April 4: Keep Bashing Musk Til He’s Gone
This week’s election results in Wisconsin had a pretty clear message for Democrats, as I explained at New York:
The most tiresome intra-Democratic debate of them all soon reached crisis levels after Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory. Should the “party of the people” focus on the threat to democratic institutions MAGA authoritarians most definitely pose? Or should they instead pursue lost non-college-educated voters via the ancient “populist” formula of class warfare over purely economic issues? The debate has often become very personal, with “populists” tending to dismiss arguments about democracy as elitist mumbo jumbo unintelligible to working stiffs who just want to see the money, and people frightened about fascism worrying that Americans will cheerfully sell out our heritage of liberty for $2 a gallon gas.
Fortunately, and just in the nick of time, a figure has emerged at the highest levels of government who can instantly unite “populists” and “defenders of democracy.” That would be Elon Musk, who is simultaneously the richest man on earth (and in modern history) and an even greater threat to democratic institutions than Trump. He is, moreover, via the DOGE initiative, waging aggressive war on public-sector programs that restrain his tiny class of corporate predators and benefit the general public while violating every constitutional norm imaginable. And suffusing this entire assault on the people and the institutions to which Democrats should feel loyalty is a nihilistic personality exhibiting some of the worst impulses of the human race: narcissism, messianism, ethnocentrism, worship of power and technology, and a testosterone-poisoned lust for combat and destruction. It’s as though Bruce Wayne had decided to become the Joker instead of Batman.
Terrifying as Musk is, Democrats should thank their lucky stars that he doesn’t simply operate in the background of the MAGA movement, financing Trump’s antics but otherwise remaining anonymous. No: He has insisted on a very public place on the stages of politics, commerce, and culture, rivaled only by his benefactor and enabler in the White House. And the more people see of him, the less they seem to like him.
This week’s judicial election in Wisconsin shows what happens when this peculiar man makes himself the center of attention in a popularity contest not limited to his sycophants on X. The most polarized electorate in the entire nation fed by the most expensive campaign ever to revolve around judges decided by a healthy margin that they did not want Elon Musk in charge of their destiny (much less the “destiny of humanity” he so fatuously claimed was at stake). And better yet, the dispirited ranks of Democrats turned out disproportionately at the polls in the first electoral test since last November’s disaster.
It’s now clear that so long as Musk is the most powerful figure in the administration and the living symbol of Trump 2.0, Democrats should make Musk-bashing even more of a daily preoccupation than it has already become. Populists can draw fresh attention to the very real class implications of DOGE’s assault on corporate regulation and on practical services like Social Security offices accessible to old folks and medical facilities that can keep middle-class people alive. Defenders of democratic institutions can continue to expose (and attack in courts) the arrogant pretense that self-appointed engineers who brag about their destructive intentions should be entrusted with “reforming” government. And everyone can keep exposing the deeply sinister tech-bro worldview Musk and his accomplices exemplify, aimed at converting the United States of America into a privately held corporate oligarchy governed by insanely wealthy elites deploying AI at will and treating life itself as a video game in which the losers are the rest of us.
Musk-bashing won’t solve all the problems facing Democrats. They still need to regain public trust about their own values and competence. For one thing, DOGE’s very existence remains a terrible indictment of the contempt for government that is now so epidemic, and that Democrats have for so long either ignored or tried to buy off with popular benefits; they need their own credible “government reform” agenda and the determination to carry it out.
But make no mistake: Elon Musk is a political gift, particularly if his ego and Trump’s reliance on his support mean he will insist on keeping himself front and center, showing up at Cabinet meetings and MAGA rallies alike while indulging his endless glossolalia on X. So long as he remains the face of Trump 2.0, Democrats would be wise to make sure that face is the first thing Americans think of when they survey the political landscape. If Musk and DOGE crash or are subdued by the jealous god in the Oval Office (as some reports suggest Trump has signaled may happen), that is a very good thing in itself and a worthy goal for the opposition.
This math just doesnt’ work. If Bush is really up by 7, doesn’t that pretty much mean he would win NJ, NY, and maybe CA?
This is a repost–it’s here because it’s more germane…thoughts?
Data-crunching 101–an attempt at self-education
I just was dinging around (technical term, yes) with the results from the most recent Pew Poll, which found that 48 percent of 1,002 RVs supported Bush compared to 41 percent supporting Kerry. (http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=227)
Tell me if this was a sensible interpretation of the data, but here’s what I found:
Using a combination of the Pew background data (http://people-press.org/reports/tables/227.pdf) and a handy Java applet that solves linear equations with three variables (http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~chamness/equation/equation.html), it appears that the partisan split for the 1,002 respondents is as follows:
333R, 303D, 366I (basically 33%, 30%, 36%)
By comparison, I ran the same analysis for the 9/11-14 Pew survey (again of 1,002 RVs), and got a split of:
303R, 336D, 363I
Where I’m going with this is this: if the 10/4 poll had reached the same number of self-identified Rs, Ds and Is as for the 9/11 poll (assuming that it’s the sampling and not the self-identification that’s changing) with the voting tendencies of the 10/4 crowd, the 10/4 poll results would have been something more like 45.4-43.6 in Bush’s favor, not 48-41. One might then note that this shows a slight shift from the 46-46 split actually noted on 9/11, but by now I figure I’ve hopelessly tortured the data nearly beyond recognition.
Long story short, what I really wanted to explore and perhaps demonstrate is that the Pew poll didn’t reach the same crowd now as before, and that if they had spoken to a similar group, the poll margin would be even tighter. Please, someone who really knows what they’re doing, tell me if I’m playing along intelligently at home–mathematically, not politically, Smooth.
This poll gives very interesting education and income breakdowns. In the most recent poll, and some but not all of the earlier ones, Kerry support goes up with increasing education level and down with increasing income. If this is the composition of the electorate, the near-universal practice of weighting a poll to reflect education but not income will bias the results toward Bush. (See my posting last week which explained the mathematics.) I don’t know the magnitude of the bias because it depends on the size of the weighting coefficients.
Another very striking feature of these data is that the voting intentions of the high-income and high-education subpopulations are fairly stable, while there is much volatility at the low income and low education end. Since these are the populations that will be underrepresented in the raw sample, this behavior is suggestive of fluctuations in the calculated weighting coefficients that result from the ill-posedness of the estimation problem and the noisiness of the data from which they are estimated. (See another earlier post.)
Another possible explanation of the reported volatility of low-income and low-education subpopulations is that because of poor response rates they reflect small samples with high sampling error. (Each respondent in this group is highly weighted in reporting the overall poll results.) Very likely, both sources of error contribute.
There is absolutely no way in the world Bush is up 7 after the first debate.