Thursday, October 31, 2024

Part I

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Behind the ‘Science’ of Polling: What are the Polls? What Do They Tell Us? What Do We Want Them to Tell Us? What Do Others Want Us to Think They Tell Us?

Well, leading polls indicate that today on The Briefing we’re going to talk about polls and polling, and that is because it is unavoidable right now, and if there is any one issue we need to clarify in terms of the political and the media conversation, it has to do with polls, and whether or not the polls reflect something, the polls predict something. What exactly are the polls telling us? Well, in reality, when you look at the entire science of polling, you need to recognize this is something that really came into its own only at about the middle point of the 20th century, and that’s because the ability to assemble wide-ranging samplings of public opinion and the ability to tabulate the figures, that’s something that didn’t really exist until the machine age and later the digital age.

And so, even as there was a hunger to answer questions like, what are people thinking? The reality is you basically didn’t know until, for example, the votes are tabulated in an election. Now, wait just a minute. I’m going to say that right now we still don’t know until the votes are tabulated in an election, but we do know a lot more, and even though we talk about the polls failing to predict or the polls rightly predicting elections, the reality is we can’t stop talking about them. Front page of USA TODAY yesterday, “Pollsters Warned that Polls Not Predictive,” subhead, “But They Can Certainly Fuel Election Anxiety.” Philip M. Bailey is the reporter in that article. Now, the headline again tells us that polls are not predictive. That’s one of the most important things we can understand about polls. Polls are a snapshot in time. 

Polls at their very best, if they are absolutely accurate, do not tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow. Although they might tell you what people think is going to happen tomorrow or they might tell you which percentage thinks this will happen tomorrow and this percentage thinks something else is going to happen tomorrow. But then you also have the question, are these people who think X is going to happen tomorrow or Y? Or are they people who think they’re supposed to be the people who say that X is going to happen tomorrow or Y? Which is to say you can chase this question like a dog chasing its tail. You’re just going around in a circle and you’ll never figure out the tail is your own. Bailey begins his piece by saying “Who is going to win the 2024 presidential race? That question is vexing the country as all types of prognosticators, whether they be pollsters, academics, or international oddsmakers advertise their data and intuition to voters eager for a peek into a crystal ball predicting either a future Kamala Harris or a Donald Trump administration.”

He then says very quickly, “No one knows what will happen on November 5. Tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots as part of early voting and tens of millions more have yet to vote their preference for who should lead the country for the next four years.” But nevertheless, the turn in the article comes when he writes, “But the country is anxious about the outcome amid an increasingly bitter political divide.” Okay, I’ll just say that at this point in virtually any presidential election, the same thing would be said. The same thing would be said if you’re just going to state that the country is anxious about the outcome amid an increasingly bitter political divide. At which point, in what presidential race was that not the case? Presidential races in the United States elections for presidents, they put all the basic issues on the line.

You go back a generation or so, it was in the context of the Cold War. You go back before that, it was the context of the Vietnam War. It was the politics of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society versus Richard Nixon calling for order, and you’re looking at different elections there, but the point is there were different themes that seemed to resonate with the American people. You also had the fact that going back into the 20th century, there were issues such as looming world wars, a great depression. Go back into the 19th century, think about the election of Abraham Lincoln. The United States was just about to enter a civil war. It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that all of a sudden this election is now confronting the public with what’s an increasingly bitter political divide. Increasing over what? The fact is that you reach this point in a presidential election, it’s pretty bitter and that’s the bitter truth.

But the issue about the polls is really important. The USA TODAY story again said pollsters warned that polls are not predictive. Now, they say that, but just about everyone thinks they are predictive. Why is that so? Why do they have to run a headline saying polls are not predictive when on the other hand, The New York Times virtually at the very same time is running articles saying, “The polls indicate that the race is incredibly tight.” Well, the fact that the race is incredibly tight today, that’s behind the pollster’s data. But the reality is that everyone’s thinking, “Okay, what does that tell us about the turnout? What’s that going to tell us about the actual vote, the tabulations? What is that going to tell us about the outcome of the election?” I’m just going to tell you that’s as natural as can be. It’s as unavoidable as we can imagine.

But it is true that the polls are taking a picture in time. They’re also taking a picture from a supposedly representative sample. So, you look at all these different polling companies, you look at all the different firms, you look at all the different approaches, the think tanks, the universities, each has its own form of an algorithm, a formula, a collection pattern. They have their own arguments for why their particular poll is giving a clear and accurate representation of that political moment, but they themselves can’t help extrapolating about what this means, not just for today, and by the way, if you’re talking about it today, the data is already is old as at least yesterday, but then again, everyone is really looking to election day and we just have to acknowledge that’s what’s going to happen.

Now, I mentioned already on a previous edition of The Briefing that one of the big issues here is whether or not polls change the situation, and that’s because at least at some points in American history, one of the patterns related to polling is a basic winner’s bias, which is to say that in certain competitive situations that might be measured by polling, at least in some situations, people want to be on the side of the winner. So, whether or not they think this person will win, they want to be a person who said they thought that person would win. All kinds of issues complicate the picture of polling, but we can’t stay away from it. 

The media will run headline news stories warning us that polls are not predictive. At the same time, you’ll have competing newspapers running front page articles, and it’s not so much that they are misrepresenting the polls saying, “This is what’s going to happen,” but they say, “Look, the race is incredibly close. This is how close it is.” I mentioned also earlier, as we talked about this in weeks past, that one of the indications that a race really is close is that both sides understand it to be close. And here’s where in the current situation the people related to the two campaigns are saying things that make it indicate they both actually believe right now that one candidate rather than the other has the momentum, that one candidate that both sides seem to think has the momentum right now is Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. But will that translate into an electoral win?

Well, Vice President Kamala Harris is not conceding the race at this point. The big speech that she made on Monday night there in New York was intended not only to be kind of a period at the end of her campaign, it was also intended to be something of a restart. But at the same time, you also have people on both sides of the equation, political consultants and pundits, who are beginning to say, “All right, let’s do an autopsy even before the body’s dead. Let’s go ahead and say if Donald Trump loses, I’m going to tell you why he lost. Or if Kamala Harris loses, I’m going to tell you why she lost. She didn’t take my advice,” that’s what a lot of them are going to say. Another problem with the polls is that Americans, I’m not insulting Americans here, but it’s true virtually everywhere in the world, common citizens really aren’t all that adept at following the math.

And so for example, you take a major report done in The Financial Times, which is a British newspaper, an authoritative, very establishment British newspaper. The Financial Times ran a major report over the weekend with the headline, “The Problem with Polling.” Oliver Roeder reporting for the Financial Times tells us, “A torrent of data on voting intentions in the US presidential election seems to get us no closer to predicting the result.” Then he asked the question, “Is addiction to polls distracting people from the real issues at stake?” All right, so characteristic of The Financial Times, this is a pretty in-depth report. It’s more in-depth than you’re likely to find in any American newspaper, and there’s some fascinating stuff in it. So for instance, you take a poll such as the one known as FiveThirtyEight, all those words are spelled out, back in the 2016 race, FiveThirtyEight gave Donald Trump only a 29% chance of winning, again 2016, only a 29% chance of winning.

Now, that does appear to be making a prediction. Now, was it right or was it wrong? They said that Donald Trump had a 29% chance of winning the presidency, and you’re probably thinking, Well, that means he had a 71% chance of not winning the presidency.” But as The Financial Times points out, 29% happens all the time, just think of the weather predictions. The Financial Times also points to something else, and that is that by the time we get to election night, there will have been thousands of polls that have been taken. Those thousands of polls will have been crunching millions of numbers. But by the time you get to the election results, you’re looking at what will eventually, and we hope sooner than later, be an authoritative number, it’s going to be a single number, but there were people who were throwing around probably tens of millions of numbers predicting, when they didn’t say they were predicting, what would happen.

But I’ll tell you where polling does often matter in campaigns such as presidential campaigns. Polling does tell candidates whether what they’re doing right now is working or not. And so you take a message, and in recent days Kamala Harris has been trotting out some new messages. Are they working or are they not? Well, I guarantee you her campaign has a pretty good idea already, and the fact that she may shift to something else indicates that the polling probably said that previous one just didn’t work all that well. Keep trying until you find one that has traction. And I’m not just speaking of the vice president in this case, this is what presidential candidates do, and sometimes they’re surprised. They say something in a speech, something appears in a campaign event or a campaign commercial and all of a sudden it catches fire and the next thing you know that candidate is talking about it all the time.

Another issue about the polls, pollsters often don’t like each other or let’s put it another way, at the least abrasive way of describing it, they are competitors. They’re competitors because they want their poll to be cited. They want their polling firm to be hired, they want to be found to be the most reliable, and it’s not the most reliable at taking a snapshot. They really depend upon their saleability in terms of being most reliable when they predict, which again, they say they’re not doing, but of course they are doing, otherwise no one would care.

Now, something else to watch in all the number crunching, by the way, is the fact that sometimes the number crunching is really opaque, it’s really complex, it’s really hard to follow. Don’t worry about that. It might not mean anything anyway. When it comes to the actual election results, even though there are a lot of numbers coming in from a lot of machines, and a lot of precincts, and a lot of voting places, a lot of states, and eventually you just add them all up, and of course it’s pointing toward the electoral college when you think about the presidential election, the bottom line is the number that matters is 270.

270 electoral votes, that’s the magic number, and only one of the candidates can get there. By the way, sometimes you will have the most ridiculous things happen in the news coverage, and I realize they’re trying to deal with a lot. They got to keep talking all the time, but one of the things that sometimes happens is they’ll say, “You know, the candidate needs 270 electoral votes. Well, Joe, the candidate has 260. How many more must that candidate get?” Oh, I don’t know, maybe 10. At that point, the middle schooler watching the election results with you is probably far ahead of the pundits. I also just want to underline that even as they say they’re not predictive, but they speak of themselves and their own polls as if they’re predictive. Americans want them to be predictive, the campaigns act as if they think they are predictive, they are also in the position of saying things that, well, when they turn out to be wrong, they say, “We’ll fix our system. We’ll fix our method.”

So back in 2016, the pollsters were way off, and by that I mean not just in terms of predictive ability, even in terms of the analytics going up until election day. The win of Donald Trump surprised everyone, including apparently Donald Trump. Then fast-forward to 2022, the polls had it way off again, they had it off in a different way. In 2022, they were predicting a Republican big landslide victory in terms of congressional and senatorial races, didn’t happen that way, especially in the House of Representatives. So when you look at this, you also recognize that there are all kinds of equations and algorithms and complexities that come into the pollsters’ calculations, and when they get it wrong, they say, “We’ll get it right next time,” but they’re not running the last election again, that’s the assumption.

We’ll fix it based upon what we just learned, but the next election isn’t that election, it’s a new election. The factors are going to be new and you can count on that being the fact as we get closer and closer to November 5th. Getting away from elections for a moment, I want to say that evangelical Christians have an absolute infatuation with numbers when it comes to say, looking at the moral landscape in the United States of America on numerous issues. I want to be careful. I want to say I don’t think those polls or surveys are likely wrong. I just think it’s wrong to look at those numbers and think that the numbers are the big story. The big story is the human heart, and we might be able to change the numbers and get nowhere as Christians. We have to change the heart. Changing the numbers is important, but changing the numbers isn’t enough.

Part II

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Opposing Worldviews, Fairness, and the LGBTQ Revolution: Will Fairness Be a Strong Enough Moral Judgment When It Comes to Men Participating in Women’s Sports?

But all right, speaking of change, that was an awkward transition, but nonetheless, here we go. I’m talking about the transgender revolution as it has landed on the sports pages, and the team in this case is the San Jose State University women’s volleyball team, which is in the news right now because there is a male body on that team. Other teams are canceling, and at least one teammate on that San Jose State team has now filed suit and is suing over the issue of having a transgender teammate. All right, this is often leading to big headlines in the sports pages, even to full page news coverage, and I want to turn to the coverage from the Associated Press. The AP reports, “They play on the same team, but they couldn’t be further apart. One member of the women’s volleyball team at San Jose State University has signed on to being part of a federal lawsuit against the NCAA, challenging the presence of transgender athletes in women’s college sports. The specific person she cites, one of her own teammates.”

Okay, the Associated Press here is following the modern media convention, and here’s the problem, the media convention is set with a very liberal worldview, and that liberal worldview says if the team member says the team member is a woman or is female, then the pronouns have to align with that. The news coverage has to assume that even when the news coverage is telling us that there’s controversy over that very matter. “Don’t believe your eyes,” that’s what people are telling us. Now, one of the things we need to note is that the transgender revolution isn’t going as planned. Now, I’m not saying it hasn’t made a lot of headway. It certainly has, devastatingly so, damaging to human lives and subversive of the entire moral order, and frankly at war with nature itself, even at war with being or ontology or just say bodies in this case.

But yet it’s also true that when you look at the L, the G, and the B, the lesbian, the gay, the bisexual, that stuff has advanced a lot further than most of us ever could have imagined. I mean, you’re talking about “same-sex marriage” now, and I’m not going to cite the poll figures, but we all know that an increasing majority of our neighbors are no longer offended by that, or at least they say they’re not. The point is that has become more normalized in the society, which is exactly what those of us who oppose same-sex marriage warned would happen.

But nonetheless, that isn’t happening, at least it’s not happening at the same pace, it’s not happening in the same way on the transgender issue. And I have said that it often does come down to the fact that transgender revolution tells people not to believe what they see with their own eyes, and you know, that’s a hard argument to lean into for long, and especially when you have a daughter on a girls team or a daughter on a women’s team at a university level, and there is a male body involved in this.

That’s true at the University of Pennsylvania when it came to the swim team, and that’s true now with respect to the San Jose State University women’s volleyball team, because a number of opposing teams simply are forfeiting rather than play. The San Jose Peninsula chapter of PFLAG, that is an LGBTQ activist group said, “It is disappointing that politicization of sports has meant some teams have denied SJSU and themselves opportunities to play simply because a team might have a transgender player.” The statement went on, “All student athletes, including trans athletes, deserve the same chance to be part of a team, learn from one another, and respect the game. Transgender athletes belong.” Well, you can make that statement as often as you want, you can state it as loudly as you want, Americans aren’t buying it, or at least they’re not buying it yet. And there’s hope that a bit of clarity will continue to show up in the American mind here.

But we are also looking at opposing worldviews and the issue of fairness. That comes out in this article from the Associated Press in a way that I think Christians simply have to note. Both sides are arguing their position on the basis of fairness, and that means there are those who going to be making the argument, I think this is the right argument, that it isn’t fair to have someone with a male body on a girl or woman’s team, period. It’s just not fair. I would go beyond that and say it’s not right, but nonetheless, fairness is the modern code word. When people don’t have any other ability to make moral judgments, all they have left is fair, and that’s for kids on a playground, but that’s oddly enough kind of what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about sport, we’re talking about play, we’re talking about athletic competition.

You cannot separate that from the moral context of fairness. So what you have, and here at the Associated Press recognizes it, are two opposing understandings of fairness. On the one hand, people are saying it’s not fair for a male body to participate in girls or women’s sports. Others are saying it’s not fair to say that that person who’s declared transgender identity and is now recognized by society in the fiction that that person is a female, it is not fair to say that person can’t be on a girl or women’s team. Well, which fair is fair? As I said, this is a major report from the Associated Press on this story. So, let me just show you how the issue comes up. “Where they stand a chasm apart is in one fundamental sticking point, a tough question in any arena, what does ‘fairness’,” fairness put in quotation marks here, “Actually mean?”

Well, if we reached the point, and yes, we have reached the point, where you have to put the word fairness in quotation marks, guess what? We are looking at an absolute moral breakdown. We’re looking at a worldview breakdown. The AP article cited Dr. Bradley Anawalt, who’s identified as a hormone specialist and professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, he said that science can answer many questions, but it can’t answer the question, what is fair? Well, you know what? That’s not only a fair response, that’s a correct response. Science can’t tell us what is fair, but you know, there’s something else, and that is that the article cites early on that, “One thing opposing sides have in common is framing their stance as a matter of what’s fair and right.” That’s absolutely true. Later, an amazing statement, “After all, a sense of right and wrong is part of the human worldview, formed from highly individual factors like each person’s environment, the cultures they grew up and live in, and their experiences.”

Okay, there’s an astounding indication that we’re onto something basic here, because now you have a secular newspaper writing about San Jose State University’s women’s volleyball team, and they’re stating something about worldview. It’s right there in the text of the Associated Press article. They’re saying a part of the human worldview is some judgment about right and wrong. Is that right or wrong? It’s absolutely right, but we understand as Christians that that’s based upon the fact that the Creator made us in his image and gave us a moral capacity so strong that there are things we cannot not know. And you’re looking here at a secular attempt to try to explain that, but you also see a bigger secular problem here. I won’t even have time today to look through this article and mention all the times opposing views of fairness are cited, but the article’s emphatic point is that society’s going to have to decide what fairness means in this situation, and that’s where I just want to say the Christian worldview reminds us of something else that’s just urgently important, and that is that fairness is not a matter of mere moral judgment.

The Christian worldview tells us that fairness, which is based after all in right and wrong, fairness is actually related to, I got to go back to that word again, ontology. It’s related to being, it’s related to creation and the structures of creation, which is to say if you’re talking about any girls’ or women’s volleyball team, you got to talk about being, that being means a baby born female. A baby born male doesn’t belong there. Fairness in this sense shows itself as an abstraction. You have the modern secular worldview that wants to have fairness without any accountability to creation and creation order. And by the way, that’s just not going to work. It’s not going to work, because as I’ve often pointed out, you can say that a man and a man are married to each other, but you know what they’re not going to be able to do?

They’re not going to be able to have a baby. Not just the two of them, I can promise you that. The article, by the way, goes on to cite, that same hormone specialist and professor of medicine at the University of Washington who said, “When we talk about fairness in competition, what we’re really trying to do is say, ‘Well, we’ve created a level playing field.'” He says, “And the truth is we never quite succeed in doing that. And so, where do you draw the bright white line in terms of what’s fair and what’s not fair?” Okay, I want to tell you what he says without saying it. What he’s saying is if being, if for instance biology, if anatomy doesn’t determine the foundation of what’s going to be fair and unfair, then someone’s just going to have to draw an arbitrary line, and someone’s going to like that line and someone’s not going to like that line.

But the other point I want to make is that line is not going to be stable, it’s going to be erased, and a new line is drawn, it’s going to be erased, and a new line is drawn, it will be erased, and you get the pattern. That’s what’s going to happen. If you separate this from biology, ontology, anatomy, then at this point you’ve just simply accepted a sliding formula. And from this point on, let’s just be honest, if it’s not tied to creation order, it’s just tied to politics. It’s going to be a matter of who wins and who loses on the court and off.

Part III

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Newsflash, People Don’t Trust the Media: Bezos Responds to the Backlash at The Washington Post’s Controversy

But all right, let’s conclude here, we’ll turn back to this issue, of course, because we’re going to have to turn back to it. But in the meantime, let me go back to something we discussed just days ago, and that is all the controversy about two major newspapers, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times not endorsing a candidate in this race.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is the owner of The Washington Post, has been blamed even by members of his own editorial staff and writers for The Washington Post for doing something they declared to be cowardly. He just shot back in a statement by saying, “In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists in the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress.” So he’s saying, “You know, we’re not considered all that credible, and maybe a part of it is because we’re so political.” And yet he says something else, and he’s not getting much attention for this part, but I think it’s really important. He said to his own staff, more or less, “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. What presidential endorsements actually do,” he said, “is create a perception of bias.” Okay? There’s a huge admission there.

It’s huge. I think he’s absolutely right. I think Jeff Bezos says it absolutely truthfully. The major endorsements that come from papers such as The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times don’t make a change in electoral patterns. It’s because I don’t know of a single human being who’s going to say, “Okay, I’m going to vote for candidate X because the LA Times told me to.” No, it is to use contemporary parlance, a form of media virtue signaling. It is virtue signaling, and it is the issuing of a tribal call. And guess what? The tribe gets very frustrated when it’s told that the paper’s not going to issue the tribal call. But I’ll say one other thing, and that is I don’t think Jeff Bezos is going to make his point really clear until he turns to some of his own staff and says, “That’s enough, you’re fired.”