Swing and a Miss
By Bill James
February 5, 2020
Missed That One
I was expecting yesterday to post an acknowledgement that I was wrong when I predicted, some time last summer, that Bernie Sanders would not be relevant to the 2020 Presidential campaign. The chaos in Iowa has delayed this article by a day or so, but I should precede.
The issue I should address, growing out of that mistake, is what exactly my misjudgment was. I certainly knew, as I reached that conclusion, that my Twitter followers were not representative of the nation as a whole, nor of the Democratic Party as a whole. I was not in the grip of any illusion that they were.
Here is what I thought. My Twitter followers—like most groups of Twitter followers—are predominantly left of center. They’re mostly Democrats. Trump has little support among them, and indeed, no Republican has very much support among them. My Twitter followers are a little more balanced now than they were then, because I try to balance them, but that’s still true.
It seemed to me, at the time, that since the group being tested was left-leaning, it would almost certainly overstate—OVERstate—the level of support for the most left-leaning candidate. Bernie was polling at something less than one-half the support level of Joe Biden—and Joe Biden was behind Pete Buttigieg, and Pete Buttigieg was far behind Elizabeth Warren at that time. I thought at that time that it was impossible to imagine that an old man who had so little support in what should have been his home field would somehow rally to become a strong contender for the nomination.
In my rather long lifetime, I have seen many passion-driven, extremist. . . not meaning extremist as an insult. Bernie represents the furthest left viable portion of the philosophical mainstream; I mean "extremist" only in that sense, not that he should be ignored on the charge that he is out of the mainstream. Over time, I have seen many extremist candidates light a fire under a group of followers, fall short of the nomination, and then try to rekindle that fire years later. They always fail, I thought; I can see now that I was wrong about that, but I go back to Eugene McCarthy and Edmund Muskie, the liberal darlings of 1968, both trying to re-ignite the fire in 1972, and in 1976. It was like they were trying to strike again a match that already burned out.
I was wrong for three reasons, or at least three reasons. First, I underestimated Sanders as a person, or as a candidate, but as a candidate based on the skills that he personally possesses, if that makes sense. Sanders has formidable oratorical skills, vastly better than the oratorical skills of Elizabeth Warren. He was able to rip Elizabeth Warren’s support away from her because he is just a hell of a lot better speaker than she is. He sticks with simple ideas, and he advocates those simple ideas with passion and conviction.
I rather intensely dislike Socialism and socialist ideas, but I kind of like Bernie. We DO need to do something serious about income inequality in this country. It IS a problem; we do need to address it. It IS time, and past time, that anyone should be able to afford to go to college without picking up a slag heap of debt. Bernie has the worst possible solutions to these problems, I think, but at least he is serious about doing something about them.
So that was the first thing I was wrong about. Second, I fell into a trap of which I have often warned others. I read the lessons of history to be fixed laws, rather than a series of examples. That something may have happened in a certain way before does not mean that it will happen in the same way again—even if it has happened that way 50 times before. A batter may swing for the fences 100 times and strike out 100 times, and yet he may hit a home run the next time up. A second baseman may field 1,000 ground balls without a glitch, and the next one may roll off his glove. What has happened before is not always a barrier to what may happen next time. I should have recognized this.
And third, there is a logical failure there which is harder to describe. In a democracy, or in any other functioning economy, what most people want very often has nothing to do with anything. This is the flaw that undermines, for example, efforts to boycott those with whom we disagree.
Years ago, the Catholic church used to publish a list of movies that Catholics were banned from seeing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they still do, although we don’t hear much about it anymore, if they still do. You weren’t supposed to see movies with boobies and bad language.
The problem was, movie makers WANTED to get on that list. It doesn’t matter who doesn’t see the movie; it matters who does.
Well, the biggest movie of the year, 90% of the public wouldn’t pay to see it; probably 95%, I don’t know. If five good Catholics say, "OK, we can’t go that movie" but one horny college student decides to take his date to the movie, the movie wins. It’s a really common syndrome.
In a small group, in a contained group, you can enforce your values by threatening those who don’t buy in with exclusion. Dealing with the nation as a whole, it doesn’t work that way. Who doesn’t like the movie, who doesn’t like the chicken company or the hobby supplies merchant doesn’t have anything to do with anything. What matters is who does.
This is a similar problem. It doesn’t make any difference, at this level, who doesn’t like Bernie. When Donald Trump called John McCain a loser, he offended many leading Republicans to such an extent that they tried to drive him out of the party. They declared him dead as a candidate.
But it didn’t really make any difference, at that level, who was offended by it. What mattered is who liked it. His outspokenness, his bluntness, his willingness to pee on the feet of the sacred cows, was appealing to many people.
Sort of the same here; I thought that it mattered who doesn’t like Bernie. It ultimately matters, but it doesn’t matter much at this level. That was my third failure.
It might also be, if you go back and read those articles, that I had some things right at that time, and indeed, that I may have been ahead of the curve on some candidates. I’m not here to talk about those things, but I am also not saying that my analysis of those polls was generally poor. I was wrong about this, and I am here to acknowledge that.
Bill James
February 5, 2020
