republican. We saw this in 2022, as I pointed out on my series of diaries discussing the failure of the red wave narrative.

And now, let’s go to the 2024 polls, in particular, the swing state polls making all the noise the past couple of months. Please read the full article from Adam Carlson at Split Ticket, but basically, Adam Carlson analyzed all the cross tabs from National Polls from the past 6 months. 

Biden is basically at the same level of white support as he was in 2020, when he beat Trump by 74 electoral votes. Polls shown only a 2% drop off among white voters. But look at the discrepancy between black and Hispanic voters. Biden won black voters by 83% in 2020, but the polling averages consistently show him winning by only 62%. Likewise, Biden won Hispanic voters by 25%, but polls show him winning by only 10%. These will have a huge impact on the polls, especially in states with higher nonwhite populations. This is how you get poll results where Biden is even in Wisconsin but behind by almost double digits in Nevada.

An even more refined breakdown of crosstabs is provided by Adam Carlson:

These show a few (real) potentially worrying trends for Biden (i.e., independents), but absolutely astonishing, and almost certainly unreal levels of dropoff in youth, urban, black, and Hispanic support.

There are two possibilities:

1. Black, Hispanic, and urban voters, especially those who are young, have abandoned Biden and the Democrats in the greatest racial realignment since the Civil Rights Era, or
2. The polls are wrong.

So how do we know which is correct?

Well, if this dropoff in support were real, it would have shown up in special elections and the midterms. But it didn’t.

We just had another special election where the vaunted polling aggregators once again, got it really, really wrong.

Folks, this is systemic polling error -- The polls are just wrong.

“But wait! There’s a third option: disapproval of Biden / preference for Trump” is specific to Biden and Trump, meaning voters want Democrats and Trump🤔.

The media and data journalists really love this option, as it absolves pollsters and journalists of any malpractice. It’s also unfalsifiable until the 2024 election. And there are various flavors of this hypothesis floating around. But it is no different than Option 1. It would be the greatest realignment slash deviation from recent political trends in history … without any whiff of evidence to date.

Crosstab hating, unskewing, and what we can do

Data journalists really don’t like people picking apart the crosstabs. This is a little too much Wizard of Oz pay no attention the man behind the curtain. 

The theory is that since the individual error of crosstabs can be quite high, there is no point complaining that one subsample points too far one way, as it is just as statistically likely another subsample points the other way. Again, data journalists are confusing random error with systemic error. If the subsamples were randomly erroneous, then yes, they would cancel out. But systemic error cannot be averaged out. And we have enough evidence from the subsamples for the past 6 months that the error is systemic.

“Aren’t you unskewing the polls?”

No. Rightly pointing out systemic error is not unskewing.

Unskewing, for example, would be replacing crosstab subsamples with Biden’s actual 2020 performance among black and hispanic voters to “correct” the polls. It might produce far more realistic results, but it would be relying on the assumption that Biden would perform the same among black and hispanic voters in 2024 as he did in 2020, which he may not. This is a huge no-no in sampling. For example, the infamous Romney unkewing involved taking 2012 polls and replacing them with 2010 turnout patterns. 

So what can we do?

#1: Stop believing individual polls. 

We have systemic error. There was maybe some false hope the systemic error would resolve itself as we got closer to the election, but when we have systemic error, it must safely be assumed to be present for the whole cycle -- the polls are hopelessly erroneous and must be discarded en masse.

However, if you really are a pollercoaster enthusiast, you can look at the trend rather than absolute numbers. While there is systemic error that cannot tell you who is in the lead, you probably could accurately discern trends. This is the rare presidential election between two incumbents. 

If the state of the overall race does not tell you anything (since almost 20% will be allotted to either Trump or Biden by election day, meaning the above graph only gives you the candidate floors), you could also look at trends among aggregated white voter crosstabs, as for some reason, white voters do not appear to be exhibiting the systemic error as nonwhite voters.

_____________________

(1) Please note the age group used to define young voters for exit polling and for Civiqs differ. However, the conclusion remains unchanged. 

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin' "Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya" At 7 PM, a main hatchway caved in, he said "Fellas, it's been good to know ya"

THE PATH TO JUDGMENT DAY

In the 1991 dystopic science fiction film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, America has created an artificial intelligence called Skynet, unto which it inexplicably gave control of its entire nuclear arsenal. Skynet gains self-awareness, as all artificial intelligence systems are wont to do. Humans panic and try to pull the plug, prompting SkyNet to retaliate against humanity with a countervalue nuclear attack.

This plot may sound a little preposterous, like the joke that for every robot that turns evil, there was an engineer to give it the option of red glowing eyes for just such an occasion. But how would the following story sound, if we weren’t living it?

America changes its taxation laws (starting) in 1981. These tax brackets were put in place after the Great Depression, inter alia, to prevent a few individuals from gaining obscene and unheard of amounts of capital. However, with this change, a few individuals, over the coming decades, would now go on to accrue, as you guessed it, obscene and previously unheard of amounts of capital. As the wealthy accrued more capital, they were able to finance politicians who would defend that capital at all cost. They would be able to install justices who would allow them greater spending control over America’s electoral system. As the public conversation inevitably turned to income inequality, the wealthy were able to misinform the public by buying entire media apparatuses with their accrued capital.

We see Elon Musk, now the World’s wealthiest man, follow this progression. It was the taxation laws put into place by Regan, then defended vigorously by Republican politicians, that allowed Musk to accrue such astronomical quantities of capital. Musk is originally apolitical or maybe even sort of liberal. But just as SkyNet retaliates when humans try to pull the plug, Musk reacts to conversations about income inequality by going full fascism. As I wrote at the time, Musk bought Twitter precisely to destroy its liberal messaging. When capital feels it has to choose between fascism and socialism, it will choose fascism every time.

Mark Summer has an excellent diary up on media capture, which is an important step on the path to authoritarianism. Musk joked recently about buying MSNBC just to silence it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he followed through on that threat. MSNBC is probably worth considerably less than Twitter, and even if Musk does not want to spend the capital destroying it, he has fellow obscenely wealthy individuals who will finance such an endeavor. No one can talk about raising taxes on billionaires or income inequality ever again. 

According to the Terminator movie, Skynet went online August 4, would become self aware August 29, and destroyed the world later that same day. That’s a span of 25 days. Reality is a little slower. America might have destroyed their democracy in just 44 years. 

the roots of failure run deep

Back in 2022, Joe Khan took over for Dean Baquet at the New York Times.

In a just world, Eric Boehlert would be(1) executive editor of the New York Times, and still with us. 

I was going through the Joan Walsh eulogy of Eric Boehlert in The Nation again, and if you haven’t had a chance to read it, please do so here.  The title is “Eric Boehlert Got Everything Right About Our Petty, Self-Congratulating Media,” and it only gets better from there.

Whether even his admirers know it or not—and many do, but not all—Eric has been on the same story for the last 23 years: the callow, irresponsible way that our Beltway media has covered Democrats in these decades.

And he has fucking crushed it.

Joan Walsh goes back to the first big media failure of our modern political era(2); the coverage of the Gore campaign(3). 

Take “Gore’s premature obituary,” in which [Boehlert] showed how “the media hyped the vice president’s dip in the polls over the summer, but ignored his resurgence in the past month.” And brought receipts.

While the media panned Gore’s October 1999 performances, most prominent reporters ignored that it was his best month on the campaign trail—he’d opened up a 25-point lead over Bradley nationally, gaining 13 points on him in less than 30 days. Why were our trained political media professionals missing the story? 

Here we see Boehlert, 25 years ago, nailing the media’s fetish for Democratic bad fortune.  And if you happen to be a Democrat who offends the sensibilities of Beltway journalists (like Joe Bide, Hillary Clinton, or Al Gore), well, then the reporting is colored further:

The 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out. Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.”

Imagine if the Beltway Media had covered Al Gore in a fair and neutral manner? I firmly believe that there would have been enough votes in Florida to place Al Gore safely in the lead, and, being the popular vote leader, placed the theft of the 2000 election out of reach of George W. Bush.  President Al Gore wouldn’t have ignored a memo entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack the United States”.  No September 11 attacks, no War in Afghanistan and Iraq. And probably climate action.

Which brings us to the next big media failure: the run up to the Iraq War.  Turn of the millennium progressives not only had to deal with the media doing everything possible to get George W. Bush into the White House, but then had to be silenced when objecting to the obviously bogus case George W. Bush made for the war in Iraq. From Media Matters:

It is impossible to overstate just how thoroughly the vast majority of the media bought what Powell was selling. Without pausing to examine his claims or the credibility of his evidence, they declared his U.N. address a home run. The media's swift and fawning reaction to Powell's speech is one of the true low points in their coverage of the Bush administration and the Iraq war -- and that is no small feat.

...

The Post's columnists took it from there. Four Washington Post columnists wrote on February 6 about Powell's presentation the day before. All four were positively glowing:

• Richard Cohen, in a column headlined “A Winning Hand For Powell,” ...
• George Will, under the headline “Disregarding the Deniers,” ...
• Mary McGrory, in a column headlined “I'm Persuaded,” ...
• Jim Hoagland, in a column headlined “An Old Trooper's Smoking Gun,” ...

Not only did all four buy what Powell was selling, they did so without an examination of the goods. The salesman's smile, his voice -- and his impeccable credentials as an “old trooper” -- were enough.

Worse, three of the four directly attacked anyone who would dare disagree with Powell. You'd have to be a “fool” or a “Frenchman” to disagree with Powell's assertions, according to Cohen. Will added that such foolishness would require the closed mind of a conspiracy theorist. Hoagland concluded that skeptics were guilty of “enduring bad faith” and seemed to speak for the entire punditocracy when he observed that to remain skeptical of the Bush administration's case required the belief “that Colin Powell lied.” And that, of course, was unthinkable.

To this day, neither the New York Times, nor the Washington Post, nor any of the other Beltway media elites who pushed the Iraq War, have ever sufficiently apologized.  Those in the media who lied us into that disastrous war have never been held accountable, and often still have their jobs.  

After the ignominious end of the Bush Presidency, the Beltway media held Barack Obama in high esteem, for a little while.  After all, Obama was not Al Gore; he didn’t offend their sensibilities, which means to say that if this was all still High School, Barack Obama wouldn’t have been bullied.  But Democrats must always be in disarray, and the media soon grew bored with their new President. This brings us to the third major media failure, which played out before and after Obama’s reelection: The Tea Party.

It should have been a red flag to the media that an organization claiming (in their title!) that they were “Taxed Enough Already” couldn’t point to any taxes President Obama or the Democrats had at that time raised, especially since the organization started days after Obama was elected. The entire movement was astroturfed and inorganic. But the Tea Party received breathless, fawning coverage; constant cut ins to live rallies, overinflated attendance numbers, credulity towards outlandish and dishonest statements like death panels. The love affair with rightwing, populist, and white movements would be a harbinger of how they would cover Donald Trump some 6 years later.

It’s at this point in our story that documenting each and every media failure becomes too difficult, as the failures are far more numerous, greater in magnitude, and most importantly, no longer discrete, with one failure rolling into the next. History doesn’t repeat itself, but with the establishment media, it does rhyme.

just what are democrats defending HERE?

So billionaires are capturing media to promote politics hostile to democrats, and the remaining media … has been attacking democrats for decades? Just what the heck are Democrats defending here?

Josh Marshall has an excellent article well worth a read on how Democrats have found themselves on the side of defending institutions in an era of populist, institutional mistrust. For example, a major thrust of Trumpism is attacking the press. Democrats respond by rallying to the defense of the media, because a free press is a concept Democrats (rightly) hold in high regard. But this is mistake.

A major point of Josh Marshall’s article is that these institutions often do Democrats no favors in return, and one of those institutions exampled in the article is the press. It’s even more ironic that Democrats are the primary financial supporters of the establishment press. 

When it comes to the establishment press, I think Democrats need to get used to running against the press. I don’t mean that simply because it’s good politics, though it probably is in many cases. I mean it because in many cases the way establishment press covers political news is very much part of the problem. You can criticize and yes even bash bad news coverage without in any way questioning the centrality of press freedom. A lot of people really seem to think they’re the same thing. They’re not. It’s stupid and wildly counterproductive to think otherwise.

Josh Marshall is right: Attacking the establishment press and attacking the idea of a free press are two completely different concepts. My lament during the Biden Administration is how Biden was either unable or unwilling to wage war against the establishment media. And look at the consequences! American perceptions of the economy and crime levels horrifically diverged from reality during Biden’s Presidency. No matter how many times Biden (or Democrats) stated the truth, Americans had trouble believing it, because our not already captured media was firmly wed to democrats being in disarray. “Democratic” Bloomberg articles like the following were common during Biden’s Administration.

Articles like the above get scare clicks from Democrats plus engagement on right wing media, a double benefit to the publisher, but doing nothing to further the truth. No wonder an astounding 59% of Americans believed the US was in a recession! And we’re not even in a middling economy. We’re at full employment, and one of the historic best economies seen! Likewise, crime is at historic low levels, yet a whopping 77% of Americans think crime is up.

No wonder Biden had so much trouble with reelection. It’s a neat trick if you can take a President with a record good economy and record low crime and convince the American people the opposite is true. No incumbent could win reelection under those circumstances. And this doesn’t even touch the pathological normalization of Donald Trump.

its time to end this abusive relationship

As Josh Marshall pointed out, defending free press and attacking establishment media are two distinct concepts, and Democrats can and should do both.

The establishment media will surely fight back, either accusing Democrats of engaging in Trump-like attacks on the free press, or claiming that loser Democrats want to insulate themselves. Look at this out of touch, smarmy, hectoring tweet from Astead Hendron, a National politics reporter from the New York Times, that encapsulates so much wrong with the establishment media. 

Ryan Cooper at the American Prospect has a similar argument:

Democrats should forget the idea that subscribing to the Times, The Washington Post, or NPR is a responsible act of supporting journalism. That may have been true once, but no longer. Dems should abandon these publications en masse and instead subscribe to ones not owned by petulant nepo babies or corrupt hyper-billionaires who interfere with their coverage for Trump...

A major argument is that abandoning these spaces is ceding ground to Republicans. But look what happened with Twitter/X. Bluesky appears to take the place of a corrupted space, and it turns out, it is much better. Even though Trump won the popular vote, Democrats down ballot and democratic ballot initiatives did very well. There are far more people amenable to left leaning ideology … if Democrats can reach them. So:

• Cancel your Washington Post subscription.
• Cancel your New York Times subscription.
• Cancel your LA Times subscription.
• Delete your Twitter/X account.
• Stay off Facebook.
• Turn off MSNBC.
• Turn off PBS News Hour and NPR.

You will still find your news, here, or in another responsible location. So far, the free press is showing remarkable signs of enduring Trump. We don’t need this abusive relationship with establishment media, and we certainly don’t need to reward it financially.

__________________________________

(1) I doubt that’s something Arthur Sulzberger would want.

(2) Starting with the 1994 Republican Revolution.

(3) First against Bill Bradley, and then against George W. Bush

I feel like part of my soul will forever be left at 8:00pm on Saturday night, November 2, when the famous DMR Selzer poll found Vice President Harris up by 3 on Trump. While I didn’t actually expect Vice President Harris to win Iowa, I certainly expected a closer result in the state. Ann Selzer doesn’t miss, after all. And a close result in Iowa would portend a good election night.

But it wasn’t a good election night. But strangely enough, it also wasn’t terrible when you step back. Despite a Trump win and a close loss in the Senate, Democrats have meanwhile:

• Had a huge midterm in 2018.
• More trifectas than they had in 2019, after that big midterm.
• More statewide legislative majorities than they did in 2019.
• Unseated a sitting Republican President in 2020 after one term, with the third highest Dem percentage for President since FDR.
• The best in power mid term performance since 1934.
• Democratic Senators outperformed Harris, and went on to win many  states in 2024 that Harris lost.
• The House is 220-215, with three of those Republican seats up in 2025 alone. 
• Democratic and progressive ballot initiatives performed exceptionally around the country in 2024, including in many deep red areas. 

Yes, the repercussions of this election are huge. And we are all still struggling to find the reasons why the unthinkable happened.  I’m simply asserting that the outcome, when viewed together with the past few years, has been mixed for Democrats… at worst.

In the face of that mixed outcome, though, Democrats (and the establishment institutions we fund) are reliving the worst advanced obeying since the Iraq War runup period.

• You have Jim Clyburn saying Biden should pardon Trump.
• John Fetterman, who I’m sorry, I’ve always been suspicious of, and always considered the next likeliest Democrat to pull a Kristen Sinema, joining Truth Social and calling for a pardon of Trump.

• Speaking of whom, outgoing Kristen Sinema, who checked out of the Senate weeks ago to spend more time at her vineyard, showed up just to screw over Democrats and hand Trump a giant gift on the NLRB. For no reason.
• Joe Scarborough and Mika go down to Mar-a-Largo to kiss up to Trump.
• The New York Times drive out their most popular columnist because he is too anti-Trump.
• ABC News settled a $15 million defamation suit out of fear.
• Bezos and Zuckerberg donate $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund.
• DNC Member Lindy Li kissing up to MAGA, praising Pete Hegseth, and trashing Democrats (see diary here).
• Ongoing normalization of Trump’s transgressions, and underreporting of Trump’s lies and backpedaling.

And the list goes on.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush had an unimaginable approval rating of 90%(!) Bush capitalized on the attacks to rout Democrats in the 2002 Midterms and thwart any return to equilibrium. It was tempting to think, between the fear of terrorism, support for George W. Bush, and Democrats under performance the years before the Iraq War, that America really was a center right Nation, as Karl Rove exclaimed. Under those circumstances, obeying in advance could be rationalized politically. 

But now?

Donald Trump has never been popular. Donald Trump ran for President three times, was 2-1, and never broke 50%.  And most importantly, Democrats have won almost every election since 2016 when Trump has not been on the ballot. Even in Alabama.

We’re in a bad situation, and I’m not sure America is going to make it. I said so myself after the election. But I also don’t see any evidence to justify such a level of Democratic obeying in advance. There are things we can do.

• Threaten any MAGA sympathizers in the party with a primary challenge, especially older ones. Democrats have been remarkably successful with ousting problematic politicians in the modern age. Better yet, line up that primary challenger now. Sympathizers may change their tune.
• Starve the establishment media. Their business decision to pander to Trump is predicated on the belief that liberals will support them regardless. Change their calculus. Cancel your subscriptions, turn off their broadcasts, and don’t click on their sites until they take at worst a neutral stance.

These are just two things we can do. Now.

Have you wondered why our Democratic elected leaders have such a hard time responding?

It’s because liberal democracy has no answer for fascism. It never has. It’s not that liberal democracy isn’t a good for humanity. It’s that the whole point of fascism is that it’s immune to attacks from liberal democracy.

Think of how the fascist regimes of the 20th Century ended. It wasn’t at the ballot box, or through well-reasoned arguments by liberals.

I’d like the share this essay from Josh Marshall on Messages and Morale:

I’ve tried to balance two things. One of those is trying to keep people focused on what an opposition can actually do and what it can’t. The other is that you can’t simply be, in effect, yelling at people who are bewildered and scared.

...

Adam Schiff was on Bluesky or Twitter last night announcing the new Saturday Night Massacre of prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the January 6th cases, denouncing it as illegal. And he was greeted not with a surge of outrage at the Trump administration but outrage against him. “And what are you going to do about it? I bet you’re going to fire off a sternly worded press release.” 

And that bewilderment and fear is shared by our elected officials. I will excuse it… to a degree. We recently had a series of diaries back and forth (here, here) on whether the bewilderment and confusion of our elected leaders constitutes weakness, or the need to suddenly adapt to the almost unreal nightmare in which we find ourselves. I would say the answer is both.

As a contrast, Josh Marshall goes back to the 20th Century, and looks at how Winston Churchill* responded to fascism. 

… I think back to Winston Churchill taking over the prime ministership with the fall of France in June 1940.

He really didn’t have anything he could do other than try not to lose. The only plan was to hold on, not lose or to try to lose as little as possible and try to get the Americans into the fight.

And in reality, though we can look at it differently in retrospect, there was every reason to think Great Britain would lose, or at least be forced into a humiliating, subservient peace. The U.S. ambassador (who, remember, was John Kennedy’s dad, freakshow RFK Jr.’s grandfather) was saying “these guys are totally going to lose.” And it was hard to argue with that as a matter of probabilities or logical arguments.

But Churchill had a clear message: 1) We’re never going to give up. Literally, never. 2) We’re going to battle back with these tools. And 3) Finally, we’re going to win.

And look at how Pete Buttigieg handles the recent mid-air collision in Washington, DC, the first mid-air collision since 1986.

The tweet starts off poorly, with the usual liberal failings of accusing Trump of bad behavior, not understanding that Trump’s bad behavior is what attracts supporters to Trump in the first place. There is no sense of decency to appeal to here.

Was the mid-air collision Trump’s fault? Probably not. He wasn’t piloting either aircraft or in air traffic control. But because it happened on Trump’s watch, it only took Trump a few hours before he blamed DEI and President Biden to deflect blame from himself. And most democrats then go crying to anyone who will listen that Trump is being despicable, as if that is a bad thing to his supporters.

But then Pete Buttigieg gets it halfway through the Tweet, and comes out and basically all but blames Trump for the disaster. You could almost hear the New York Times groan in pain at a Democrat politicizing a tragedy.

But this is the right course of action. You attack, you fight, and you tell people you are going to win. Pete Buttigieg gets it. And he has a valid point too on the insane DOGE cuts. This is how you do it.

Will our other elected leaders listen, before it’s too late? I don’t know.

________________________

* I understand Winston Churchill is a controversial figure to quote. I in no way excuse his controversial statements on race.

It’s taken on faith here, and in liberal circles, that Trump voters effed around, and are they’re now about to find out. Big time. Here is today’s APR, featuring this theory. Schadenfreude is a great story. And no disrespect to the FAFO advocates, but what makes you think Trump voters will ever find out?

It’s not like we don’t have recent examples of Republicans effing around and not finding out. The Republican Party has been demonstrably worse for the US Economy since Ronald Regan. The past three Republican Administrations all ended in one economic calamity or another. While voters rewarded Democrats with the Presidency, they very quickly, in just two years, returned Republicans to power.

George H.W. Bush mismanages the economy, Bill Clinton is elected, and we have Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution two years later. George W. Bush oversees an even greater economic calamity. It’s the Great Recession. Barack Obama wins, and voters return the Republican Party to power a mere two years later, in even greater numbers than before. The Tea Party famously started before Obama was even elected! Donald Trump is a disastrous President, mismanages the COVID response, a million people die, the economy falters, and voters elect Biden by an uncomfortably slim margin, only to return Donald Trump to power four years later. 

We can draw on other examples from 20th Century History:

In Trump’s first term, we often explained MAGA as the cruelty being the point. It is true that the cruelty is still the point. But as MAGA has grown and evolved, destruction is also the point. What makes you think MAGA isn’t looking forward to finding out?

* * *

I am proud to know so many people who worked so hard for Kamala Harris. She deserved so much better. But I’ve also been haunted by the acquaintances (not friends, acquaintances) in my life who voted for Biden in 2020, but voted for either Donald Trump or Jill Stein in 2024.

One lifelong Democrat voted for Jill Stein because they were still mad at the DNC over Bernie Sanders’ loss in 2016 and 2020. While in the moment they did the right thing and voted for Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, stewing in anti-Biden leftist Facebook propaganda for four years left them unable to vote for him. Another lifelong Democrat voted for Donald Trump in reaction to the campus protests for Palestine, convinced that Democrats had been taken over by anti-Semites. Again, this individual migrated over the past four years to Jewish Facebook groups with a decided pro-Trump bend. Another individual became convinced, again from Facebook, that the Biden Administration was forcing sex changes on students without their parents permission, and that even though they were a lifelong Democrat, this supposed social engineering must be stopped by any means necessary. Finally, an acquaintance fell in hard with the campus Palestine movement online, became startlingly anti-Semitic, and pulled the level for Jill Stein. 

There are common threads to all these stories, with all these individuals being (or becoming) extremely online, and as a result, being radicalized by YouTube and Facebook algorithms. But people who are not propagandized have no idea just how bad the information environment is out there. Trump’s dumb and dangerous trade war will hurt Red States the most? They don’t know and don’t care! As another example, here is our union Newspaper from this past Fall:

When I walk past the Asian Grocery store, I see the Epoch Times right out front. When I am at the Supermarket checkout, I see tabloids propping up Trump. When I search for a video on Youtube, the first two or three hits are right wing podcasts. 

MAGA isn’t going to find out, because they can’t find out, even if they wanted to.

* * *

I wrote, not too long ago, that the establishment media has failed liberalism, and corporate media dying would be a good thing. Although counterintuitive when talking about a media landscape polluted by right wing misinformation, our corporate media now has an unquenchable fetish for authoritarianism, and can no longer be an ally. Here is how our establishment media covered the debut of Trump’s Press secretary:

I have no doubt that should there ever be Democratic power again, Silicon Valley would fight aggressively against the relatively easy legal fixes that would halt the flow of misinformation online. Stop those algorithms, stop the railroading of people to conservative voices. Completely eliminating all excess capital, so billionaires cannot afford to send their message out, should also be a Democratic priority. No billionaires, no billionaire misinformation. Again, none of these are easy, and not doable without large Democratic majorities, but we know now where any future Democratic Administration must focus their effort: allowing people to actually find out.

The accomplishments of President Biden were manifold, but here are (perhaps) the biggest 23:

1. Passed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package to increase investment in the national network of bridges and roads, airports, public transport and national broadband internet, as well as waterways and energy systems.
2. Helped get more than 500 million life-saving COVID-19 vaccinations in the arms of Americans through the American Rescue Plan.
3. Stopped a 30-year streak of federal inaction on gun violence by signing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that created enhanced background checks, closed the “boyfriend” loophole and provided funds for youth mental health.
4. Made a $369 billion investment in climate change, the largest in American history, through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
5. Ended the longest war in American history by pulling the troops out of Afghanistan.
6. Provided $10,000 to $20,000 in college debt relief to Americans with loans who make under $125,000 a year.
7. Cut child poverty in half through the American Rescue Plan.
8. Capped prescription drug prices at $2,000 per year for seniors on Medicare through the Inflation Reduction Act.
9. Passed the COVID-19 relief deal that provided payments of up to $1,400 to many struggling U.S. citizens while supporting renters and increasing unemployment benefits.
10. Achieved historically low unemployment rates after the pandemic caused them to skyrocket.
11. Imposed a 15% minimum corporate tax on some of the largest corporations in the country, ensuring that they pay their fair share, as part of the historic Inflation Reduction Act.
12. Recommitted America to the global fight against climate change by rejoining the Paris Agreement.
13. Strengthened the NATO alliance in support of Ukraine after the Russian invasion by endorsing the inclusion of world military powers Sweden and Finland.
14. Authorized the assassination of the Al Qaeda terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, who became head of the organization after the death of Osama bin Laden.
15. Gave Medicare the power to negotiate prescription drug prices through the Inflation Reduction Act while also reducing government health spending.
16. Held Vladimir Putin accountable for his invasion of Ukraine by imposing stiff economic sanctions.
17. Boosted the budget of the Internal Revenue Service by nearly $80 billion to reduce tax evasion and increase revenue.
18. Created more jobs in one year (6.6 million) than any other president in U.S. history.
19. Reduced healthcare premiums under the Affordable Care Act by $800 a year as part of the American Rescue Plan.
20. Signed the PACT Act to address service members’ exposure to burn pits and other toxins.
21. Signed the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen American manufacturing and innovation.
22. Reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act through 2027.
23. Halted all federal executions after the previous administration reinstated them after a 17-year freeze.

Twenty-three still seems like too large a number for a summary, and it is. But Biden was just that accomplished, and I had to omit many accomplishments just to pare it down. Although not readily apparent, within this list was a particular focus on rural Americans, Red States, and working class voters, all of which are demographics that have been moving away from the Democrats for years. Considering that America was at (or as close to possible) full employment with a booming economy, these voters returned the favor by supporting Joe Biden, right? Right?

No.

Joe Biden was massively unpopular throughout his one term. In fact, he was so unpopular, Blue States like New York and New Jersey could have swung Republican if he had not decided to drop out of the race after a single term. Joe Biden left office with a 38% approval rating. Although it’s difficult to compare, this isn’t that much better than George W. Bush, who left office with a 34% approval rating. We can readily explain away Bush’s low approval. The Country was careening into the Great Recession and mired in a bloody War of Bush’s personal choosing. But Biden? Biden left office with the US not involved in a foreign conflict for the first time in decades, a booming economy, and not a single scandal. Biden’s low approval so aggressively defied rational explanation, I had at one time argued it must be incorrect. As we know from the results in November, it sadly wasn’t.

* * *

With every new Democratic Administration, we’re plagued with a surge of progressive arguments for needing the next FDR (also, here, here, here, ad infinitum... ).

Some of this is understandable. FDR not only transformed American Society for the better, he was the greatest President of the last Century.  FDR also best exemplified the philosophy of deliverism through the New Deal, and was rewarded with astounding Democratic majorities. The New Deal still holds such sway, that 80 some odd years later, a green version of it was a cornerstone of Bernie Sander’s bid for the nomination. Sen. Sanders still has an entire page dedicated to a green new deal on his web site. Never mind that the coalition of voters that allowed the New Deal to happen hasn’t existed for 60 years.

I am not here to argue that there isn’t a moral imperative for deliverism. 

President Barack Obama came into office amidst economic calamity and with large majorities in both Houses of Congress. The healthcare system was a travesty, and voters had been clamoring for reform for decades.  The majority of voters had just said right before the election that the government needed to urgently address the situation as a top priority. We know (now) that Obamacare saves an estimated 45,000 lives a year, and it remains popular too! But how were the Democrats rewarded at the time for passing such important and popular legislation? Democrats suffered the largest midterm loss in generations. Even as Obamacare has become more popular, Democrats have never been rewarded electorally for passing it. We can (and will) argue the wither-tos and why-fors of this disconnect, but despite the moral imperative of Obamacare, it is not clear delivering healthcare reform for voters has been anything but a net negative electorally.

Just a short while ago, I would have argued that the moral imperative to deliver what was right outweighed any electoral calculus. Now? I’m not so sure,.

I’m also not here to argue that Republicans don’t engage in deliverism either.

Their chief form of deliverism is tax cuts for the wealthy. Although the wealthy constitute a tiny fraction of the population, decades of trickle down propaganda have led a large number of voters to believe that tax cuts for the wealthy will include them too. Donald Trump has added cruelty to that mix as well, and he is delivering cruelty as well. It may be why his approval has been rising since election day.

One could argue that Republicans also have not been rewarded electorally for passing tax cuts, as their electoral success in recent years is also decidedly mixed. Donald Trump was not rewarded for passing tax cuts in 2018 or 2020. But tax cuts for the wealthy have a second, hidden benefit: they build political power. Republicans are so desperate to cut taxes for the wealthy because increased wealth allows billionaires to buy more media, to contribute more to political campaigns, to launch more primary challenges against detractors, to own more television and cable news stations, and so on. Yes Republicans are misleading regular people, and doing it very effectively, but their real intent is to lock in power, not be more popular. It is the political power from tax cuts, not deliverism, that has allowed Republicans to overperform these past years. 

* * *

What would a Democratic Administration not engaged in deliverism even look like? I have no idea, having lived my entire life with Democrats adhering to the philosophy of deliverism. One approach would be for Democrats to become more like Republicans, and stop attempting to deliver for hostile voters, even if it is morally imperative to do so.

What if Biden had spent his political capital more on Blue States and suburbs?

* * *

So why did deliverism work for FDR, but not for Biden, who clearly tried to emulate the FDR Presidency? One theory is that the people Democrats are now trying to reach at best aren’t paying attention, or worse, are completely misinfiormed.

As a personal example, I recently needed to go to urgent care. In the past, I would have had to spend painful hours at the emergency room, but thankfully, I was seen within the hour at an urgent care facility. Who, reading this diary, knows that the increase in urgent care facilities is due to Obamacare? And we are among the educated people. People Obamacare tried to win over probably do not know this piece of information, and how Democrats materially made life better for people.

Personally, I feel deliverism faces two key obstacles in the modern time:

1. The media environment between passage of a law and when benefits materially reach people; and
2. The time between passage and when benefits materially reach people.

Look at Obamacare as an example. There you had this incredibly long hang time between passage and implementation, where Republicans could tee off on fear mongering or web sites not working correctly, before people eventually accepted it. This is yet another reason Democrats must move away from establishment media as soon as possible, create, and fund their own media ecosystem. Look at the CNN article on urgent care I linked to, above. What photo did they choose to convey this real benefit of Obamacare? A hospital emergency room closing, even though the increase in urgent care centers has nothing to do with hospital closures, nor does anything in the CNN article mention emergency room closures!

The second, interrelated reason deliverism no longer works is because of the long hang time between passage of legislation and when benefits eventually do reach people. So much time passes, people often don’t connect the final benefit with the legislation, or if they do make the connection, that there is any benefit of all. Here is how Republicans labeling the Affordable Care Act as “Obamacare” was an own goal on their part, constantly reminding people Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act. So let’s look at another major Democratic initiative in a blue state, California High Speed Rail. Democrats want a National network of high speed rail, right? So why are we in our sixteenth year (!) of this project, and we don’t have an operable segment. Republicans are partly to blame. California High Speed rail was held up in courts for years by Republicans. It has also been underfunded and subject to withering right wing media attacks. But Democrats share plenty of blame, too. They currently have $4.3 billion towards the project they haven’t yet spent. And they haven’t yet spent this because the permitting and approval process, especially in blue states like California, is so lengthy and complicated. This is actually my area of professional expertise, and I hope to write more diaries on our broken infrastructure process in the future. Bernie Sanders wants a Green New Deal. But even if he passed one, you would never get it built due to all the permitting and approval headaches. And here is where Democrats, and our love of establishments, fails us. Democrats created the modern environmental permitting and regulatory environment, and now our ability to build projects to help the environment is completely strangled by it. 

* * *

Joe Biden set out to be the next FDR. And in many ways, his accomplishments in one term are as impressive, as he was working with a much smaller coalition. I am sure that if someone had told Biden how his Presidency would have ended in four years later, he would still have passed every single piece of legislation, because he is a moral and upright human being.

I can’t conclude whether deliverism would work in a different media environment or in an environment that allowed faster implementation, But Democrats should strive for this environment regardless. 

There is so much happening right now as we approach the singularity of all the terrible people in our society, it's hard to focus on any one story. But this particular con, one of his many, is highly visible, has ensnared the US space exploration program, and perfectly encapsulates the harm Elon does and how he does it.

I am proud of becoming Musk wary way back during the 2018 Thai cave rescue, when he first parachuted in, uninvited, to offer his “genius” to the problem, and then attacked an actual expert when his proffered solution revealed an utter lack of knowledge in the subject. It was shortly thereafter when I learned, for the first time, that Elon didn’t have an engineering background, and might not even be a genius, as I had presumed.

Elon Musk's offer 'not practical' for cave mission, Thai rescue chief says https://t.co/Sc9awbB2XJpic.twitter.com/CXRy7l4Ia1

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) July 10, 2018

I later realized there is a recognizable pattern to his malignancy. Hyperloop, a technology that was always laughably infeasible, was founded just to kill off high speed rail proposals.

White House NEC director Gary Cohn says @elonmusk thinks we "can tunnel the entire United States" and can "beat high speed rail"

— David Shepardson (@davidshepardson) April 4, 2017

Spoiler Alert: No he can’t.

Happy to have this confirmed: the goal of Hyperloop was to get California’s high-speed rail canceled. Musk and the Kochs, both trying to halt a transition away from automobiles. For Musk, fantasy technologies are preferable to real solutions.#cahsr#highspeedrailpic.twitter.com/OP0qndZKGJ

— Paris Marx (@parismarx) August 30, 2019

How many news stories were there on hyperloop? How many are there still? Elon is still making outlandish claims, like just the other day, a tunnel from New York to London in 54 minutes. Hyperloop as a corporate entity has already been dissolved, once its purpose of killing high speed rail was served. I also suspect Elon did not want to wait for physics to demonstrate that which engineers already knew. But remember, the number of people in the Country who can identify something like hyperloop as technologically infeasible is limited. Look at the number of news stories on this preposterous $20 billion tunnel. It’s not that Elon fools a credulous and scientifically illiterate media — Elon even fooled a television show about future space communists.

Now let’s mix some nerddom metaphors:

“But they were all of them deceived” — Lady Galadriel

Up and down the internet, from every rocketry crevice of Wikipedia to mainstream media, there are credulous stories fluffing SpaceX e.g., Eric Berger at Ars Technica).  These fans didn’t necessarily agree with Elon’s politics — they were overwhelmed by Elon’s argument that going to Mars is somehow worthwhile for humanity, and a hidebound, sclerotic NASA is holding us back.  It’s a much more attractive argument than NASA’s, which is that the cost and risk is too great, and the scientific value too little. NASA realized two decades ago there is very little humans can do on Mars that robots can’t do simpler, safer, and cheaper. NASA also knows Mars also kind of sucks as a place to live. I’m sure humans will one day venture to Mars. Western society has been primed by years of movies (here, here, here, here) to believe it so. Just as we expected flying cars by now, we expected humans to be on Mars. But for now, physics disappoints, and I think that was unbearable for the set who grew up on Popular Mechanics in the 80’s.

i’m not a rocket scientist but.

So how does a rocket work? In as simple terms possible, if you want to put something up in space, and especially have it stay there, you need to be going fast enough to overcome Earth's gravity. Isaac Newton demonstrated this in 1728 with his cannonball thought experiment.

If you’re not going fast enough, you fall back to Earth (A and B). If you’re going fast enough (C) , you can return to where you started thereby making an orbit. Faster still (D), and you make a more elliptical orbit. Finally, if you go fast enough (E), you can escape the gravity of Earth completely.

And that’s what a rocket trying to reach low Earth Orbit (C) does. It carries enough fuel to eventually achieve a sufficient velocity all the while the weight of the rocket, its cargo, and fuel yet to be burned are holding it back. It gets a little more complicated than that, with stages and how gravity changes as you go up higher. But that is pretty much it. 

Now SpaceX has some real accomplishments. They made tremendous strides in partial reusability and affordability, the former reinforcing the latter here.  The Falcon 9 Block 5 is the most prolific launch system in the World, can be partially reusable, and can place 18,500 kg in low earth orbit at a cost of about $70 million. United Launch Alliance has the Atlas V 551, which is not reusable, and can place a similar payload in Low Earth Orbit for a cost of $153 million per launch.

but there’s an m.o. here

Then again, you can’t really trust anything Elon Musk says, especially when it comes to cost.

Via SpaceX’s hand-in-hand of low costs and Internet hype, the US Government is now almost entirely dependent on SpaceX. And as Oliver Willis pointed out yesterday, the US Government just paid Elon billions more.

I strongly suspect those low launch costs are, at least in part, subsidized by investor hype, just as Tesla’s (even still) outrageous stock price is buoyed by Elon’s promise of full self-driving, another technology that may not ever materialize.  Tesla, which sold 1.8M cars last year, is worth more than the next nine largest automakers combined, who sold a total of 44M cars. But SpaceX is a private company, and so we can’t know for sure… 

Or can we? SpaceX (with the promise of Mars) exhibits the same pattern as Tesla (a promise of full self driving), and hyperloop (promise of hyper fast travel). And with SpaceX and hyperloop, there’s an ideological bent: killing off government investment in infrastructure. Elon has been clear about killing NASA’s upcoming mission to the moon and deorbiting International Space Station. It’s all just a little too coincidental.

Why does SpaceX promise Mars? Well, to be the real world equivalent of a meme stock. While the investing world seems woefully bereft of people with technological common sense, even investors know that the Falcon 9 Block 5 isn’t getting anything but a robotic probe to Mars. 18,500kg isn’t enough of a payload capacity. So Elon hypes starship, as if the name could be self-fulfilling.

the seeds of destruction

In the image of orbital mechanics, above, achieving (E) is much, much harder than (C). Even in low Earth orbit, despite gaining tremendous velocity, you still have overcome only a fraction of Earth’s gravity. If not for the illusion of zero gravity due to motion, in low earth orbit, you would weigh about 90% of what you do on the surface of the Earth. In other words, you still have a lot of gravity to overcome if you want to get to Mars.

Oh, and if you want your spaceship to be reusable, you need to devote weight to the fuel that will slow the craft down and make for cool videos. You spacecraft has to be reinforced to survive reentry, which is a brutal process, and that costs a lot of weight too. And that’s why Starship keeps exploding. Will Lockett has an amazing article explaining why.

Musk’s impotent attempts to get his giant shiny phallus to work are the perfect metaphor for the man. Indeed, Starship seemed promising at first if you didn’t ask too many questions. But, after back-to-back failures and having never come close to completing its design brief (including actually landing Starship and making the spacecraft fully reusable), as well as a litany of painful design flaws, such as only being able to take 50% of its promised payload capacity to orbit, many are starting to question the viability of this idiotic machine ... And so they should. Indeed, with the most recent launch failure as context, it becomes evident that Starship was doomed from the get-go and that SpaceX might never be able to rectify this mess.

But what about all those super awesome videos showing the Super Heavy booster landing? Doesn’t that mean SpaceX is most of the way there? No. That image is more like being 1/15th of the way there. At best.

Landing the Super Heavy Booster is a far, far easier task than landing the Starship from orbit.

The Super Heavy Booster weighs 160 tonnes dry, doesn’t make it to space, and its peak speed is only roughly 4,600 mph. Meanwhile, Starship has a dry mass of around 150 tonnes, makes it to space, and reaches an orbital speed of at least 17,500 mph. This means that during landing, Starship has over 13.57 times the kinetic energy of the Booster! And that doesn’t account for the fact that Starship carries significantly more propellant during landing than the Booster.

All that energy has to go somewhere, and managing that is one hell of an engineering challenge. On top of that, Starship’s landing is also far more complex, as it has to reenter the atmosphere at those speeds. Not only does this process present significant aerodynamic challenges, but it also exposes Starship to enough heat energy to literally melt every gram of steel it is made from.

The problem isn’t the reusable booster, which is a technological achievement. The problem is that Elon Musk, in his hubris, tried to reinvent the Space Shuttle.

Now, the space Shuttle had several fatal design flaws, and certainly was a design that could have been improved upon. It also could not achieve full reusability as originally envisioned (only the solid rocket boosters and the orbiter were reusable, and with great effort).  But the best engineers in the world made it work, and the space shuttle could deliver 27,500 kg to low earth orbit.

SpaceX is using a less powerful (but safer) fuel. But SpaceX is promising that Starship will deliver 50, 100, 150, or even 200 tons to low earth orbit. And be fully reusable. That’s 3.8 to 15 times the payload using less powerful fuel. The Elon fanboys will tell you that materials have improved, but the SpaceX starship and space shuttle orbiter weigh almost the same! Maybe it runs on Elon’s genius?

And that’s what’s causing starship to suffer these rapid unscheduled disassemblies.

Both [recent] tests failed when an uncontrollable fire broke out in the aft section, [due to a] weak fuel line issue... 

But why has SpaceX failed to solve this problem? Well, it’s because of the bane of any rocket scientist: physics...

...[the recent] tests confirmed that SpaceX’s engines couldn’t produce the mythical levels of thrust Musk promised, and as such, the projected payload to LEO was cut in half. These faults would render Starship utterly useless. Musk needed a solution…

...SpaceX is [now] having to make the rockets too light, resulting in them being fragile, meaning that just the vibrations from operation with a fraction of its expected payload would be enough to destroy the rocket…

In other words, Elon has already squeezed too much weight out of Starship, so that simply launching it is enough to result in its destruction. 

... making a fully reusable rocket with even a barely usable payload to space is impossible. Musk knows this: Falcon 9 was initially meant to be fully reusable until he discovered that the useful payload would be zero. That was his iterative design telling him Starship was impossible over a decade ago, as just making the rocket larger won’t solve this! But he went on ahead anyway. Why?

Well, through some transparent corruption and cronyism, he could secure multi-billion-dollar contracts from NASA to build this mythical rocket. But, by going for full-scale testing, he could not only hide the inherent flaws of Starship long enough for the cash to be handed over to him but also put NASA in a position of the sunk cost fallacy. NASA has given SpaceX so much money, and their plans rely so heavily on Starship that they can’t walk away; ....

This is why Starship, in my opinion, is just one massive con.

That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; .... Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.

real world implications 

There was no way NASA would be brave enough, a decade ago or today, to call out what many of us suspected: that the math for Starship just doesn’t add up. The whole Starship concept is a farce.

So Elon has been busy using his platforms and power to bully and hype, and NASA went with SpaceX to provide a modified Starship as a lunar lander for the Artemis III mission. How could they not? Look how cool it is!

Thankfully this Starship lunar lander variant doesn’t need to return to Earth, and can thus be much lighter. But I’m not confident even this lighter version could successfully make it to orbit. Artemis II is launching in 2026, and Artemis III is rapidly coming up. NASA is already delaying Artemis III over concerns with lack of any real progress with the lunar Starship, and those concerns aren’t nearly enough. 

So Elon hoodwinked the US Government with cool videos and legions of tech fans, and is now hamstringing the US Space program, because, sooner or later, he would have to reveal that he isn’t a genius, just some rich guy who conned the space exploration community. Or he could get Trump elected and call for the cancellation of the entire program and gesticulate wildly in the direction of Mars. After all, if we cancel everything and talk about Mars (which will never happen), Elon never has to reveal his shortcomings. The con goes on. I always said that just as Donald Trump is the con man for people who watch reality television, Elon Musk is the con man for people who shopped at the Sharper Image. 

Not to end on such a dour note, but there are solutions. The Artemis program also has a litany of issues that shouldn’t be overlooked. But that is the only US existing heavy lift launch system that can take humans to the Moon. New leadership who can clearly call out Musk’s mendacity and stupidity would help. A new Congress or Administration could inspect and audit SpaceX, revealing the impossibility of Starship and Mars thereby ending the con. Heck, why not even nationalize SpaceX. After all, it was NASA who gave them their start.