Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…
… and one of those ways to teach you to do some fucking karate.
On my first day in Ass-Whipping School I was taught to punch not at the surface of the target but about three inches into the target. To punch straight through. Which at the time I thought was excessive and a bit overly aggressive. Now that I’m older I understand that if you’re forced to whip ass you gotta whip that ass right down into the ground until that ass can’t ass no more.
Which of course brings us to polling. Or maybe I’m jumping ahead.
Rule of thumb: You bring in a futurist when you have no good data, you can’t extrapolate any findings in good faith, and you’d otherwise be lost in the woods. Futurists work in data-light, data-medium, and data-ambiguous environments really well but as you get better data and it gets right-up-close to your target time horizon the less you listen to futurists and the more you listen to the data people.
So now that we’re past Labor Day and the data (polling) people are in their element, I’m listening to them more than I’m listening to me. Except for this one thing: both candidates are polling dead-even. We know what the numbers are but we don’t know what the numbers mean. Welcome to data ambiguity. Different interpretations of the now yield different forecasts about the next.
First, which data people am I listening to and reading on a near daily basis?
The stars in my constellation are 538 and Nate Silver for numbers and statistical odds, my election-wonk-forecasters are Larry Sabato, the Cook Political Report, and most of the pundits that 270towin uses for their own consensus forecast (which has a map you can manipulate on your own).
For understanding what’s going on within the numbers I rely on Rachel Bitecofer (who forecasts election outcomes based on who’s more animated to vote against someone, ie. the “negative partisanship” approach) and Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark (who has been running focus groups with Trump supporters who have abandoned him or are considering doing so).
(I recognize that’s an odd and incomplete constellation but I’m doing some extra thinking with each of those sources that I’ll tell you about another time.)
Collectively, they’ve found a few things.
Most election forecasters have the odds as 55-60% of a Kamala Harris win and 40-45% Trump but because of all the polling wobble and that the fact the election is going to be decided in the Electoral College in states that are functionally tied or within the margin of error, that means the entire election is absolutely tied.
Trump’s numbers can go only down (he’s been banging against his ceiling of support for a few weeks now); hers can go up or down. According to several sources, Trump is unwilling to campaign on the issues now — he thinks his winning strategy is to drive her numbers down, to defame her until her numbers drop below his.
He, however, faces a set of number-beaters of his own between now and Election Day, though: this Arlington National Cemetery dumbassery is probably hurting him (it must offend Actual Jesus and Army Jesus), he could screw up in the debate next week, he’ll be sentenced the week after for all 34 convictions, and there’s still a chance the evidentiary hearing of all the evidence of his big-ass crimes related to the Capitol Riot plus the rest of his election-overturn efforts may hit oxygen in the weeks or days before the election. There’s also the outside chance that Trump could successfully pressure the House GOP into blowing the funding deadline and causing a partial federal government shutdown at midnight on the last day of this month and shutdowns generally make voters of both parties marginally pissed at the GOP to marginally significant margins-y margins.
For her part, she could screw up during the debate — which I don’t think she’s gonna — or she could be hurt by Trump and his surrogates calling her a slut. Or black. Or a woman. Or a black woman slut. At which point I’ll want America to strategically deploy Doug. And Ivana may poof-return from the dead to hold Doug’s jacket and his smile so they don’t get dirty. (If Kamala wins, she should establish some sort of Strategic Doug Reserve. We’d all be the better for it.)
All of this still means that, Doug-Almighty notwithstanding, we’re staring right at a tie between two big ol’ floating silent spheres of the exact same size floating weightless in space and none of us know what exists inside either one. Both are completely opaque.
This is why election forecasters have been falling back on fundraising amounts and rates and crowd sizes and the like: they’re treating them as proxies to try to divine what’s going on inside each sphere.
This is part of why Trump is so obsessed with crowd sizes: not just because he thinks he can get people to believe he has the bigger, uh, thing but because he understands that right now in this election the larger the crowd size means the greater amount of enthusiasm — and thus an indicator of the greater solidity within his own sphere. He knows his support is flagging or static and that hers is disrupting the Jetstream overhead but he’s trying to make it appear the other way around.
And election forecasters been trying to divine the same from what’s being said in focus groups.
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark has been running them weekly and she’s pea-green each weekend when she reports her findings online because they don’t quite square with polling numbers. Overall, she was finding previously that Trump-voting Republicans who have been open to a switch have mostly been clamoring for a change — any change from the negativity and darkness and polarization of the past two decades. Now the Democrats have offered a change and positivity and It Can Be Morning in America while the Republicans have doubled down on Fear, Crime, Brown People, and Darkness and It’s Midnight in America. But still it doesn’t look like Kamala on the ticket has broken the tie.
So now it’s left to the rest of us to rely on the least reliable indicators of anything: the absence of campaign signs in the yards of those who were diehards but ain’t now and the presence of signs in the yards of those who now are.
Nevertheless, it remains a tie between two opaque spheres floating in the air.
One is large and scary but might be hollow.
The other is the same size but might be filled with potential.
One might be an empty balloon and the other might be a bomb. And we won’t know which is which until Election Day when we get up-danger-close to both of them with a lit match.
What does all of this mean?
Trump supporters’ strategy should be to appear as scary as possible in order to look like the larger, more intimidating sphere; her supporters’ strategy should be to always-and-every-day behave as if she is two points behind and to remember the first lesson of Ass-Whipping School and — explosives of righteousness and anger behind — to punch three inches straight through.
“punching three inches straight through” - I can do this in my own small way. Thank you, Ms Cassidy.