I wrote a comment on Fladem’s recent post The African American Turnout: Worrying data about the young
Here it is:
Too MUCH "worrying data."
Not enough humanity.
Too much nitpicking. This race, that sex, these ages…all theoretical, no soul. Like we’re robots. Numbers in a machine. Data doesn’t win elections…people do.
You want a strong Democratic Party? Great. Build one that addresses the needs of the majority of Americans…economic needs. All Americans. Jobs. Education. Equal opportunity for all, not selected groups that are being given attention solely for political reasons. Safety from terrorism of all kinds…nutcases with guns and drug problems of all sorts. (Including psychiatric drugs.) Reform the whole healthcare system so that it works for the patients, not for Big Med, Big Insurance and Big Pharma. Build a party that is not owned by corporate interests. Field candidates who are not 30 or 40 years away from having walked the streets as workers or students, candidates who can relate to working people experientially, not theoretically. Stop military adventurism. Americans are sick of war, sick of being seen as the bad guys. Start rebuilding the infrastructure instead. Insist on the rule of law up and down the system, starting at the top, not the bottom.
Do these things and you will win. Do not do them…remain a party of elitists…and you will lose.
Where is our FDR?
AG
P.S. Nina Simone knew. Way back in 1969:
“Have We Lost The Human Touch”
Bet on it.
I was going to leave this as a comment, but then I ran into the following article on Counterpunch by Ted Rall: The Splitting Up of the Democratic Party: Why It’s Probably Coming Sooner Than You Think
It dovetailed so well into what I had written that I decided to post the two as a standalone piece.
Read on for more.
The Splitting Up of the Democratic Party: Why It’s Probably Coming Sooner Than You Think by Ted Rall
Before the election, some pundits were predicting that a Trump defeat would cause the Republican Party to split into at least two discrete new parties — one representing the old GOP’s business establishment, the other for the populist firebrands of the Tea Party. As the fight over gutting Obamacare reveals, those factions are in an uncomfortable marriage. But a full-fledged rupture doesn’t appear imminent.
A bigger story, one the corporate political writers aren’t focused on, is on the left. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Democratic Party split in two.
In my imagined scenario, the liberal Democratic base currently represented by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren file for divorce from the party’s center-right corporatist leadership caste. What next? Led by Sanders/Warren or not (probably not), prepare to see a major new “third” party close to or equal in size to a rump Democratic one.
I even have a name for this new 99%er-focused entity: the New Progressive Party, or simply the Progressive Party. Since this is ahistorical America, no one remembers the Bull Moosers.
Today’s Democratic Party is evenly divided between the Bernie Sanders progressives who focus on class issues and the Hillary Clinton urban liberals who care more about identity politics (gender, race, sexual orientation and so on).
In the short run, a Democratic-Progressive schism would benefit the GOP. In a three-way national contest I guesstimate that Republicans could count on the roughly 45% of the electorate who still approve of Trump after two months of hard-right rule. That leaves the new Progressives and the old Democrats with roughly 27.5% each — hardly a positive outlook for the left in the first few post-schism elections.
But as the cereal box warning goes, some settling may — in this case will — occur…and sooner than you’d think.
First, some “Republicans” in the Trump coalition — those Obama and Sanders voters who switched to Trump — will migrate left, attracted to a Progressive left-nationalist economic message that puts working-class Americans first minus the racism and nativism of the anti-NAFTA Trump right. Doesn’t feel like it this second, but bigotry is finding fewer adherents.
Second, demographic trends favor any left-of-the-Democrats party. Slightly more than half of Americans age 18 to 29 oppose capitalism in its current form. Some Millennials will move right over time, John Adams style — but most will not, mainly because the capitalist economy isn’t likely to reward them with better-paying jobs as they age. A strong Progressive Party — and 27.5% of the vote is strong, guaranteeing access all the way down the ballot to minor races and a spot on the national presidential debate stage — would be the natural home for America’s long-disenfranchised political left.
Third, the Progressives would attract sustained media attention. Excitement generates enthusiasm.Finally, it’s isn’t a stretch to imagine that some mainstream Republicans disgusted by a Trump/Tea Party-dominated Republican Party might scoot over to the old Democrats — whose current politics are Republican Party circa 1980, so it’s not like it would be an uncomfortable fit — adding to their numbers.
Granted, this is all very back of the envelope. But my instincts tell me we’d probably wind up with three surprisingly evenly matched parties before too long.
To be clear, a Democratic split isn’t inevitable. It may not even be more likely than not, not in the next few years anyway. But 10 or 20 years out? The further you extend the timeline, I’d bet a tidy sum that the left will finally hear what the Democratic Party leadership has been telling them for half a century — we don’t need you, we don’t owe you, we won’t do anything for you — and walk.
—snip—
Still controlled by center-right Clintonistas, the Democratic National Committee continues to snub progressives and leftists despite the fact that Bernie could have beaten Trump.
Throughout the campaign, polls showed Bernie would outperform Hillary in the fall. Still, the DNC cheated on her behalf. And they sleazily lined up the superdelegates for her.
She never considered him for veep. She didn’t even promise to appoint him to the cabinet. Big mistake.
She didn’t adopt any of his signature platform planks.
After the debacle Democratic leaders blamed everyone but themselves: WikiLeaks, Russia, the FBI, the media, even Bernie voters. They didn’t think they did anything wrong.
In the race for DNC chair and thus for the soul of the party, they picked the establishment choice over the progressive.
If you’re a Bernie Sanders Democrat, you have to be a complete idiot to believe that the Democratic Party has learned the lesson of 2016: lean left or go home. Even after it became clear that Trump was putting together the most right-wing administration in American history, Democrats were still voting in favor of Republican appointees.
—snip—
The tsunami is coming. Lefties have a choice: get washed away, or grab a surfboard.
Sounds about right to me…
AG
During the primaries and presidential campaign, almost 100% of the “data” showed HRC winning. I took my all-too-human ass out onto the streets and roads of America and saw quite clearly that the “data” was wrong. I said so here from the very beginning of the Republican debates and continued saying it until Trump won.
Now I am saying this:
“Data” sucks!!!
It doesn’t vote.
It doesn’t have trouble paying the bills…in fact the data industry is a golden egg-laying goose.
It isn’t afraid of going out of the house at night.
It doesn’t bleed or get sick.
It’s a fucking robot!!! And the people who prefer robot mind over human mind are really a species of cyborg. They have surrendered to “data.”
And “data” is never wrong.
When it is wrong?
“Oh…that was just a temporary glitch in the machine. Not to worry. We’re not. We work with it every day. It pays us really well, too!!!”
Riiiiight…
The “glitch in the machine” is the fact that it is a machine. And that ain’t temporary.
Bet on it.
We may be, though.
Temporary, that is.
So it goes…
AG
Elections are decided by data. Data is always relevant in evaluating the elections.
There is a serious point to be made about data: it can carry with it the air of authority that overstates its significance.
So if you go back to the Wall Street Crisis, you find one chief cause was overconfidence in data.
https:/www.wired.com/2009/02/wp-quant
I made this point before the election when Booman posted about Sam Wang’s prediction on the day before the election:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/11/7/103254/
So data can distort our perception of the world, and when not understood can convey certainty that does not exist. This is a point Michael Blurry makes at the end of The Big Short.
And there is a moral component to politics that makes it as much about the human heart and about morality as anything else.
But it also true that without data everything becomes just an opinion, often largely a function of someone’s own narrow view of the World.
Properly used data can help us listen to what people are trying to say about their lives. Not what you think they are saying, and not what I think they are saying, but what they actually want.
So data always is threatening to those who are unable to move beyond their own view of the world.
It is silly in the extreme to think Bernie is ever starting a third party. It’s just nonsense – because Bernie understands how they count votes in elections.
Which is why he has endorsed every Democrat for President since 1984.
You write:
That’s also why he will never have any real power.
Rall knows this.
“Probably not.”
Yup.
I think “data” in its current form has not yet caught up with the power of social media. The data is skewed because it is not being collected on the right people in the right way. Even if it is Twitter and Facebook-fed, it only counts the people who post…yea, nay or undecided. For every poster, how many ghosters are out there? People who just follow whatever posts interest them without posting anything. Can you judge by hits? “Likes?” I do not think that you can.
And…I believe that Trump understands this problem at a gut level. HRC and his primary opponents all had hundreds of little data mice scurrying around with their various pieces of info cheese. Trump is apparently almost allergic to digital action. He does not know…or does not want to know…how to send an email. He writes them out in longhand and then has a secretary send them. This general aversion has stood him in good stead. He uses his gut rather than the flappings of digital helpers and their “data.”
And he won.
I don’t have much use for “data,” either. And I won. too. How many people who were not Trump supporters thought that he would be the president months and months before he actually won?
Coincidence?
Maybe, but I don’t think so.
I think your whole data-collecting system data is either seriously flawed or…most probably…truly useless when playing against a talented politician. Politics is people, fladem. Not numbers.
People.
The greatest sickness in this culture right now is the belief in “data.” It’s almost magical thinking. “If it’s digitally proven or made, it’s just got to be good!!!”
Not so fast, children.
I am a performing artist in a musical style that is highly physically, emotionally and mentally based. I have yet to hear a machine come anywhere near the subtlety and power of a great musician. No contest whatsoever. There is a whole, hugely profitable industry that does nothing but produce mechanically and digitally-based-and-altered music. None of it is worth a crock of shit next to say tre work of say Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Jascha Heifetz, J.S.Bach, Duke Ellington or any other musical genius. The whole society is falling apart because of this over-reliance on so-called “data” at the highest levels of the culture.
As the Sufis say, “As above, so below.”
There is no “there” there fladem.
Not in the music and not in the data as well.
It’s just well-paid, digital masturbation.
Someone gets lucky and hits a jackpot…correctly predicts an election or makes a pop hit. Then they have a rep, so more fools pay attention to them,even when they are terrible. The career of Nate Silver is a perfect example of this. He got lucky with Obama, so now he’s a guru….even after his “data” totally whiffed regarding HRC in 2016. The law of averages will work on him just like it works on everybody who hustles. He’ll walk away with a lot of money first, of course. Good on him. He’s got a great hustle.
So what.
ASG
No — the Wall Street guys weren’t smart. High intelligence and the ability to crunch a lot of cherry picked data doesn’t make one smart. It’s evidence of a crook and/or a person that doesn’t know enough to question big assumptions handed to them. Like the LTCM “geniuses” and the guys that labeled Enron as the best run company in the country.
Data alone hardly ever supplies the complete picture. More so for NASA missions than other human endeavors, but even there, it wasn’t error-free.
I disagree with AG’s dismissal of data, but he has a point that no data or anecdotal data can be superior to flawed or poorly collected data or good enough data that is poorly analyzed.
If you haven’t viewed, do check out the “male Hillary and female Trump” experiment video that mino linked to in my France diary.
I am a telescope junky. To be out in a field on a clear night with the right people and music and wine and the heavens is great.
Of course telescopes vary in their magnification. A good friend, far more skilled than I, likes to try and find comets. And you use different power scopes to do that. A high resolution telescope allows you to see the object more clearly. And you sense the object’s movement more acutely. You have to re-position the scope periodically to keep it in view.
But finding an object in the sky is usually easier with a lower power scope. It gives you a broader field of vision.
And so it is with data. The more minutely you focus on polls, the more you are able to detect movement, and that is really what polls are for.
But if you confine yourself to averages and probabilities without knowing the full history, you will not understand what you are looking at.
If I could tell someone one thing I have learned from watching polls I would say that politics is extraordinarily volatile, and that the single most common mistake people make is underestimating that volatility.
“It moves” said Galileo after looking through telescopes. Polls move too, because people change their minds in unpredictable ways, and woe be it to anyone who has the arrogance to think they can predict how those minds will change.
You would think Sam Wang would have known that.
I have checked the video – it reminds me of listening to one of the JFK debates after watching it. People reached one conclusion if they watched it, another if they heard it.
Yiu write;
But when it moves…months and months before the election, I saw quite clearly that it had already moved in the white working class/lower middle class areas of the East Coast (and by extension in the samed sorts of aeas across the nation…when it moves and the polls do not catch or recognize that movement, what doe sthat say about the state of “data” in thne U.S. today?
It says that it is either crooked…completely bought and sold by the Permanent Government/Corporate alliance (You know…the one that used to be called “fascist’ in another incarnation?) or it is as completely incompetent as is most of the rest of the functioning bureaucracy in this country.
Either way it is not to be trusted.
While you had your weather eye on “the polls,” the people were ignoring you.
As Bob Dylan said, “You don’t need a weatherman to see which was the wind is blowing.”
You don’t need polls, either.
Just look out the window.
AG
AG