Good news! The Orange Cheeto is dissolving before our eyes. Saturday’s “Million MAGA March” in Washington, DC was a bust. Perhaps 10,000 people came, as Melissa Ryan of the great Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter details. Trump’s lawsuits to overturn various state returns are going nowhere. While he can still try to get Republican legislators in at least three swing states to vote to ignore their own voters and instead award their Electoral votes to him, the odds of that happening are infinitesimal. (And if they tried, the massive crowds that danced the day Biden was declared the winner would revolt.) It’s all over, and unless Trump somehow starts a war in the next 63 days, his presidency will end not with a bang but with a whimper.
That said, this looks like another election where the Gods of Big Data again have feet of clay. We go through an entire election depending on polling and voter data to make all kinds of choices, but afterwards, do we remember how fallible these tools really are? It appears we do not. Witness all the people currently citing the 2020 exit polls to make arguments about the meaning of the election, when those polls are basically useless. Do you remember Elan Kriegel, the vaunted “invisible guiding hand” of the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign who was its chief analytics officer? Did we ever get a post-mortem on how badly the Clinton data operation blew that race? The Clinton team’s belief in its data analytics was so resolute that when lower-level staff on the digital outreach and field teams reported that as many as one in four of the people they were contacting in swing states were thanking them for the call or text reminding them to vote by saying they were voting for Trump, the data team rejected their warnings, trusting their models instead of what their own folks were telling them. (Kreigel is the co-founder of BlueLabs Analytics, which counted American Bridge 21st Century, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the League of Conservation Voters and The Immigration Hub among its clients in 2020. So he’s doing fine.)
Now that Biden has won, the same question arises—will there be a broader accounting for how poorly pollsters read the electorate? And inside the Democratic campaign world, will the people who managed the voter files and made the decisions about which voters to target share their post-mortems with the millions of people who volunteered their time and energy to make all those phone calls and texts? I ask these questions because a huge number of grassroots activists volunteered to call, text, door-knock and write to voters, and they (we!) deserve to know if their time was well spent.
On polling, here’s what appears to have happened: This was a high-intensity election, and both sides brought new and irregular voters into the electorate. (Democrats weren’t the only ones working hard to register voters for 2020, by the way. And the universe of unregistered voters may tilt less Democratic than in past years, which means nonpartisan efforts by platforms like Facebook to register users may have ended up helping the GOP too.) When it comes to polling failure, it seems Trump voters were somewhat less willing to talk to pollsters (due to an anti-media tilt?) and Biden voters were perhaps more willing (due to a sense of civic obligation?). There are also signs that pollsters overestimate how many voters have a college education, and as you grow the active electorate you bring more non-college voters in too. So what looked like a likely Biden landslide in the polls was never a reality. Nate Silver of 538 says that overall, the polls underestimated Trump’s strength by about 3 to 4 percent in national and swing state polls, and furthermore that that kind of degree of error is “normal by historical standards.” You don’t say! It’s definitely time that we made a collective decision to ignore polls. Especially when you consider how much Democratic primary voters were influenced by their perception of how their candidates might do against Trump.
But as I think about the election just over, the biggest question I have is: Does anyone know what worked, or didn’t work, in swaying voters? Millions of people signed up to phone bank or text message voters this year, and many also spent hours handwriting letters and postcards, ultimately mailing more than 17 million this fall alone. But do we know if these tactics worked as promoted? With the Georgia Senate run-offs ahead, Lauren Melodia, a grassroots volunteer, has written an open letter calling on the Democratic campaign ecosystem to “stop harassing voters.” She reports speaking to many other volunteers who reported similar experiences to hers: tons of hostility or nonresponses from people she called; drastic declines in the response rate to text messages (from 10-20% down to 0.1%), piles of unopened campaign literature at doors in Philadelphia, and many young volunteers whose creative ideas and energy for how to move voters were ignored. I’m going to ask some of my friends who work in this arena for their take—stay tuned.
One additional observation: If there’s a recurrent theme to the Democratic post-mortems I’ve seen so far, it’s the need to invest in year-round community organizing and not just late efforts in reaching voters just around an election. That’s Beto O’Rourke’s conclusion: “We should be talking to voters year round.” That was also Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s prescription. And today Steven Teles, a moderate Democrat at the Niskanen Center, has a sobering op-ed in the New York Times about the limits of liberal dreams for political change that argues that Democrats have to invest in a 50-state strategy of party-building “even where the odds seem slim, in order to help Democrats prospect for attractive issues in red states (and red places in purple states), to identify attractive candidates and groom them for higher office and to build networks of citizens who can work together to rebuild the party at the local level.” Amen to that. In my experience, grassroots activists who are grounded in local communities are usually the most strategic and pragmatic about the challenges of organizing beyond the choir.
That said, long-term efforts at community organizing still get a fraction of the funding that political campaigns and national advocacy organizations soak up. In 2018, the Movement Voter Project—one of the very best national networks supporting local progressive organizing—moved $10 million to local groups. This cycle, it had moved nearly ten times that total through October, with half going to Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania organizations. That’s almost $100 million—the same amount a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires—the ubiquitous Eric Schmidt, the elusive Dustin Moskovitz, and Twilio founder Jeff Lawson–pledged to spend on a last-minute TV advertising blitz that, yes, a bunch of data wonks told them would be the best way to spend their money to move votes.
Speaking of the whims of the ultra-rich, the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, just announced the first big grants (nearly $800 million) out of his $10 billion Earth Fund will go to several of the world’s biggest environmental nonprofits. Apparently being really rich also means you can’t be very creative, since the best advice money can buy seems to settle on the most obvious and safe choices. Imagine if instead of bulking up the already top-heavy professional advocacy sector, a Bezos decided to support local infrastructure for democratic community organizing? Think of Andrew Carnegie, a Gilded Age baron who paid for the creation of 2,509 libraries between 1883 and 1929, many of which still serve their communities around the world. My own experience with Civic Hall over the past five years suggests that the change-making benefits of providing a local hub for activists to work, network and collaborate with each other are huge. If a donor just offered to cover the rent for such spaces, the economics for membership- and community-supported hubs becomes very feasible. But alas, most socially-oriented philanthropy these days goes to programs and staff, not community-weaving.
Odds and Ends
If you’re wondering why I’m not using Substack for this newsletter, this piece by Clio Chang in Columbia Journalism Review, gives you some idea. I’m just not interested in feeding yet another VC-powered plantation platform. (Chang is a great young writer who I had the pleasure of being fact-checked by for my 2017 cover story in The New Republic on Obama’s Lost Army.)
“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.” That’s President Barack Obama talking a few days ago to The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg. I’ll admit it: I’m looking forward to getting my copy of Barack Obama’s new memoir in the mail today. How about you?
Speaking of not being able to distinguish the truth, Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac report for BuzzFeed that Facebook’s data scientists know that the company’s current efforts to reduce the spread of President Cheeto’s false claims about the election are having little effect. It seems that merely labeling something as false without restricting people’s ability to share it doesn’t reduce sharing much. As I keep saying, Facebook is Chernobyl, a badly designed nuclear reactor that makes a lot of energy/money for its owner by harnessing the inherent power of connecting atoms/people to each other, but without more external oversight and regulation will keep producing toxic effects.
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