Whatever happens in the election, our fight for rights and a better America will go on – Daily Kos

Now this is partly because, over the past 25 years, people are responding less and less to pollsters. Back in 2019, Pew Research Center released this chart showing how telephone response rates, typically the most reliable polling method, fell from 36% in 1997 to just 6% in 2018. Then last month the pollster from The New York Times, Nate Cohn, said “only 0.4 % of dials” in their poll at the time yielded a completed interview, adding “If you were employed as one of our interviewers at a call center, you would have to dial numbers for two hours to get a single completed interview.“

So, given all that, the best estimate we have is that Republicans are favored to win but not overwhelmingly so. And there’s a huge range of possible outcomes. That’s not the message on Fox News, which has been touting surging Republicans and days until [rescuing?] our country, laying the groundwork for Republican candidates to claim fraud if they lose next week.

Joining me now is Cornell Belcher, a pollster and Democratic strategist, to talk about what his expectations are for where the midterms stand right now. First, Cornell, let’s start on the response rate issue and the general reliability of polling right now—your sort of takeaway as a practitioner.

BELCHER: This is an important conversation. Look, a few researchers have been doing this going back to 1997, 1996, I believe, studying this relationship between response rates. And quite frankly, they’ve found that, thus far … there’s very little relationship in the fall of response rates and survey accuracy. Now, that said, at some point do you go off a cliff? Right? When you get down to less a percentage of response rate, does it go off a cliff. Now I will say that I’ve not in our internal polling got down to the point where it’s less than a 1% response rate. But it is an issue, although thus far it has not been a huge issue.

I think the larger issue, Chris, is, quite frankly, the art of polling, not the science of polling. I think the science of polling is still fundamentally sound. But getting the science right doesn’t not make you a good pollster, does not make for a good poll. It is the art of polling.

Take 2012, for example. In the last week—I was working for the Obama campaign—in the last week of the campaign or so, the Romney folks were doing really interesting things. They were going into Pennsylvania, spending money and then doing all these other things in blue areas that was very curious. Now, after the fact, come to find out that they thought the electorate was going to look more like the Bush-Kerry electorate than the ‘08 electorate.

When polls are wrong, Chris, it is in fact happening with what their expectations of the electorate are, what’s their “likely voter.” I want to say this, and this is important, Chris. Republicans have flooded the zone with poll after poll after poll that internally don’t look anything like the electorate that we’ve seen over the last two cycles.

I think there’s more here than meets the eye. Why are they doing this? It’s diabolical. And we in the news media are beginning to follow that narrative about a Republican surge and how everything’s leaning Republican. I can tell you right now, when you look at early vote and you look at the percentage of people— especially young people—who are participating in early vote, this doesn’t look anything like three of the last four midterm elections. It looks like the outlier of 2018. Given the outlier of 2018, a lot of these polls are going to be, quite frankly, off. Because it looks nothing like what a traditional midterm electorate looks like.

HAYES: Yeah, and we should say that that’s the big variance, what the electorate looks like. We should also say that voting choices have become so polarized that it’s hard to tell what early voting portends for same day. But, generally, what I’m getting from you, as a takeaway in the last 40 seconds, is just that you think … there’s a wide range of outcomes possible on Tuesday?

BELCHER: Yes, I do. And, by the way, Chris, I’ll go a little deeper. We are bastardizing the science of polling for our own political narratives. And that has been real clear with how we’re trying drive a political story with a poll. Polls, Chris, were never in fact created to give us a horserace number. There’s so much more rich data in there, more important data in there, and what we asking polls do is to tell exactly what the future is going to be.—two weeks, three weeks, a month out. And [they] just can’t do that.

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A wide range of possible outcomes. In the coming few days, as the tension rises even higher, that’s good to keep in mind. In case the bad news outweighs the good in that outcome—let me reprise something I wrote about loss here at Daily Kos on Nov. 3, 2004, right after George W. Bush was re-elected, which felt a lot like Ronald Reagan getting re-elected 20 years earlier. Obviously, after 18 years, there is some datedness to this essay, but the basic message remains relevant, I believe:

OK. I read thousands of comments and dozens of Diaries last night and this morning. And you know something? I’m going to forget I read most of them. Just erase them from memory along with the names of those who posted them. Chalk them up to adrenaline crashes, too much rage and reefer and booze.

Because what I found in my reading was a plethora of bashing Christians, bashing Kerry, bashing gays, bashing Edwards, bashing Kos, bashing America and bashing each other. As well as a lot of people saying they’re abandoning the Democrats, abandoning politics, abandoning the country. This descent into despair and irrationality and surrender puts icing on the Republican victory cake.

Why were we in this fight in the first place? Because terrible leaders are doing terrible things to our country and calling this wonderful. Because radical reactionaries are trying to impose their imperialist schemes on whoever they wish and calling this just. Because amoral oligarchs are determined to enhance their slice of the economic pie and calling this the natural order. Because flag-wrapped ideologues want to chop up civil liberties and call this security. Because myopians are in charge of America’s future.

We lost on 11/2. Came in second place in a crucial battle whose damage may still be felt decades from now. The despicable record of our foes makes our defeat good reason for disappointment and fear. Even without a mandate over the past four years, they have behaved ruthlessly at home and abroad, failing to listen to objections even from members of their own party. With the mandate of a 3.6-million vote margin, one can only imagine how far their arrogance will take them in their efforts to dismantle 70 years of social legislation and 50+ years of diplomacy.

Still, Tuesday was only one round in the struggle. It’s only the end if we let it be. I am not speaking solely of challenging the votes in Ohio or elsewhere – indeed, I think even successful challenges are unlikely to change the ultimate outcome, which is not to say I don’t think the Democrats should make the attempt. And I’m not just talking about evaluating in depth what went wrong, then building on what was started in the Dean campaign to reinvigorate the grassroots of the Democratic Party, although I also think we must do that. I’m talking about the broader political realm, the realm outside of electoral politics that has always pushed America to live up to its best ideals and overcome its most grotesque contradictions.

Not a few people have spoken in the past few hours about an Americanist authoritarianism emerging out of the country’s current leadership. I think that’s not far-fetched. Fighting this requires that we stick together, not bashing each other, not fleeing or hiding or yielding to the temptation of behaving as if “what’s the use?”

It’s tough on the psyche to be beaten. Throughout our country’s history, abolitionists, suffragists, union organizers, anti-racists, anti-warriors, civil libertarians, feminists and gay rights activists have challenged the majority of Americans to take off their blinders. Each succeeded one way or another, but not overnight, and certainly not without serious setbacks.

After a decent interval of licking our wounds and pondering what might have been and where we went wrong, we need to spit out our despair and return — united — to battling those who have for the moment outmaneuvered us. Otherwise, we might just as well lie down in the street and let them flatten us with their schemes.

Those schemes have, of course, gone on a tear since that was written. That makes the fight even more crucial. Unlike what I wrote back then, I don’t have much faith in decent intervals anymore.

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