Back in the summer of 2016, I made a prediction: Donald Trump had a reasonable shot at being the next president of the United States — a prediction made long before nearly all of the TV political pundits. They were wrong. I was right. They still have their high-paying jobs on TV. I’m a bottom writer on Medium. Where’s the justice in that?
We had a great look at Mr. Trump’s personal life decades prior to his entry into the White House. The presidential antics after the election should have been no surprise to anyone.
I made another prediction. The predictable unstatesman-like nature and the predictable political ineptness would cause his political support to crumble. Not by a huge amount, but enough such that many traditional Republican voters would not show up to vote for Republicans in 2020. That would be their way of telling the Republican back rooms to find someone more sensible for the 2020 election.
The back rooms should have started an internal campaign against Mr. Trump when it became blatantly obvious he was not fit for the job. I was predicting the crumbling to be noticeable by the end of 2017.
Sometimes, that’s how Western democracy removes incompetent leaders who somehow get a big political job. It takes a year or two, but it usually works. Richard Nixon in 1974 was a good example — he got pulled off the stage by party insiders. And in my province of Alberta in 2014, an inept premier was removed with an internal party battle, not a general election. The same thing should have happened to Donald Trump.
I was wrong. I did not fully understand the psychology behind MAGA. I have acquired a fuller understanding.
MAGA is a political phenomenon in a modern democracy. While I have my theories on this political force, the USA political system has, eight years later, not been able to move this man far enough away from the levers of power. He will still be a viable contender in 2024.
But he has maxed himself out. There is no upside from his 2020 showing. If he wins, it will be by a narrow margin.
The antics of incompetence are still building. It’s not hard to imagine 5M Republican voters not voting as their protest against their party for continuing with such a poor leader. It’s not hard to imagine 5M more non-voters finding their way to the voting booth to vote against the Republicans. That shift would guarantee a Biden victory.
My Mastodon feed is full of articles about the Democrats out-fundraising the Republicans — and casting doubts on where the Republican donations are actually going.
So I am puzzled as to why the American pollsters are still calling a 50/50 contest for November. Why not say 52/48 or 55/45?
I have recently written an article on my experience with pollsters. In a quick summary, pollsters cannot determine if a voter, who seems to have a strong opinion, will actually vote.
So the typical disclaimer of “Two percentage points of error, 19 times out of 20” is rather meaningless in a close election. Americans like the drama of close elections — and seem to find interesting ways to get that entertainment. It would be funny if the consequences were not so real.
A decisively decisive victory
But maybe something more sinister is happening. In January, I wrote a six-part series on Election 2024. I posited that the Democrat election machine needs to find 5M more volunteers than usual to create a “decisively decisive” win. Part 3 talks about getting a 65/35 split.
Why such a big split, you ask? Because too many MAGA members have been inculcated to not accept a Trump defeat. They are ready to overthrow their democracy to get that result — just like the patriots ousted the British in 1776. A 65/35 split will take a lot of steam out of their violence.
While a 52/48 split will have Democrat apologists dancing in the streets, this split will prolong the violence. Maybe even lead to a successful Republican insurrection. Or maybe the Democrats will make a preemptive strike to quash the Republican oligarchy with a Democrat oligarchy?
We should not wish for a narrow D victory.
Meanwhile, in the back rooms
Have the sensible people in the back rooms of reasonable political power reach the same conclusion as I have?
Probably. They are probably trying to engineer the situation to convince the extra 5M Americans to put more effort into democracy going beyond the usual complaining, blaming, and posting on the Internet. They need more election workers and election donors.
If the polls are saying a 53/47 split, too many of that extra 5M will say something like: “Well, Joe Biden has the election wrapped up. There’s no sense me giving my free time and spare money to his election.” And then, the USA will get that 53/47 split. Unfortunately, this election outcome will not be decisive enough to quench the simmering fire within MAGA. The sensible people in the back rooms already know this.
So maybe the 50/50 polling is propped up — to maintain a sense of political urgency. A 50/50 poll will scare 5M Americans into becoming bigger political actors than complainers, blamers, and amateur political writers.
The mainstream media will happily seek out the polls that play to the 50/50 story. A 50/50 contest moves eyes and ears from the sports and movie channels to the news channels, which leads to higher ratings and more ad revenues.
And a polling company that gets out of line will be politically corrected. Say that has not happened before in American politics.
So let’s assume the Democratic Party gets its 5M extra workers. The November split does go 65/35. We will be so happy with this result that we won’t question why the pollsters got this all wrong. Ends justifies the means, right?
But Dave, where’s the grift?
If the 50/50 polls find those extra 5M workers and donors to give us 65/35, where’s the corruption?
It starts with negative political advertising. We should expect the Democrats to create many great “quick clip” ad campaigns that cast Trump and the Republican Party in a bad light. The objective of negative ads is not to convince a MAGA member to switch his/her vote, but to convince that voter that his/her preference is not worth the effort to cast a vote. A vote not cast for Donald Trump is almost as good as a vote cast for Joe Biden. If 10% of MAGA become non-voters (which is a realistic objective), then it’s game over for Mr. Trump.
We could argue that this silliness is all fair in politics and war. Political parties have been using negative advertising for decades.
But who really benefits from these negative ads?
Answer: the people who make these negative ads
Let me explain
To sell us things we probably don’t need, advertising agencies have become very good at their craft. They psychoanalyze their marks. They write up a storyboard and script. They consider carefully every word and every tone of voice. They delve into every physical feature of the ad from the clothes the actors wear to the pictures hanging on the wall. They work out the best camera angles. They set up an elaborate stage, taking hours to shoot a 30-second commercial. They spend hours selecting and compiling the best version of the many takes. When you see a TV commercial, nothing in that commercial has been left to chance.
Then they build a focus group and run their ads past that group. When they find ads that work well with focus groups, they then run the actual campaign in a select location, for example, Toledo, Ohio. If they can see the right movement in Toledo, the campaign goes national. If not, adjustments are made.
The ad is run at a frequency and duration regarded as optimal for results, based on previous advertising experience and research on selling us things we really don’t need. As that optimal run is being passed to the public, the ad masters are creating follow-up ads.
Modern advertising is a blend of science, psychology, and experience. It is not based on good feelings from well-meaning people. It requires highly paid professionals to do this job well. I estimate your average ad manager with a proven record of selling us things we do not need is earning $250,000 a year!
If the Biden campaign wants to pull these professionals away from the corporate world, that’s the price to pay in order to “save the country.”
The ad managers are supervising other skilled workers — actors, models, camera operators, photographers, stage managers, writers, software jockeys, accountants — all of whom are making a decent middle class living.
Of course, the ad managers have a CEO and VPs to report to. These “workers” are getting even more money than the ad managers.
In essence, donations to the Democratic Party are laundered into the bank accounts of employees of the advertising agencies.
Let me say this in a different way. Convincing a grocery store worker, a restaurant cook, or a truck driver to give $500 to the Democrat campaign chest is going to move more money from the working class to the professional class. Did I mention that the professional class is already earning more money than the working class?
And today’s 50/50 stated polls are leading the way to this grift. By creating a sense of urgency that might not be there, some of us will open up our wallets.
And there’s more grift
And then there is the mainstream media. They need a good election season to keep their tap turned on. These employees would not mind a pollster saying 50/50 when it is really 65/35. They too are indirectly paid by donations to the Democratic Party.
Did I mention that TV people are also well paid?
The Election Complex
President Eisenhower warned us of the “military industrial complex.”
Well, there is also a big industry profiting from elections, regardless of who wins the election. This industry has a vested interest in showcasing a 50/50 election.
Yeah, but Dave you were wrong before
I was in lower-middle management of a Canadian political party. I was able to see some of the internal sinister forces. But because these forces are hard to prove or disprove, they do not get investigated and reported. While conspiracies abound in internal party politics, acquittals and convictions are few. Rumors spawn more rumors. Intrigue — proven or not — is a big part of political culture.
So, it’s not a big stretch to report 50/50 when the poll actually says 53/47! These two outcomes are similar (and almost within margins of error), but one poll result opens up more wallets than the other. And open wallets can move the split beyond the 53/47.
Can I prove the polls are being manipulated? Nope! Is it plausible? Yep! And because it is plausible, it taints the process of today’s democracies. It doesn’t matter whether it is true or not. Or the ends justifies the means.
If you don’t want political intrigue affecting our public policy decisions, I have a new democratic system for you!
And with this new system, the grocery store workers, restaurant cooks, and truck drivers can “save their country” by voting for good character and capacity for governance — and keep their $500.
Published on Medium
Western Democracy is a Ford Model A
Addendum 2025
On November 6, I checked the Wikipedia article about the numbers behind the election. It seems Mr. Trump had 71m votes and Ms. Harris had 65m votes. In American political culture, this would have been a decisive victory. And the 50/50 polls were wrong!
But these numbers kept changing as the days wore on. By the end of November, the numbers settled to Trump 77m votes and Harris 75m votes, which makes the polls accurate. It seems 18m votes were not counted until later. I seem to be the only one who noticed this shift and saw this late counting as another threat to democracy.
I am flummoxed that 86m Americans (eligible voters) chose to sit this election out. In the political theory of "voting for the lesser of two evils," Harris was the likely choice for citizens who are not political junkies. The stakes were high. And Mr. Trump's first month in office is showing how these stakes were high. Had 10m of the non-voters cast a ballot, Ms. Harris would have legitimate win. Had 20m voted, that should have been enough to take some steam out of the MAGA violence that was likely with a Harris win.
But the makers of the Democratic ads were well paid. Maybe that is what is important.
Once again, I encourage readers to study Tiered Democratic Governance--so that we won't have all this drama in governance and such different societal paths taken because 3% of Americans decided not to vote.
