Race for the White House — Food Fight on Aisle ‘24
Joy Reed of MSNBC’s “The Reed Out” report proffered an interesting theory recently explaining what may be really driving the push by some Democrats to get Joe Biden to step down as the Democratic presidential candidate. She offered her take Wednesday evening during the cable network’s coverage of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Based on her reporting inside the Congressional Black Caucus, Reed pointed out that there is a belief the step-aside-Joe campaign dominating the news media over the past several weeks has a hidden agenda. That campaign, with constant media drips and punditry, has arguably driven down Biden’s poll numbers. It is being pushed, in large measure, by Democrats and donors out of California who have their sights set on the 2028 presidential race.
And Kamala Harris is conspicuously absent from their calls for a replacement candidate for Biden.
And there seems to be some merit to the theory, if we consider that White House sources believe former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “backed Representative Adam Schiff’s call for President Joe Biden to step aside in the U.S. presidential race and she has told Biden he cannot win the Nov. 5 election,” Reuters reports.
Federal Election Commission records also show that her campaign committee, Nancy Pelosi for Congress — a hard money campaign war chest — has donated money to 14 of the 21 lawmakers who have so far called for Biden to drop out of the race. Also on that list is California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
All received money in varying amounts and time frames between 2015 and 2024. Pelosi’s campaign committee last contributed to Kamala Harris’ campaign coffers, however, in 2010, (a bit more than $5,000) in her run for the California attorney general post, a survey of FEC records shows.
The amount of money is not the point. The total dollar amount of donations is not huge by campaign-spending standards. But the donations do indicate lines of loyalty to a degree.
When you examine the shakeout from a potential loss of Biden at the top of the ticket, with a Harris dethroning as well, you can see who it moves up from California in the pecking order for the top of the ticket. Gavin Newsom could end up leading the ticket as early as this election cycle if Harris is pushed aside.
If Biden remains the presidential nominee, however, with Harris as vice president, it pushes the presidential prospects for Newsom [or some other West Coast candidate] out at least four years. And if Harris leads the 2028 ticket [which could well be the result] and wins again, maybe even two consecutive terms, that would push Newsom’s chances out to at least 2036. And that assumes no GOP White House in the interim.
Newsom is now 56. In 2036, 12 years from now, he’d be 68 — and himself then considered “old.”
So, it would seem now is the time to strike in the world of politics, which can be Machiavellian, even within political parties.
The good news is that if the remove-Biden campaign fails to find success prior to Biden being consummated the nominee of the party by early next month, the Democratic infighting is likely to collapse, and unity will break out.
The bad news is if such an effort were to succeed, pushing Harris aside and resulting in an open convention, the Democrats chances of winning in November are arguably going to be drastically handicapped.
Black voter turnout in 2012, when Obama was on the ticket, was 66.2%. With an all-white Democratic ticket in 2016, it plummeted to 59.6%. With Harris on the ticket in 2020, it shot back up to 63%. There is no way the Democrats can beat Trump in 2024 absent a big black-voter turnout.
We are likely witnessing a major geographic battle for power in the Democratic Party, West Coast vs. East Coast (with Harris playing on the East Coast team now). These power struggles can be expected from time to time even within a progressive party like the Democrats, which is, after all, a coalition party. Politics is always about power.
It’s better this fight is being played out now and settled, rather than in October or November, or even once the Democrats win the White House again. So, let’s have the food fight now and a cleanup on aisle ’24, well before the store doors open to voters in November.
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Why should we be wary of political polls?
Human error can be introduced at multiple levels in polling and not realized by some researchers, particularly if they aren’t aware of the pitfalls, or don’t care because they are facing deadline pressures.
It’s not every poll, but clearly it happens.
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Did you realize a great number of political polls today make use of the same pool of individuals that are set up randomly and then resampled continuously, and to increase response rates, they offer money incentives upfront and then for every survey returned?
Inside those panels, which might include 30,000 people or more randomly chosen, the polling outfit might get 1,500 responses for a particular poll, and those results are then extrapolated to the entire nation or some group writ large?
The problem with repeated sampling of a random-sample pools using incentives is that you can end up with reliability problems. The incentives do have some influence on who is likely to respond [people needing the money, for example, vs. those who don’t] but they do increase response rates. Also, if the random panel you establish [that 30,000 figure] has any reliability problems, those errors infect every poll done from that panel. I have a master’s degree in mass communications and oversaw longitudinal surveys in graduate school for three years.
The red wave that never was…..
Here are several dangers in polling drawn from scholarly papers, and there’s more:
Self-selection bias (also called volunteer bias) refers to the bias that can occur when individuals are allowed to choose whether they want to participate in a research study. Because participants often differ from nonparticipants in ways significant to the research, self-selection can lead to a biased sample and affects the generalizability of your results.
Sampling bias occurs when some members of a population are systematically more likely to be selected in a sample than others. It is also called ascertainment bias in medical fields.
Conformity bias is the tendency to change one’s beliefs or behavior to fit in with others. Instead of using their own judgment, individuals often take cues from the group they are with, belong to, or seek to belong to about what is right or appropriate. They then adapt their own behavior accordingly.
The framing effect occurs when people react differently to something depending on whether it is presented as positive or negative. In other words, our decision is influenced by how the information is presented rather than what is being said.
One more, related to political polls:
A second reason incentives might influence responses is if they influence people’s opinions directly, or at any rate the expression of those opinions. A striking example of such influence (not, however, involving an incentive) is reported by Bischoping and Schuman (1992) in their analysis of discrepancies among Nicaraguan preelection polls in the 1990 election and the failure of many to predict the outcome of the election accurately. Bischoping and Schuman speculate that suspicions that preelection polls had partisan aims may have prevented many Nicaraguans from candidly expressing their voting intentions to interviewers.
They tested this hypothesis by having interviewers alternate the use of three different pens to record responses: one carried the slogan of the Sandinista party; another, that of the opposition party; the third pen was neutral. The expected distortions of responses were observed in the two conditions that clearly identified the interviewers as partisan. Even in the third, neutral, condition, distortion occurred.
The authors claim that polls apparently were not perceived as neutral by many respondents. In the Nicaraguan setting, after a decade of Sandinista rule, a poll lacking partisan identification was evidently regarded as likely to have an FSLN (Sandinista) connection (p. 346); the result was to bias the reporting of vote intentions, and therefore the results of the pre-election polls, which predicted an overwhelming Sandinista victory when in fact the opposition candidate won by a large majority.
