Standard Of Measure

In all seriousness this post amounts to his announcing that he'll have the GOP doing the burger runs for his campaign this cycle, like he did with Christie last time. And really, why shldnt he? The whole party has pledged loyalty to him, even the ones nominally running ... https://t.co/cascCw1ujp

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 20, 2023

3/ It's the basic morally economy he operates in. I know I've won when you lose. It's all part of the authoritarian mix. He won't even humor their effort to hold primaries. Which was perfectly predictable.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 20, 2023

Trump is just following the logic of the first rule of political punditry: The polls are right, and the primary purpose of elections is to verify the poll numbers.

That’s all projections on election night are: ballot counts verifying poll numbers. When it’s the polls that are wrong, the sense is almost that the voters got it wrong.

How many people have already decided (not just assume, but take it as read) that Trump is the GOP nominee? The primaries are just expected to affirm that fact, and if they don’t, we’ll almost retcon the returns to assure ourselves we always knew the outcome, so we can continue the game of prediction, next time. We’ll be so shocked we won’t blame pollsters for how they read the chicken entrails, we’ll look at the electorate and wonder if they meant to do this? And how could they? And what are they saying?

Because polls are our standard of measure.

Trump didn’t really invent this outcome, he just took the logic of the system and accepted as fact the fiction it was (is) selling us.