Following the Election, a Small Meditation on Facing Reality

The image here to the right was developed by Harry Enten who is a senior political writer and analyst for Five Thirty Eight, my go to site for the national election horse race.

As I was reading the article for which this image was an illustration, I found my mind wandering to how people engage things of importance.

Frankly, it seems most of my friends are so concerned with the success of their candidate that anything that suggests that person is not winning is some sort of moral failing. While most of my friends are of the contemporary left politically, and those are the first people I’m thinking about here, I notice its true whatever one’s political leanings.

I find this kind of shocking. Me, I like to think my passions for my candidates are as burning bright as anyones. But, I also like to know what’s going on out there in the real world. At least to the degree that’s possible. And as it turns out there are in fact ways to track what people plan on doing. It’s called polling. Some of these methods are better than others. And its all messy, but big numbers tend to point to things accurately. Something it turns out that too often people don’t really want.

I got a real handle on this in the last presidential election when I saw how the Republican party leadership had convinced itself that the major pollers were all wrong, and they discounted the polling which put Mr Obama in the lead, in favor of Mr Romney. They thought people weren’t really telling the pollsters the truth, and had in-house people who were happy to crunch numbers with that bias built in. Me, however, I was following the work of the polling aggregator Nate Silver whose track record predicting American elections was amazingly accurate. As it happened for quite a long time he told those who followed his work that the president would be re-elected.

Among the interesting things is that because he correctly predicted the presidential election (again, he had done it before in 2008), in conservative quarters he has subsequently been demonized. I was just looking his name up and there are a surprising number of articles explaining how he’s nothing but a liberal shill. Back, to my opening observation. There appears to be some innate desire to kill the messenger. In fact by his own description Mr Silver’s personal politics lie “somewhere in-between being a libertarian and a liberal.” In an interview with Charlie Rose reported in Wikipedia, he adds, “If I were to vote it would be kind of a Gary Johnson versus Mitt Romney decision, I suppose.” Hard to even call that left of center. By contemporary standards I guess Mr Silver’s pretty middle of the road. And more important, being right in calling the numbers is obviously vastly more important to Mr Silver than his desire for one candidate or another to prevail. At least when he’s at work.

The important point is that people have a real problem getting out of their own way when looking at the world. Pretty much everything is going to be through a glass darkly. But, as Philip K Dick once observed, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” And there’s a lot of that around us, brick walls that we walk into at our peril.

And, as it turns out if you want to understand things sometimes numbers can tell you those things. In Mr Silver’s case he has been condemned for making political prognostications without ever having walked a precinct himself. Totally missing the point. He isn’t in the game, best I can tell, to advocate for anything but the truth, messy, dynamic, and changing as it is.

And so, my point here is, it really is okay to advocate. In fact I think people who don’t take sides in the great questions of the day are passing on a moral obligation. And, you want to know what’s happening? Particularly in the area of political races? Check out Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com website.

We really can walk and chew gum. We really can have passions and passionate convictions, and see what’s going on outside our neighborhood with more clarity than not.

Harry Enten’s image gives us a lovely chart showing how to use the polls.

You might want to use its common sense rule of thumb way of engaging them.

And you might even see who is going to win what before most people.