Bad Math or Bad Intentions

Media botches Michigan primary. 300,000 is more than 100,000

Last night, the Republican and Democratic Party held their respective presidential primaries in Michigan, spawning a million takes from the pundit class. But in reality only two numbers matter: 294,334, the number of anti-Trump Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley, and 100,960, the number of Democratic protest votes amplified by the Far Left to extract foreign policy concessions. That effort was also helped along by some Republicans-masquerading-as-Democrats with the intention of hurting Biden.

Haley voters hurt Trump in a different way than “Uncommitted” votes hurt Biden. Both hurt, but only Haley voters are a credible threat to cross party lines.

Size also matters. You’ll note that 300,000 is significantly larger than 100,000, which is why the media should do a “deep dive” into its own habitual, incessant, untruthful, corrosive, and just plain inaccurate obsession with false equivalency.

Last night offered an opportunity for nuance from the media: typically, about 11% of Democratic primary voters cast an “uncommitted” ballot for an unopposed incumbent president running for re-election. Last night, thousands of additional voters took to the ballot box to voice their displeasure on an issue they care about, driving the uncommitted vote up two percentage points to 13%.

Meanwhile, Nikki Haley again over-performed polling as more than one-in-four GOP voters opposed Trump - a number that would cripple his chances of re-election if those more centrist Republicans join in coalition with Democrats.

Unfortunately, the media has fallen for it. 

Tortured Data

POLITICO was even more brazen this morning, toggling between raw numbers and percentages to inflate Biden’s opposition. “Uncommitted” was described as “five times the protest vote that Barack Obama saw” (italics and bold theirs!) while switching back to the percentage vote for Biden. Did they note that Biden’s vote total was four times as large as Obama? Course not.

As a British economist once noted, “if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”

If the media had capacity for nuance, these campaigns would be seen for what they are: ploys to drive a media narrative. Sadly, the media fell for it, writing breathlessly about the threat that the “uncommitted” campaign posed to Biden, even as the mirage faded as the night progressed. In 2012, the last time a Democratic incumbent president ran for re-election, 11% of Michigan voters chose “uncommitted” rather than President Obama. This despite facing no coordinated campaign to get uncommitted voters. The heavily covered, highly vaunted campaign has managed to improve on the 2012 showing by two points.

An assignment from the Welcome Assignment Desk: cover the facts, not the narrative.

Murder-Suicide and The Couch

The media is difficult to control.

But candidates have agency. And it is time for Biden to call the Far Left’s bluff and embrace a Welcome strategy. The path to winning, it turns out, runs through getting the larger number of voters.

There is an argument from the Far Left that defines swing voters as base voters. In the words of Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, the choice is not between Biden and Trump but between Biden and The Couch:

Voter turnout is obviously a very real factor in winning elections. But voter turnout in Michigan was enormous - for Biden, who got more than four times the votes that Obama got in 2012.

The “uncommitted” campaign in Michigan was not about turnout, it was an explicit threat to hurt Biden - the progressive politics of extortion we covered in He Admit It. Matt Yglesias has termed this approach “murder-suicide politics”, and it extends far beyond foreign policy. As he writes, such threats are not specific to Israel:

This is important because it’s a general feature of how progressive activists have thought about politics over the past eight years and it helps explain a lot of Democrats’ conduct during this period. I’ve written several times about the mobilization delusion, the myth that a secret stash of hyper-progressive nonvoters is ready to surge to the polls if only Democrats shift to the left. But a very non-mythical thing is that if left-wing thought-leaders tell highly engaged progressives not to vote for the lesser of two evils, they can probably succeed in tanking turnout and throwing the election to Republicans.

In practice, this is what I think a lot of progressive activism has amounted to: Donors fund groups that are completely ineffective at mobilizing non-voters or persuading swing voters but can credibly threaten to actively discourage people from voting, and then they use these murder-suicide threats to extract policy concessions.

The “uncommitted” campaign is part of a larger bluff, and the Biden campaign should call the bluff. Because while 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted,” about than 300,000 Republicans showed up and voted for Nikki Haley. And the last time we checked, 300,000 is bigger than 100,000.

And these voters are more than ready to vote for Biden in 2024. According to the South Carolina exit polls, a majority of Republican primary voters reject the label “MAGA.” According to the Iowa exit polls, 43% of Haley voters are planning to vote for Biden. 

Pundits have demanded that Biden pursue the Left vote; in fact, every four years, the political press frets that younger voters will abandon Democrats, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when one notices that younger voters are actually the most moderate age cohort. But the reality is that the organized left can’t even manage to increase the share of “uncommitted” voters from 11% to more than 13%. Meanwhile, across all primaries, Haley has managed to pull a third of the Republican electorate away from Trump. These voters represent the path to victory. 

These are the voters Biden can, and should win. They represent the coalition to defeat Trumpism. The Far Left wants Trump to remain powerful, because they believe they can use the threat of Trump to extract concessions from the Democratic Party. The Professional Left wants Trump to remain powerful because his presence rewards them with clicks and cash. The growing Center Left wants to strengthen the coalition to beat him. And that coalition is only growing.