Click above to visit the entire site
Summer Fronts
27 June 2008:
David Runciman on the Election, in the London Review of Books
As the Democratic primaries wound up earlier this month, I grew certain that one thing that I didn't want to spend time on this summer was the presidential campaign. I remembered too well the last election season, which coincided with my inching toward blogging and following a lot of political sites. I emerged from the experience with nothing but contempt for an electorate that, in spite of all the evidence of incompetence, chicanery, and sheer wicked-mindedness, could return George W Bush to the White House. This isn't to say that I expected him to lose the election — that contempt didn't materialize in one malignant miasma the day after the voting. It built up all summer long, as my own personal sonar told me that, for all the yelling and screaming, there wasn't much listening.
This impression received graceful rhetorical confirmation in the current issue of the London Review of Books. In "The Cattle-Prod Election: David Runciman on the 2008 Presidential Campaign," Mr Runciman shows that the details of Barack Obama's somewhat ragged victory were predictable, given what we already know about how Americans vote. The most exciting primary in history was an illusion conjured out of accidents.
All the twists and turns have been a function of the somewhat random sequencing of different state primaries, which taken individually have invariably conformed to type, with Obama winning where he was always likely to win (caucus states, among college-educated and black voters, in the cities), and Clinton winning where she was likely to win (big states with secret ballots, among less well-educated whites and Hispanics, in rural areas). Even the initial drama of that week in early January – when Obama’s victory in Iowa had seemed to give him a chance of finishing Clinton off, only to be confounded by her victory in New Hampshire, which defied the expectation of the pundits and had them all speculating about what had swung it (was it her welling up in a diner? was it hastily rekindled memories of Bill? was it hints of hubris from Obama?) – turns out to have been an illusion. Iowa was Obama country (younger, smaller, caucus meetings) and New Hampshire wasn’t (older, bigger, voting machines). The salient fact about this campaign is that demography trumps everything: people have been voting in fixed patterns set by age, race, gender, income and educational level, and the winner in the different contests has been determined by the way these different groups are divided up within and between state boundaries. Anyone who knows how to read the census data (and that includes some of the smart, tech-savvy types around Obama) has had a good idea of how this was going to play from the outset. All the rest is noise.
The rest is noise. Mr Runciman goes on to demonstrate the utter worthlessness of the political polling system; it may be broken, but it is in not in the interest of those who pay for it to fix it. The media, for example, depend upon capricious polls in order to generate headlines. Politicians' advisers formulate tendentious questions, knowing that while Americans will agree that the government ought to help the needy but disagree that welfare is a good idea. It is hard to know, in 2008, whether tiny polling samples are more or less egregious than the reliance on the landline telephone network, instead of the Internet, to sound the public. (It is my understanding the cell phones are never dialed in polls, thus eliminating an ever-broader swath of younger voters.)
The answer is that in an election like this one, the polls aren’t there to tell the real story; they are there to support the various different stories that the commentators want to tell. The market is not for the hard truth, because the hard truth this time round is that most people are voting with the predictability of prodded animals. What the news organisations and blogs and roving pundits want are polls that suggest the voters are thinking hard about this election, arguing about it, making up their minds, talking it through, because that’s what all the commentators like to think they are doing themselves. This endless raft of educated opinion needs to be kept afloat on some data indicating that it matters what informed people say about politics, because it helps the voters to decide which way to jump. If you keep the polling sample sizes small enough, you can create the impression of a public willing to be moved by what other people are saying. That’s why the comment industry pays for this rubbish.
If the election were held today — but the election will not be held today, nor tomorrow, and not until 4 November. We have no way of knowing how, if the election were held today, it would differ from what will happen in November. The question is profoundly uninteresting to any mature viewpoint. Almost as tedious is discussion of one's voting plans. Anyone undecided at this point will be swept up by last-minute caprice, and no amount of sound talk will settle anything. My own reason for voting Democratic — to staunch the hemorrhaging of liberal principles from the American judiciary — will strike many fellow-Americans as odd, I know; In my experience, it is next to impossible to remind people who aren't trained in the law that the political hue of the federal bench can have a transformative effect on the quality of justice meted out. A look at yesterday's headlines alone — "Justices Rule for Individual Gun Rights"; "Damages Cut Against Exxon in Valdez Case" — is conclusively persuasive. If you are someone who generally votes Democratic but who plans to sit out this election because you wanted to elect the first female American president, or because you're disinclined to elect the first black American president, then it's just as well that you and I spare ourselves a fruitless conversation.
On thing I am not going to waste my time on this summer is trying to join in the production of "an elegant piece of analysis for every hope."
Copyright (c) 2008 Pourover Press