R-pilled Polls Are Bad For Rs…and This Week’s Writing 9/7/24

Nate Silver's a grifting dope, plus! what I published this week.

Hello again! As the kitty is telling you, I’ve got a list of what I published this week below. Before we get there, though! I thought I’d check in with you all on The Polls.

Nate Silver’s new forecast, The Silver Bulletin, has been predicting a Trump victory, in contrast with most other models (and poll averages) which show Harris with a 3 point lead and a slight edge in the electoral college.

Silver’s averages are different (as far as I can tell) because he’s adjusting for a convention bounce that didn’t really happen for Harris (she got her bounce when she entered the race) and because he’s including a bunch of shitty Republican biased polls whose sole purpose is to reassure R partisans that they’re winning.

These shit R polls drive D partisans nuts, and I understand that. It’s enraging to have Nate Silver wandering around social media insisting that the Harris campaign is collapsing when there is in fact no evidence that the Harris campaign is collapsing, or anything like it.

It’s worth realizing, though, that this kind of empty R boosterism driven by lousy R pollsters doesn’t actually help R candidates. Instead, it’s another instance of the way in which right wing media incentives and right-wing electoral incentives have diverged.

GOP pollsters want clicks and attention which they can convert to ad dollars. The inventives for them are to put out polls that show Rs winning.

But! Candidates would if anything prefer to be seen as underdogs. Harris/Walz have been fundraising hard off of Silver’s crappy polls, warning Ds that they’re behind and need to contribute more. GOP partisans want to feel like they don’t need to worry. But in a close election like this one, candidates want their partisans to worry! They want them to donate, to volunteer, to vote. A constant barrage of R pollsters insisting that the election is over is demobilizing. If it has any effect, it’s going to hurt Rs, not help them.

We saw a clear example of how honest, negative polling can help a party just a couple months ago. Joe Biden’s polling was terrible. That led him and many other D leaders to believe he might not be able to win, which prompted his exit from the race—and the entrance of Harris, whose polls (and fundraising tallies) have been much stronger.

Trump would of course never drop out. But also the GOP is unlikely to be open to recalibrating strategy on the basis of polls because lousy R pollsters flood the zone with garbage numbers which lead Rs to think all is well even when it isn’t.

Seeing crappy pollsters puffing Rs is irritating if you’re a Democrat. But it’s worse than irritating for Republicans, who are systematically gouging out their own eyes so that they can’t see any pitfalls ahead. It’s an unusually vivid example of the ways in which GOP partisan media is in the business of perpetuating itself, rather than in the business of winning elections for the GOP.

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Also! If you like my writing/find it valuable, consider becoming a paid subscriber? It’s $5/month, $50/year, and it makes it possible for me to keep on keeping on in a…very bad environment for freelance journalists.

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Okay! Here’s what I published this week!

Politics

Harris’ 2020 campaign was not a failure. (EIH)

Zionists don’t get to define Zionism for everyone. (EIH)

Cultural Criticism

I was interviewed about the Blair Witch Project. (Colin McEnroe Show)

Death vs. genre in A Quiet Place: Day One. (EIH)

Poetry

A poem about all the Spocks. (Synchronized Chaos)

An interview about my book Not Akhmatova. (rob mclennan’s blog)