Hal Bidlack
For the most part, I accept that President Joe Biden has a very good chance of being re-elected this November. So far, I agree that Biden’s team has not been the best at messaging and there is too much room for Republican nonsense to fill the void.
But I remember that it’s only May now. I recall a lesson I learned when I attended a candidate training program before the 2008 Congressional campaign began in earnest. My lecturer pointed out that “ordinary” people don’t care about politics this far from elections. The only people who care this much about politics are weird people like us in that room.
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That’s why most political campaign experts say to hold off on large-scale messaging until late summer. You can campaign early if you want, send emails, etc., but voters don’t actually start thinking about campaigning until much later when political junkies start thinking about it. These first few months were spent fundraising like crazy (I spent up to 8 hours a day on the phone with him, which is truly soul-sucking work), signed up to volunteer, and in the fall You need to make a plan for it.
Ordinary people aren’t immediately interested in things like this.
That said, I’m still a little nervous about recent polls and an interesting New York Times op-ed. The op-ed’s pessimistic title is “Trust the Democrats. Biden Could Lose.” Uh-oh. The same newspaper also published an article stating that former President Donald Trump is currently leading Biden in the top five major states.
I have often compared the political theater of today to the political theater of about 1850. The country was deeply divided, and there was a national mindset among the political class that if you disagreed with someone, you were not only wrong, you were not truly American. I don’t think we’re on the brink of an actual civil war again, but the dystopia that President Trump wants everyone to think we’re living in is spreading across the American electorate. It casts a surprisingly effective shadow.
Or maybe not.
Let’s talk a little bit about polls. Do you all remember President Michael Dukakis?
no?
Well, in 1988, then-Governor Michael Dukakis was running against a relatively incumbent Vice President, George H.W. Bush Sr. had to deal with an economic slowdown and other challenges that at least put his election in doubt. Lo and behold, after the Democratic National Convention, Dukakis came out with a whopping 17 point lead, and he lost.
We now know that it is a tradition for people who are behind in the polls to accuse the polls of being wrong. Well, that argument may be at least a little more accurate these days. When I attended graduate school at the University of Michigan, I was fortunate enough to study polling and polling at one of the nation’s top schools. So I ended up taking six of his courses on fairly advanced statistics and polling. This gives us at least a little confidence that the polls are trending further and further in the wrong direction.
why? When I was studying his polling in the 1990s, you had his two methods of polling. So there was part of the sample where we sent real human pollsters into people’s homes (people don’t lie as easily to pollsters in their homes as they contact them by phone), and the rest. Carefully selected people were contacted by telephone. Fancy math allows you to weigh the results to best reflect your overall opinion.
You don’t need me to tell you about the recent problems with landlines and polls. Very few young people have a landline (they don’t even have a landline) Dial It’s a rotary phone, but that’s another issue), and there’s no phone book for the cell phone.
The key to good public opinion research is obtaining a sample that accurately reflects the views of the population you want to understand. With mobile phones, it’s even more difficult. Polling agencies are working hard to find ways to address the mobile phone problem, but obtaining representative samples is extremely difficult. If you still want to call a landline, the sample will be biased toward older people because older people like me are much more likely to have a landline than children. So the poll itself looks likely to be off, at least in my eyes.
And while the final analysis of what exactly the Trump effect is will have to wait a generation or two until it’s fully studied, in my mind it’s a combination of Trump’s lies, serial infidelity, business fraud, and I can’t believe the multiple trials and likely convictions. Once again, it completely captures the attention of American voters. Probably, but I don’t see it working. That’s because the opposition (including the many independent groups that earn ad time) wants to keep a steady stream of pro-Trump BS supporters front and center in the American electorate.
Oh, and abortion access might be a saving grace for Biden, too.
Ultimately, this editorial is correct in that the Democratic Party is correct. did it If they make the mistake of 2016 and don’t take him seriously, they will hand the election to Trump. His base continues to believe everything he says and is perfectly happy with other facts, but his base is probably 25% to 30% of all voters, so at least for now many It’s clear that we need to pick up independents and others. , is not open to his various inflammatory messages, which may ultimately save the country.
stay tuned.
Hal Bidlack is a former political science professor and retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught for more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
