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| PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN LOCHER / AP |
NEW YORKER
This is a difficult time in the business of political predictions.... The earliest moments of the 2016 campaign were marked by a conspicuous pageant of wrongness. Last year’s predictions, as collected by Politico, included explanations of not only how the presidential campaign would be conducted (“Meerkat will change politics forever”) but also who could conduct it (“Joe Biden/Elizabeth Warren/Mitt Romney”) and what would they would need, above all (“Money will be everything”).
Trump has been catnip for predictors declaring his imminent political collapse; his candidacy has reached the “beginning of the end,” or some other description of demise, no fewer than thirty-three times in publications that span the ideological spectrum, according to a tally by ThinkProgress.
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So are the predictors getting worse? Or is the political world getting more unpredictable? Both, although one should be cautious about assuming that there ever was a golden age of political predictability. First, on the predictors: changes in the technology of media and the status of celebrity are steadily driving forecasters further from accuracy, even as technology increases our assumption that accuracy should be possible. More than a decade ago, the professor Philip Tetlock, of the Wharton School, who specializes in decision-making and social and cultural psychology, published “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” It was based on a long-term study of two hundred and eighty-four people who make their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends.” He asked them a range of questions, such as “Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf?” He amassed more than eighty thousand predictions and then waited for history to yield a verdict. In his now-somewhat-famous conclusion, Tetlock reported that human beings who hold forth on the state of the world to come are, by and large, “poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys.”
So are the predictors getting worse? Or is the political world getting more unpredictable? Both, although one should be cautious about assuming that there ever was a golden age of political predictability. First, on the predictors: changes in the technology of media and the status of celebrity are steadily driving forecasters further from accuracy, even as technology increases our assumption that accuracy should be possible. More than a decade ago, the professor Philip Tetlock, of the Wharton School, who specializes in decision-making and social and cultural psychology, published “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” It was based on a long-term study of two hundred and eighty-four people who make their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends.” He asked them a range of questions, such as “Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf?” He amassed more than eighty thousand predictions and then waited for history to yield a verdict. In his now-somewhat-famous conclusion, Tetlock reported that human beings who hold forth on the state of the world to come are, by and large, “poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys.”
From that broad reading of the data, Tetlock pulled some important details: the longer the range, the lower the accuracy, so that “when you move beyond about one year,” predictions rarely perform better than random chance (i.e., dart-chucking primates); second, he found that analysts are prone to unassailable, and unwarranted, personal confidence: “When they say they’re eighty or ninety per cent confident, they’re often right only sixty or seventy per cent of the time.” Lastly, he found that fame breeds certainty, such that prominent predictors were “more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”...as more readers move to the Web, writers have adopted the click-bait pose of total certainty, instead of permitting qualifications and unknowns. (Tetlock’s advice? Beware of “experts who say ‘moreover’ more often than they say ‘however.’ ”) Moreover, the emphasis on celebrity has grown, too, as rising generations report a measurably greater desire to be famous than previous cohorts did.
But the element that has caught forecasters most off-guard this year has been a more fundamental change—a seeming decline in the predictability of politics because of a shift in how institutions shape outcomes. In an admirable explanation of where he and others went astray, Silver wrote that he was overly skeptical of Trump’s prospects because he “assumed that influential Republicans would do almost anything they could to prevent him from being nominated.” He relied on the presumption, once sound, that the Party itself would make decisive choices, in the form of endorsements and funding, that would bless some candidates and doom others. The parties, it turns out, are weaker and more out of touch than observers understood.
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[This is the perfect spot to segue into PAUL KRUGMAN'S terrific piece in the NY Times:]
Lack of self-awareness can be fatal. The haplessness of the Republican establishment in the face of Trumpism is a case in point.
As many have noted, it’s remarkable how shocked — shocked! — that establishment has been at the success of Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic campaign. Who knew that this kind of thing would appeal to the party’s base? Isn’t the G.O.P. the party of Ronald Reagan, who sold conservatism with high-minded philosophical messages, like talking about a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks?
Seriously, Republican political strategy has been exploiting racial antagonism, getting working-class whites to despise government because it dares to help Those People, for almost half a century. So it’s amazing to see the party’s elite utterly astonished by the success of a candidate who is just saying outright what they have consistently tried to convey with dog whistles.
What I find even more amazing, however, are the Republican establishment’s delusions about what its own voters are for. You see, all indications are that the party elite imagines that base voters share its own faith in conservative principles, when that not only isn’t true, it never has been.
Here’s an example: Last summer, back when Mr. Trump was just beginning his rise, he promised not to cut Social Security, and insiders like William Kristol gleefully declared that he was “willing to lose the primary to win the general.” In reality, however, Republican voters don’t at all share the elite’s enthusiasm for entitlement cuts — remember, George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security ran aground in the face of disapproval from Republicans as well as Democrats.
Yet the Republican establishment still seems unable to understand that hardly any of its own voters, let alone the voters it would need to win in the general election, are committed to free-market, small-government ideology. Indeed, although Marco Rubio — the establishment’s last hope — has finally started to go after the front-runner, so far his attack seems to rest almost entirely on questioning the coiffed one’s ideological purity. Why does he imagine that voters care?
Oh, and the G.O.P. establishment was also sure that Mr. Trump would pay a heavy price for asserting that we were misled into Iraq — evidently unaware just how widespread that (correct) belief is among Americans of all political persuasions.
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Now, however, they face the reality that most voters inside their party don’t agree with the orthodoxy, either. And all signs are that they still can’t wrap their minds around that fact. They just keep waiting for Donald Trump to suffer the fall from grace that, in their world, always happens to anyone who questions the eternal truth of supply-side economics or the gospel of 9/11. Even now, when it’s almost too late to stop the Trump Express, they still imagine that “But he’s not a true conservative!” is an effective attack.
Things would be very different, obviously, if Mr. Trump were in fact to lock in the Republican nomination (which could happen in a few weeks). Would his raw appeal to white Americans’ baser instincts continue to work? I don’t think so. But given the ineffectuality of his party’s elite, my guess is that we will get a chance to find out.