Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

7 Tips for Watching This Presidential Campaign

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

We are now five weeks out from the start of actual voting in Iowa. That being the case, and given that the field has been winnowed to fairly manageable proportions, I thought I should offer a few pointers to those observers who are having trouble tearing their eyes away from this slow-motion car-crash spectacle.

1. The media and political consultants all treat polls as though they were video footage of a horse race, but they are not video footage of a horse race. Polls are simply an educated guess, and sometimes they ought to be considered more of an uneducated guess. It is handy and convenient to be able to say that Candidate X is five points up, or ten points down, but keep in mind the possibility that the measuring rod stretched five points or shrank ten. Polls do tell you something, but errors outside the margin of error frequently occur. The method is inductive — you ask questions of 2,000 people in order to find out what 200 million are planning to do. So when election results come in wildly different from what the polls were saying, keep in mind that this might be the result of Candidate X “surging” at the last minute, but it might also be an indication that the polls were purblind and groping their way all along.


2. The fact that polls are not necessarily reliable does not keep them from being powerful players. They are influential players regardless of how “scientific” they are because everybody believes in them. They are a feedback loop that all the politically-interested hold in common. Candidates drop out of the race on the basis of them, and supporters  who are looking for a candidate with “winnability” are attracted to campaigns on the basis of them. Polls are therefore a means of driving campaigns, either off the road or down the road. They directly affect what they purport to measure.

3. Everybody uses polls. Candidates cite them, donors give on the basis of them, the media reports them, and so on. But we need to keep in mind that the general electorate also uses them. The electorate doesn’t have nearly as many opportunities to do so, but when opportunity presents itself, as it certainly has in this cycle, a politically-active electorate is engaged enough to send a message to the elites by means of them. I believe the Trump naughtiness falls under this heading. It is an opportunity to scare the establishment without actually wrecking anything. As I have noted before, the electorate is currently on a spring-break bender, the point of which is to frost the parents. This is not the girl they are going to marry.

4. When the Iowa caucuses convene, something is actually happening. Prior to that time, nothing has happened.

5. If my surmise at the end of #3 is erroneous, a phenomenon that I understand has happened before, and we are faced with a choice between Trump and Clinton in the fall, what is a good little Christian to do? Faced with a choice between a grim and abiding disaster and a disaster with high entertainment value, what should we do? My best suggestion is that you should rummage through your old school things in the attic, find your lucky pencil, and take it to the voting booth to write in your mom.

6. Despite a few off-putting things here and there, I like how Ted Cruz has been running his campaign. He is very smart. He has money in the bank. He has built an impressive ground game in places that count. He is a conviction conservative, and not a weather-vane like Trump. He has been a consistent contrarian, and this does seem to me to be a contrarian year. Cruz stands in a good way to win Iowa, and if he does, he is in a great position to make the argument that it is time for conservatives to coalesce around him. After things start happening, we’ll see what happens.

7. Cruz is absolutely detested by the official Republican establishment. I can’t imagine a better commendation. I also can’t imagine a better indicator of what kind of things will happen if he wins Iowa.