The polls validate Trump’s psychodrama

This past week of watching American politics has been as frustrating as playing three-card monte against a seasoned street hustler. You begin by following the cards and fully trusting your senses. And just as you feel confident that you know where your card will land, well, then comes the switch…

This time, the switch arrived on Monday with The New York Times publishing their latest polls. It was a masterful demonstration of the hustle, with a series of results (and provocative headlines… so many headlines!) that will have convinced many that Donald Trump is winning nearly every race that matters. 

“Mr Trump was ahead among registered voters in a head-to-head matchup against Mr Biden in five of six key states: Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania,” it reported. “Mr Biden led among registered voters in only one battleground state, Wisconsin.”

Set aside the fact that, compared with the same poll from November, the new poll shows a significant narrowing of his lead across the five state races. Trump was soon boasting about his numbers in the corridor outside courtroom 1530 in Lower Manhattan. The numbers offered a counternarrative to that of the past few weeks which suggested that Biden was building momentum and that Trump was tanking across the board. 

No, no, the polls seem to say. You were mistaken to look over there. Here. Was this your card?

And maybe it was. Or it wasn’t. There’s no way of proving if this snapshot of the electorate was representative. All we can say for certain is that it was the card Donald Trump was thinking about. 

The polls validated his psychodrama; offering a glimpse of that alternative reality where his golf scores are in the low single digits and his animal magnetism off the chart. The Poll was an affirmation of his alpha male virility, that residual power he maintains over the Republican caucus which brought so many surrogates to New York. A call had gone out from his campaign to get big-name supporters to New York to provide some backup after a week when Trump had felt isolated in court. So, here to the rescue was J.D. Vance, the senator from Ohio, rumoured to be in the running for Trump’s VP pick. There was Vivek Ramaswamy, also rumoured to be in the running for the VP pick. There too was North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, also rumoured to be in the running for… Well, you get the idea. 

About the only person who didn’t look like he was running to become Trump’s Mike Pence replacement was the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who had his own reasons for being there. He’s been propped up in the House by Democrats after Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest attempt to topple him. This was a chance to MAGAfy himself in front of the boss.

So, yes, amid so much testosterone and chest-beating, The Poll felt totemic, an omen of better times for The Donald.

The problem for him and for Republicans is that it only felt magical in the way all great street hustles feel magical. Look closer and you see the tricked-out decks, the palmed cards, the secret flaps in the black felt. 

The New York Times/Sienna poll has something of a reputation and little of that has to do with its ability to predict elections. In June 2020, the same poll reported that Joe Biden had a fourteen-point lead on the then-incumbent Trump. This time, there are serious doubts about the poll’s methodology, skewed as it is towards rural voters and non-voters. It is also based on registered voters which skews in Trump’s favour, rather than “likely voters” which skews towards Biden. It has internal inconsistencies such as counting people who have never voted as “likely voters” and presents some baffling results that are at odds with each other. How, for example, do we reconcile the suggestion that among voters aged 18-29, Biden is ahead by twenty-four points in Michigan but down by 27 in Wisconsin?

Cynics might note that the poll generated the kind of publicity that The New York Times might have hoped it would generate. Tensions are to exist between the paper and the White House. It was only in late April when Politico reported that A. G. Sulzberger, The New York Times’ publisher, has been trying to land a sit-down interview with President Biden. “Biden’s closest aides had come to see the Times as arrogant, intent on setting its own rules and unwilling to give Biden his due.” Others speak of the paper’s propensity to boost Trump and diminish Biden. 

It certainly felt odd enough to make one pause and wonder about the sleight of hand that might have been at work. 

None of it spoke about Trump’s staggeringly bad week: his sleeping in court, the lack of crowds (other than some desperate VP wannabes) supporting him in Manhattan, his defence team’s woeful cross-examination of Stormy Daniels, his wild Hannibal Lecter rant in New Jersey, and the growing likelihood of his losing the case.

Either Trump is in a bad place or we have shifted into some alternative reality in which Trump is not as deluded as he sounded when he told a crowd on the Jersey shore that: “We’re expanding the electoral map, because we are going to officially play in the state of New Jersey. [… ] We’re going to win the state of New Jersey.”.

That’s not to say that the numbers were entirely divorced from what’s happening in America right now but the polling is too wild, too early, and too crude to cause anybody to stand waving sheets of paper in the air. 

It’s true that Biden should not be struggling and maybe the poll precipitated a little panic in the White House. It certainly did seem to provoke Biden to challenge Trump to two debates later in the year.

“I hear you’re free on Wednesdays,” he quipped, referring to one day of the week when Trump’s Manhattan trial doesn’t sit.

Trump quickly responded on Truth Social. “Crooked Joe Biden is the WORST debater I have ever faced – He can’t put two sentences together! […] I would strongly recommend more than two debates and, for excitement purposes, a very large venue, although Biden is supposedly afraid of crowds – That’s only because he doesn’t get them. Just tell me when, I’ll be there. ‘Let’s get ready to Rumble!!!’”

And perhaps Trump really means to debate. 

Or perhaps, most likely, he doesn’t. 

That’s the beauty of the great cons, as well as of the uniquely Trumpian spell. It’s about expectation management. We are drawn into the illusion and perhaps even enjoy being tricked. We admire the duplicity of the hustler, their confidence in making us believe that the world is a place of magic and mystery. Trump standing outside the courtroom with his printouts of The New York Times polls sounded utterly convincing. He made it hard to doubt that he’ll win a resounding victory in November.

But polling, like card tricks, is only fun so long as you don’t take it all too seriously. Nobody in their right mind changes their theology based on the turn of a single forced card.

@DavidWaywell

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