Member Newsletter
I’ve made this point a few times in recent weeks, here and on the podcast. I’m going to make the point again because I think it’s critical for understanding this election nine days out. We keep hearing that this is the closest election in decades. Polls say that’s right. At least 5 of the 7 swing states are within a single percentage point — fairly meaningless margins statistically. National poll averages are between one and two points — right on the cusp of where most believe a Democratic Electoral College victory becomes possible. But I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. What we have is a high uncertainty election. That’s not the same thing. There’s every chance that most or every race that looks close will veer more or less uniformly in one direction. And that wouldn’t necessarily be because of one late-breaking story, some great decision by one of the candidates or even undecideds all “breaking” in one way. It could simply be because the dominant understanding of the race and the electorate was just a bit off and had been all along.
Even more than usual this year our understanding of this race, from polls, from dominant media narratives, understandings of what happened in the past two elections, is based on assumptions that may simply be wrong. In my way of looking at it, there are a small number of interlocking assumptions about the electorate that make up our understanding of this race. There are plausible arguments that each is wrong. That makes the outcome very uncertain. It also creates a lot of avenues for wishful or motivated thinking.
It should go without saying that I’m not encouraging a fatalist approach to the contest in which there’s no point eking out every last vote with phone banking and donating and door-knocking. That would be absurd. I trust our audience is smart enough and, yes, small enough that I don’t need to worry about making that clear.
You might also say: Well, that’s interesting, but what’s the operational take away? Is there any practical impact on anything I might do?
Well, not really? I say it only because I think it affords us a better understanding of what we’re in the midst of. To me, that has a value in itself.
Finally, isn’t this how it always is? Electoral fog of war, the inherent uncertainty of knowing how a vast national community of hundreds of millions of people is going to make decisions at the ballot box? Sort of. But not entirely. I think there’s more uncertainty than usual because of 1) rapid changes in the polling industry in response to evolving technology, 2) methodological changes in response to polls twice underestimating Donald Trump’s electoral strength, and 3) the steep and inherent difficulties of separating what about the 2020 election was embedded electoral trends and what was the COVID pandemic. So yes, I really do think there are more question marks, more debatable assumptions packaged into the analyses than usual.
Of course, if the polls said that either candidate was 15 points ahead this would all mostly be moot. We know that the race is at least fairly close. That’s why all these factors are in play. And that’s a good way to conclude on the expectations setting — that I’m not saying some sort of blow out in either direction is likely. Just that it might not actually be that close. And we should be careful to distinguish between these two things — close and uncertain.