Nonlinearity is a wonderful thing. I saw a dynamic system undergo a catastrophic collapse. After a night in the 20s, I walked out to a windless, bright October morning. All around me, the leaves on the trees were letting go. Leaves were falling silently, like snow. The dynamic system of the trees were triggered to go dormant, overnight. Together. Within an hour, all the trees I could see lost all but a hardy smattering of their leaves. Unusual? Yes. Real? Yes.
Truth can often be stranger than fiction. Our elections since 2000 have been marked by lots of these unlikely, but still real, events and outcomes. The 2008 election was a particularly wondrous catastrophic collapse of one state of systemic equilibrium for another.
Polls are again evenly balanced or oscillating around inside their margins of error. Ten years later. Small actions by millions of people can, once again, tilt the balance one way or another. Small actions by one person, like a vote, could be the tie breaker in 2010 for one or more races -- again.
Take action.
Vote.
The term karmageddon was coined by Tulip in a comment to my diaries Countdown To No Confidence, dicussed more fully here.
Since 2000, the electorate has stayed within a eerie balance: split evenly on a shifting array of issues while diverging in different directions. That balance in the 2000 election provided the opportunity for the Supreme Court to make a small move -- delaying the last recount past the State's Constitutional limit over a weekend -- and shift the delicate balance the way they wanted.
In 2010, the whole of our electorial system is again in an attractor orbit near an equilibrium. In 2010, as has been true for over a decade, individual actions can be amplified.
A distrust of the Government is now shared by most of the electorate. A ironic twist of the rise of the Tea Party Movement is that now they are sensitized to the power we have yielded to the Government, and that means those of us watching that encroachment for decades on the left are now able to agree on several specific remedies. But we are pushed away as socialists (Fabian or otherwise), as radicals, as terrorists.
The national organizations spawned by the Republican political machines to enwrap and tame the nascent Tea Parties have yet to hold a convention accepted by all tea parties. But they have been able to capitalize on them for one last desperate attempt to have an electorial victory of any kind to lift their flagging devotion after the massive victory of their opposition in 2008. Elements of those machines which have the money have pumped over a billion dollars into this desperate hope.
Oscillating On The Edge
The contrast between the Likely Voter and the Registered Voter percentages in the polls is exactly what that money hopes to influence. It is a spread they have hoped to maintain. These right-wing group hope to keep the Republican party relevant as they are. They fear actually shattering so they can reform naturally. Local tea party members I have talked to are encouraging voters to register as independents, not Republicans.
A spread between the national Tea Party<super>TM</super> and the tea parties is significant. The moneymen provide buses to go to rallies and all the media outlets they need to leave the "lamestream media" behind. But the talk has also been allowed to be more extreme and in conflict among various dogmas within the regressive community. Yet the individual local chapters want to think they are not being influenced.
Unlike the progressive community, the regressive community wants to back up, back down and back away from problems Government could help address. Ronald Reagan led the way by busting unions, privatizing the military and law enforcement and preaching smaller government while in reality growing it even larger. But the growth was in the "defense" portion at the expense of the domestic portion of the budget. That shift has continued ever since.
Red states have consumed more of those domestic dollars than blue states. All the while complaining about spending in general. Citizens receiving VA and Medicaid benefits have moblized to deny Government health care to other citizens. Indeed, they seek to deny even bringing regulation into play to make private insurance policies fair and not misleading people into a false sense of health security.
Overton windows move along a track. Joseph Overton was really creating a simple model of what are a called attractor orbits in dynamic systems modelling. Like a marble in Chinese checkers trying to fall down another ring, the ring right beneath it has to move to a slot. If that happens when more slots can be lined up under it, the marble can fall more than one ring. A really lucky coincidence would allow a marble to fall all the way to the center.
Each ring is an "attractor" into which a marble can fall and in which it will tend to stay. Each alignment of slots is a potential path for moving toward the bottom. Overton windows are polling positions tracked by a whole industry of pollsters on all sides of the political and business spectrum. Various poll questions seem to move ahead of several others. Others seem to lag changes in the answers to other questions before they move. This chart space has now been studied and tested in field operations for decades. Each year more nuanced relationships to ever-more-specific questions are added and tracked by various pollsters.
So when the answer to a question stays within a specific range for a while, it "sticks" in an attractor orbit like a moon captured by a planet. Indeed, political quants take the mathematics physicists use to model orbiting bodies and gravitational attraction to model clusters of questions vis a vis clusters of populations diced in various ways.
When Overton windows move, key question-moons seem to move to another orbit. Polling subjects tend to shift from one population cluster to another one within the time series data sets. All this motion can be predictable, or not.
Haunted By Data Ghosts
The problem with these models is that they are... models. When a question-moon starts to shift, it may still vacillate on the boundary of the margin of error, so you don't know that it is a real movement or just random noise. When it obviously accelerates toward another orbit, how far will it go? Will it jump around or make a smooth transition to the new "orbital insertion".
All of these dyanamics can be played in a million ways. Master pollsters learn to recognize patterns by intuition. Machine masters learn the ways those numbers can be moved by deliberate actions through the Government and media. Whole new industries now create phrases like "death taxes" and sell access to tactical actions: coordinating a network of media pundits and politicians to influence legislation or defend the reputation of a major corporation, for instance. These craftsmen of the knowledge economy have models to detect the penetration and movement of these specific phrases and use that information to measure the impact of those pathways on polling questions.
Like throwing big asteroids into the polling solar system model, the question-moons seem to shift in response to the gravitational influence of the transient masses flying through.
But for all its beauty, can it really predict what points will swarm and when? Have we really reduced all that variation of real people to a model which can predict what we will do and how we will act?
Dualities In Our Eyes
The United States electorate is polled in various ways to feed the media narrative. Things have to be simple. No more than seven (wonk), five (informed reader) or three (general consumption) categories can be given. Our two-party dominance means the solar system for this gravitational model has two suns vying for millions of individual question-planets, all with moons and asteroids and all the other junk thrown in by massive political action funding.
It's quite an invention. Points seem to move like flocks of birds or schools of fish. The archetypes of two extremes opposed to each other overlay on races between Democrats and Republicans, giving it Biblical and mythic resonance in our collective experience. It is interesting that saying "The Democrat Party" is now considered perjorative instead of the politically correct title is "The Democratic Party". Our points can move, damn it! Any party is just an "ic" -- a sun against which each of us find our own orbital comfort zone.
But writ large, we have created a mythology that voters ebb and flow, pulled by two tidal forces. Voter-points move toward either sun or hang out in the DMZ of "independent" at the edge of the pull of both suns.
So Joseph Overton simplified this dynamic by visualizing a set of polling questions which would pin a particular voter-point to a point on a line between two extremes. It is a great rule-of-thumb tool for rough estimation. But in this decade of extreme balance, the next catastrophic shift of voter-points is impossible to predict.
No amount of modelling saavy could have predicted that in a single hour on that bright October morning in my back yard, all the leaves on all the trees would "choose" to fall as if they had "decided" to do so. Catastrophic changes in systems can be modeled, but very complex systems -- such as those attempting to model millions of peoples' individual decisions in the voting booth -- cannot be predicted completely. A window of opportunity for the unexpected, for wonder, is always there. One of the things every media narrative loves is the unexpected turn of events.
Because the unexpected still happens. All the time. All around us. Every day.
Rapture Of The Swarms
In this mythos, points swarm. The size of the swarm itself influences other voter swarms. Some repel each other. Some attract each other. Some merge and then divide. Diaries have poured forth in the past couple weeks, and especially in the past couple of days, reporting GOTV work. The difference between a Likely Voter (therefore a point even being watched) and a regular old Registered Voter is precisely whether that voter is likely to vote. GOTV makes that difference, and it is the only difference that matters now.
The decision to vote this time for this election cycle is one many people are making right now, outside the reach of pre-election polls. That decision is made in private, by and large. Beyond this limitation of polling the people who might or might not swarm are other factors such as cell phone bias, headwinds, tailwinds and a host of real and imagined factors which might lead individual voters to actually vote when they didn't plan to, or weren't asked by a pollster in the first place.
The Likely Voter model is the jewel in the crown, or the pike up the ass, for pollsters these days. You may or may not have a point in the models of one or more pollsters. You may never have a point in any of their models.
But this is an election, and the only poll that matters is the one you, as a fellow citizen, have the right to take. Whatever the buzzing you hear around you; whatever the resistance you face to get to a polling place and vote; whatever money-driven messages themselves swarm about you seeking to confuse you with propaganda and craziness -- it comes down to a power only we as citizens can wield. Only you have the power to vote.
All the other polls are foreplay. Only one is the real thing. Be a point in the only tally that matters. Be the source for wonder by everyone watching their moving dots on a chart. Make your choices and fulfill your piece of the promise of our democracy. Ignore the other polls. This one is still the only one that matters.
Vote.
I carry with me those that went before me into that voting booth. I leave with those that will come after me.
Comment by yawnimawke to the T-9 diary
GOTV
The series so far:
T - 10: The Prisoner's Dilemma
T - 9: I Voted Today
God Bless The Skeptics - A Musing
T - 7: Money Can't Buy You Love
T - 5: Listening
T - 3: Grins and gaggles