I was a bit fascinated with the interpretation by Jennifer Rubin of WaPo of recent poll results contrasts with that of Erick Erickson, far right pundit. First, Rubin:
Consider the obsessive coverage of a single New York Times-Siena College poll a full year before the election (touting four-times indicted former president Donald Trump as leading in five of six swing states, although only one was outside the poll’s margin of error). The Times built its political coverage around it for days. Virtually every cable news show featured it. (Full disclosure: I am an MSNBC contributor.) Other outlets focused on it. Roundtables gathered to discuss it. The coverage assumed the poll to be gospel — accurate, productive, important — and then used it as evidence that Biden is toast. (A majority of national polls, by the way, show Biden tied with or slightly ahead of Trump.)
But consider how utterly meaningless this poll truly was. First, it’s a year from the election. Go back to 2011 and 2012, and you would see the same hysterical predictions, from the same sort of premature polling, anticipating then-President Barack Obama’s political demise. Second, many other polls, including a highly reputable Pennsylvania poll, show Biden doing quite well in swing states. (As others have pointed out, even a Republican poll had Biden tied in Nevada, not losing by 10 points).
The Times poll had obvious anomalies (e.g., showing Trump trailing by one point among younger voters; Trump winning 22 percent of Black voters; Biden leading in Wisconsin by 2 but trailing in Nevada by 11 points?). Those findings don’t appear in other polling. But to put that in proper context would have killed innumerable news cycles. (By contrast, when The Post came up with a national poll, clearly an outlier, it said so.)
It’s hard to argue with her points, really, and there’s more of them as well, pointing out the dubious track record of most polls.
Democrats, for all their rhetoric about Donald Trump being a threat to democracy, do not really mean it, or they’d ditch Joe Biden tomorrow. The only Democrat who could beat him in 2020 — that was literally Biden’s ad campaign — is one of the few who might not be able to beat him in 2024.
If the economy were as good as Democrats say, Biden would be running away with it. But he’s tied with Trump, according to good pollsters. He has the benefit of incumbency, which is an advantage. He probably does have a greater than fifty percent chance of beating Trump. But if Trump really is a threat to democracy, Democrats should be acting like it, and they aren’t except on MSNBC performances.
Naturally, both commentators are trying to rally their supporters. In evaluation, I’m looking for the ratio of incoherency to facts and logic. Rubin, to the extent I know, in a general way, her data, appears to have a good grasp on what happened in 2022: Huge disappointment for the Republicans, misleading (sometimes deliberately) polling, as my long-term readers know, and, unquoted here but present in her article, an awareness that abortion is the pivotal issue. I think Democrats must work hard to field a candidate in every district throughout the nation.
Erickson, on the other hand, seems incoherent to me. “Democrats, for all their rhetoric about Donald Trump being a threat to democracy, do not really mean it, or they’d ditch Joe Biden tomorrow.” I don’t even know what that means. He doesn’t mention the abortion issue, because that’ll be a hot nerve for his readers and listeners, and then there’s the tendency of what passes for a conservative today to indulge in mendacity. He’s just convinced that today’s polls are definitive.
Add in that Rubin used to be a Republican, and I give her the edge.
