I take comfort in the fact that we are still months out. Biden "laid low" last time and it worked. Perhaps that is part of the strategy this time too. Ignore the noise. Watch the signal. Isn't there some study that says the truly Undecided don't decide until the final days before voting? (But yes we do need to push back about the uneven unfair unbalanced coverage of a really good man and good president! )
Like many others - I will emphasize again & again - how grateful I am for Hopium, as well as Robert Hubbell & Heather Cox Richardson! These 3 are my main source of news these days. I have given up on the veteran MSM outlets. While I want badly to know why they do what they do - these communities have helped motivate me not to get bogged down with such wheel spinning. For the last 3 months I have by and large done what WaPo contributor Jennifer Rubin advised & ignored the coverage by the MSM, and just keep working.
"Biden got an incredible 96% of the vote in the South Carolina primary, which my husband and I were both two votes in support of!"
Thank you for voting and showing your support!
It drives me nuts that the MSM media keeps "damning Biden with faint praise" (as my late mother was wont to say). His truly decisive victory in SC is couched as "Biden really needed this pick-me-up since he is doing so poorly in the polls". Heck, Biden did better as a write-in candidate in NH than Trump did in the same-day GOP primary. Does anyone in the MSM report it from that perspective? Very few that I have seen.
But Trump's win gets reported as "Trump crushed it!" No mention of the 91 felony counts he is facing, his rapidly deteriorating mental capacity, or his out-in-open plans for revenge against "his enemies" should he (God forbid) get re-elected. Nope, just impatient speculation about when Nikki Haley is going to drop out!
<End of Rant> Back to work on "Doing More, Worry Less"
And I don't think the national numbers support it either. Though given the electoral college one could say national numbers aren't an indicator of who's winning (nobody is winning this far out, actually).
I know! This morning I checked the final numbers for the non primary in NH. Per NYT Jan 30th, Biden won with 63 percent as a write in, Phillips was just under 20 percent and he was on the ballot. So people showed up and wrote Biden in just to prove a point, with absolutely nothing on the line.
And Biden’s write in lead crushed dts. As he just broke over 50, and this was a real R primary.
Seriously WFT does Kornacki think he's doing?! I guess generating eyeballs/clicks/subscriptions at the direction of the network. Or maybe there's a financial motivator on his part. Either way he's contributing to what I continue to call "The Bedwetter Show". That's why I've had to customize all my YouTube account for it to stop recommending that kind of bullshit. Like you said Lisa heads down and ignore the flooded zone.
So when you're watching a video on YouTube - you know how there's a list of recommended videos off to the side ? There's a small 3 dot dialogue box right below the thumbnail of each video. If you click that little 3-dot box, there's an option that says "don't recommend channel". Just click that. That's what I've done overtime so I don't inadvertently see a melodramatic, catostrophizing headline. It has helped me IMMENSELY!
Anytime ! I've had to do that with soooooo many channels overtime. I hate to bury my head in the sand, but thankfully between this place & other newsletters, as well the excellent "Daily Beans" podcast with Allison Gill/Dana Goldberg I seem to hear the essential pieces of news
On the subject of polling response rates -- Your post today made me think of my own experience. Over the past couple months, I've received several text polls from what appear to be progressive organizations, asking me if I support Joe Biden. Despite the fact that I DO support Biden, I never answer the question. I always reply STOP because I assume that if I reply "yes," I'll be bombarded with more texts, which I don't want.
Not only bombarded with more texts, but if you answer yes, and keep going, it always ends up in fundraising. I've tried just saying yes and leaving. I have no idea if that works!
Just a reminder to all the postcard writers out there. The Suozzi campaign is asking that all postcards be mailed by Tuesday unless you live in NY, NJ, or CT in which case Wed. is OK. They also asked that all those writing postcards switch to phonebanks (if remote) or canvassing (if local).
Mailed mine on Friday ! I forgot how good doing that felt! BTW - side note - is it me or in the photo that Simon always shows of Tom Suozzi - does he look a little like Clive Owen ?
Oh, Simon, I'm in tears. I loved your story about your connection with Tracy Chapman, and thank you so much for posting the video. There's something so touching about your including a story that has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with heart. Although in a way it does have something to do with politics in that if Trump gets back in the White House, we will have even less time for things of the heart because all of our efforts will be on survival. Thank you for all you do. I'm proud to be one of your first paid subscribers!
PS I've been writing postcards for Tom, and I'm going to try to overcome my dyslexic fear of phone banking (I can't read the forms fast enough) to make some calls. I live in DC and I know how important it is that he get elected to Congress.
On Democracy (a "podcast" associated with Meidas Touch) host Fred Wellman interviewed Kaivan Shroff this week. Very interesting discussion from which I picked up this factoid I hadn't heard elsewhere:
The analysis of the NH primary showed Biden's win as a write-in candidate was stronger that the NH average in college towns. That sort of refutes the narrative that young people are abandoning Biden.
If I had to choose, I think I would rather have polling that underestimates Democrats than overestimates them. It gets our people fired up to vote, volunteer, and donate when we see them "taking the lead." But ultimately, coverage of polls is symptomatic of our really problematic conception of elections as "races" in which candidates are ahead or behind at different points of the year. Simply put, we treat the metaphor as reality. Also, it really gets me how much emphasis people put on the history of presidential approval ratings when it comes to Biden but completely ignore the exit polling (among actual voters) at the GOP primaries in Iowa and NH. When's the last time someone mentioned that on TV? Also, when's the last time someone crunched the numbers on how many presidents have won an election against an incumbent who defeated them when they were an incumbent 4 years previously? We have seen it time and time again. In the media coverage, when it comes to Trump, numbers and history are meaningless. When it comes to Biden, they have the status of scientific certainty. Pollsters like Nate Cohn are trying to tell us that election results don't matter (in 2022 and 2023 for instance) because they don't have the same gold-standard status as polls in measuring voter sentiment, totally getting it backwards. We polled 100% of likely voters in 2016 on Trump-Biden and that result is still about where we are.
One of the interesting threads showing up now is that this is a two-incumbent race: Pres Biden vs Pres Trump. I'm not sure what kind of factor that is, or if it is one, but it is a unique situation in our presidential elections,, isn't it? (How does this equate to false equivalencies?)
Thank heavens for Simon's constant focus on what's going RIGHT for us.
It's totally unique. It's also unique for a party who has lost so many elections to skip the "post-mortem" to determine what went wrong and how they can fix it and instead run a candidate who claims that he actually did win and that everything he did was perfect. It's because of believing their own BS and shutting out all evidence to the contrary the about half of GOP voters believe the man who can obviously beat Biden is the only one who has ever lost to him.
If it were 2020 and Hillary Clinton was the Dem nominee for the second time against Trump and getting the same numbers as Trump is now, what would the narrative be? "Dems have lost their minds!" "America has already rejected this woman, why run her again?" "These polls are just the wishful thinking of media elites out of touch with the Real America," etc.
The evidence is overwhelming that legacy media has to be willing to do whatever it takes to get clicks and eyeballs or they will bleed revenue. As a result, they are going all in on polling and the attention it gets, reinforcing their own narrative that the polls they take are newsworthy.
"There is no better way to channel all the anxiety we all have than by doing the work and winning elections." Such wise, empowering, true words. Thank you for the reminder, Simon!
Also thanks for sharing your incredible Jumbo history with Tracy Chapman and posting the sublime video. Wow. Absolutely love it!!
Thank you Simon, you may not think addressing polls all the time is a good use of your time, but it really is invaluable to the rest of us. I will refer others here and to the material you wrote about. I'm a trained social worker, and we need to understand that we as a people have experienced a lot of trauma over the past few decades ( Bush V Gore, 9/11, The Great Recession, trump's fluke election, and a pandemic that has affected ALL of us. So it is understandable that many of us panic or get anxious when polls look bad. It really is important for me, at least, and I'm sure to all the others I will share this material with, to see a rational discussion on them. We do not get that elsewhere.
If you want to get polled, people can sign up for the YouGov polls, it'll drastically increase your chance to get a response in compared to just waiting for the phone to ring.
They primarily do polling on products and services, but they're a fairly respected political pollster. You sign up to get surveys, but they do some sort of magic to determine who gets a political poll and when.
There seems to be a naive premise that poll responders are actually trying to participate and that they are actually representative. In my few real experiences (mall questioners with clipboards), I found myself trying to cooperate with the pollster, so they could keep their jobs, answering how I thought might make them look good, etc. I had zero interest in which color was most attractive for a hypothetical TV Dinner box, but I wanted the pollster to a.)like me, b.)keep her job, c.)stay motivated, etc. “Truth?” Not an issue. The truth is: I could care less about TV Dinners but I liked the person and wanted her to be pleased. Assuming that I was really wanting to get to a statistical “fact” was a mistake. The number of people who snubbed the pollster by walking on by, walked to the other side of the mall, yelled at her, etc. made me sympathetic and willing to waste my time while my wife was shopping.
I take comfort in the fact that we are still months out. Biden "laid low" last time and it worked. Perhaps that is part of the strategy this time too. Ignore the noise. Watch the signal. Isn't there some study that says the truly Undecided don't decide until the final days before voting? (But yes we do need to push back about the uneven unfair unbalanced coverage of a really good man and good president! )
Like many others - I will emphasize again & again - how grateful I am for Hopium, as well as Robert Hubbell & Heather Cox Richardson! These 3 are my main source of news these days. I have given up on the veteran MSM outlets. While I want badly to know why they do what they do - these communities have helped motivate me not to get bogged down with such wheel spinning. For the last 3 months I have by and large done what WaPo contributor Jennifer Rubin advised & ignored the coverage by the MSM, and just keep working.
"Biden got an incredible 96% of the vote in the South Carolina primary, which my husband and I were both two votes in support of!"
Thank you for voting and showing your support!
It drives me nuts that the MSM media keeps "damning Biden with faint praise" (as my late mother was wont to say). His truly decisive victory in SC is couched as "Biden really needed this pick-me-up since he is doing so poorly in the polls". Heck, Biden did better as a write-in candidate in NH than Trump did in the same-day GOP primary. Does anyone in the MSM report it from that perspective? Very few that I have seen.
But Trump's win gets reported as "Trump crushed it!" No mention of the 91 felony counts he is facing, his rapidly deteriorating mental capacity, or his out-in-open plans for revenge against "his enemies" should he (God forbid) get re-elected. Nope, just impatient speculation about when Nikki Haley is going to drop out!
<End of Rant> Back to work on "Doing More, Worry Less"
And I don't think the national numbers support it either. Though given the electoral college one could say national numbers aren't an indicator of who's winning (nobody is winning this far out, actually).
I know! This morning I checked the final numbers for the non primary in NH. Per NYT Jan 30th, Biden won with 63 percent as a write in, Phillips was just under 20 percent and he was on the ballot. So people showed up and wrote Biden in just to prove a point, with absolutely nothing on the line.
And Biden’s write in lead crushed dts. As he just broke over 50, and this was a real R primary.
Seriously WFT does Kornacki think he's doing?! I guess generating eyeballs/clicks/subscriptions at the direction of the network. Or maybe there's a financial motivator on his part. Either way he's contributing to what I continue to call "The Bedwetter Show". That's why I've had to customize all my YouTube account for it to stop recommending that kind of bullshit. Like you said Lisa heads down and ignore the flooded zone.
How do you do that? Customize it.
So when you're watching a video on YouTube - you know how there's a list of recommended videos off to the side ? There's a small 3 dot dialogue box right below the thumbnail of each video. If you click that little 3-dot box, there's an option that says "don't recommend channel". Just click that. That's what I've done overtime so I don't inadvertently see a melodramatic, catostrophizing headline. It has helped me IMMENSELY!
OH THANK YOU
Anytime ! I've had to do that with soooooo many channels overtime. I hate to bury my head in the sand, but thankfully between this place & other newsletters, as well the excellent "Daily Beans" podcast with Allison Gill/Dana Goldberg I seem to hear the essential pieces of news
Agreed! MSNBC might not want to always follow the NBC trail of tears. I get really tired of "if it bleeds it leads" crap.
Is it possible he’s just telling it like it is?
On the subject of polling response rates -- Your post today made me think of my own experience. Over the past couple months, I've received several text polls from what appear to be progressive organizations, asking me if I support Joe Biden. Despite the fact that I DO support Biden, I never answer the question. I always reply STOP because I assume that if I reply "yes," I'll be bombarded with more texts, which I don't want.
And fundraising requests!
Not only bombarded with more texts, but if you answer yes, and keep going, it always ends up in fundraising. I've tried just saying yes and leaving. I have no idea if that works!
Those are very unlikely to be real polls, it's just a way to get people to click something and confirm they're real.
So cool that you knew Tracy Chapman in college!
Just a reminder to all the postcard writers out there. The Suozzi campaign is asking that all postcards be mailed by Tuesday unless you live in NY, NJ, or CT in which case Wed. is OK. They also asked that all those writing postcards switch to phonebanks (if remote) or canvassing (if local).
Here is a listing from Mobilize of upcoming Suozzi events: https://www.mobilize.us/?org_ids=36995
Mailed mine on Friday ! I forgot how good doing that felt! BTW - side note - is it me or in the photo that Simon always shows of Tom Suozzi - does he look a little like Clive Owen ?
Thank you for Tracy. I’m crying, that was beautiful.
Oh, Simon, I'm in tears. I loved your story about your connection with Tracy Chapman, and thank you so much for posting the video. There's something so touching about your including a story that has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with heart. Although in a way it does have something to do with politics in that if Trump gets back in the White House, we will have even less time for things of the heart because all of our efforts will be on survival. Thank you for all you do. I'm proud to be one of your first paid subscribers!
PS I've been writing postcards for Tom, and I'm going to try to overcome my dyslexic fear of phone banking (I can't read the forms fast enough) to make some calls. I live in DC and I know how important it is that he get elected to Congress.
On Democracy (a "podcast" associated with Meidas Touch) host Fred Wellman interviewed Kaivan Shroff this week. Very interesting discussion from which I picked up this factoid I hadn't heard elsewhere:
The analysis of the NH primary showed Biden's win as a write-in candidate was stronger that the NH average in college towns. That sort of refutes the narrative that young people are abandoning Biden.
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD6wYzEzKF8&list=PL36GQAccexbwfbZk_lhXI_-1-rRwHZ7ea&index=1&pp=iAQB
Saw that too! Great show.
If I had to choose, I think I would rather have polling that underestimates Democrats than overestimates them. It gets our people fired up to vote, volunteer, and donate when we see them "taking the lead." But ultimately, coverage of polls is symptomatic of our really problematic conception of elections as "races" in which candidates are ahead or behind at different points of the year. Simply put, we treat the metaphor as reality. Also, it really gets me how much emphasis people put on the history of presidential approval ratings when it comes to Biden but completely ignore the exit polling (among actual voters) at the GOP primaries in Iowa and NH. When's the last time someone mentioned that on TV? Also, when's the last time someone crunched the numbers on how many presidents have won an election against an incumbent who defeated them when they were an incumbent 4 years previously? We have seen it time and time again. In the media coverage, when it comes to Trump, numbers and history are meaningless. When it comes to Biden, they have the status of scientific certainty. Pollsters like Nate Cohn are trying to tell us that election results don't matter (in 2022 and 2023 for instance) because they don't have the same gold-standard status as polls in measuring voter sentiment, totally getting it backwards. We polled 100% of likely voters in 2016 on Trump-Biden and that result is still about where we are.
One of the interesting threads showing up now is that this is a two-incumbent race: Pres Biden vs Pres Trump. I'm not sure what kind of factor that is, or if it is one, but it is a unique situation in our presidential elections,, isn't it? (How does this equate to false equivalencies?)
Thank heavens for Simon's constant focus on what's going RIGHT for us.
It's totally unique. It's also unique for a party who has lost so many elections to skip the "post-mortem" to determine what went wrong and how they can fix it and instead run a candidate who claims that he actually did win and that everything he did was perfect. It's because of believing their own BS and shutting out all evidence to the contrary the about half of GOP voters believe the man who can obviously beat Biden is the only one who has ever lost to him.
If it were 2020 and Hillary Clinton was the Dem nominee for the second time against Trump and getting the same numbers as Trump is now, what would the narrative be? "Dems have lost their minds!" "America has already rejected this woman, why run her again?" "These polls are just the wishful thinking of media elites out of touch with the Real America," etc.
The evidence is overwhelming that legacy media has to be willing to do whatever it takes to get clicks and eyeballs or they will bleed revenue. As a result, they are going all in on polling and the attention it gets, reinforcing their own narrative that the polls they take are newsworthy.
"There is no better way to channel all the anxiety we all have than by doing the work and winning elections." Such wise, empowering, true words. Thank you for the reminder, Simon!
Also thanks for sharing your incredible Jumbo history with Tracy Chapman and posting the sublime video. Wow. Absolutely love it!!
God, that's a beautiful song.
Thank you Simon, you may not think addressing polls all the time is a good use of your time, but it really is invaluable to the rest of us. I will refer others here and to the material you wrote about. I'm a trained social worker, and we need to understand that we as a people have experienced a lot of trauma over the past few decades ( Bush V Gore, 9/11, The Great Recession, trump's fluke election, and a pandemic that has affected ALL of us. So it is understandable that many of us panic or get anxious when polls look bad. It really is important for me, at least, and I'm sure to all the others I will share this material with, to see a rational discussion on them. We do not get that elsewhere.
Agree. The trauma of the past several years has left many with PTSD and more.
If you want to get polled, people can sign up for the YouGov polls, it'll drastically increase your chance to get a response in compared to just waiting for the phone to ring.
Thanks for that info, Meg.
I'm not sure I would trust a poll that works by having you contact them. The whole point is to get a random sample.
They primarily do polling on products and services, but they're a fairly respected political pollster. You sign up to get surveys, but they do some sort of magic to determine who gets a political poll and when.
Yay Tracy! Xoxo
There seems to be a naive premise that poll responders are actually trying to participate and that they are actually representative. In my few real experiences (mall questioners with clipboards), I found myself trying to cooperate with the pollster, so they could keep their jobs, answering how I thought might make them look good, etc. I had zero interest in which color was most attractive for a hypothetical TV Dinner box, but I wanted the pollster to a.)like me, b.)keep her job, c.)stay motivated, etc. “Truth?” Not an issue. The truth is: I could care less about TV Dinners but I liked the person and wanted her to be pleased. Assuming that I was really wanting to get to a statistical “fact” was a mistake. The number of people who snubbed the pollster by walking on by, walked to the other side of the mall, yelled at her, etc. made me sympathetic and willing to waste my time while my wife was shopping.