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And these days, every vote not counted, counts.
Ask any candidate for public office to explain a poll that finds 98 percent of the electorate despises him, and this will be his answer: “The only poll that matters is taken on election day.” Self-serving? Yes. Dodging the question? Sure. Putting lipstick on a pig? Uh-huh. The thing is, though, it is absolutely true.
Polls don’t tell us much of anything. Many of them have small samples, or self-selected samples (as in Internet polls), or loaded questions, and actually subtract from the sum total of human knowledge. The ones that are well done offer us a snapshot of opinions held when the poll was taken, and that almost certainly have changed by the time we hear about the poll.
But polls are the junk food of journalists — no nutrition, but tasty, with no work required. Thus every day we are told what polls have to say about the economy, international diplomacy, and whether brain surgery should be conducted with stainless steel, or ceramic, scalpels. In that last category, we have recently been informed that Robert Mueller’s approval rating among the American populace has dropped. The assumption apparently is that only popular prosecutors get convictions.
Lately we are being assailed every day with the latest “generic ballot” poll, the one that asks, “if the election were held today would you vote for a Republican or a Democrat?” The two things that make that a junk poll are first, that the election is not being held today, but on another day in the future with an entirely different set of facts in play; and second, that there is no such thing in the world as a generic Republican, there is only the particular candidate in the particular race, and that’s why the only poll that matters is the election.
Then, after the election, everyone talks about it as though it were a poll. No. A poll is a survey of opinion, an election is a decision about governing our country. Screwball polls come and go all the time, but a screwball election, such as the presidential election of 2016, must be properly understood if a repetition is to be avoided.
There are all kinds of screwball explanations for 2016: the Russians did it, the fed-up working class did it, James Comey did it, the Democrats blew it, yadda yadda yadda.
Here’s the truth: of the registered voters, that is, the people eligible to make the decision of 2016, a hair over 25% voted for Trump, and a hair over 25% voted for Hillary. A hair under half the registered voters didn’t bother to vote. The decisive factor in the 2016 election was apathy. And apathy won.
There’s a lot of fear and loathing (among rational people) about Trump’s “base,” or his approval rating, measured as a percentage of all people, or of the people who actually voted last time, or of the people who took a poll. But his base in 2016 was 25% (of the people who were eligible to vote), and in 2020 will undoubtedly be less, because while he keeps inflaming the already converted, he has done nothing to expand their numbers.
Twenty-five percent is not much of a base. Among the things believed by one-quarter of Americans, according to polls, are the following:
- that the sun revolves around the earth
- that armed revolution against the US government is “imminent and imperative.”
- that global warming is just natural variations in the weather
- that God determines the outcome of the Super Bowl
- that extraterrestrial aliens have not only visited Earth (75% of Americans agree with that), but have abducted a friend or family member.
- that God has told them, personally, to do specific things
- that the Constitution stipulates that the United States is a Christian nation.
Okay, these are polls, and they don’t matter. What matters is that the apathetic — not the Russians, or the Deep State, or the Billionaires, but the Indifferent — have turned the government of their country and ours over to the lunatic fringe by treating elections as if they didn’t matter, either. We must not make that mistake again.
How about, also commenting about the lunatic fringe on the left. I wish you would refrain from political commentary, as I am sure many of your readers, like me, are apolitical. I could find as many damning attributes of the left as you do of the right. Even though I happen to agree with you re: the above.
I think democracy has been a sham for the longest time.A bunch of low IQ individuals voting for who can give them MORE!
Name me one politician left or right who stuck to their campaign promises?
Name me one politician that was elected campaigning for austerity. Which is what our planet desperately needs?
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. – H. L. Mencken
Kudos, once again, to you Mr. Lewis for finally reiterating what so many “democrats” or alleged “progressives” or much of anyone else will… the Great Orange Moronic Turd was “elected” by a small fraction of the “eligible” voting constituency of this country. Perhaps “voting” does NOT “matter,” given the way the “Electoral College” and gerrymandering of voting districts work hand-in-glove. Perhaps “Citizens United” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) precludes any “significance” of MOST of the votes, but with that level of voter “turn-out,” we’ll NEVER “know.” Of course, it could also be that “democracy” and “THE United States of America,” as concepts or ideals, are something completely different than what we have been programmed to believe by our “educators” (who, themselves, have been sold a “bill-of-goods”). Nonetheless, the evidence is clear and overwhelming that the preponderance of this country’s population is ignorant, ill-informed, irrational and happy as pigs in mud to remain that way. This is all only going to end one way. Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies…
Oh, and Costa Rica isn’t going to be so “pleasant” in a decade or so when their wet-bulb temperatures regularly exceed 95F.
I’d argue that even the elections themselves don’t really matter. Recounts in my state of Michigan were inexplicably stopped, for no good reason — other than perhaps they were revealing too many irregularities? Independent voters participating in California’s democratic primary probably wanted to assume that their votes were being counted, when in fact they weren’t (as was well documented by Greg Palast).
We were all lead to believe that the democratic candidate garnering rally crowds of nearly 30,000 simply wasn’t as popular as the one whose crowds were rarely a 10th of that? Hmmm… Americans are being played by a complicit media, methinks!
As a matter of FACT, no matter which “side” (of the same political coin) “gets elected” to “lead” the country, we get the same policies (economic, political, foreign etc), so what’s the point of voting?
i’m with Carlin on this – it’s to make you FEEL like you have a choice. You don’t.
That’s the reality of the situation. We’ve been taken over by the ruling class (made up of the wealthy, including the big banks) and their corporations (including the military/industrial sector) who are gutting the middle and lower status sectors to keep the bloated, rotten status quo for themselves, ALL at the expense of the environment.
Many say it’s ALWAYS been that way and that the electorate finally noticed and QUIT “playing.”
The “mistake” you reference at the end of your well-written essay is participating in this charade. It doesn’t work (for most of us) and it isn’t going well, no matter which party is at the helm.
Nice circular reasoning: reminds me of my roommate in college whose mantra was, “Any girl dumb enough to go out with me is so dumb I don’t want anything to do with her.” It’s all a charade, that could only be fixed by smart, honest people like me, but it’s beneath smart people like me to participate in a charade, so screw it.
No choice? If you were a Democrat, Bernie was a choice — with policies as different from Hillary’s as could be imagined. The 19 Republican candidates for nomination were all singing from the same sheet music, granted, but even in the general election the 50% who didn’t bother could easily have elected Jill Stein, and that outcome would have been different.
I know the crash is coming. I know we probably can’t fix any of it. But we were all going to die anyway, that’s not an excuse for failing to live fiercely in the meantime.
The game theory of voting has been a losing proposition for a very long time. Whether abstaining out of disgust, voting out of protest, voting out of emotion, voting for a throwaway 3rd party candidate, voting one’s conscience, voting one’s hates, or voting in earnest, the myriad ways one’s vote is manipulated, coopted, invalidated, and/or aggregated long before one gets to the voting booth makes the entire prospect feel like an exercise in futility. For a long time, I abstained. In the last few election cycles, I cast my vote, though my support of the endeavor is feeble at best. Mostly I just got sick of being accused of being part of the problem (for abstaining in disgust) even though I did nothing to contribute to the problem. Not sure I believe in such a sin of omission, but oh well …
Cute.
Whether you participate or not, the game is rigged and we don’t win – Obama was at least as bad as Bush, and Trump isn’t through yet. Republican or Democrat – they BOTH suck, and we get stuck with the bill. As we found with Nader, 3rd parties don’t get elected (I voted for him twice), so what are you complaining about again? You think voting is going to do anything different – fine, YOU participate. i’m done and fuck you and your college roommate.
The language you used to express your final thought is not welcome here.
I don’t think it was apathy, I think it was 50% of the voting population saying “None of the above”. I would have voted for Sanders (and I still think DWS should be in jail) regardless if he was on the ballot if he had not endorsed HRC – same with Sen. Warren who will now have to wait for people forget she did that.