The Problem of Political Commentary
Screen capture of CNN’s coverage of the RNC, July 2024. [Warner Bros. Discover]
In the opening of his brilliant Cicero trilogy, the novelist Robert Harris declares: “You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election. But an election is a living thing … with thousands upon thousands of brains and limbs and eyes and thoughts and desires, and it will wriggle and turn and run off in directions no one ever predicted, sometimes, just for the joy of proving the wiseacres wrong.”
If Harris is right, there are a lot of fools in America right now. Pundits, politicos, and prognosticators of all stripes are happily telling anyone who will listen that either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will surely win. For one reason or another, these individuals believe they can read the tea leaves of American history.
People in the predicting business should more carefully follow Robert Harris’ advice. The truth is that the outcome of politics is harder to determine than weather and economic trends combined. Though polling certainly illuminates much of politics, polling nonetheless attempts to quantify the unquantifiable – the complex soup of longings, fears, hatreds, and passions that determine the fate of mankind. Sometimes such polls are correct, but for several elections in a row they have consistently proved their inadequacy. Polls drastically overestimated Republican strength in 2022 and 2020. On the flip side, the election of Donald Trump took pollsters by surprise in 2016.
Instead of spending so much time on predicting the outcomes of current events, political experts should concentrate their efforts on understanding how current events have come to be. Politics is complex and voters deserve to have access to rigorous commentary that places the rapid unfolding of events within the context of history – that shows the historical roots of our contemporary moment and thus helps us better understand how to react to events.
Commentary of this sort is more important in a democratic society than any other regime. Democracies tend to focus on the present to the exclusion of the past. This tendency is further exacerbated since the advent of social media – since such websites allow voters to follow events in real time and make moral judgments about these events instantly. However, judgments that do not take into account historical forces are worse than useless – they lead to ill informed, vicious, and mobocratic tendencies. It is little wonder we live in an age of mounting political violence when each and every political event feels entirely new.
Political commentary that focuses on providing historical and philosophical context is vital. The predictions of pundits may get good ratings but they are simply feeding the writhing mass of anxiety, anger, and aimless musings that define our politics.
An example of this is what is happening right now with Kamala Harris.
A few weeks ago, most horserace polls had her polling about the same as Biden, maybe a bit worse and there wasn’t any reason to suspect she might perform better.
Now, suddenly, there has been an explosion of enthusiasm and support for her. What happened? Which of the Savvy horserace touts and tea leaf readers on cable news predicted this?
The fact is, all the Savvy predictors were caught by surprise because none of them really had ever bothered to dig deep and see what the Democratic base was thinking or feeling.
The latent enthusiasm for a Democratic candidate was always there just under the surface but until Biden gave his permission and endorsement, it was invisible to most of the pundits who never left the confines of their social media feeds.Report
TL:DR – Twitter is not reality.Report
For that matter, it has surprised me too.
I knew that I personally was hungry for a vibrant and aggressive Dem candidate, but questions about Harris always felt to me somehow disloyal, like the very question itself was a criticism of Biden so I couldn’t see it in any other than abstract terms.
Once Biden stepped aside and gave her his unqualified support, I personally felt a sudden rush of enthusiasm which I hadn’t felt before.
This is why I think this essay is so vital because it captures how elections turn on the emotions and unpredictable nuances of people.Report
I will admit that I had been feeling a dreary malaise since the debate that lifted when Biden stepped aside. What an incredible thing for him to do (for whatever reasons he did step aside- a venal man faced with a strong push to oust him would have said “fish you” and taken us all down flaming with him out of sheer spite),Report
A venal man might last three weeks before the leaks from the aides, and questions from the formerly adoring press, and then the polls showing he was losing, and then finally the old political “friends” pulling finances and calling for him to step down, finally got to him.Report
“Adoring press,” my behind. The papers have been telling us gleefully that Americans despise Biden since before he took office. The right likes to claim that the left is a cadre of whiners, but you’ve never heard real whining until you get a republican on the subject of the so-called liberal media.Report
No, a proud, self centered and aging man would run again, having won twice already in the face of the usual suspects claiming he couldn’t do so, and would hang in there hoping against hope he could pull it out again for a third time.
And, yes, the party had to organize and push hard to dislodge him (so much the better that the party could do it) but a truly venal man would never have stepped aside regardless and would have taken the whole thing down with him.
I’ll just endorse what Ken said about the “adoring press” bit.Report
Harris has had her A game on for the past two weeks. I don’t know if it can continue like this forever but things are going much better in her favor, Trump is panicking, and the zoom calls are political brilliance. Plus Vance is weird and I enjoy the pointing out that the right-wingers are deeply weird.
When I am super optimistic, I imagine her getting a 2008 style victory. When I am less optimistic, I imagine a repeat of 2000 or 2016Report
When doing my commentary/media I’ve been saying wait till the first of September before the polling will really be of any use. I suspect VP Harris will ride pretty high on the new excitement wave through the DNC and the roll out has gone about as well as anyone on Team Blue could have hoped for with switchover from President Biden. Trump is going to shoot for a repeat of 2016 and won’t be able to restrain himself from making it a nasty race, his crowning achievement being defeating Hillary and berating her as he did it. But this isn’t 2016, he isn’t the 2016 Trump, and the optics and vibes (the word of the moment I don’t like but does get the point across) of him going hard, nasty, and personal after Harris will be very different and hit the public different. IDK that the 2020 map looks all that different when this is all said and done.Report
I largely agree. 2024 is not 2020 or 2016 and Harris has been subject to the same decades-long level of hate that HRC suffered from. You are also correct that Trump is and has always been massively unpopular and even the cult can get bored of his schtick now (even though he still basically controls the GOP in ways no Democratic President ever controlled his party).
I’m a lot more confident than I am glum these days and while I still worry about Trump winning in 2024, I don’t have the same dread and anxiety I had in 2016 and 2020’s elections (I did have it for the first part of this year though).
Apparently voters don’t associate Harris with inflation like they associate Biden with inflation. I think associating a President with inflation is dumb but whatever.Report
The president discontinued his campaign because he said that the fate of democracy is on the line. Do you think the Trump campaign can go nastier than that?Report
He can put democracy on the line.Report
Heh. Good line. I was assuming a reasonable conversation, but you zagged.Report
There’s no more reasonable conversation to be had. In the last election TFG tried to hol,d on to the office he lost by numerous illegal means. You seem to think he wouldn’t do that again if he is reelected. Why, I have no idea. But to expect “reasonable conversation” with that as reality is questionable at best.Report
Let me expound. The Republican Party has at the head of its ticket a man who incited a riot in 2021 which had as its participants people who were actively trying to subvert the will of the electorate. He’s spent the last 4 years telling those same people that any other result than him winning in 2024 will be due to the fact that the opposing side cheated. Do you think his supporters will be more peaceful in 2025 than they were in 2021?Report
I think it’s even simpler. Trump engineered an incident. The mob was shameful but the fake electors and pressure on Pence are IMO actually worse. There’s ample reason to believe he would attempt to engineer another incident and no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt. There’s also no reason to believe that’s true for Harris (or Biden had he stayed in), and love her, hate her, there is no reason to believe she wouldn’t exit the stage in 4 or 8 years time, as is the normal course of things.
The Republican party had the opportunity to nominate multiple other candidates and chose not to. I don’t see why it’s somehow unfair to make note of things that actually happened and that no other president has done.Report
This is tangential to your point, but one of the things that’s really struck me about conservative rhetoric over the last 4 years (and really for a decade or more before that, as the “election fraud” obsession grew among them) is the extent to which they talk about the attempts to overthrow the last election, and their willingness to overthrow any future election they lose, as an effort to save democracy. There are historical examples of exactly this (subverting democracy by claiming fraud/cheating, and describe your actions as saving democracy), and they’re not the ones you want your political right to be imitating.Report
I agree with Andrew. We need to wait until September to get a good idea of where the race actually stands. The hopium is good, enjoy it, but don’t forget that September will likely give us a colder message. As Chip says, there’s a lot of Trump voters out there.Report
Dude, you have no idea how hard it has been to merely wait until FREAKING AUGUST.
RCP is right there. A google away. Just put RCP polls into the google. You can see them. Read the tea leaves. Tell yourself that it’s still summer and nobody pays attention to the election until the World Series is over.
We still have a convention to watch (and attendant protests).
We may still even have a debate.
God knows how many White Dudes for Harris updates we’ll have to endure.
Tomorrow we can look at the polls.
And just know that they don’t mean anything yet.Report
I think what we can look at, before we get to the polls, is the donations. That does mean something.
Although the people who give donations are not the same group as ‘the voters’, and almost certainly were going to vote Democratic regardless, let’s be honest. But they have become a good deal more enthused there, and it would be very odd if that enthusiasm wasn’t also boasted in slightly less active Dem voters.
Annoyingly, that might impact ‘whether or not people are likely to vote’ more than ‘who they are voting for’, which means it’s going to be harder to see in the polls to start with.
I’m not waiting until September to see the polls, but I will wait until we actually have a week of polling without completely insane stuff happening, and then, like, one more week for things to settle down, maybe?
Although it is interesting that Trump attempted assassination appears to have done…nothing to the polls? Slightly confusing there. And the RNC and naming Vance appears to have done…slightly negative things for Republicans? But really we’re still dealing with _Vance_ not being reflected in the polls, much less Harris, and at some point we’re getting her VP too, which is going to scramble things again.Report
That’s the way I felt about it as well, Chip.Report
They know what their Republican paymasters wantReport
Inset Upton Sinclair quote here about how it is hard to get a man to understand something if his (or her) paycheck depends on him (or her) not understanding it.
Punditry is a weird profession in that we essentially have a few dozen or so people who are paid good money to give their opinions on TV or print or radio. But they know straying from conventional wisdom/herd too far is not a thing to do and many were journalists before and infected with the shortcomings of that profession like BSDI and the View from Nowhere. Plus they have their own sense of self-importance.Report
In the Before Times, when I used to watch the gasbag shows, I could always tell which gasbags had come up from the shoe leather reporting side of the media and who had come up on the editorial side. I often found the shoe leather guys (they were almost all guys) had something insightful to say while the editorial side, after a few months of watching, were almost entirely predictable recyclers of talking points, left and right alike — though the right side guys (and they were almost all guys in those days too) tended to depend on it more and do it more consistently.
There aren’t that many shoe leather types on the shows anymore. Even some of the nominal news reporters are rarely insightful because they concentrate too much on prevailing narratives rather than dig into what is actually so and why that is.Report
I do wonder if the paid pundits are even opinion-drivers right now, though.Report
Affirmers, not drivers.Report
Stuff that flatters the reader will always sell.
Stuff that throws shade on the reader’s antagonists will usually do well.
Stuff that tells the truth? Well… it depends, doesn’t it? Best to phrase it just right… change an adjective here, a verb there… maybe it’ll sell better now.Report
One of the many advantages to having been yeeted from Twitter 18 months ago: No longer seeing links to videos of TV pundits. I know some people like to watch the shows so that they can learn the messaging of the day and then play the home game of the show [*], and I’m not going to yuck their yum [**], but I don’t like the aftertaste it leaves.
( [*] Is that ’70s game show reference too musty to still use?)
( [**] If I’m old enough to make ’70s game show references, then should I be using this slang?)Report