934: Rolling Wrong
Democrats who can do math
A hit piece in Rolling Stone last month closed with the following quote from WelcomeFest speaker Lakshya Jain:
“A lot of you may say you find some of Jared Golden’s votes to be annoying for a Democrat,” Jain said. “Well, guess what? The choice isn’t between Jared Golden and AOC. The choice is between Jared Golden and Paul LePage. So who would you rather have?”
… if the results of the 2024 election have indicated anything, it’s that attitude — the attitude that was also adopted by the Harris campaign — is a losing one: We know that demoralized Democratic-leaning voters who stayed home decided the election.
Well, yesterday the Golden campaign released polling showing that the choice really is between him and MAGA former Gov. Paul LePage:
the poll’s release comes amid growing speculation that Golden could face a primary challenge from Matt Dunlap, Maine’s auditor and former secretary of state. The survey also tests Dunlap in a hypothetical matchup against LePage.
The state auditor fares worse than Golden, according to the poll, trailing the Republican by 10 percentage points, 37% to 47%.
“The totality of the data makes clear that Maine’s 2nd Congressional District is challenging ground for Democrats, with Congressman Golden one of the only Democrats able to win, and the only Democrat who has consistently won,” the memo reads.
Leftists can’t do addition
Primarying Jared Golden? What?
Back in the Bush era, progressives knew how to do math. Here’s David Axelrod on Nancy Pelosi:
I asked her once, "Well, what'd you learn from your father?" She didn’t hesitate. She said, "I learned how to count."
She was trained at the ward level about how to count votes, how to get votes and how to produce a result.
But the Trump era has been focused on subtraction, with leftists counting Twitter likes and small-dollar donations while trying to beat other Democrats.
And mis-counting poll results.
Rolling Stone had a big '"exclusive” yesterday with polling on Biden 2020 voters who sat out the 2024 election. The article is by the same author who critiqued the Golden-or-LePage question, and basically picks up the unconvincing argument where the last article ended.
The poll by Celinda Lake was sponsored by Way To Win, the leftist group founded by an heiress to the Hunt oil fortune.
The breathless headline invoked AOC, subtitled with a quote from the pollster: “The conventional wisdom is really wrong on these voters.”
Conventional wisdom, reinforced by multiple independent analyses of the 2024 electorate, is that non-voters were just as Trump-leaning as the electorate overall and voters believed the Democratic Party was too far left.
This article seeks to counter the consensus on where Democrats need to go in the future:
new research suggests the prevailing wisdom that has guided those efforts — the idea that Democrats tacked too far to the left last year — might be,well, wrong.
Like many such claims, the oil heiress starts by smashing Occam’s Razor. Why rely on the simplest explanation - voters told pollsters Harris was too far left! - when a convoluted, multi-step meandering set of logic with different data points is available.
In this case, the equation is:
Some of the voters who didn’t vote in 2024 did vote in 2020
Some of those voters supported Joe Biden
Most of those voters who didn’t vote in 2024 but did vote for Biden in 2020 view AOC favorably
AOC is a leftist
Therefore, the Biden 2020 voters who did not vote in 2024 are leftists
Democrats must actually be more left-wing to motivate these voters to participate and win in the future
This tortured argument happens frequently. Sweet, sweet progressive foundation money flows through leftist activists into good pollsters doing credible-ish work with bad implications.
So no big deal.
Only this time … the pollster didn’t even add up their own data correctly.
Centrists have a terrible tendency to actually read stuff. And when you actually read this poll, it shows that these voters are actually more likely to be favorable to generic “Democrats in Congress” than to AOC.
The green bars 32 + 32 next to AOC add up to 64, but the total (in blue font) is 67.
67% is actually the share who view the generic “Democrats in Congress” favorably, while 64% view AOC favorably.
The slide flipped the numbers.
National polling shows Democrats broadly have even stronger favorability of AOC, further undermined the argument that this group is particularly AOC-focused.
The pollster begrudgingly admits these voters are generic Democrats in the next slide, saying these voters are “surprisingly favorable towards Democrats in Congress” and “intensely unfavorable towards MAGA Republicans.”
But liking Democrats and not liking Republicans is not the goal of the leftist factional project. The goal is in the clause after their surprise: “there is not high intensity.”
What matters more in Maine and around the country, the intensity of primary voters or winning general elections?
We need the community focused on the latter to be much, much bigger.
326 days until the Democratic primary in Maine, and 934 days until the next presidential primary.