November 8, 2016.
I’m at Big Bar in Los Feliz, posted up in the midst of a hip East Hollywood crowd, holding my drink like a trusted friend whose sole mission is to assure me I’m cooler than I actually am.
At Big Bar the cocktails are craft, and the playlist is custom. No one is really dressed up, but there is definitely a vibe. Lots of plaid shirts and scruffily beards and felt hats and designer-ish glasses. Everywhere I look I see “I Voted” stickers taped to chests and knowing smiles plastered on friendly faces. The mood is easy, maybe too easy. I guess we all read the same projection on Fivethiryeight.com. And while the game hasn’t been played, it appears the score is no longer in doubt. This won’t be a contest, it’ll be a coronation. Cheers to that!
So when the group quiets to hear a pundit call Pennsylvania for Trump, I remember how it felt like a tennis ball had dropped from back of my throat right down to the pit of my stomach. Check that, it wasn’t dropped. More like Serena served that thing into my gut at 100 MPH.
The others must have felt the same, because in the aftermath of the T.V. pronouncement a murmur swept through the room like a low intensity L.A. earthquake. Right then, at that exact moment, I knew it was over.
I spent the rest of the evening on the patio, consoling myself and others, wondering just how bad the next four years would be. Pretty fucking bad, as it turns out.
More drinks followed. Big Bar does make excellent cocktails, maybe the best in the city. But none of them brought an ounce of joy. It was, to use a presidential expression, SAD!
In the aftermath of Trump v. Clinton, lots of pollsters autopsied their projections. According to the best analysis, it’s very unlikely there were secret Trump voters lying to pollsters, or even truly awful misrepresentations in sample. The most likely scenario was that people simply made up their mind late in the game, particularly among the poor, white population. That change was never captured in the polls.
When we think of 2016 we like to remember that the polling played a horrible trick on us, but by historical standards, the national polls were actually pretty accurate. The national average predicted a Hillary victory by a margin of 3.3%. When all the votes were counted it ended up being 2.1%, easily within the margin of error. It was only in a handful of states where the projected winner was flipped, and only by a total of about 80,000 votes. But 80,000 votes was all it took to win the (cough, cough) electoral college and change the course of U.S. history.
Looking forward, it behooves us to remember that polling is, after all, just a snapshot in time. At one point in the summer before their elections, even the likes of Hubert Humphrey, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry all had a 5 point lead in the tracking polls. We know how that all turned out.
So when I see all the glowing polling coming out for Biden––Over 50% in key states like Michigan and Florida and Arizona, and a 10-point lead nationally––I can’t help but recoil in fear. No way you’re getting my hopes up this time. No way Lucy is going to Charlie Brown my ass. No way in hell. This time I’ll abide the same advice I’ll be shoving in everyone else’s face:
Don’t look at the polls. Don’t even think about the projections, as rosy as they might seem. Just assume the race you’re voting in is a coin flip, and while you’re at it you can assume every other race in every other state is also a coin flip, and you can cajole your fellow Dems accordingly. Put another way, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, VOTE!
If we all did that, fate might smile on us all, and come November 3 I’ll be a man getting drunk in jubilation, instead of disappointment.
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