Editors’ Blog

I wanted to do an update to my post on Monday about the situation in Israel-Palestine as well as on campuses on the United States.

A few of you asked, what was the response to the post? It was, I think, overwhelmingly positive. I did have one longtime reader say he was quitting the site and ending his subscription over it. If I interpreted his message and what I’ve known about his viewpoints generally, he thought I was being too critical of Israel. But people are entitled to their opinions and viewpoints and feelings. And I say that not as a throwaway line but as a statement of fact and a recognition of the right way to live in the world. But the overwhelming and almost universal response was positive.

Everyone is publishing their bills of particulars about all the horrible things Donald Trump will do if he becomes president again. That’s become even easier with Time magazine’s publication today of a lengthy interview with Trump in which he expands on the list and provides quotes that make them more specific. (Get ready for your pregnancy ankle bracelet and fetal monitor if you get pregnant in a red state.) But there’s one item on these litanies that’s not really correct. And we should understand what it actually means more clearly.

I wanted to share a few thoughts on the ongoing crisis and mess in Israel-Palestine and also on America’s elite college campuses.

First, a thought on the campus situation and this question of whether these protests are tainted by anti-Semitism. I know most about the situation at Columbia, which certainly isn’t to say I’m an expert on it. To me it seems clear that non-students operating on the periphery of the campus have been responsible for the most egregious comments or incidents that almost no one would deny are anti-Semitic. There’s been some of that from students on campus, usually in heated instances when visibly Jewish students are in the proximity of protesters.

There were so many things that happened yesterday in the Supreme Court’s hearing on presidential immunity that it’s hard to know where to start. But one part that captured it for me was Sam Alito’s line of argument that presidential immunity might be necessary to make it possible for presidents to leave office voluntarily, or that not having some broad grant of immunity would make refusal to leave office more likely. Here’s one of the quotes: “If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is gonna be able to go off to a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy? And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process, where the loser gets thrown in jail.”

For most of this election season so far, FiveThirtyEight hasn’t surfaced its own presidential race average. Compiling these averages in a sophisticated and honest way is actually kind of complicated. (They explain their methodology here.) We used to play in this space with PollTracker. So I know from experience. For me it’s not that I put so much weight on the specific number. It’s just a simpler way of visualizing the trend over time.

Well, now they’ve finally rolled theirs out. So I don’t have to be so reliant on RealClearPolitics, which has both a clumsy methodology and goes to comical length to add or not add polls to juice their favored candidate. All that said, the absolute averages as of today as remarkably similar. Trump up .4% on FiveThirtyEight and .3% on RCP. This reminds us of some of the ironies and … how can I say it, melancholy and ennui of complexity. The FiveThirtyEight model is HUGELY complex and sophisticated. It factors in all sorts of different variables. It incorporates findings from individual states into the national averages and vice versa. And yet for all this statistical leg work the averages as of this moment are essentially identical.