I’ve just watched about all I could stand of George W. Bush’s press conference announcing the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. Not surprisingly, he got a lot of questions about the implications of yesterday’s elections, and started yammering about his desire to work with Democrats.Yeah, right. Next thing he’ll be telling us he wants to be “a uniter, not a divider,” and usher in a “responsibility era.” Day before yesterday, he was finishing up a campaign swing that focused on the argument that the Democratic Party was basically a terrorist front organization. And even in today’s remarks, he couldn’t stop himself from suggesting that anyone who questions his and Rumsfeld’s sorry record on Iraq is undermining the troops and frightening the Iraqis.As for the timing of the decision to finally let Rummy go, a couple of years too late, I’m sure we’ll hear from right-wing chatterers that it couldn’t happen before Election Day because it would have discouraged the conservative “base.” If, God forbid, I were a conservative base voter, I’d be pretty damn insulted by the idea that Rumsfeld, who has done more to discredit Republican national security bona fides than anyone not named Dick Cheney, was one of my heroes. The real issue is that the administration needs to pretend it’s rethinking Iraq before Democrats ride into Washington, take over congressional committee gavels, and start asking questions about Iraq that should have been asked by Congress a long time ago.Rumsfeld’s proposed replacement, former CIA chief Bob Gates, is currently president of Texas A&M University. Let me be the very first to suggest his replacement in College Station: my colleague The Moose. He’d love to return to his native Texas; his original strategy of joining the staff of Governor Kinky Friedman hasn’t exactly worked out. And the timing’s perfect: he could get out of the political arena on a high note, just after the humiliation of Karl Rove and the apotheosis of Joe Lieberman, and before John McCain has a chance to break his heart. Despite his yankeefied higher education in New York and Ann Arbor, the Moose is totally an Aggie Wannabee. I can attest to the fact that he knows every word of the Aggie War Hymn, and can sing it at a considerable decibal level.So if anything really good is to come of the latest Bush maneuver, maybe this is it: A&M President Marshall Wittmann. To paraphrase the War Hymn:Rummy’s horns are sawed offRummy’s horns are sawed offRummy’s horns are sawed offShort! A!
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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October 25: It Could Be Harris Over-Performing the Polls This Time
Sometimes we need to shake assumptions based on past elections, and I offered a possible example at New York:
Despite some small recent trends favoring Donald Trump, 2024 presidential polls remain stubbornly very close, both nationally (where Kamala Harris leads by 1.7 percent according to the FiveThirtyEight averages) and in the seven battleground states. Trump currently leads in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, while Harris leads in Michigan and Wisconsin, per FiveThirtyEight, but no one leads in any battleground state by more than 2 percent.
Polls are not, of course, perfect by any means. So the big question right now is whether they are “off” in some systemic way that conceals the fact that one of the two candidates is really on track for a decisive win. As it happens, two iconic political-media gurus have weighed in on this question all but simultaneously, with neither professing to have a definitive answer.
Polling and forecast wizard Nate Silver (founder of FiveThirtyEight but now out on his own) has a New York Times op-ed that expresses a “gut” view that Trump has a small advantage, but nestles it in arguments that polling errors could go in either direction. He reminds us that state polls in 2016 and both national and state polls in 2020 underestimated Trump’s vote, and also notes an explanation that could again show an underestimation of that same vote:
“[T]he likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias. It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them.
“Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve. Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization. Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.”
But Silver concedes it could work so well that polls are actually overestimating Trump’s vote:
“[T]he new techniques that pollsters are applying could be overkill. One problem with using one of those — “weighting on recalled vote,” or trying to account for how voters report their pick in the last election — is that people often misremember or misstate whom they voted for and are more likely to say they voted for the winner (in 2020, Mr. Biden).
“That could plausibly bias the polls against Ms. Harris because people who say they voted for Mr. Biden but actually voted for Mr. Trump will get flagged as new Trump voters when they aren’t.”
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki drills down into some comparisons of 2024 polls and the actual 2020 vote in key demographic categories and suggests there are signs the Trump vote is now being captured fully. In Michigan and Wisconsin, ground zero for 2020 polling errors based on underestimation of white working-class voters, Trump’s lead in that demographic is actually higher than his 2020 performance. So maybe the pollsters have successfully adjusted for past polling errors. Meanwhile, the Harris camp has grounds for suspecting her ultimate vote could be poorly reflected in the polls:
“From Harris’ standpoint, part of the hope now is that polling is undercounting her support with what have long been core Democratic constituencies: Black, Hispanic and young voters …
“The concern for Harris, obviously, is that her Hispanic support is far lower than Biden’s was, both in the 2020 polls and the final election results. But much of Trump’s new Hispanic support comes from younger voters who have not participated at high levels in past elections. If these voters end up sitting on the sidelines in this election, Harris could end up faring much better with Hispanics than the polling now shows. It’s also somewhat encouraging for her that Biden performed better in the election with Black voters than polling had suggested. Harris will need this to happen again.”
There’s a reason Team Trump is devoting much of its get-out-the-vote strategy to low-propensity voters. If he doesn’t reach and motivate them, he could underperform compared to polls showing him making gains among Black, Hispanic, and first-time voters.
If the polls are wrong, it could again be good news for Trump or instead good news for Harris. We just don’t know right now, even though many fearful Democrats and triumphalist Republicans share Nate Silver’s “gut” feeling that the 45th president wins all ties.