Election 2022: Predictions and Musings
You might not have heard that we've got midterm elections next week. The MSM, social networks, texts, and phone calls have barely covered it. But we do. Here are some thoughts.
With the midterm elections now a week away, everyone and his brother-in-law is issuing predictions. Few of them are particularly interesting. Most of them say more-or-less the same thing. That’s by design. Back in the 80s and 90s, I built AI models to forecast both the world oil market and severe summer storms. I learned a lot about forecasting.
I also learned two useful adages. The first, courtesy of colleagues in the world of oil-price forecasting, is: “The best place for your forecast to fall is halfway between Exxon’s and Shell’s.” The meaning was clear: You can’t get in too much trouble if you’re only as wrong as the most prominent people in your field. The second was taken from the Koran, as an admonition to a lovely assemblage of forecasting dignitaries on the shores of Lake Geneva: “All prophets are liars, even when they tell the truth.” That’s the flipside of the first message. The conventional wisdom forecasts of this world are often wrong. On those many occasions, one of the outliers normally derided for wackiness will appear to have been prophetic. Which one? Who knows? But if most people are clustered in the safety of the center and the answer emerges at the periphery, one of the peripheral players will emerge as closest.
With those thoughts in mind, my prediction is straightforward: The Republicans are poised for a very good night. There’s no great insight there. For decades, the polls have consistently shown that most late deciders break in the same direction. The overwhelming majority of polls taken over the past few weeks indicate that the GOP is likely this year’s beneficiary—as expected for the party out of power during a midterm. Don’t pay too much attention to how many seats they gain compared to other midterm years. That’s largely a function of how poorly they’ve done in recent elections. Going into these elections, the GOP has the largest minorities on record. The 2022 Democrats simply hold fewer swing seats than do most majorities. Instead, remember the number 247. That’s the largest Republican coalition the House has seen since the 1920s. Let’s see if the GOP does well enough to break that record.
One of the other things that we’ve learned about polls in recent years is that “people willing to respond to pollsters” are not necessarily representative of the population as a whole. That’s even better news for the GOP! A sizable number of voters skewing to the right and a far smaller number of voters skewing left distrust major media and polling organizations. When pressed, they’ll either refuse to answer or lie to avoid trouble. The growth of leftist cancel culture has driven them even further underground; it’s now entirely rational to raise Democratic banners and yard signs in public while voting Republican in private. That way, you can join your leftist neighbors in deriding the troglodytes responsible for Republican governance while still enjoying the benefits of Republican governance. If Republicans are winning decisively among poll respondents, they’re lead among the public at large must be significant.
Arrayed against those right-leaning forces, however, is a festering and unresolved problem: American elections lack credibility. It’s entirely unclear what our elections are supposed to measure and there’s no reason to believe that they measure anything effectively. If you’re unclear as to what you’re trying to do, it’s tough to make a compelling case that the rule changes you champion will improve your performance.
Start with basic definitions. An election is a measurement instrument with a prize. Many people are invited to opine about a narrow question and the choice receiving the largest score is handed certain powers and privileges. Fair enough, but imprecise. A laboratory experiment designed with such vague parameters would scream of the sorts of nonsense used to game funding sources rather than actual science.
IMHO, American elections should attempt to measure the preferences of all eligible voters interested in expressing a preference, at a fixed point in time set well in advance, on the narrow questions of who, from a finite slate of options, should be handed authority for a pre-set term in office.
That’s a far cry from what we do. Early and absentee voting eliminate the “fixed point in time.” Mailed ballots circulating freely for weeks or months, with no custodial oversight, shatter any pretense of restriction to “eligible voters.” Bizarre, unstable, and conflicting rules about both voter verification and the collection and tabulation of ballots drive the point home further. Erratic application and enforcement of those rules are the icing on the cake.
The bottom line is that American elections are incoherent exercises, driving towards a hidden objective, that take every opportunity to invite illegality and fraud.
Now, that hardly means that every American election is fraudulent, or even that any particular election is fraudulent. It means, as I noted above, that American elections lack credibility. Who in their right mind would trust a procedure upon being told that its objectives were vague, its rules incoherent, its enforcement mechanisms uneven, and its arbiters partisan?
The answer is easy: Only those who like the outcome.
Now, I’ve never lived in a Republican-dominated jurisdiction, so my knowledge of what goes on there is hardly firsthand. I have, however, lived and voted in the Democrat-dominated jurisdictions of New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. I can state from firsthand experience that if there is a mechanism useful in promoting fraud, the Democrats leading those jurisdictions have championed it. I’ve also followed from a distance as certain jurisdiction with two robust parties—what we call swing states—have fought about electoral procedures. According to all reports, Democrats in those places seek to reduce security and invite fraud while Republicans tend to favor secure elections.
The upshot is that while it’s hard to believe that all electoral fraud comes from the left, it’s clear that the left promotes and deploys fraudulent practices that swing many close elections. Next week, I’ll be skeptical of the results coming from states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New York, Arizona, Nevada, and California.
That skepticism will remain even if the GOP prevails in all or most of those races. After all, even fraud has its limits. As I asked about Donald Trump on the morning of November 3, 2020: Can Republicans in those states win by enough to clear the “Margin of Fraud?” Evidence from those willing to respond to pollsters suggests that more than a few will. Still, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that as compelling as the rejection of the Democrats’ descent into may appear, the truth of the rejection is likely far broader and deeper.
So…you want a prediction? The Democrats will pretend that their problem lies solely in messaging and PR, rather than in the collective sanity of the American people. And the Republicans will wake up the morning of November 9th to face the terrifying question: What the hell are we supposed to do now?
I’ll take that question on in my next essay.
For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com
To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).
To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).
To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at https://coalition4america.com/.
To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.