We Can't Keep Letting Him Lie To Us
What is Nate Silver hiding?
Prior to 2016, I was not very cynical. It’s hard to be when you haven’t even voted before. I generally trusted that the nerds of Washington knew how to do their jobs. I did not yet view political science majors as morally aberrant threats to decent society. I #BelievedWonks. I naively assumed that you had to be smart, or even correct to make millions in political strategy. Surely, if you were wrong as often as a carnival weight guesser and lost as often as a WWE jabroni, you could not succeed in politics. I figured if you had a mansion in Virginia shaped like Ronald Reagan’s horse, splashed around in the Champagne Room at the National Prayer Breakfast, and collected rare objects which were inserted into the Bushes during Skull & Bones hazing, you were good at your job.
I was wrong. After the catastrophic miscalculations of 2016, I stopped believing. I put on a fedora and became an atheist in the church of political predictions. I still read the New York Times, but I avoided the Op-Ed page and reminded myself that this is not how most of the country gets its news. When the polls came in for 2018, I acted like my Grandma Roberta in Lord & Taylor when nothing’s on sale: I looked, but definitely did not buy anything.
The primaries rolled around. With them came the takes, from hot to spicy to Five Alarm Firehouse Chili. My friends and family (almost all college graduates from the Northeast) offered commentary on which professional-managerial careerist would most appeal to people in Iowa. People whose perceptions of the Midwest are defined by Parks and Recreation and Lou Malnati’s told me why Bernie would win or lose there. They made predictions about New Hampshire based on what they knew from skiing in Stowe, Vermont. I did my best to remember that we all know nothing.
Then came election season. I got lazy. I stopped checking Breitbart every once in a while. I figured I’d see what Charles Blow and Maureen Dowd had to say. In quarantine, I talked to fewer strangers and acquaintances. It was easy to fall back into my cozy echo chamber. Boy, my Ivy League Democrat friends sure disagreed with my Ivy League Democrat parents!
I even crawled back to Nate Silver, that cruel temptress, and 538’s siren song of certainty. It was like a Martina McBride ballad: in a moment of weakness, I let a man back into my life, knowing full well he’d end up hurting me again. I got greedy. Three hundred electoral votes? Why not four hundred? And the Senate! And you get a car and you get a car and you get a car!
Now, I sit here ashamed, like a pudgy, sticky little boy whose mommy just walked back into the kitchen and found him sitting on the counter licking cupcake batter off the whisk. Caught red-handed. Humiliated again.
This was the worst outcome. Allegations of fraud and cheating will follow this election forever. Republican lawyers, beholden to their masters like court eunuchs, are descending on swing states with enough frivolous lawsuits to make an ambulance chaser blush. But can you really blame them? If another country held an election where it was this difficult to vote, with a system this convoluted and opaque, and someone won on margins this thin, the Organization of American States would be called in to liberate us. Worst of all, we’re going to keep hearing about this election for fucking ever.
I’ll be surprised if many of you even read this. I’m sure you all, like me, are just refreshing your browser like you’re trying to buy a Jordan release. I think Biden is still going to win. But, I don’t know. Neither do you. Our puny brains are not designed to handle this much data. We can’t make any sense of it ourselves. So, journalists and campaign workers, communications majors who took music theory to fulfill their math requirement, are explaining it to us.
If there’s one lesson from these last four years, it’s that we are absolutely incapable of estimating unknown unknowns. We should have known this would happen, if only because we did not expect it. None of us really know anything. We clearly do not understand each other or our country. We can’t predict the future. Maybe we just need to shut up.
(Look for more about shutting up, staying quiet, and keeping your opinions to yourself in my next weekly opinion newsletter.)