If you’ve picked up a newspaper, fired up your laptop, or turned on a cable news network lately, you know that Bernie Sanders is staying in the Democratic primary race … until they pry it from his cold dead hands. I joke, a little, of course. It’s perfectly fine that he stay in. He’s basically a Lebron James layup away from officially losing, but it hasn’t happened yet, so he and his campaign are fighting on.
And good for them. As I said in my analysis at the end of my last post, there’s no real danger in him staying in until the primaries are over, so long as he tries to win on the power of his ideas and not by burning down the building he’s staying in. Also, there are undoubtedly a lot of people in the final states that want him to be their nominee. It’s a massive long shot, like a high school football team beating the 1984 Bears long shot, that he sweeps all of the final states, and by a massive enough margin that he closes the enormous 3 million gap in popular vote and hundreds of pledged delegates to have a legitimate gripe about losing, but democracy isn’t always about winning. It’s about getting the chance to have your voice heard first and foremost, and these poor, sad, desperate losers have every right to have their voices heard.
I do have a logical, rational problem with the argument for not only why he should stay in, but for why the Democratic Party should throw out the will of their voters thus far and ditch Hillary Clinton for him: And that’s the argument that polls have him winning at a higher margin over Trump than her.
Now, there are several rational reasons I hate this argument, such as the fact that there has been almost zero real scrutiny of his policy goals and how I have a feeling that the general election voters would turn against him in droves one they really heard the details, but that’s an examination for another day. My first reaction is: Seriously? Polls? WTF?
First, I hate how much emphasis on something that no one takes seriously. C’mon, how many of you actually answer the phone when a pollster calls? Or opens that email asking you to kindly take a few moments of your time to answering a few question? I, for one, will come up with any excuse to avoid answering a poll and wasting my time, and I bet 99.9999% of you out there do the same. So who are these poor, sad, desperate losers who are sitting for these polls and not hanging up the fucking phone on them or clicking the little “X” in the corner to close the popup, and why are we giving such an inordinate amount of power to a random sample of a few thousand of these losers and extrapolate that over a nation of 300 million-plus people?
Having said that, sadly enough, there’s no way … yet … to read everyone’s minds, so polling stands in for that. It sucks, but it is, unfortunately, the best we have.
So, do Bernie Boosters have a point? What exactly do polls in May of the election year say?
Gallup, thankfully or not, accurately or not, has been in this business since the year that Queen Victoria died, cars started to need to have license plates in New York, and Teddy Roosevelt took over for a recently deceased William McKinley as president of the United States. 1901, baby. That’s a long time to be doing something with such a debatable level of validity and quality. Anyway, such a run does give us a certain amount of reliable consistency. So let’s see what we have in presidential Mays, starting back as far as I could find.
Seriously, Dewey was ever that close to FDR, for Franklin’s FOURTH go around? It does make you question how powerful Roosevelt was. Well, maybe a tiny bit …
In May 1948, Richie Rich (aka Dewey) took over lead in the race from the incumbent Truman and kept a commanding lead through the election which he won soundly. Oh shit. Wait. That’s not how it happened …
Ike was up on Adlai in both elections, for the entire of both elections, from the opening gun to the finish line. Both times. But c’mon, he was Dwight D. Eisenhower. He beat Hitler. Seriously, poor Adlai never stood a chance.
Nixon pulled back to even with JFK in May and overtook him in June, leading for most of the rest until television unveiled him for the sweaty monster he was. Or at least that he was standing next to cool, collected Jack.
Polling started in June in 1964, but the ’64 election was never close, regardless of whatever fiction your so-called Libertarian friend cooks up to tell you otherwise.
In May 1968, Humphrey passed Nixon. Humphrey. Hubert … Humphrey. Not Bobby Kennedy … HUUUUUbert Humphrey.
No polling in May again in 1972, but again McGovern never really came within spitting distance of Tricky Dick.
The nation was tired of Ford, whom no one actually voted for. Poor Gerald Ford. He didn’t deserve all that crap. Seriously.
In May 1980, Jimmy Carter was beating Old Man Ronny by almost 20 fucking points … and that’s with John Anderson pulling in nearly a quarter of the vote. Dayum.
Mondale never really had a chance. Not much else to say there.
President Dukakis. Yes, one morning in September, the entire nation woke up and realized that that sound completely fucking ridiculous.
This one is just funny. In May 1992, Bill Clinton was losing to BOTH George HW Bush AND Ross Perot. And for more than a month, Perot was winning. Seriously. It’s like the nation smoked cracked for a month and then woke up one day in a ditch and said, “Where the hell am I?”
Four years later, the American people recognized a good thing when they had it …
If you’re as saddened by the fucked up ending of this election as I still am, it is a bit hard to swallow that W lead almost the entire way through to November. Sad but true.
May was a virtual dead heat between Frankenstein’s monster and Dick Cheney’s figurehead, with Frankie’s only real lead coming after his party’s convention.
This one , 2008, just hurts my eyes. But both were up, several times, over the course of the months leading up to the final stretch. It was only at the very end, as the financial crisis hit, that Obama began to pull ahead and stay there.
And then in 2012, after each led for a few weeks in April, the race between Obama and Romney was neck-and-neck through the end of June. A similar trajectory to the 2008 election, which is funny because after the fact it does feel as though Obama held a decisive margin while in fact it was closer than most of us remember.
So, what do we learn from all of this?
In the past 18 presidential elections stretching back to 1944, polls in May of the year of the election had the eventual winning candidate ahead nine times (1944, 1952, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1976, 1984, 1996, 2000). The May polls were dead wrong for the entire month of May four times (1948, 1980, 1988, 1992). And the remaining five times, the polls were close or the two candidates traded leads throughout the month (1960, 1968, 2004, 2008, 2012). That’s a .500 batting average. (It’s much better if you include the neck-and-neck races, but those really tell us nothing.)
Of the polls that were correct, let’s eliminate all of the ones with an incumbent running. If you’re currently president, then the nation already knows you and at least that one small barrier of familiarity doesn’t have to be leaped over by the voters. Also, if you’re doing a halfway decent job as president, you generally get re-elected. It’s true. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter are the only two sitting presidents to be defeated during a re-election in the entire 20th century. So let’s take re-elections off the board. That leaves only 1952, 1964, 1976, and 2000 as non-incumbent “correct polling in May” years. To be honest, we should take 1964 off the board too, because the country was still reeling from John Kennedy’s assassination the year before so LBJ was basically an incumbent.
That leaves 1952, when Eisenhower (who, you will remember beat the fuck out of Adolph Hitler) took poor sacrificial lamb Adlai Stevenson to the cleaners; 1976, when Gerald Ford (who, you will remember, no one voted for in any capacity); and 2000, when George W. Bush ran a better campaign than anyone really gives him credit for because he seemed like such a fucking dunce. Three correct, non-incumbent polls in May in the past 80 years.
On the other hand, three of the four years that were dead fucking wrong, were non-incumbent election years, and the other was the disaster of Carter’s re-election bid.
Again, I’m no friend of the pseudo-science of polling, but this isn’t the kind of track record that I would be relying on if I were making my case to be the nominee of a party in the fall.