Here, I’m riffing off some Wall Street Journal articles about the election outcome.
Vice President Kamala Harris lost her bid for the White House on Wednesday despite spending most of the funds on an expansive ground operation, staffing and a flood of ads. President-elect Donald Trump won a second term with half of what Harris’s campaign spent.
Maybe there’s something to a businessman’s understanding of expenses and budgeting. It’s also true that the performance of the administration of which Harris was such a vital part was a serious handicap that money had a hard time papering over.
The experts said the economy was doing great. Everyday Americans disagreed.
Everyday Americans, us average Americans, aren’t as dumb or ignorant as the Left, or the press, or the Progressive-Democratic Party insist that we are. And we got tired of their gaslighting and insults.
On Tuesday night, wealthy Democratic donors and operatives, who had been getting positive updates from the campaign throughout the day….
This is either the Progressive-Democrats lying to their own donors or a measure of their own incompetence in reading the voters and reading the incoming returns. Both of those are well within the performance bounds of Party. Party has, after all, been lying to us all about our economy for nearly four years.
In laying blame for Harris’s loss, Democrats were quick to point to Biden’s decision to run for re-election two years ago and the ensuing efforts to quash any dissent from those who thought it was a bad idea or sought to challenge him.
This, also, is typical of the Left and of Party: it’s always someone else’s fault. This part is sort of recognized, if broadly tangentially (yeah, yeah, math majors), by Chris Kofinis, former chief of staff to Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV):
The elites of this country alienated voters everywhere because they didn’t want to hear what working- and middle-class voters were screaming for four years—focus on us and our problems, not your agenda to destroy Trump[.]
Indeed. They’ve—all three: Party, Left in general, and press—have been solely focused on Trump is bad, not Trump policies are bad and Party’s are better. All three, further, ignore working- and middle-class voters because us average Americans are too ignorant and stupid to be worth listening to.
And one overall riff, this on the polls and the pollsters who make them. Once again, as has been the case for the last several election cycles, both Presidential and intermediate, the polls were widely off, especially on the size of the leads and of the victory margins, but also on who would win, though they did get one right. Take the just concluded election as a typical (I claim) example.
The contest was balanced on a knife’s edge, with a (very) slight advantage to Harris. The seven battle ground States each hung on a knife’s edge, also. That’s according to the polls. In the realization, Trump won a decisive victory, and he won solidly five of the battle grounds. The remaining two (as I write Thursday), Nevada and Arizona with 92% and 71% of the votes counted, respectively, have Trump leading by 4 percentage points and 5 percentage points, respectively. If the battle grounds truly were on a knife’s edge, it would be reasonable to expect anywhere between 3 and 5 of them to go to one candidate with the remaining going to the other. The likelihood of all 7 of them going to one candidate (assuming, for this simplified overview, that “knife’s edge” means a 50-50 chance) are a skosh under 0.8%—1 chance in 12,800. Even the likelihood of 5 States going one way (the upper bound of my middle range) is only 3%.
These errors, though, have been repeated over the last several cycles. The likelihood of accurately done polls being so consistently wrong in the same way is even smaller. That strongly suggests either (or both) of two things to me. One is that the pollsters creating these polls are utterly incompetent. They’ve had all these cycle with which to figure out what they’re getting wrong in their poll construction and execution, and they still haven’t succeeded.
Alternatively, the pollsters are dishonest and are focusing their efforts on getting a particular outcome to their surveys so as to construct a narrative favoring one candidate/party over the other rather than simply reporting a potential narrative as told by the pollees in their aggregate.
Either way, it’s become clear that no one with two neurons to bump together into a ganglion can take the pollsters’ products as anything more serious than mindless entertainment.
