Grand Old Fantasies

There's been a lot to analyze and think about in the results of our recent election, but what I'm finding most fascinating right now is the astounding wrongness of Republican predictions on the eve of the vote—or, to be more precise, the stubborn adherence to wrongness by a whole lot of smart people in the face of overwhelming evidence.

       Without exception (as far as I know), prominent Republicans predicted a Mitt Romney victory while nearly every nonpartisan analysis of the polls put the probability of an Obama victory at 80 or 90 percent. And this wasn't just let's-predict-victory-to-keep-our-spirits-up cheerleading. These were serious prognostications. Some expected a Romney landslide, when even the most Republican-leaning state polls showed him trailing in nearly all the swing states he needed to win.

Nor were these just the usual Fox News gasbags like Dick Morris. They included seasoned observers like George F. Will (who a few months before had written a sober and sensible analysis of why Obama was going to be very hard to unseat), strategists like Karl Rove (whose credibility would seem to require a realistic grasp of the facts), and, worst of all, the very people who should have been most realistic about what was going on with the electorate, the pollsters working for the Romney campaign.

        I heard three main arguments from these people as to why all the nonpartisan analyses were wrong. The first was that the polls were "skewed," especially that they were "oversampling Democrats." Even though 38% of voters identified as Democrats and only 32% as Republicans, several pundits insisted that voters from the two parties should be sampled equally, even hinting (at least on Fox News) that the greater number of Democrats was the result of the pollsters' own political biases. This seemed to spring, on the one hand, from a certain paranoia—why on earth would pollsters and odds makers whose livelihoods depend on accuracy intentionally publicize inaccurate information to express a political sentiment?—and on the other from the juvenile but deep-seated resentment that we hear so much of from the right wing lately, that the world is unfairly ranged against them. Republicans should be sampled the same as Democrats, damn it. Otherwise it's just no fair!
       The second argument was that Romney was riding a wave of momentum that had started with the first debate, so that he just had to pull close enough by the final weekend of the campaign that his momentum could carry him over the finish line. That ran against all the evidence of the public polls, which showed that his momentum had stalled out at least two weeks before the election and that the incumbent was actually pulling further ahead by the end. (The GOP apparently produced a few polls on the final weekend showing Romney gaining again, but everyone in that business knows not to trust weekend polling.) In the face of that, members of the campaign talked about the excitement of the crowds wherever they went, a feeling of momentum that couldn't be denied. That one was just wishful thinking.

       The most reality-based of the arguments was the one that held that while the polls' projections of turnout among young and nonwhite voters were based on 2008 results, the truth would surely be that those groups would only turn out at 2004 levels; in others words, 2008 was a fluke because a mad passion for Barack Obama made black people and twenty-somethings behave in a way they never would again. There was actually some evidence to support that one: pro-Romney voters expressed distinctly higher levels of interest and intensity than pro-Obama voters. Still, interest levels have always been an unreliable measure; organized get-out-the-vote operations have proven to matter more, and no one doubted that the Democratics had that part down. The non-partisan poll analysts had the same basic information and didn't bother much about the "intensity gap."
       The New Republic ran an article a couple of days ago breaking down the Romney camp's internal polling and dissecting just how this delusional group-think evolved. But it doesn't answer the other question: why? Why were so many experienced analysts and strategists willing to fly so boldly in the face of so much contradictory evidence, to assert so confidently that they alone had the "real polls" (to quote Dick Morris), to imagine that they had exclusive possession of reality?  
       This was a triumph of mutual self-deception, a vast collaboration on a shared fantasy. Not the sort of thinking one expects from a lot of smart grown-ups with decades of experience in the real world. I'm sure a lot of elements came together to make that happen, but I think the biggest one is also the simplest: We don't like pain and fear, and when they're intense enough we'll do almost anything to squirm away from them. As organisms, we may be able to think in the long term, but we feel in the short term. It's how we evolved: pain and fear are so hard to bear that we bring all our resources to escaping them. And if we can't escape the situation that inspires them, we bring those resources to adjusting our own thinking so the feelings diminish.
       Usually, group wisdom keeps us grounded in reality even in those situations. But when the group is united by an especially agonizing anxiety, then the members may start encouraging each other not to an uncomfortable acceptance of reality but to a mutual soothing of the pain. When the group feels cut off from other people and is already inclined to distrust what it hears from outside, then those strategies of reassurance can zoom like a welcome virus through the mass conversation. Think of the Nazi high command believing that the war could still be turned until there were Russian tanks in Berlin. When we give each other a veiled choice between amplifying our anxiety together and creating hope together, we're primed to choose the latter.
       Republicans had spent years working each other into the terror that an Obama reelection was the worst thing that could happen to them. Then they spent months encouraging each other to believe that that fate could be averted. And, of course, all along the way they continued to reinforce in each other the conviction that the liberal media was ranged against them and couldn't be trusted. When the evidence kept stripping them of their hopes and leaving them naked against their fears, they did the human thing: they came to one another's emotional defense.  
       In times like those, no matter how experienced we are and no matter how complex are our mental gymnastics, we're all like kids again: doing whatever we can to comfort ourselves through the night, but leaving ourselves vulnerable to an ugly reality in the morning.