On Bernie Sanders, Polling and Perception

 

As those of you who’ve read my articles and my work online will already know I’ve been sticking my neck out by saying Bernie Sanders is going to win the Democratic Party 2020 primary since literally just before Christmas way back in 2016; and I began formally writing about that belief again in late 2018, when the campaign started to really heat up but Sanders had still not yet announced his candidacy.

Of course, these statements aren’t prophecy, they’re analysis and as such there’s always going to be a chance that I’ve read the information and the mood of the public wrong; but watching 33,000 people try to cram into a city park in Queens, NY just to hear Bernie Sanders speak, strongly suggests otherwise.

The simple truth is that I believed and continue to believe that structural deficiencies in the Democratic Party of 2019 which closely resemble structural deficiencies in the Republican Party of 2015, have created a clear path for an anti-establishment candidate to take the nomination even in an unfair fight. As I told you back in December, when you’ve got twenty candidates all clawing and scratching to emerge as the party’s chosen Bernie Sanders Slayer, the secret truth is that you clearly don’t have any *good* candidates for the job and you’re just throwing human spaghetti at the wall in the desperate hope “anyone but Bernie” will stick.

Today, the facts that Sanders has raised the most cash, has the most individual donors, has the most diverse base of supporters, has the most labor class (the largest class) supporters, is holding the biggest rallies and has already buried previous liberal establishment favored saviors Kamala Harris and “Beto” O’Rourke, all suggest I was right on the money when I said Sanders had the momentum to take the whole party on and win this time.

There’s just one problem with that prediction, but it’s certainly a big one; the polls aren’t matching what every other point of data is telling us should be happening in the primary lead up, or at least the majority of polls aren’t – we’ll talk more about why you never hear about GOOD polls for Bernie below.

Fueled by the now standard and relentless “so-biased-as-to-be-intellectually-offensive” anti-Sanders coverage in the media, this issue is keeping “Berners” up at night and if I’m being honest there are certainly moments in the dark hours of shadow where I wonder if all is lost and my analysis failed somewhere along the line.

The truth however, is that much like there are structural deficiencies in the Democratic Party establishment as it stands today that strongly advantage Sanders, there are also structural deficiencies in the polls, the way we do polling in general and the media’s coverage of polls that not only drastically alter how we think about the polls, but also artificially suppress the “legitimate” polling numbers Bernie Sanders or for that matter any candidate looking to fundamentally alter the power and class arrangements in American life, will ultimately put up.

First an absolutely metric f*ck ton of these polls are literally straight up bunk. You’ve got polls that skew heavily towards homeowners with landlines, polls that don’t feature a statistically significant number of voters under fifty; someone published a poll of literally fourteen people in Montana recently. A few weeks back I wrote an article about a wildly hyped poll in the media that was literally based on some ex-Dem Party political operative’s feelings about responses to a questionnaire that didn’t ask who you’re voting for; the guy just made up the numbers and said Warren wins.

What about that recent poll showing Biden cruising to victory at 34% nationally? Total bunk based on about 350 respondents with a 65/35 split between landlines and cell phones – and of course Sanders, who does well with young people, dominates the field if you look inside *those* numbers.

You’ve got 538 out here on Twitter hyping polls of “Dem Party activists” like these folks are somehow representative of the electorate and aren’t going to be biased against the guy who says “this party sucks and you’re all minions.” Come on Nate, who are you kidding buddy?

How about the recent poll that showed Warren and Biden beating Trump and Pence in Florida, but *purposely* didn’t even bother to include Sanders who is polling at worst third in the race? When you’re assuming there’s a better chance a Mitch McConnell-led GOP Senate impeaches Trump and thereby propels Mike freaking Pence to the Republican nomination, than there is of Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic Party 2020 nomination from “third” place, I think I have every goddamn right to accuse you of a clear and obvious anti-Sanders bias.

We can argue until we’re blue in the face about what “rigging” means, but you cannot tell me that poll after poll after poll that is purposely skewed against the exact demographics where Sanders dominates the race for the nomination are producing an accurate picture of how the voters are going to behave during primary season here.

Furthermore despite the new (old) trend towards accusing Sanders supporters of being tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists for talking about “rigged polls” the simple truth is that the economic and racial segregation of America makes it pretty damn easy to straight up rig polls. If you want to generate a poll that shows the pro-labor class candidate getting murdered, all you have to do is target neighborhoods where the median income is generally much higher than labor class voters make; it’s like the instant soup version of political propaganda.

Frankly, this isn’t even a particularly new scam; pollsters have been largely ignoring economically depressed African American communities (another demographic that now goes for Sanders) for decades this exact same way! There’s actually a whole business in America built around hiring PR firms to construct and conduct public polling specifically *designed* to reach a particular conclusion on behalf of clients – it’s a big part of how energy companies have avoided the pitchforks over the complicity in causing and covering up the ongoing climate crisis.

It would be pretty foolish to assume that this service is not available to politicians with multi-million dollar war chests & it would be more than a little bit naive to assume that even major polling firms don’t know what results the big media companies that pay them want to see. Now this isn’t to say that “all polls are bunk” – just that an incredibly large number of the polls you’re worried about right now as a Sanders supporter, will turn out to be bunk if you simply examine the sources and methodologies behind those polls.

Which brings me to my second major point; namely that the negative feelings you have about how Bernie is doing in the polls are being drastically influenced by the “Bernie Blackout” phenomenon and how those polls are being covered in the anti-Sanders, mainstream corporate media.

The blatant and obvious truth here is that this is not a fair media environment and coverage in the corporate mainstream political media is in fact heavily slanted against Sanders; the “Bernie Blackout” is real and this anti-Sanders bias extends to coverage of the polls.

That’s how you end up with a situation where every major “liberal” media outlet breathlessly reported that “feels for Warren” poll I told you about earlier, for days on end, and yet you’ve hardly heard about the recent national poll showing Sanders a mere two points behind current front-runner Palooka Joe Biden.

By focusing coverage on polls that make Sanders look less electable, and largely ignoring (and certainly never talking about more than once) polls that make Bernie look more electable, the media is trying to suppress enthusiasm for Sanders & make you quit before Iowa even happens.

The amusing part is that you can easily prove that this phenomenon isn’t a “Bernie Bro” conspiracy theory by identifying its other victims.  Kirsten Gillibrand (rightly) demanded Al Franken’s resignation in the wake of (eight!) sexual harassment claims and she got the cone of silence too. This “either all negative, or no comment whatsoever” corporate media marginalization technique has also been deployed on Tulsi Gabbard, Marianne Williamson and to a lesser degree, even Andy Yang; basically anyone even marginally outside of the mainstream Democratic Party and/or elite liberal orthodoxy.

As Matt Taibbi reminds us in his new book about American corporate media, “Hate, Inc.” this same selection bias in media coverage had a drastic effect on how polls were reported in the 2016 general election as well – leading “the polls” to be “wrong” about Downmarket Mussolini on election day. The unfortunate truth is there were a number of polls showing that Trump was much stronger than the liberal media was prepared to report, but those polls were invariably discarded as having a “pro-GOP bias” or “outliers” leading to supreme confidence Hillary would win; until she didn’t.

This brings me to my third point, about why the entire methodology of conducting polls in American politics contains structural biases that will invariably depress the returned numbers for a pro-labor, anti-establishment candidate like Sanders and thus underestimate his support. To understand my argument however, you have to understand a little bit about how mainstream media-funded polling services decide who to poll, even if they aren’t actively engaging in junk polling designed to ratf*ck a left wing populist style candidate.

The vast majority of polls conducted in American politics are tabulated by surveying what are called “likely voters.” Okay, so how do you determine if someone is a likely voter? Well, the easiest and most heavily-relied on method is to survey people who voted in the last election. In other words, for most polling companies a “likely voter” is actually just a “past voter” and while you can certainly see some logic involved in conducting polls that way, it’s a methodology that is hopelessly out of step with reality in an America dominated by non-voters.

This problem is of course magnified when we’re talking about a Democratic Party nomination contest because you’re not just whittling down to “likely voters” but rather “likely Democratic primary voters” which are once again, mostly going to be ppl who voted in a primary last time.

What about young people who couldn’t vote in 2016? What about independents who couldn’t vote in a closed Democratic Party primary but have since registered to vote for Sanders this time? What about folks who’d never vote for a corporate Democrat after being betrayed by Obama but have come back to vote in the primary because they’re inspired by Bernie? Virtually none of those people are going to show up in a poll because the polling itself is based on “likely voters” and the absolutely absurd base assumption that an electorate that grows every year, will somehow remain the exact same or even shrink, compared to 2016.

This is especially problematic for Bernie Sanders because as a politician, he dominates demographics full of *un*-likely voters; young people, a jaded labor class sick of neoliberalism and war, independents, the poor, the marginalized, angry seniors who’ve given up on the party.

Of course you might be tempted to think that this sort of thing doesn’t really matter in the end, but to do so you’ll have to ignore the numbers. There are now more non-voters, than voters in America. There are more independents than Republicans or Democrats.

On the Republican side of equation, this has lead to a no-holds barred fascist creep and open embrace of a diluted type of white nationalism. On the Democratic Party side, we are clearly looking at the age of the pissed-off millennial voter and that voter? Is overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders.

Yet if you only poll “likely voters” the simple truth is that you’re overlooking a massive portion of the support for Sanders from these unlikely voters the current system refuses to account for – even though the GOP version of these unlikely voters just put Herr Trump in the White House no matter what the polls said.

All of which brings me to my fourth and final point; I know Bernie Sanders is going to massively outperform the polls in the 2020 Democratic nomination contest because Sanders (for all the reasons we mentioned above) has *already* done so – in the 2016 Democratic Party nomination fight against Hillary Clinton.

While I could literally spend all night going over primary election results, the easiest example for me to reference would be my home state of Michigan – where Clinton led the polls by double digits all the way up to election night and nevertheless still lost to Bernie outright.

Look, would I prefer it if Sanders were crushing the polls three months and change out from Iowa? Sure I would, because that would mean that Bernie Sanders was almost certainly headed for a landslide victory despite all the structural problems we just discussed above. But just like analysis, polling is not prophecy and after watching the media spin a bunch of junk polls into wildly inaccurate predictions about how both Sanders and Trump would ultimately fare against Hillary Clinton in 2016, I think it’s safe to say the polls aren’t any more likely to be predictive for Sanders this time in 2020.

Factually Bernie Sanders is going to massively outperform the polls again in the 2020 nomination contest; the only question left is whether or not he’s going to beat the pollsters by enough to defeat the elitist, neoliberal, mainstream Democratic Party and corporate media machine pitted against him

I’m betting the answer to that question is “yes.”

 

– nina illingworth