A Sound Of Thunder

Who will tell Ezra? >>> Resilience Part 1 (or a First Look at the 538 Model for 2024) https://t.co/rCFaKqzj8T via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 11, 2024

First, while poll averages are helpful to making sense of the current state of the race, forecasts are like predicting the future. In fact, they are literally about predicting the future. And predicting the future is hard — a basic life lesson if you haven’t come across it yet. To me, the 538 modeling is the gold standard. But I see it still as half a novelty. That’s no criticism of the people who put it together, incredibly smart folks. It’s just that there are a lot of factors that can’t be reduced to formulas and data inputs and the data that can be put into the model come with their own clouds of uncertainty. To me it’s a helpful data exercise which takes a knowledgable person’s range of factors, adds a bunch more and looks at them in a systematic and consistent-over-time fashion, stripped of wishful thinking. That’s helpful. It’s just not the be all and end all.

No, first, the problem with the future is that NOBODY LIVES THERE! Science (which is supposed to be the basis of polling), cannot predict the future because it cannot observe the future. As Hume pointed out, we only know the sun will rise tomorrow BECAUSE IT ALWAYS HAS. We have no reason to expect it not to, but if tomorrow it doesn’t then our expectations failed. We also predict presidential election results every four years, and those almost always fail. Not because we can’t account for enough variables (the problem is not pop chaos theory, or “Life Finds A Way”), the problem is, it’s the future, and by the time it gets here, reasonable guesses are more likely to be right, but also more likely to be meaningless.

Who predicted 2016? Somebody somewhere did, but so what? In polling a miss is as good as a mile because it seldom predicts the future, but every four years we blame black swan events and October surprises and declare four years after the fact that James Comey screwed over Hillary Clinton, and but for…!

But how do you know? Do you go back in time and step on the butterfly that leads to the birth of James Comey and find out?

Probably too many variables, right?*

IIRC, Romney was giving Obama a narrow path to re-election. In the end, it wasn’t even close. In my lifetime only three Presidents who ran for a second term, lost: Carter, Bush pere, and Trump. None of the three were as good at retail politics as their opponents. And Trump is now being noticed for babbling about electric boats and sharks and teleprompters. And he’s still raising money to pay lawyers, not to campaign.

And being a convicted felon is not likely to be a benefit on the campaign trail. Still, the future will be what the future will be. In 2016, we decided Trump would be the corrective that would teach us all to listen to Susan Sarandon; or that no matter how bad Hillary was (because: Bill. And because: Hillary.), Trump wouldn’t win; and mostly because, Trump can’t win, and I’m not voting for Hillary.

And have we learned from that?

These are the variables that try men’s (and women’s?) souls.

But the biggest problem is trying to get back to the future without a DeLorean equipped with a flux capacitor. It’s the obsession with the future which is the real narrative of the narrative. The moment the Presidential election is over, speculation begins about the next election in four years. Trump has taken our two national political obsessions: Who’s next?, and What do the polls say?, and like an evil (or simply feral) genius, turned them against us. All the political press cares about is the horse race, assuming always it’s a battle between Tweedledee and Tweedledum, so the outcome doesn’t matter. The sound of thunder happens so far in the past only the butterfly hears it. All that matters is who wins in November, so the speculation on who wins four Novembers from now, can begin. We are constantly chasing the future in four-year increments. And Trump is using that, now, to try to avoid the criminal prosecutions he can’t avoid.

Trump has been running for office practically since he left Washington, and he claims it gives him extra-legal protection that no court has recognized. He also claims he’s leading in the polls, so he can’t be guilty; or even prosecuted. He’s working the two polls of the narrative: who’s next? (Trump) and what do the polls tell us about the future? In political reporting no two things are more sacred than who is running, and what is their standing in the polls? Every time someone complains about Trump’s attacks on democracy, consider how they are twisting themselves even tighter into those bindings, because all they are really talking about is what the polls say, and what the future will be. That political narrative is old and familiar and, like it or not, we accept it as true and trustworthy. The same way we accept presidential candidates as worthy to hold the office. If they were not worthy, would they be candidates?

In the end, the narrative won’t save him. Trump’s con is on himself: he confuses the narrative with reality. He thinks polls are actually windows on the future, and can tell us who in the future is next. He thinks being next retroactively protects him now; or at least will extend endlessly into the future. He also presents himself as worthy of the office, because how else could he have supporters? The problem is less who he is, than who we think who he must be. He’s crashing not because somebody in the past stepped on the butterfly, but because he’s trying to live in the future we’ve always insisted was the only place that matters. But reality is in the here and now, and it’s wrenching to the national discourse to focus on the present (not on the future that never arrives because “Who’s next?”) and on character (which is not just a partisan campaign issue that muddies the “objective” POV of political reporting.). 

The irony is, reality and the present are not giving Trump a very good future at all.

*If you remember the story, you remember that the untimely death of a butterfly in the Jurassic era lead to the unwelcome election of a strong man over a wise man, to the American presidency.