Knowing What You Know

For a brief note on men’s role in Trump’s misogyny, click here.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Watching the runup to Iowa’s caucuses is like watching a mud-wrestling contest among a large group of naked women. It has its titillating moments. But, all in all, it’s a gigantic embarrassment, a total irrelevancy, and a gross waste of even surplus pundit time.

Iowa went for Trump in 2016 by 9.4 points. The chances that any Democrat will win it in the general election are small. So why—quite apart from its demographic uniqueness—should Iowa loom so large in the Democratic primaries?

As no less than two leading pundits have observed (here and here), Iowa, like New Hampshire, is grossly unrepresentative of our nation as a whole. A mature, data-driven Democratic Party would relegate it to third or fourth rank in its primary race.

Much of the frenzy surrounding Iowa arises from neglecting the most basic rule of epistemology. When all else fails, know what you know, what you don’t know, and what you cannot know. Yet the whole lemming-like focus on Iowa reflects our media’s absurd focus on the unknowable: “electability.”

In 2016, pollsters and pundits spent billions of dollars and many person-years of labor trying to measure that variable. As Sarah Palin might ask, “how’d that work out for ‘em?” They all said Hillary would win.

There’s only one measure of “electability” that counts: the upcoming 2020 presidential election itself. If the nation’s best political “operatives,” media, pollsters and pundits got it so wrong in 2016, what chance has the average voter this year?

Asking the average voter to try invites all sorts of irrelevant guesses about what neighbors may think—not to mention what voters in other, quite different regions may think. It invites voters to apply their own prejudices in estimating and judging others’ prejudices and predilections, compounding dangerous irrelevancies with unknowables. No one who knows what the word “data” means and how mathematicians and scientists use it would ever make so fundamental a blunder.

No, the right way for voters to think about voting is to do what voters are supposed to do: pick the best candidate. That’s what voters did in 2008, and it worked out just fine.

True, they erred in 2016. But they did so because Trump had no political record. He was virtually unknown outside of New York, which rejected him by a landslide margin of 22%. Elsewhere, many voters didn’t like Hillary and took a flyer on a dark horse. Now Trump has a record of three years of tantrum Tweets, inconsistency, meanness, stupidity and cruelty. Voters know him as never before, and there’s a basis for comparison.

Guessing “electability” is more than just an entirely wrong approach. It’s wrong in detail, too, including basic math. The seven critical states most likely to decide the 2020 election are in that category precisely because their margins of decision (red or blue) in 2016 were 3% or lower. That’s at or below the margin of error of almost all political polls.

Without spending far more money and taking far more time than pollsters typically do, it’s probably impossible, even in theory, for them to determine with any reliability which part of that below-the-margin-of-error “persuadable” fraction of voters would go for each of several candidates. Try to do that, and you get down to fractions of one percent, or an order of magnitude below the margin of error in polling. No respectable scientist would ever publish a paper in which the probability of error is so much larger than the supposed conclusions.

Equally important, pollsters tend to focus on the 3% to 5% of voters who purportedly switched from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. Those voters may be relevant, at least in the seven states known to be in play.

But precisely what drives them? Pollsters have tried for about three years to determine that, in past tense for 2016, without much success. And even if they could determine past tense, they can’t predict future tense: that’s intrinsically unknowable. Something unpredictable now—like the Chinese coronavirus becoming a global pandemic active throughout the entire presidential campaign—might be the deciding factor.

Focusing on “electability” among the 2012-2016 swing voters is also a wrong approach for another reason entirely. Hillary Clinton lost in part because she failed to pass the “Woody Allen” test: she didn’t show up during the critical pre-election days in several of the key states she lost. She also lost by failing to raise enthusiasm among core Democrats.

Whether new progressive Democratic voters motivated by enthusiasm for progressive policies will outweigh swing voters attracted by so-called “moderation” is unknown and unknowable. But it stands to reason, in this age of deliberate voter suppression, that voters moved by enthusiasm, instead of mere revulsion at Trump, might jump the hoops that vote-suppressors put in their way, register and vote. At least the political operatives spending millions to get out the vote think so.

So should we be asking individual voters to try to do what the nation’s best and best-paid pollsters tried to do in 2016, and failed miserably at doing? Or should we admit that all this stuff is unknown and probably unknowable? Should we ask voters instead to focus on things they can see and know, like the candidates’ records, experience, policies, personalities, character, and strengths and weaknesses as debaters and campaigners?

Last but not least, there’s the question of “identity.” I’ve seen pundits and voters speculating that a woman can’t win because Hillary Clinton lost. That reasoning ranks among the most absurd and misogynistic non-sequiturs I’ve ever heard.

Today’s female candidates are nothing like Hillary. Neither Warren nor Klobuchar has ever called voters “deplorables.” Neither voted for our endless war in Iraq. Neither failed to understand that every worker has two e-mail accounts, one for work and one for home. Neither was in the chain of command of a diplomatic post overrun by terrorists. Neither has given highly-paid speeches to Wall Street and refused to divulge their contents.

There are many more misfortunes and errors of Hillary that have nothing to do with Warren or Klobuchar. Attributing them to either Warren or Klobuchar, even by implication, is nothing more than the vilest of gender prejudice. Pundits who repeat that bogus comparison ought to be ashamed of themselves, both for its implicit prejudice against women and its derogation of the common sense of American voters.

I plan to do just the opposite. I plan to vote for Warren in the primaries because her policies match mine more than any other candidate’s, because she avoids leading with her chin by calling her plans “socialism,” and because I think she has the greatest raw brainpower of all the Dem candidates. (Smarts are not overrated.)

Warren is not perfect. She’s made some mistakes, in my view, but she’s flexible and adaptable. Her age, which would be 71 at inauguration, is the oldest I would like to see in any first-term president. As for Klobuchar, I would pick her over Biden because she’s a bit more progressive, smarter and much younger than he and seems to have good rapport with voters in two of the seven key states. (Klobuchar also has a decisive advantage in her native state, Minnesota, which I put in the reliably Democratic column despite Clinton’s narrow margin there in 2016.)

Most of all, I’m committed to Warren and maybe Klobuchar precisely because they are women. Men have ruled this nation all of my 74 years. While it has progressed in some respects, in several important respects it has lost ground steadily, relative to other developed nations, for most of my life. Those respects include economic equality, quality education for all, support for families, military restraint, fighting global warming, and basic quality of life for people who work mostly with their hands.

Anyway, a female candidate might just be Democrats’ “secret weapon” in this election. It’s one thing for Warren to complain that Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, with no witnesses, doubted her chances to win. That sounds a bit like whining. It’s quite another thing for Warren’s supporters to run ads showing Trump and his minions caught on tape disrespecting, insulting and belittling women, over and over again.

There are enough clips of horrendous behavior to air a separate attack ad every week from now until the general election. Collectively, they could send most women, and lots of men, into the voting booth fired with zeal to crush Trump like a bug, in full accordance with the law and our Constitution. The attack ads should include the infamous “access Hollywood” tapes, Trump’s attempts to downplay gag-settlements with his port-star conquests, his hint about menstruation to Megyn Kelly, and his Secretary of State’s recent challenge (easily met!) to the reporter and national-security expert Mary Louise Kelly to find Ukraine on a map.

For some reason, Hillary Clinton didn’t emphasize this sort of evidence in 2016. Maybe there wasn’t enough of it then. But there certainly is now. And at a time when voters are again trying to have the Equal Rights Amendment ratified, Trump’s repulsive brand of vulgar and casual sexism is on everyone’s mind. Or it should be.

When the ad-makers use it to advantage, Trump might not know what hit him. Just as he didn’t see anything wrong in extorting the President of Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, he probably doesn’t understand that protecting, respecting and valuing women has been a fundamental goal of human civilization, especially in developed nations, for about a millennium.

Like his high-school-locker-room approach to over half our species, most of what makes Trump so vile is a product of excess testosterone, undiluted by empathy, basic morality, or any sense of fitness, tact or diplomacy. We can all look forward to something better under female leadership. If I think so and vote this way, as a man, I can’t believe there aren’t millions of women who will do the same, in the privacy of the voting booth, when offered the chance to vote for a female without Hillary Clinton’s baggage.

What about Trump himself? The Ukraine debacle suggests that he fears Biden more than other possible challengers. But why should we trust his erratic and unreliable judgment on this point, any more than on any other? He’s been wrong so many times that it’s hard to count them.

Trump has routinely underestimated, belittled and marginalized women. He seems not to understand that they are no minority group, but a majority of our population, as well as of our registered and likely voters. What a shock it will be for him, and a pleasant surprise for the rest of us, if this time they stand up and stand together, as they appear to have done in 2018. And what a nice bit of poetic justice it would be to follow our most misogynistic president ever with a female!

I will vote for any nominated Dem against Trump, including Biden. I will not waste my vote on any third-party or protest candidate. This election is too important.

But if either Warren or Klobuchar gets nominated, I will donate to and work for her to the limit of my ability. This is the right time, when we have two well-qualified and baggage-free female candidates, to show the world what female leadership of the world’s still-most-powerful nation can do. That’s why, I believe, the New York Times was both prophetic and strategic in endorsing Warren and Klobuchar jointly for the presidency, leaving individual voters to decide whether they themselves—not unknown and unknowable others—prefer a true progressive or a moderate (but not by asking Iowa, which picked Trump by 9.4% in 2016.)

If our voters torpedo our ship of state by accepting a proven monster yet again, I will go down with it proudly. I will go with confidence that I chose the best candidate insofar as I could know. And I will be absolutely certain that I couldn’t have made a better choice by asking the unknown and unknowable—who can win?—in advance.

Endnote: A Word about Men

Trump’s routinely execrable treatment of women is not an issue for women alone. Every man has or had a mother. Most have wives or/and lovers, or (for older ones) their memories. Many have sisters and/or daughters.

How many men would enjoy seeing the females in their lives dismissed as loutishly as Trump and his crew routinely do women? Surely the geniuses of Madison Avenue can use these simple facts of life to expose Trump as the monster he is.

There’s more. Trump, apparently, has succeeded in part by channeling the inner high-school bully that more than a few men remember (many falsely). But high school and adolescence are not generally happy times in American culture. Surely the great manipulators of minds in our PR and advertising industries can weaponize these facts as well.

To paraphrase our illustrious naval warrior John Paul Jones, the Democrats have not yet begun to fight. Right now, each Democratic candidate is like Abraham Lincoln at the start of the Civil War, when he went through a passel of field marshals before finding one—General Ulysses S. Grant—who could fight and fight cleverly.

That’s exactly what the Dems need. They need to stop fighting among themselves, and each needs to find her or his political general like US Grant.

When one or more do, they will expose the media’s hand-wringing about “electability” as the product of political enemies and fuzzy minds. Then this race will start to take shape, the mental fog will dissipate, and events will expose Trump not just as the most horrible, but also the most politically vulnerable, president in American history. You can’t dis’ the majority of our species without consequences.

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