Democrats couldn’t believe it when Michael Moore (photo, left) predicted (here) that Trump would win the 2016 election.
Even after Trump won, Democrats still couldn’t believe their eyes, and struggled with believing what Moore had told them (“millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can”).
And they did, because they were mad at a political system that had failed them and ignored their sufferings; and also they hated Hillary, whom they considered “untrustworthy and dishonest.” The rest is sad history.
The polls predict Democrats will hold the Senate but lose the House. With a caveat: the polls are tightening, and warning Democrats could lose both, because they may have peaked too early.
Moore says that’s poppycock, the pollsters are wrong again, and a “tsunami” of turnout will bury this year’s crop of anti-democracy and just-plain-crazy Republican candidates at the real polls on Nov. 8 (read story here).
I don’t like making predictions, because it’s a crapshoot, and I’d look bad if I was wrong. As the immortal philosopher Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” However, some people do it anyway, because it’s their livelihood. As long as there are customers for predictions, whether campaigns that pay for surveys or readers of newspapers and news websites, there will be predictions and people making them for a living. Moore arguably falls in that category, although it’s possible he does this a hobby (predicting Trumpageddon, that is).
Pollsters construct complicated proprietary statistical formulae and then call a few hundred or thousand people and ask them questions. Lots of people just hang up on them, not least because fake “push polls” and outright scammers have conditioned them to distrust strangers (a reasonable defensive mechanism in a society that for all its technology is unable or unwilling to control robocalls or phishing emails).
If anything goes wrong with the methodology’s presumptions (I like that word better than “assumptions”), the results will be off, as they were in 2016; i.e., GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out”). That’s another reason to distrust polls.
Moore talks to people, too, like the guy who stopped him in the street in 2016 and told him, ““Mike, we have to vote for Trump. We HAVE to shake things up.” But he also looks at what people do. In other words, he uses anecdotal evidence.
For example, in 2022, a GOP school board incumbent in Boise — where Trump won 73% of the vote — “endorsed by a far-right extremist group, the Idaho Liberty Dogs, that led a campaign against the local library, calling their LGBTQ+ and sex ed materials ‘smut-filled pornography'” was shellacked by an 18-year-old high school student who’s a progressive climate activist (in an admittedly low-turnout election, I would add; see details here).
Moore also uses simple logic. He argues Republicans will lose the 2022 midterms “because this time around they are ‘running the biggest batch of nutters nationwide in American electoral history,’ and promised to name 10 specific “whackadoodles on the Republican side of the ballot” (see the first one here). I don’t disagree; even the mainstream media, whose blindness Moore excoriates, has commented on an exceptionally weak field of GOP candidates in this election, as a result of Trump-endorsed election deniers and extremists nearly sweeping the GOP primaries.
But winning a primary is one thing, a general election another. Moore says voters “are going to descend upon the polls en masse — a literal overwhelming, unprecedented tsunami of voters — and nonviolently, legally, and without mercy remove every last stinking traitor to our Democracy.”
There’s reason to believe he might be onto something. In Kansas, for example, voters turned out in record numbers and voted solidly in favor of keeping abortion rights in the state constitution. As Raw Story observes (here),
“So if we’re seeing a swing away from Trump-style Republicans in Kansas and Idaho, there is reason to believe that the combination of Trump fascist nutters on the ballot, the revelations from the Jan. 6 committee hearings, the various investigations into Trump and, last but definitely not least, the fact that the Supreme Court put abortion back on the ballot could lead to the type of voting tsunami Moore is predicting.”
But Moore, like the pollsters and “lazy” (his word) media pundits, is trying to predict the future — something philosopher Berra warned us is tough to do. There’s simply no way to know for sure until the votes are counted after the real polls close on Nov. 8.