DISTORTING AMERICA'S CHOICE

The New York Times opened its digital edition yesterday with a banner headline telling the world that Donald Trump would win the next presidential election.

The paper did not say it that way but in essence it could have.  Instead, the paper reported that, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College  poll,  Trump now leads President Biden in five of the six so-called battleground states likely to decide next year's contest.  The surveyed states are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.  Biden won them all in 2020 but Trump is ahead everywhere today except in Wisconsin, and there, Biden holds only a two-point lead.

The poll talked to 3,662 registered voters in the six states.  The margin of error in each of the six states was around 4.5%.  Trump leads Biden by five points in Michigan and Arizona, six in Georgia, nine in Nevada and four in Pennsylvania.  The poll attributes these results to Biden's age and supposed mental acuity, the view that Trump would better manage the economy and the world, and an erosion of support for Biden among non-whites voters.  The latter, it claims, is especially stark given that Biden beat Trump by more than forty points among non-whites in 2020.  In the poll, he is now leading in that group by considerably less; among non-whites under age 45 he has lost thirty-three points.

It's almost impossible to take these results seriously.

It becomes even more unlikely when you look at the cross-tabs in the poll.

In those cross-tabs, the same voters who reject Biden in favor of Trump immediately switch their votes when they are asked who they would vote for in a race between Trump and an  "unnamed generic Democrat".  In that match-up, the unnamed generic Democrat beats Trump handily.  He (or she) does so by three points in Nevada, seven points in Michigan and Georgia, eight points in Arizona, ten points in Pennsylvania and eleven points in Wisconsin.  To put this in context, the race switches from one in which Trump wins comfortably in these battleground states to one in which the Democrat wins by even greater margins (and in two states -- Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- by what today would be considered landslides).

The cross-tabs also report some other . . .  er . . .

Anomalies.

For example, did you know that Vice President Kamala Harris would come closer than Biden to beating Trump in these six states?

I didn't.

But, alas, the poll says Harris is better than Biden by six points in Georgia, by three in Michigan and Nevada and even by one in Scranton Joe's Pennsylvania.  The two lose by the same margin in Arizona. And Harris actually loses Wisconsin by one point (where Biden wins by two).  

Here's another.

According to the New York Times and Siena College,  11% of those who would vote for Kamala Harris for President  would not vote for Biden. Though most in that group said they would not vote at all or would vote for some other Democrat, 16% of these Harris-but-not-Biden voters said they'd "definitely" vote for Trump.

On issues, the poll is a Rorschach Test of projection.  Those surveyed trust Trump more on the economy, immigration, national security and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  On abortion, they favor Biden. On who will better preserve democracy, the poll reports that 48% favor Biden and 45% favor Trump.  

Given this poll, one of two things is now true.

Either this poll is nuts.

Or the majority of voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona are.

My vote is on the poll.

The poll, like its confreres, is preternaturally pointless.  The pollsters are asking people to make a decision today that they will not have to make for almost a year.  They are doing so  in an environment that is at best context-aberrant and at worst context-free.  Unlike the electorate that will exist next fall, the electorate the pollsters now question is tuned out,  turned off and inundated with information they have neither the time nor inclination to fully process.

To wit:

Some of the questions asked are not remotely on the mind of voters today.  And won't be a year from now either. No one, for example, is wondering (or will) how any generic unnamed Democrat would fare against Donald Trump.  They are not doing so because (i) they are not now thinking about an election a year away and (ii)  there is no such thing as an unnamed generic Democrat.  Nor is anyone seriously contemplating whether to vote for Kamala Harris, who is not running for President.  Or saying to themselves "I would prefer Harris for the top spot and will therefore dump her for the second and vote Trump for the first".    

It is also hard to believe that, in the space of a few months, voters have gone from believing Biden reconstituted NATO and our European and global allies into an effective counterweight to Russia in Ukraine to now thinking Trump will magically end the war on terms acceptable to us and the west. In any case, none of the questions disclosed in the polls did any kind of deep dive into the scores of decisions Biden made to get us where we are today or wondered which were approved and which were not.

Ditto on democracy.

The poll would have us believe that . . . 

After fraudulently demanding that state officials "find" him votes; telling the Vice President to unilaterally refuse to count certified electoral votes;  openly encouraging the violent January 6 insurrection; refusing for hours to call it off; watching for those same hours as his people ransacked the Capitol and called for the hanging of Vice President Pence; being indicted on ninety-one charges in four separate jurisdictions; falsely accusing General Milley of treason and calling for his death; finding "fine people" among neo-Nazis; being found liable for both sexual abuse and business fraud; lying pathologically; and exhibiting unbounded narcissism . . .

45% still think Trump is a better bet to preserve democracy.

Or that Biden, at 48% on this issue, is only slightly better.

I want to meet these people.

The media world we live in today is grossly asymmetric. 

Because Biden actually is president, he has been subject to a barrage of criticism from the day he took the oath of office.  Among the mainstream media, no Biden foible or lapse has gone unnoticed  and no charge levelled  (too old, sloppy speech, Hunter, the dogs, alleged bribe-taking) has gone unreported. At the same time, FOX News and the MAGA echo chamber (Breitbart, Bannon et al.) has been running a veritable infomercial for Trump.  They literally broadcast his vitriolic insults, fact-free ramblings, repeated lies and MAGA fictions on a continuous twenty-four-hour loop.

In this environment, objective truth is often the first casualty.  

The economy last quarter grew at a record 4.9%, which was unheard of in the Trump years.  Unemployment is at 3.9% (having topped out at 14.7% in April 2020 while Trump was president  during the pandemic).  Inflation is at 3.7% and  has been cut by more than half in the last year. 

None of this, however,  has seeped into voters' consciousness.

Why?

Three reasons.

First, in the short term, MAGA has spent two plus years pretending Trump's economy was perfect even though it wasn't.  In particular, unemployment hit 14.7% during the pandemic and Trump himself was either AWOL or mindless in managing the nation's response to it.  Contrary to his claims, bleach was not medicine. And contrary to the far right's idiocy, the Covid vaccine was effective.

Second, in the intermediate term, the pre-pandemic economy that Trump and his GOP supporters brag about was not one he created.  It was one he inherited.  The person who rescued the economy from the Republicans near-depression in 2007 and 2008 was Obama, not Trump. And growth was glacial, not fast, between 2009 and 2016 because the GOP refused to fully fund the needed investments (and continued to do so after Trump was inaugurated).

Third,  over the past forty years, conservatives created a winner-take-all economy  that moved wealth to the top 1% and turned the middle class into a heads-just-above- water group of strivers a paycheck, illness, spousal death or lost job away from poverty.  Biden is trying to change all that with infrastructure spending, the return of domestic manufacturing and pro-labor victories. 

America's choice next year will be between a prosperity built on an ongoing reversal of that winner-take-all mentality or a continuing anxiety and long-term decline based on preserving it.

America's choice will also be between a democracy where all vote and the law is neutrally enforced and universally respected . . .

Or a dictatorship in which January 6's coup-plotting criminals are pardoned, the federal government's civil servants emasculated, and Trump's revenge -- like his narcissism and disdain for truth -- boundless.

In short . . .

Between freedom.

And fascism. 

An "unnamed generic Democrat" will not be on the ballot.

Nor a reformed, honest, empathetic, studious or law-abiding . . . 

Donald Trump.