The Rules of the Game

Not just in France

So French voters did that thing they do periodically, usually in a presidential election, and rejected fascism decisively in the second round of the snap legislative election. Somewhat grudgingly—they don't want the candidates they voted for to think they're impressed, but they know their duty.

As did the parties, which showed commendable discipline in carrying out the program of dropping out candidates to turn every race into the two-person race in which they had the best chance of defeating the Rassemblement Nationale. But it was the massive turnout that completed the job and defeated not just the fascists but the pollsters as well, who kept predicting a majority for the Rassemblement well into yesterday afternoon,  even as they noticed an unexpectedly large number of voters.

I couldn't help thinking I was seeing a repetition of a pattern we've been seeing a lot of lately, of voters breaking the poll predictions when they're voting to say there's a degree of authoritarianism they can't tolerate, in Brazil and in Poland, Spain and Iran, even when it's not enough to really change anything, as in the losses endured by authoritarian rulers of India and Turkey, and Hungary (in June's EU election), and of course in the United States of America in elections going back to 2018 reacting against the chaos of Trumpery, the terror of the incompetent COVID response and the racist violence of police forces, the overturning of Roe and rush to outlaw abortion.

I mean, it's not just heartening, but it's also interesting that the polls keep erring in that direction, with authoritarians underperforming. It doesn't happen when authoritarianism isn't a primary issue, like in Germany in June (where the appeal of the fascistoid Alternativ für Deutschland is still only in the former East Germany, while voters in the former West were punishing the sort-of leftist government by voting for the normie conservatives). Though in Britain one survey had Nigel Farage's "Reform Party" winning 18 seats in Thursday's general election (they won four, I think, or five).

It's as if there were something systemically wrong with the poll model leading polltakers to overestimate the chances of the nutcases, or underestimate their opponents. Not that I have a useful idea about what that might be (though if I did it would probably be less connected to whether respondents tell the truth or not, or what kinds of phone they use, and more to the likely voter screens, in keeping with my longstanding obsession with turnout).

But it is heartening too, as another indication, in a series of indications, that we don't have to give total credence to the polls we're seeing at the moment. As is this, from four years ago, which I went hunting for yesterday, on a hunch:

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At this time in the 2020 campaign, Biden was 8 points ahead of Trump in the head-to-head preference polls, but voters couldn't bring themselves to think much of him. They knew they were going to vote for him, but his favorability rating was just beginning to climb out of the 44%-45% doldrums it had been stuck in ever since he'd announced his presidential candidacy in May 2019, even as Trump's continued sinking from the high it had reached early in the Covid pandemic. But the timing of Biden's rise doesn't quite look like a function of the pandemic, or of the George Floyd protests; it's just extremely gradual from around July 2019 until September 2020, and then it takes off.

What it really looks like is a thing Biden himself likes to say when they get him talking about the horserace: that normal Americans don't start really paying attention until Labor Day, and that's when the undecideds begin to decide. Which could explain why he's so confident he doesn't need to be worrying about the dismal polls. He's been playing this game for 50 years (while you might say George Stephanopoulos has been unlearning it for 30, ever since he gave up Democratic politics to present the Received Opinion on ABC), and he absolutely believes he knows. Of course he could be wrong. I'm just saying he's not lying.

Also, while I'm up, the confidence he expressed to Stephanopoulos seems extreme, but he certainly couldn't say what Stephanopoulos was trying to force him to say, that he feels frail and is consumed by doubt. Stephanopoulos should have asked him about something else instead of repeating the same two or three questions for the whole 25 minutes (let's remember here that George moderating a debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 election spent the whole thing hounding Obama on the subject of his imaginary relationship with the ex–Weather Underground member Bill Ayres, evidently on advice from Sean Hannity, and refusing to ask him any substantive questions).

Speaking of the undecideds, there are apparently an awful lot of them this year—20% according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll of three weeks ago—and I think I know why. It's because of the way the Washington press corps, under the leadership of The New York Times, has developed the "age issue", not as a substantive question about whether Biden is too old or unwell to be an effective president, but as a horserace question about whether being old "hurts" him as a candidate: the message has always been, "You may not think Biden is too old, but your neighbors probably do," and therefore he's going to lose the election.

This year's undecideds must include many Trump haters infected by the fear this raises (and is apparently intended to raise): if Biden is the nominee, Trump will win, not because I wouldn't vote for Biden, but because my shallow and ill-informed neighbors wouldn't. And that fear keeps making people—voters who would normally be automatically with the Democrat, the union candidate, the abortion rights advocate, the climate change fighter—wish there was another nominee, and reluctant to believe it's too late to change that.

And you can't blame them! They might not have a clear understanding of how damaging it would be to the party to create some kind of new process to replace the primaries we've already had and spark an internal war four months before the election, but they understand very well the danger of a second Trump presidency. I'm scared too!

But it's at least equally possible, for reasons we've discussed,  that sticking with Biden's candidacy is the best way of avoiding a second Trump presidency. The weirdness of the "debate" was awful, but it doesn't seem to have been repeated; he's still the Biden who's the only politician to have beaten Trump; and it's the way a lot of people I greatly respect feel, from Josh Marshall to Barack Obama. 

Whereas the movement to dump Biden belongs to what David Kurtz calls the Do-Something Caucus, the "centrist" punditry of NeverTrump Republicans and conservative Democrats, and irritating politicians like former presidential candidates Seth Moulton and Tim Ryan, who believe me don't know as much about how to get elected as Barack Obama does (before his hopeless run for the presidency, Ryan challenged Nancy Pelosi for the speakership, and afterwards he ran for Senate against Yalie hillbilly J.D. Vance, a miserable campaign in a race that Democrats should not have lost). And don't get me started on Claire McCaskill...

Exactly because of that, I was really taken aback to hear yesterday that my own not-at-all-conservative and extremely politically savvy congressmember, Jerry Nadler, had joined a group of representatives—Adam Smith (WA), Mark Takano (CA), and Joseph Morelle (NY)—in calling on the House leadership to get Biden to step down. And pleased to learn today that whatever Nadler thought he was doing is now over.

With which, I think, it's pretty much all over. The Times will no doubt continue its crusade, but remember that most voters don't read The Times. The Democrats are closing ranks. The undecideds will realize in late August or early September, if they didn't realize earlier, that Biden is the only alternative remaining, and, like the French voters who marked their ballots for Macron's party even if they themselves were Communists, or for the Communist candidate even though they'd have liked to support Macron, come out, however grudgingly, to save us from fascism. Most likely. I hope. But it really is the only way. Those are the rules.