Poll Realism III
or debunking the Bie Lie
Once during a Senate Committee hearing in the late 1980s, a CEO argued that particular piece of legislation would put a company out of business, Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH) threwn down the gauntlet.
“Show me your P&Ls”
The CEO quickly demurred. His Profit and Loss statement, while public, wasn’t something the company wanted discussed and furthermore; although the P&L would show that the legislation might trim a small percentage off the company’s profits, it was still going to be very much in the black.
When the Big Lie presented itself in late 2020, the Political Left seemed stymied how to counter the bizarre and weird conspiratorial arguments of the Nihilists in the GOP.
The Idealists chimed in with a rather straightforward “The vote totals show that Joe Biden won and there aren’t enough voting anomalies to put any results at issue.”
The cacophony of “What about”-isms rendered this approach short sighted and ineffectve.
The Pragmatists took a more legalistic approach of “well you should have proven that in court” followed with “you lost 60 times in court because there was no proof that the election was stolen.”
Basically, the Hitchens Razor1 approach.
Realists, knowing how Nihilists seem to be immune to that kind of logic, take a more playful approach:
Show me your polling data. Show me the tracking polls in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that put Donald Trump leading in one or more of those states in November 2020.
With data of that sort, I might be inclined to at least listen to the the Big Lie argument.
It’s notable that neither Donald Trump nor his campaign nor his political team within the White House ever made this argument.
Why would they? The entire “Hey, our tracking polls showed us ahead in Arizona” argument pales to Biden’s ground game in 2020 which was quite frankly state of the art. Ditto for Georgia. And if you lived in Arizona or Georgia, you’d’ve known that Biden’s polling was showing him in a position to win there.
Why? The Biden campaign was blistering the airwaves there.
And if you lived in Florida or Ohio, you probably saw less as the calendar reached Halloween. Why? The tracking polls there were showing Trump ahead consistently with little to no movement (i.e. Biden pulled back on his ads as did Trump — still running them, of course, but much less frequently.).
Polling directs political advertising money. And political advertising is a sign that the state is in play. Presidential campaign ads don’t get a lot of play in California, New York, the Plains States, or the Dellta Duo2; because they are either bright blue or barn red.
That said, the “show the evidence you were winning” is a better response to the Big Lie than the “results speak for themselves” or Hitchens’ razor arguments.
If you get caught up in this argument (God forbid), try this rejoinder —
“Trump was blistering Arizona and Georgia, states that the Democrats had not won since 1996, with ads in 2020; because Trump’s polling was showing him tied with Biden. And when you are tied, you aren’t ahead.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
Lousiana and Alabama
Trump supporters almost invariably repeat his claim that he couldn’t have lost, because his rallies had so much more attendance than Biden’s. Of course if that were a valid argument, the polls wouldn’t have been so close.
Thank you for keeping up with all this chaos