This has all the usual buzzwords and scary rhetoric.
Allan Lichtman had correctly forecast the result of nine of the past 10 US presidential elections (and even the one he didn’t, in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore). His predictive model of “13 keys” to the White House was emulated around the world and seemed all but indestructible.
Until, that is, Donald Trump, the notorious human wrecking ball, came along and broke his crystal ball. Lichtman had prophesied that Democrat Kamala Harris would win eight of his keys, claiming the presidency, forcing him to face the harsh truth that his winning streak was over. Was it a big personal blow?
His six keys worked by and large up to this point. However, Trump doesn’t play by the established rules, but the main thing I take from it all is a failure to read the public mood. There comes a point where the established order needs booting out because the people are sick and tired of it. My own feelings were that Trump would win – by a smaller margin, but a win nonetheless. I am not a pollster. I do not use any special methods. I simply read the room and the room was saying ‘we are sick of this.’
“Of course,” the 77-year-old admits by phone. “But I care far less about the personal blow than I care about the blow to our democracy. Even before the election I said, ‘Look, if I’m wrong, the implications are vastly greater for our society than they are for the keys.’ It’s much more important to look at the broader implications.”
Ah yes, the old ‘bad for democracy’ schtick. Bullshit. The ‘wrong’ person winning is not bad for democracy, it is democracy in the raw and your side got to lose this time. Suck it up.
Why did he think Harris would win, and what went wrong? “The keys are premised on the proposition that a rational, pragmatic electorate decides whether the White House party has governed well enough to get another four years,” he explains. “Just as this kind of hate and violence is new, there are precedent-shattering elements now to our political system, most notably disinformation.
“There’s always been disinformation but it has exploded to a degree we’ve never seen before.It’s not just Fox News and the rightwing media. It’s also rightwing podcasters and we have a brand new player, the $300bn guy, Elon Musk, whose wealth exceeds that of most countries in the world and has heavily put his thumb on disinformation.”
How many times do we hear this bollocks about disinformation? Disinformation is simply information they don’t like. Information that has not been filtered and twisted by the legacy media. People have their own ways of getting information that hasn’t been propagandised by organisations such as the BBC, Guardian, et al. This twat seems to be presuming that propaganda is some sort of right wing thing. It isn’t. Both sides do it. The difference now is that we have more access to raw information and can draw our own conclusions. This though, is disinformation. Frankly, I stop taking people seriously when they use the term – see also Islamophobia, Homophobia, Transphobia, racist, xenophobic, far right and so on.
Lichtman continues: “It’s been reported that the disinformation that he disseminates has been viewed billion of times. The disinformation extends to every aspect of our society and our economy. Many people are living in an alternative universe and that calls into question the fundamental basis of political decision-making in this country.”
Well, yes, anyone who thought Harris was a viable candidate was certainly living in an alternate universe. The American electorate gave the establishment a good hard kicking last week. Not because of disinformation, but because their lives have been made worse by that establishment.
Another problem for Lichtman’s model was a presidential candidate who has constantly torn up the rulebook and defied categorisation. “We’ve seen Trump far more than we’ve ever seen in the history of this country channel the darkest impulses in American life – things that have always been with us but were increased exponentially this time: racism, misogyny, xenophobia, antisemitism.
You see what I men about the usual buzzwords here? I simply cannot take this man seriously because he doesn’t present a serious argument. His polling method might be interesting – not least why it failed, but all we are seeing is the usual bullshit from someone who is sore that their side lost.
“We’re seeing something new in our politics, which affected the prediction and could affect future predictions but has a much bigger message for the future of our democracy. George Orwell was 40 years too soon. He made it clear that dictatorships don’t just arise from brutality and suppression. They arise from control of information: doublethink. Famine is plenty, war is peace. We’re in the doublethink era and maybe we can get out of it, maybe not.”
Er, yeah, it wasn’t the rise of people like Donald Trump that Orwell was warning against – it was the kind of people we have in power in the UK who are actively enacting thoughtcrime and destroying free speech. Trump may have a touch of the demagogue about him, but he isn’t Orwellian. Starmer is. Harris would have been. Trump isn’t Orwellian, he is the response to the rise of the Orwellian dystopia seen on both sides of the Atlantic this past couple of decades or so.
I was speaking to an American lady recently. She voted for Trump. She said she was old school and didn’t hold with all this woke nonsense. Probably a lot more like her. Religious, been brought up right, know what’s right and what’s not.
“I care about the blow to our democracy.”
That says it all really doesn’t it? The proles voting for the wrong guy is a blow to our democracy. You keep using that word, I don’t think it means what you think it means.
We see plenty of people who construct artful polling systems and descriptions of processes that are assumed to work – as long as their view of the world is not disrupted. Sometimes they are pundits, sometimes politicians, sometimes economists. But the dangerous people are those who insist on making the messy world fit their preconceptions.
The USA appears to be changing from two old crusty political machines manoeuvring for leadership to a more dynamic (and less respectful) democracy. I guess the old polling systems need some updating.