The 2024 election season has given me whiplash. The fallout of Roe’s overturning, economic vicissitudes, Trump’s resurrection, Biden’s abdication, and Harris’s ascension have slapped me back and forth too many times. Every day delivers another hit of contradictory predictions in the horse race. Everyone around me is expressing extreme anxiety and utter indecision, simultaneously. I’m unable to absorb the constant bombardment of ambiguous information, teasing me with tea-leaf significance—or not. This political junky is left in a fugue state.
Sheep Polls
Despite the surrounding political dramatics, public polling has been strangely steady and uniform. Trump vs. Biden was tied within the margin of error earlier in the year, and numbers remain about the same with Harris now. Presidential election polls have never been so close and unchanging, especially as we near election day. Most national polls are matched, which is unprecedented. Something feels off. And it’s not wishful thinking.
Polling observers, including Nate Silver, have called out the anomaly: poll herding. In order to protect reputations and future business opportunities, public polling companies look at competitors’ findings and decide to hedge their bets. They change data to be inline with the mean average. The false weighting ensures pollsters can claim “our predictions were accurate within the margin of error” after the election, regardless who wins. Pollsters do not want to stick their necks out like in 2016 when they forecasted a Hillary Clinton win but didn’t correctly sample populations in key states that would ultimately cost her the Electoral College.
Instead of improving their methodology this year, pollsters may be cooking the books. Outliers in polling results are common and necessary, as academics who study polling will attest. One poll is going to produce different data and emerging trends than another because people from disparate locations and demographic groups have their own opinions and change their minds over time. That’s the point. Succeeding polls can verify if an outlier poll is on to something or a one-off sampling error. If polling questionnaires are pre-fixed or poll results altered to always show a statistical tie between candidates, actual voter preferences are not being gauged. Furthermore, publishing homogenized data impacts public opinion. A candidate’s electability and popularity are influenced by simplistic media coverage of the presidential race.
538 has warned that polling manipulation could be hiding a potential electoral sweep. The herd mentality may be heading pollsters off a cliff and taking public trust with them.
Voting Laws of Nature
Polling in this cycle smells fishy. However, I am not qualified to proclaim that polling data is rigged or even discern the manner in which polling data may be misinterpreted. Indeed, professional observers don’t know how to correct for specious numbers. They mix the polls in a pot and hope an aggregate mean rises to the top. Partisan pundits are useless in providing guidance, and the media have never delivered insight into the voting patterns of the electorate. Shared anecdotes from the field, social media memes, and word-of-mouth buzz are not reliable predictors. Given the paucity of reliable data and an avalanche of hunches, I turn to Newton’s first law:
“A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force.”
The force nudging the body politic is usually a vanguard of risk-takers — not an individual politician or campaign — which pushes the electorate in a new direction. In 2016, disillusioned voters allowed Trump to bump Clinton out of her path to the White House. In 2020, voters demanding a course correction favored Biden. In 2024, a groundswell of women and democracy institutionalists appear to be the voter vanguard.
Updated: Election Gone Awry or Inevitable?
In this original blog (posted on the eve of the election), I predicted the inertia of voters and electoral votes would favor Harris. I suspected women and small-d democratic believers were not being accurately sampled, weighted, or reported in the public polls:
Women’s empowerment is not an infinitesimal movement and may be statistically absorbed under the all-encompassing female demographic. People motivated by the preservation of democracy that Trump threatens are not a quantifiable constituency arranged by party affiliation and may be flying under the radar. These voting groups could be the driving force in the election. While human behavior does not necessarily follow Newton’s laws of physics, I’d rather rely on universal truths — and historical voting trends — than paid prognosticators with conflicts of interest and iffy track records.
I naively thought equality was the counter balance to Trumpism. After all, doesn’t the physics of a pendulum demand that fascism eventually swing back to democracy? Not only was I wrong, but the backlash against feminism and diversity in the voting booth was unequivocal. Americans don’t want a woman in charge, especially a black/Asian woman, and believe a white man is being aggrieved—and by extension all men are treated unjustly.
I erred in believing that chauvinism was a weak countervailing force on the body in motion. I should have known that white male dominance will not fade away gradually or die off by a million cuts. The patriarchy has been defying gravity for millennia. The hairy beast is not going down without a fight, and war is man’s specialty. American history offers ample precedence. We inevitably return to an equilibrium: any leap forward is met by aggressively pushing people two steps back. I don’t know what the future holds for America since our experiment with democracy has failed to deliver equality.
Some 900,000 years ago hominids nearly went extinct. Through a combination of luck and determination we have advanced against all odds. Our primal force is to move forward, despite whatever caveman tries to pull us back from the brink of progress. Perhaps in another million years, humans will look back at this time as a mere blip on the trajectory towards enlightenment.