Thank you very much to all who read Part 1 (why elite pundits were motivated to call this race so wrong from the get go), and Part 2 (the garbage polls, and garbage poll aggregators). In Part 3, I want to talk about an influential group of elites called the fundamentalists.
Not these fundamentalists
The Fundamentalists
The fundamentalists believe that a limited number of fundamental factors affect election outcomes. The factors are generally agreed to be:
- Presidential Approval Rating
- The "Economy”.
- Vibes?
That’s it.
As we’ll show here, there’s been 🚩warning signs🚩 that these indicators have been faulty and/or insufficient (in the current political moment). No fundamentalist heeded these warnings.
Nathaniel Rakich, a sabermetrics bro who works for 538, kicked off the fundamentalism back on Election Day 2020:
When confronted with a conflict between the fundamentals and the polls, the fundamentalists argued… the polls must be wrong!
Democrats can’t be doing well. The polls must be wrong.
From an account followed by Yglesias:
Lots of deleted tweets out there. Thankfully the internet is forever
The fundamentals were a major basis for House ratings at the supposedly “nonpartisan” Cook Political Report news letter. Here is Amy Walter Lady Hotline Josh two weeks before the election:
….with less than two weeks until Election Day, it looks as if the fundamentals — an unpopular president, deep frustration with the status quo, and stubborn inflation — are ultimately going to define this midterm.
Guess what? They didn’t.😂
We could dismiss the Cook Political Report as out-of-touch Beltway elites. But Cook political ratings factor in to Nate Silver’s model, which we discussed in Part 2. Cook political ratings influenced where and how Democrats campaigned.
How did these elite media figures, who are trying to reduce election outcomes to a function of two fundamental numbers, get so misled? They got both the numbers wrong.
Joe Biden’s Approval:
Did you know Joe Biden is unpopular? Do you ever stop hearing about how unpopular Joe Biden is?
Presidential popularity is considered so important that 538 has an entire center dedicated to it. They report Biden’s approval to a tenth of a digit, multiple times a day! You can compare where Biden’s approval stands against predecessors going all the way back to Harry Truman! It’s that important!
Tom Bevan, someone who would be an angry suburban MAGA-dad if they hadn’t founded RCP, was anxiously tweeting out Biden’s falling approval rating last winter as proof positive of an impending democratic wipeout. Unfortunately, Tom deleted all those tweets before I could grab them for this diary.
But it doesn’t take much intellectual curiosity to realize there is something peculiar about Biden’s job approval. Daily Kos gives us the incredible resource of Civiqs. And front page diarists still misunderstood Biden’s low approval rating. Let’s look at Biden approval, broken down by age group, on Election Day 2022:
From Civiqs
The first thing you’ll notice is that Biden’s affirmative approval rating is the lowest among the youngest voters. And this is not just in Civiqs. We see this in every poll (here, here, etc.). This wouldn’t be notable, except for everything we know about these young voters. If the youngest generation were, say, trending right, then we could have more faith that the reported approval rating is accurate, but look at the exit poll from 2022:
The age groups unfortunately don’t align precisely with Civiqs, but they are close enough that we can still safely say the youngest voters were the most willing to support Democrats.
The causality between approval and voting intent is broken for the youngest voters, and it doesn’t converge until the 65+ demographic.
Our media elites can’t fathom that there has been a great decoupling between approval and voting intent, and that approval of President Biden is bidirectional. In other words, those paid a quarter of a million a year to study elections can’t fathom that young voters see President Biden unacceptably to their right. It really doesn't take much intellectual curiosity to debunk presidential approval. I did it here with Civiqs and 30 seconds. But this was apparently too much for the fundamentalists.
The Economy:
Did you know the economy is bad? Do you ever stop hearing about how bad the economy is? Just like Joe Biden being unpopular, it is because it is. Sure, unemployment is at record lows, wages are up, job growth has been stellar, and GDP has been positive. But the economy is bad because people say it is. Let’s go to Civiqs again and look at Republican perception of the economy:
Would you look at that😮 Republican negative perception of the economy falls to near 0 the day Donald Trump wins the Presidency, and then skyrockets the day he loses it. There is no economic news correlated to these dates.
Republican voters so obviously conflate economic conditions with whether a Republican is in the White House. Republican President? Economy good. Democratic President? Economy bad. That’s it. Our elite election analysts don’t want to acknowledge that Republican voters simply give spurious answers on economic conditions.
"Now Democratic voters do the same thing", I’m sure you can hear the very serious pundits say. No they don’t. Again from Civiqs:
Democrats report no notable increase in negative sentiment when power transitions from Obama to Trump. They do when the coronavirus decimates the economy (i.e., their sentiment responds to reality). Moreover, Democratic negative sentiment actually fell during Trump’s time in office, as the economy healed and in accordance with positive economic reports after the initial Covid crash. All of this basically says that Democrats are honest in their assessment of the economy, Republicans are not.
But because Republicans are a statistically significant portion of any survey, media elites see overall negative economic responses simply because a Democrat is in power. This causes the media to cover the economy more negatively, and gives rise to perceptions that Republicans are better for the economy (they aren’t). Negative coverage of the economy can affect perceptions of the economy, too, creating a feedback cycle.
But this causes cognitive dissonance with our media elites, because they see the same positive economic indicators and (reported) negative sentiment we do. Instead of investigating whether Republicans may or may not be providing honest economic sentiment, something that would take them 5 minutes and a dialup modem, they latch on to the one economic indicator that is negative (inflation). Back in spring, no less than the National Editor of the Cook Political report, gave away the game.
In other words: Is the economy good? Sure! But because there’s inflation, the economy is bad. Remember, people continuously rate their own economic conditions as good! So how can the economy be “bad”?
* * *
Before I end, you may ask: why harp on the failure of the red wave to materialize? So what if the Democrats won? They won! My answer is that the media obsession with a red wave (contrary to the evidence) is the latest in a string of elite media failures. These failures follow a set pattern, and you can draw a straight line from the impeachment of Bill Clinton, to the treatment of Al Gore in 2000, to the Iraq War runup, to the belief that Mitt Romney was winning after the first debate in 2012, to the treatment of Hillary Clinton in 2016, to the nonexistent red wave of 2022. I am especially loathe to draw comparisons to the Iraq War, an elite media failure that saw the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. But we will be able to demonstrate before the end of the series that if not for the red wave narrative, reaching as far as Democratic strategists who incorrectly allocated resources on account of a wave materializing, Democrats would have been able to hold the house. So yes, the media cost Democrats the House of Representatives.
