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In 2015, statistician Nate Silver, the founder of the election forecasting website FiveThirtyEight, published a book titled, “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t.”
The thesis of the book was simple. Silver argued that data — such as political polling — can easily lie to us and cause us to misinterpret reality, because of statistical noise. Interpreting what is real (the signal) and seeing through the noise is difficult.
This is always true in politics, but never more so than in this unprecedented presidential election.
In just the last month, we have had a historically bad debate performance from President Joe Biden, an assassination attempt on the Republican nominee, a decision by Biden to drop out of the race and the elevation of a new candidate, Kamala Harris, as the Democratic standard bearer after she secured enough delegates to win the nomination. A friend joked to me on Tuesday that this year the only thing left to happen in an October Surprise is an actual alien invasion.
Any time anything happens, voters overreact and we have had to live through unserious “analysis” based on those overreactions.
A week before the first presidential debate, the RealClearPolitics aggregate polling average showed Donald Trump leading Biden by half a percentage point. A week later, Trump had a nationwide lead of more than three points, and in swing states like Pennsylvania the race had shifted from a dead heat to, in some polls, a five-point Trump advantage. Several prognosticators on the left and the right were quick to declare the election effectively over, and Democrats were in a full panic.
Of course, the race was in no way over.
It happened again after the assassination attempt on July 13. On that day, FiveThirtyEight’s polling estimate had Trump ahead by 1.9 percent nationally, and a week later he was up by 3.2 percent. The same swing state phenomenon happened in places like the aforementioned Pennsylvania, as well as Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. Both Trump supporters and those who don’t like him declared that the election was over and that he had won.
Again, it wasn’t.
What happens in these situations is that fickle, emotional voters allow their passions to overwhelm their reason.
Almost immediately after the assassination attempt, Elon Musk posted a tweet endorsing Trump, and reports quickly emerged saying that he was planning to give Trump $45 million a month to help him get elected. The image of Trump defiant with his fist in the air and blood on his face was enough for Mark Zuckerberg — Mark Zuckerberg! — to call Trump a badass, and say that “on some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight.”
Many voters felt the same, which is why the polling moved so significantly in such a short period of time. People who were on the fence, or even nominally to the left but had been dislodged by Biden’s shaky debate performance had a sharp, quick and strong emotional reaction to what they saw, and they allowed those passions to capture and override their logical minds. For the moment.
But do those passions last?
No, they don’t. These reactions are the “noise” Silver was referring to, and given a little bit of time and a settling of emotions, the impulsiveness of the moment goes away, and people revert back to who they really are. Musk, for instance, is now denying he pledged that money, and Zuckerberg isn’t endorsing Trump. A political contest like this will always revert back to what it really is — the “signal” — eventually.
This is something to keep in mind today, as Harris becomes the Democratic nominee for president. Biden’s odd resignation was dramatic and historically unprecedented, and her elevation was quick and equally dramatic. In the short time since this has happened, her campaign has raised record cash, as have Democrats across the country, she has received fawning press coverage, and she is enjoying some good poll news. Suddenly, Democrats everywhere are experiencing head-spinning euphoria.
More noise, and no signal.
Harris will almost certainly live through a short honeymoon period, where these events will cause the very same emotional reactions in voters that had previously happened to the benefit of Trump. But when the emotions die down, and we start to see the race for what it really is, we will be right back where we started before the first debate.
This is going to be a close election, and no amount of movie-like drama will ultimately change that.
