I can't believe what's happening in this election.
The Disgruntled Curmudgeon is clinically depressed, really bummed out, on a major downer. I've been this way for weeks, wandering around aimlessly, muttering under my breath, unshaven and badly in need of a shower most of the time. My girlfriend ran off by herself to Italy to paint and sight-see for a few weeks, but it's not her absence that is the source of this malaise. It's the incredible stupidity of the fickle, low-information, swing vote component of the electorate. Those morons are geared up to put the Republicans back in charge. It's making me sick to my stomach.
Our man Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight is doing his job punctiliously as usual. For those of you who are not familiar with his work, he uses sophisticated Monte Carlo simulation modeling to predict what's going to happen in upcoming elections. What this means is that his predictions are expressed in the carefully calculated probabilities of outcomes, not the usual raw polling figures with the statistically meaningless "margin of error" percentage. (What is that supposed to mean, anyway? More on that later.) If you've had a college course in statistics, and you look at Silver's predictions, you know what's coming next month.
The difference between what Silver's predictions say and what traditional poll results tell us is analogous to the difference between looking at the posted odds at the race track and just talking to people standing around. Talking to people is like taking a poll. You can get a lot of good information and find out what the consensus is. With that method, you might find that Mama's Boy looks like a shoo-in in the fifth, so you head to the $2 window with those dog-eared bills clutched in your hand. Someone else might just look at the tote board and see that Mama's Boy is heavily favored, but you know something else. You have odds, which can be directly related to probability. If the favorite goes out at 3-1, then you know that for every dollar that says Mama's Boy will win, three dollars say he won't. That's a 25% probability of a win.
A 25% chance is pretty good in a large field, but in politics it's more like a two-horse race. So, if you've got a substantially greater than 50% chance of winning, you can probably rest easy. Mr. Silver puts the Democrats' chance of keeping a majority in the House of Representatives at an anemic 28%, which means that the Republicans' chance of taking over the House is a commanding 72%. You can't argue with that kind of overwhelming portent of doom. We're screwed.
It doesn't do any good for us to whine about it. Mainly, I'm still trying to figure out what happened. What caused a substantial portion of voters to just plain lose their minds? I think the answer is fairly simple. Thanks to those activist jurists on the Supreme Court legislating from the bench in the Citizens United case, Republicans are free to outspend Democrats by so much that nearly all close races are leaning toward the Republicans. Those too feeble-minded to formulate a coherent political philosophy by themselves, and therefore identifying themselves "independent voters", are being swayed by the sheer mass of ballyhoo. God knows where they are getting all that money, and we'll never find out now that corporations, both foreign and domestic, have unbridled free speech without public disclosure. Yep. As I said, we're screwed.
Here in Washington (the state, not the city), we've got a three-term Democratic senator who should win easily fighting for her life against a sleaze-ball who's lost twice running for governor. There are so many ads that some shows are sponsored entirely by political ads. During commercial breaks, they alternate between contending candidates for the same office. Sometimes, they show the same ad twice in a row. This is nuts.
The thing that has me so distraught is how fast this all happened. I have been frustrated and angry for years that there seemed to be no way to get through to the lumpen proletariat and convince them that progressive social and economic policies would benefit them and improve their lives. I was resigned to the intransigence of that hard core 20% or so of stupid people, but I thought that I could reason with the rest of the people. The ascendancy of Barack Obama and the resurgence of the Democratic Party had meant that there was light at the end of the tunnel. I thought that we were coming out of the dark winter of our discontent and were on the verge of founding the New Jerusalem. I was all ready to dance in the sunshine, link arms and sing out joyfully, "Come on people now, smile on your brother. Everybody get together and love one another right now!"
But, it was not to be. That fickle mob of gullible nitwits, those ambivalent nincompoops in the middle between the forces of evil (the corporate lackeys of the military-industrial complex) and the enlightened defenders of truth and justice, has switched sides again. Without a care in their air-filled noggins, they are poised to chuck any chance to getting universal health care, job security, an education, improvements to the public infrastructure or any of the other amenities of a social democracy.
No, they have bought the big lie again, a scant two years after coming to their senses and ejecting their fascist overlords. Those idiots want them back. It doesn't matter that we're still reeling from three decades of Republican kleptocracy. It doesn't matter that we're still sending our sons and daughters to die for oil in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we've been doing that longer than we did it in Vietnam. It doesn't matter that we're going broke buying crap from China on credit made by the workers who displaced us when our jobs were exported. It doesn't matter that foreigners are buying up the whole country with the money they are making from this lopsided balance of payments. It doesn't matter that the super-rich and their minions in Congress are blandly asserting, with a straight face, that the solution to this mess is to cut their taxes even more. None of this absurdity fazes them in the least. They are buying it, hook line and sinker. Not matter how you look at it, we're screwed.
All this gloom and doom isn't going to keep me from voting, though. Despite the grim prospects facing us next year, I'm not going to let them take that away from me. It's all I've go left.
As for my promise to expound on the "margin of error" fallacy and that ridiculous phrase "statistical dead heat", forget it. If you took statistics, you know what Nate Silver's Gaussian distribution and two-tailed alpha (confidence level) mean. If you didn't, the conclusion's pretty much the same: We're screwed.