Yes, folks, yes, he is losing, big time. I don’t want to get into the reasons why this is happening. Instead, I urge you to accept that this is what is really taking place, for whatever reason, and not that it validates your personal, normative model of human nature or the general mind set of American voters. You may think you know why this is happening, but you may don’t because everyone’s assessment is skewed by leaning toward the notion that everyone thinks as you do. We don’t. Remember, some portion of the populace at large agrees with you and are rational people with common sense, fundamental decency and compassion. The rest are delusional, deranged, cretinous barbarians laying waste to civilization.
Before we get into any more of my amateur theorizing about psychology, bookmark this link to Nate Silver’s election forecast site and navigate to it every day until election day. This is the best site to track the race. Review this page every day before engaging in sophistry about the race or listening to what anyone else says. It tells you what’s really going on in a few seconds as opposed to sifting through a lot of hysterical chaff from infotainment sources. You’ll soon see that the daily fluctuations depend mainly on small changes in Arizona and Georgia, the only states where it’s even close. You might be amused by how unexpectedly close Clinton is getting in states like Georgia, Missouri and Georgia, but they are not likely to flip. Everywhere else, it’s locked in for Clinton or Trump, which means that Clinton will win handily. It doesn’t matter why. It is what it is.
That said, let’s examine why normative thinking, the impulse to view reality as one wants it to be, can lead you astray. Succumbing to one’s bias in this election colors your explanation for the collapse of the Trump candidacy. Instead or nit-picking about what’s taking down The Donald, I’d rather examine the way people explain it. This tells me more about people than whether or not they support Trump.
- Those who favor Hillary Clinton may see this development as the triumph of common sense and rational thought over foolishness and hype. The feeling is that most people are, basically, not stupid. Once they assess the candidates objectively, without being swayed by emotion, the choice is obvious.
- There is also pragmatic self-interest. This dynamic is best evidenced by African-Americans. They look at what the policies supported by each candidate have impacted them, personally, and they don’t see any possibility that Trump would better their lot. Hillary gets almost all their votes except for a nut fringe of wannabe cowboy-capitalists who feel a kinship with Trump’s bizarre world view. It’s important to recognize that African-Americans have endured being ignored, marginalized and swindled by rich, old, white men for so long that they are wary of rich, old, white men. It’s also import to recognize that even though Barack Obama was and still is immensely popular among African-Americans, in 2008 they favored him over Hillary Clinton by a much smaller margin. Those two were close enough in their views that the choice became solely about which would be more likely to help people of color, so they went with the black guy, which is entirely rational. In the general election, this idea carried over, so McCain did worse among African-Americans than previous Republicans. Four years later, Romney tanked even lower than McCain with black voters because he had even less to offer anyone who wasn’t white, which was proven by his “47%” remarks.
- So, why does anyone support Trump at all? How come everyone hasn’t rejected Trump’s disingenuous posturing and prepared the ground for a total, 538-electoral-vote blowout for Clinton? Other non-European demographic groups, youth and women are skewed in favor of Clinton for similar reasons as African-Americans, but less distinctly so because they are also swayed by emotional arguments not related to basic self interest. Like the tiny number of African-Americans who like Trump despite being mocked and excoriated by members of their own community, people can be cajoled into supporting a candidate with whom they can identify in some fashion. Generally, the more white, self-possessed, morally destitute, bellicose, racist, gullible and stupid one is, the more likely one is to be attracted to Trump. Everyone has a combination of genetic and environmental characteristics, resulting in assorted virtues and character flaws. These characteristics, as a whole, act as an impetus to drive one toward one candidate or another. This is why, in every election, everyone running gets at least a few votes. Somebody always goes for what a candidate purports to offer.
- What about those who assert that Trump isn’t really losing because, “Look at the crowds he’s drawing and how enthusiastic they are!” Oh, my. This is wishful thinking at best and stubborn, delusional resistance to demonstrable fact at worst. When you’re way behind in the polls, you’re losing. When it is shaping up as an electoral college blowout, as evidenced by Nate Silver’s diligent research and sophisticated modeling (Monte Carlo simulation), it’s delusional to think that the final result will differ substantially from the consistent forecast. Giving any weight to anecdotal information, like tallies of rally attendance and the perceived enthusiasm of attendees, leaves one at the mercy of mistaken perceptions. This is normative thinking at its worst. Some ardent Trumpeteers have convinced themselves that because they like The Donald, everyone will eventually come around to their way of thinking, “once they wise up”. Or, they think that those deviating from their point of view haven’t really made up their minds yet. For the most part, they have. And, not agreeing with you doesn’t necessarily make a person stupid, either.
- Of course, there are the conspiracy nuts who think that the polls are rigged to hide a huge groundswell of popularity for Trump that will make the election a blowout for Trump rather than Clinton. Dream on.
- If anything, current polling techniques, like calling people on land-line telephones and cherry-picking poll-taking locations, favors Republicans. As for falsifying the results, it’s not happening among legitimate pollsters because if they are discovered doing that, they will no longer be able to get paid for their results. Statisticians covet their status as professionals and are unwilling to risk it for a small payoff.
- People with low math skills don’t trust any polls because they don’t understand statistics. Republicans did some weird stuff in the 2004 election, especially in Ohio. Areas with heavy African-American presence got insufficient voting machines, so voters had to wait in long lines, for as long as ten hours, and even then were not allowed to vote. Nobody knows how many people gave up before they voted. While it has never been proven that Republicans electronically falsified ballot returns in Ohio, it’s also impossible to prove that they did or did not because of the way the votes were counted. Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold, Inc., who had promised Ohio Republicans a year earlier that he intended to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes, got the contract to count Ohio’s votes from Ohio’s Republican voting officials. There’s nothing criminal or even irregular about that. For some reason, though, he ran the results through a server in Lexington, Kentucky, where the results could have easily been changed with a few keystrokes. That’s not direct evidence of any wrongdoing, either. No one can prove that they did or did not do that because the data that flowed into the server, directly from the polling places, was the raw vote. The data sent back to Ohio were the official totals. It was initially alleged by statisticians from CalTech and MIT that there was a suspiciously high deviation from exit polls in the official results. Other statisticians questioned their methodology and a later report by the same CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project said the 2004 Ohio results were fine. The second conclusion was based on corrected results of the exit polls based on the official results. The idea that there was “something fishy” was based on statistics done with data from the original exit polls, which were not released, so you cannot replicate the statistical calculations yourself. The point is that the exit polls differed from the official results by a statistically significant margin, which is “proof” of something to some statisticians. The official results in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, in 2004 cast doubt on the validity of exit polls in general, such that news organs no longer “call” an election based on exit polls. This is prudent for the news people, because they are in no position to contest official results, but not proof that exit polls “could show anything”. It doesn’t mean that, but suspicion of poll results like exit polls makes it easier for some people to summarily dismiss any polls.
- Some people assert that support for Clinton is an artifact propagated by “liberal media” bias. If people were not being hornswoggled by those damned liars spouting their false propaganda, then they would naturally be supporting Trump. Right. Mostly, such talk is calculated, disingenuous posturing because news media do make a reasonable attempt at fairness. Every news outlet leans to some extent, but, with the exception of Fox, they try to act as if they did not. In fact, the media have been quite indulgent with Trump because covering him gets ratings. He’s interesting to watch, even if you hate him. Even without the “clown factor”, though, corporate media tend to favor Republicans. ABC is owned by Disney, a Republican institution, and they never miss a trick to prop up Republicans and give Democrats short shrift. MSNBC, vilified by Trumpies as the most ardently biased liberal organ, is quite evenly balanced. You get Rachel Maddow for an hour a day, which they show three times in the course of 24 hours, and three hours of Morning Joe where Republican Joe Scarborough bullies his co-host and various sidemen into accepting the notion that Republican ideology has any connection with compassion for humanity, economic theory, basic morality or even rational thought. He’s delusional most of the time. Even if he is against Trump now, it doesn’t mean that he’s not a Republican hatchet man at other times. If anything, media favor Republicans over Democrats, and they have bent over backwards “being fair” to Trump. No, the disfavor into which he had descended is entirely his own doing, not that of the media. You can’t script a better attack ad than just quoting Trump’s own words. To say that there is a bias favoring Clinton, and that such is the cause of a false preference for her over Trump, is to declare that people can’t think and are too stupid to “see reality”. This is decidedly normative thinking. If people don’t agree with you, then they must be deluded or lack intelligence. (This reminds me of that line from Springtime for Hitler in The Producers. “Don’t be dumb; be a smarty. Come and join the Nazi Party!”)
- Another variant on the normative thinking model is that the fix is in for Clinton and that she is going to steal the election from Trump. The notion being bandied about by desperate, wild-eyed Trump supporters is that if Clinton wins as handily as she is likely to do, then it somehow must have been rigged. They just can’t believe that she could actually be more popular than their cherished tycoon. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds at first.
- Republicans rigged the vote in Florida in 2000. In 2000, Governor Jeb Bush promised his brother, the Governor of Texas, that he would do what it took to deliver his state. He, as they still do in many Republican states, used voter caging, lists of felons in Texas, roadblocks and other illegal methods to disenfranchise certain groups, like people of color and students, that don’t generally vote Republican. Once his Secretary of State found that the early returns were close, and that W was losing the state despite the disenfranchisement of more than 80,000 eligible voters, she started throwing away ballots from precincts that had voted heavily Democratic in the past. When it was still too close to call, and there was clear evidence that the slight margin in favor of Bush had been falsified, she hastily certified the election in his favor to block Gore’s winning the state. A recount was started, but was blocked by legal action, installing George W. Bush as president. The challenge to that certification went to the Supreme Court and was denied by the majority of Republican justices. A full recount was eventually held, paid for by the New York Times and the Washington Post, showing that Gore had actually won the state, and thereby the election. Bush had been in office for a while and Gore had long before given up any hope of reversing the election, so Bush remained in office despite clearly having been the loser. Nothing that happened mitigates the reality that they stole the election. When someone vows to deliver their desired outcome using “whatever it takes”, they might mean it.
- Democrats have stolen elections before. Despite the recent history of direct, criminal election fraud as being exclusively Republican behavior, it doesn’t mean that Democrats haven’t done the same thing in the past. There are cases, like Lyndon Johnson’s primary victory in his first campaign for the U.S. Senate. His supporters stuffed a ballot box with the votes of dead people, a box that had been conveniently “overlooked” in the initial tally, and threw the election to Johnson in a squeaker. That was the old way of rigging an election.
- Now, the nation has largely moved to electronic tallying of votes, so computerized tampering is the best way to steal votes. Even with paper ballots, they are now read by machines, so results can still be falsified. When partisan officials have complete, unfettered control of elections, it’s easy for wholesale fraud to occur. All that it takes is for a small cabal of unscrupulous crooks to find a way of doing it. Without independent, unbiased overseeing of elections, such fraud will occur again. Voting in all states is controlled by partisan officials, so there is no structural impediment to election fraud. It could happen.
- The main reason why vote rigging by Democrats is unlikely, at least this year, is that there’s little reason to commit such a crime when the likely result is a resounding victory. Why risk it? Polls are real; you don’t have to cheat what you’re going to win fair and square. This reality does not mean that Democrats are above such shenanigans and morally superior to Republicans. If Democrats haven’t been caught red-handed rigging elections as often or a recently as Republicans, it only shows that they were winning, and when they were losing, unlike desperate Republicans, were not as intent on winning at all costs.
- Some people, and they are very few, believe that the results of this election, as well as natural events like the earthquake today in Italy, are subject to divine intercession. It’s the will of God that Donald J. Trump is going down in flames, albeit metaphorically, which is nonetheless a precursor to the very real fires of eternal damnation in which he will writhe in agony for all time as punishment for his evil ways. As appealing as this image is to me, a scoundrel receiving his just deserts, it’s not real. This is mythology and fantasy, not real life. (It’s “deserts”, pronounced “dee-ZERTS”, as in what one deserves, not “DEZ-erts”, the places with lots of sand. It’s not “just desserts”, either, because there will be no tasty treats for Donald in Hell.) Anyway, God’s not punishing Donald, and to think that means you must be into voodoo or otherwise engaged in irrational, magical thinking.
So, which of these points of view is the most realistic and provides the best explanation for the current status of the race? Well, for me, it’s because the greater portion of the populace has settled down and is no longer amused by the carnival sideshow that is Trump. They realize he’s not qualified for the office and would prefer someone who is actually capable of being president. Those who don’t see it that way are obviously delusional, deranged, cretinous barbarians attempting to lay waste to civilization. But, then again, I’m a hopelessly optimistic humanist who has always trusted that people are, at their core, rational. How about you? Do you agree, or are you still tilting at windmills?