Political Junkies Verses Sports Fans: Who Is More in Touch with Reality?

Last Friday, a day after President Biden’s disastrous debate performance, Nate Silver tweeted this which I’ve been thinking about a lot since:

The difference between sports fans and politics fans is that if you write a column saying the Jets should replace Zach Wilson as their quarterback, sports fans are like "yes, obviously, we want to win!" while politics fans are like "why do you hate the Jets, you loser!"

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 28, 2024

I pay attention to both sports and politics, so I see all the time how people react to negative facts about the side they root for. Many people’s response to Silver’s tweet was that sports fans are not exactly rational either, and they have a point. Fans often overestimate how good the teams they root for are and get angry at others, especially people in sports media, for not agreeing with them on their team’s greatness. Fans will accuse others of hating their teams if their opinions aren’t completely positive. (There’s a great bit with baseball writer Buster Olney where someone collected screenshots of fans of all thirty MLB teams accusing Olney of hating their team.)

But I think Silver is at least directionally correct on this in that sports fans are, on average, more in touch with their side’s strengths and shortcomings, compared to someone who’s a partisan in politics. Three reasons for why I think sports fans are on average more objective: more sample size for sports fans to have educated opinions, opinions having the ability to affect outcomes in politics but not sports, and the presence of moralism in the us/them perspective in politics but not sports.

Compared to politics, there just are many more events in sports for fans to have an informed opinion. Games are happening every week if not more often. We see numbers that players put up. We see wins and losses. There’s some subjectivity to the numbers, and we can argue about how much any athlete contributes to their team’s wins and losses, but almost always the debates are within a reasonable range. People argued for years over who’s better, Tom Brady or Peyton Manning. No one was suggesting Chad Pennington was better than both of them. Bears fans might have disagreed on whether to keep Justin Fields, but no one thought he was Patrick Mahomes.

In politics, however, there are very few real events where your opinions can be validated or disproved, so there’s much more room for delusion. The only real scoreboard is election results. In between, there are polls and public opinion, but many people have learned to act as if they’re not real. People tell themselves, no one answers the phones anymore. You can’t look at the top line, you have to look at the crosstabs (the crosstabs where my side looks good, not those other crosstabs.) Etc.

The Thursday debate was a rare political event in that we see massive numbers of people update their view on an important matter in real time. We might never see anything like this again. Things on the ground are happening quickly. There’s a chance that by the time you read this Biden will have already announced he’s stepping aside. We’re suddenly finding out from Biden allies that he’s been having episodes for months if not longer.

But before that, there was a lot of room for delusion when it comes to Biden’s condition. I have to admit that this was me. Before the debate, I agreed with many of the Biden talking points that he’s mostly fine, that his stutter doesn’t indicate mental decline, and the clips of him misspeaking were out of context. It was easy to tell myself that Biden was fine, especially when the likely replacement for Biden was vice president Kamala Harris, who I’m not a fan of. Of course it didn’t help that the people who saw him up close for months weren’t telling the public what was happening until now. In sports, you can’t hide the scoreboard from the audience.

There are other reasons why politics fans can be more delusional. In sports, fan opinion has no effect on who wins actual games. In politics, opinion shapes reality. People are turning away from Biden now because it’s very obvious now he’s no longer capable, but before that, it was a matter of debate. If you can persuade undecided voters that Biden’s fine, then they’ll be more likely to vote for him. When you need to lie to other people, often the first step is to lie to yourself. It’s much easier to argue that Biden’s fine to other people if you believe it yourself.

Then there’s the moral component to politics that’s not present in sports. Red Sox fans might call the Yankees the evil empire, but no one (well maybe a few people) thinks Yankees fans or players are actually evil. In politics, the other side doesn’t just disagree with you on the issues, there’s actually bad people who want bad things for our country. You can’t admit Trump had a better debate than Biden, because Trump is a liar and he wants to overthrow democracy and why are you helping him win anyway? What are you, a MAGA supporter? So you can’t admit that Trump won the debate because you can’t say that Trump is better than Biden at anything. If a sports fan keeps telling you their team are the real champions because they played better even though they lost, they would just get dismissed. In politics they’d have thousands cheering them on.

The Jets replace Zach Wilson a year ago because the results on the field were so obvious. We’ll see whether the Democrats have the courage to make an equally obvious move.