Will Coronavirus Impact Our Perception of Trump?

Some are saying Trump will be remembered for the deaths that result from his bumbling on coronavirus, that this is finally him crossing a line he can’t come back from. How many are still remembering him, how many can still find that line for the kids in cages, the escalation in hate crimes, the erosion of rights that protect women from violence, the other things he’s caused that kill, the other abominations we insisted he’d be remembered by, that he’d be collapsed by, the travesties we set aside to remember the next one, like Matryoshka dolls of memories each hidden inside one more hideous than the last.

I can’t help but think of Ronald Reagan, of the hundreds of thousands who died because he ignored the 1980s AIDS crisis and vilified its victims. He’s largely remembered as an icon, an emblem of the country, a hero.

I remember even the wildly progressive telling me to wait and respect John McCain passing away, that it was inappropriate to talk about Navajo and Hopi water rights, his support for SB 1070 and profiling of Hispanics, that his passing away should earn him days of forgetting so many of the rights and lives he had a hand in ending.

Witness how many now normalize George W. Bush, and his endless wars, the erosion of FEMA and disaster response capabilities, the militarization of the police, militarization of Border Patrol, the erosion of Constitutional protections that created the foundation for so much of what Trump now takes advantage of. Because George W. Bush paints and likes candy and gets along with Michelle Obama. That’s it. That’s all it takes.

We are a country of forgetting. It is a national addiction. To remember anything with accuracy, that has to be changed first. People will remember if we do, and if we give them no other choice, if it becomes utterly unacceptable to treat this differently in this moment. The universe won’t magically remember Trump for any of these things for us. We need to do the work to define it as wrong now, to oppose it now, and to mitigate the damage now.

No one will do it for us. The worse this gets, the more it serves a man who revels and exploits chaos and shock. Memory won’t make up for it, won’t create some balance in the end. Memory fades and twists, and it is not a trade for lives that can be saved. Actions survive and give rise to more actions.

Figure out what you are going to do, who among your elected officials you’ll call, and what exact expectations you will communicate to them. Don’t count on someone else’s memories of how this moment took place when you are in this moment and can make it take place the way you want it to.

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Yes, It’s Realistic that Roseanne Voted for Trump

by Gabriel Valdez

In the 2018 re-launch of “Roseanne”, it turns out that white, feminist, Boomer icon Roseanne Conner voted for Trump. Many feel that this is a betrayal of the character. Is it?

No. It’s deeply accurate.

If you think it’s unrealistic and a betrayal of the character that a white feminist Boomer icon like Roseanne Conner would vote for Trump, I don’t think you yet have a realistic idea of what happened in 2016.

Boomers voted for Trump by a 9-point margin.

That means white Boomers voted for Trump by a double-digit margin.

White Boomers who were women voted for Trump by a slightly lesser margin…but they still voted for Trump.

This was especially true of white Boomers without a college education, such as Roseanne.

The show is set in Fulton County, IL, on the western side of the state near Iowa. That county voted for Trump by a margin of 15 points.

Roseanne Conner is at a demographic intersection where she would have been extremely likely to vote for Trump.

Trump won white voters by a greater margin than any in our history outside Reagan ’84.

This includes a lot of people who would have been ostensibly liberal in the 80s and 90s.

During the original run of “Roseanne” from 1988-97, Fulton County was one of the most liberal in the state. In fact, it hasn’t gone Republican since 1984.

You should feel betrayed – but not by the show. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t critique it or its messages. But if you think Roseanne Conner would never have voted for Trump, you’re still not looking at 2016 with a realistic eye for what happened.

There are results where racism overbears other progressive leanings. We need to understand that.

A lot of Roseanne Conners voted for Trump, and if you can’t recognize that, you’re harming your ability to understand why and to work against it.

The feature image of the “Roseanne” cast is from Biography here.

Trumpalytics: How We Help Donald Trump Metagame Toward Power

by Gabriel Valdez

Hi, Donald Trump! Hi, real poll analytics! Why don’t I ever see you in the same room anymore? Are you secretly the same person?

Trump’s support has repeatedly hit a ceiling of about 35% in Republican polls, right? A full third of Republicans are shouting, “Yay, racism!” From the rest of the Republican field, it seems more like a tepid, “Er, go…go racism, I think. Aren’t we normally more subtle about this?” Which really puts Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in some difficult positions. It should do the same to Ben Carson, but this cycle’s Rick Santorum 2012 is destined to one day become Rick Santorum 2016.

So…America is obsessed with Trump, right? Everyone’s going to vote for him and he’ll win all 50 states, and ban everything but golf and gambling, right?

Here’s the thing. Trump’s support has hit a ceiling of about 35%, and that’s of registered Republican voters. Registered Republicans make up only about 25% of voters. Registered Democrats make up a bit over 30%, and the rest are independent.

Why hasn’t Trump been able to catapult himself over that ceiling of 35% among Republicans? Because of his ridiculous negatives. His unfavorable rating consistently hovers near 60%. We’re talking about a candidate who might not even be able to win the presidency in an up-down referendum wherein he’s the only candidate.

Furthermore, if you look at the polls being made of Republicans thus far in the cycle, most of them are of any adult or registered Republican. Most of them are internet polls. Most of them are not of the most accurate metric polling can offer: likely voters in live phone polls. These are voters who vote regularly, and Trump’s support among them has been lower by anywhere from 6-10 percentage points throughout most of the campaign.

Why avoid live polling of likely voters when it’s the most statistically accurate metric? Because people click on Trump. I’ll click on him, you’ll click on him, we’ll all click on Trump just to see what crazy, racist, deport-my-born-and-bred-U.S.-citizen-ass bullshit he comes up with next. We click on that bastard like there’s no tomorrow, and that means more ad money for the sites being clicked on. We’ll hang on channels showing him, and that means higher ratings for the networks being watched.

Among likely voters in live phone polls, Trump has never crested 28%. Despite little opposition, his ceiling is fairly established. Why would he struggle to increase that number when other candidates who are polling lower wouldn’t? They aren’t saddled with his negatives. As the Republican field narrows, candidates like Rubio and Cruz (or even dark horses like John Kasich and Chris Christie) will absorb far more of the voters freed up when other candidates drop out.

That doesn’t mean Trump can’t win the GOP primary if the Republican field fails to winnow down. It does mean that, in order to win, he needs most of the 14 candidates still in the race to stay in the race without giving ground through most of the primary cycle. There’s a better chance of that than in most primary elections, but it would still be fairly unprecedented.

Why should all these metrics matter? If Trump is hammering out a maximum of 28% of Republican voters, and Republican voters make up 25% of all voters, that means Trump is polling a whopping…drum roll, please…7% of likely voters. Ooh.

We all wonder why polls are so inaccurate. They really aren’t, if you know which ones to pay attention to and how to read them. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox have no interest in presenting them accurately, giving context, or teaching people how they work. They spit out statistics, no matter how misrepresented, so that others will repeat them ad nauseum. In recent years, there are fewer and fewer independent pollsters. Most now have a patron, and that patron is always in the form of a news network, a newspaper, a think tank, or a PAC (political action committee). The shape of the kinds of polls we take has changed according to what these patrons need to drive their story lines. That’s how we end up with months of coverage about future presidents Herman Cain, Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Santorum.

These organizations have an interest in creating the most exciting story lines, the ones that’ll make you click on their sites, change to their channels, or share an interview that goes off the rails on YouTube.

Yes, we should continue protesting the ugly things Trump says. What he says encourages and endorses hate crimes, racial violence, and sexual violence. We need to speak out against it, but not just in regards to Trump. What much of the Republican field says encourages these same things.

But we shouldn’t freak out, and we shouldn’t buy into much of the information being sold us about the shape of this election. We should educate ourselves about polls. If you post a news story about a poll, have you clicked on that poll and actually looked at the questions being asked? Do you know if a poll’s questions are worded in a leading manner? Do you know how the poll was taken – online, automated phone, live phone. Was it of all adults who responded, registered voters, or likely voters? Was a particular demographic relied upon to supply answers? Is the sample size even realistically viable? Chances are, you don’t know any of those things when you post a poll, so why are we posting them as if they’re facts?

We’re so quick to post articles about how Americans are getting less education, about how we’re understanding less and less by generation, about how facts are becoming more malleable than they once were, about how specific groups of people are being less represented in our history books. Polls and the story lines created off them are all this in a nutshell, but we post them as if they are fact. We need to stop thinking that we are immune to understanding less and relying on fact less. We have our blind spots, and we succumb to them just as much as a Trump voter might.

We are no better, and we are no worse, but we can’t keep posting these kinds of things without understanding them, and then pretending they’re real representations of how this country thinks. That doesn’t just feed into the networks’ narratives, it feeds into the narratives of people like Trump. It feeds into the narratives that give him more air time, that lets him cause more damage, and that feeds his campaign.

If there’s one success in Trump’s campaign, it’s that he’s the only candidate who understands this. This is the metagame Trump plays, and this is how we feed it. By pretending he’s a front-runner, he becomes more viable in the minds of voters as a front-runner. By pretending the things he has to say, good or bad, are worth listening to, the things he says become more interesting in the minds of voters. By pretending that he’s a serious politician, he becomes a serious politician. The emperor has no clothes, but we are all so convinced he does that we share it as fact, as something impending, as a main attraction instead of a side show.

Without understanding the nature of the stories we post, all we do is drive Trump’s most advantageous narrative – that he is a serious candidate. We’ve done it enough that we’ve made it true, and by doing so, we’ve aided his campaign.

We can oppose the things he says without being afraid of him, without treating him seriously. I’ve written a good amount on polls and how we read them. People always ask, “Why does it matter, they’re just polls?”

Because we share them as fact and treat their realities as fact without bothering to understand them. That makes their realities our own. That means our political reality is now one that helps Trump, even when we oppose him.