What the Polls Got Most Wrong
Eric Kaufmann, one of the most astute political scientists writing today, notes that the segment of the Trump vote the polling missed was educated white voters. He suspects they were afraid to say out loud to pollsters how they were really going to vote. After all, “45% of Republicans with degrees, compared to 23% of Democrats with degrees, said they feared that their careers could be at risk if their views became known.”
So the polling got the less inhibited white non-college-educated Trump voters right, but the graduates very wrong: “The exit polls show that Trump ran even among white college graduates 49-49, and even had an edge among white female graduates of 50-49! This puts pre-election surveys out by a whopping 26-31 points among white graduates.” The threat of wokeness both alienated educated white voters — and caused more of them to vote Trump than anyone expected. The problem with woke media is that they mislead Democrats who then misread the country.
Another part of the Sullivan post that I liked:
And this is where I think I have been wrong about Trump’s appeal, and where I think I’ve misunderstood why otherwise decent people could support such a foul disrupter of democratic norms. Many of them simply didn’t take Trump’s threat to our system seriously. They took all his assaults on democracy as so much bluster from the kind of car salesman he is. They deal with this kind of bullshit all the time, took liberal democracy for granted and saw little reason to fret about its future. The writer Jamie Kirchick says that everything Trump says makes sense if it is preceded by the following words: “And now, Donnie from Queens, you’re on the air.” Many people heard Trump exactly that way, and couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
The one thing I think Sullivan, along with a good many people I'm seeing on FB, gets wrong, is concluding that the fact Trump has apparently lost says something important about the American people. Trump losing has important implications for the next four years. But in an election this close, where the result would have been reversed if one percent of the votes switched from Biden to Trump, which side of the win line the outcome came out on says very little about the electorate.
Sullivan provides parts of his output free by email, which is how I am getting it, a larger amount, along with reader comments, for subscribers on Substack. I considered subscribing, as a substitute for Slate Star Codex until it reappears, possibly also on Substack. But unlike SSC, Sullivan's The Weekly Dish posts only a selection of reader's comments, and I don't feel entirely comfortable participating in a conversation where whether my comments appear is up to someone else.
But I may change my mind. Certainly this post was worth reading.
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