Why I don't sell Hopium

The truth -- and nothing but the truth.

I got an email from a new paid subscriber on Tuesday morning. This was what it said:

Not too sure how long I'll want to pay for daily emails that tell me how the situation is nearly hopeless. I can get that from Fox for free.

Which gave me pause. Because I have been thinking a lot lately about what I am doing here and, as importantly, what I am not doing. (Sidenote: Fox News isn’t free! You pay for it in your cable bundle!)

Before I get to that, I want to flag something that has been bouncing around in my head these last few days. Which is intimately related to how I think about all this.

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It’s a Q and A between The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner and

Simon Rosenberg

, a longtime Democratic strategist who now writes the very successful “Hopium Chronicles” Substack.

Here’s the key bit (it’s long but important):

Chotiner: A lot of Democrats and liberals are worried about the state of the Presidential race. You seem to have a different take. What do you think people are missing?

Rosenberg: I think there has been a tendency in recent years among commentators to overestimate the strength of Republicans and to underestimate our strength. And we saw that play out in 2022. The fundamental dynamic of our politics, since the spring of 2022, has been consistent Democratic over-performance and consistent Republican underperformance. We saw it across the country in 2023. We’ve seen the same manifestation in 2024, with Trump struggling, and bleeding some of his votes, and underperforming polls in the primaries. And so, I think there’s just generally a view that, as people get closer to voting and have to go through that process of deciding who they’re going to get behind, Republicans lose ground and Democrats gain ground. And this has been particularly true after Dobbs. The whole political landscape in America changed fundamentally with Dobbs. And so any comparisons to 2016 and 2020, for example, I think are not valid because I think everything changed in 2022.

Chotiner: You’re definitely right that various commentators were wrong about 2022. But, broadly speaking, the polls were pretty accurate. There were—

Rosenberg: No, that’s not true. That’s not true. I mean, we have to stop. People have to stop saying that. The RealClearPolitics final map for the Senate was fifty-four seats for the Republicans based on averages. [The actual projection was fifty-three seats.]

Chotiner: This is from FiveThirtyEight: “Despite a loud chorus of naysayers”—

Rosenberg: They’re not correct.

Chotiner: Hold on, let me finish reading. “Despite a loud chorus of naysayers claiming that the polls were either underestimating Democratic support or biased yet again against Republicans, the polls were more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party.”

Rosenberg: They’re wrong about that. I mean, they’re just wrong. They’re wrong. I mean, I’m presenting you with facts. How in the world could polling averages be correct if they ended up with fifty-four seats in the Senate? And I have an explanation.

Chotiner: Some of the Senate races were perceived to be close. Democrats won those races when some people thought Republicans were going to narrowly win them.

Rosenberg: No, but what FiveThirtyEight wrote is not true. And I have a clear, definitive proof that what they wrote in that is not true. In 2022, there was an effort—and this has been documented again and again—by Republicans to flood the polling averages with bad polling, to push the polling averages to the right, which was then successful.

The entire political commentary in the final month before the election settled on the red wave. Shane Goldmacher wrote one in the New York Times. I was mocked and attacked by Nate Silver, by Dave Wasserman, and by all these other folks. Part of the reason I got the election right when almost nobody else did was that I separated out the Republican-heavy polling from the independent polling. And what we saw consistently is that, in the independent polling and independent-media polling, the election looked close and competitive. So, if you wanted to see a close and competitive election, there was a lot of data backing that up.

Chotiner: As FiveThirtyEight makes clear in their piece, “While the polls in a few closely watched races—like Arizona’s governorship and Pennsylvania’s Senate seat—were biased toward Republicans, the polls overall still had a bit of a bias toward Democrats. That’s because generic-ballot polls, the most common type of poll last cycle, had a weighted-average bias of D+1.9, and polls of several less closely watched races, like the governorships in Ohio and Florida, also skewed toward Democrats.”

Rosenberg: I’m ending the interview. I’m ending the interview because what you’re doing is ridiculous.

Chotiner: Wait, wait—why?

Rosenberg: Because I have definitive proof that what you’re saying is not true. And I don’t care. I know what FiveThirtyEight wrote. I live this every day. And so, the point is what you’re saying is wrong. I am on record saying that what FiveThirtyEight has written is incorrect, and I’ve given you definitive proof otherwise. So if you want to keep coming back at this, do it. But this has become one of the most ridiculous interviews that I’ve ever done my entire professional career.

The interview actually went on — and seemed generally pleasant after this episode.

But, like, really? Confronted with a different opinion, Rosenberg just threatens to take his ball and go home?

(Sidebar: Simon and I have known each other professionally for many years. I even asked him to do a Q and A with me about his relentless optimism for Democratic prospects months ago! He didn’t respond to that request.)

Now, let’s deal first with Rosenberg’s insistence that the 538 analysis of the 2022 polls is wrong. His basic point is that it’s wrong because polling projected that Republicans would win 53 seats in the Senate and they wound up with 49. Ergo, the polling was all wrong — and Rosenberg was right.

I went back and read through the 538 article in question again. Here’s how they came up with their conclusion:

We analyzed virtually all polls conducted in the final 21 days¹ before every presidential, U.S. Senate, U.S. House and gubernatorial general election, and every presidential primary, since 1998,² using three lenses — error, “calls” and statistical bias — to conclude that 2022 was a banner year for polling.

In our opinion, the best way to measure a poll’s accuracy is to look at its absolute error — i.e., the difference between a poll’s margin and the actual margin of the election (between the top two finishers in the election, not the poll). For example, if a poll gave the Democratic candidate a lead of 2 percentage points, but the Republican won the election by 1 point, that poll had a 3-point error.

As we’ve written many times, some degree of polling error is normal. Taken altogether, the polls in our pollster-ratings database have a weighted-average³ error of 6.0 points since 1998. However, polling in the 2021-22 election cycle had a weighted-average error of just 4.8 points,⁴ edging out the 2003-04 cycle⁵ for the lowest polling error on record.

And here’s the chart they produced on 2022 polling versus past elections:

Rosenberg seems to be conflating two things here. He is pointing out that Real Clear Politics polling averages suggested that Republicans would win 53 seats.

But, Real Clear Politics, which, as the New York Times noted in 2020 has swung to the ideological right, isn’t the same thing as 538. Not the same company. No relation. And what Chotiner is quoting from is 538, not Real Clear Politics.

Rosenberg also suggests that 538 is wrong — and that he has “definitive proof” of that fact but he doesn’t present it in the interview. (Which isn’t to say he doesn’t have it. Just that it’s not in the interview.)

Look. Simon is right that he was FAR more optimistic than the conventional wisdom — yours truly included — when it came to the 2022 midterms. Most observers expected there to be a red wave or at least a very good election for Republicans. It was not.

Simon nailed it.

That said, I am still very wary of concluding that because he got one election right that we HAVE to take his word that he is right again. He might be! He might have cracked the code!

But, he also might not be! And what Simon is doing — and there are lots and lots of other Democrats doing the same — is selling a hopeful idea of what this election is to his followers.

Democrats do not want to believe that Donald Trump could be elected again. They believe that his tenure in office — and what he said he will do if elected again — means that he is disqualified.

And, along with this belief, they think that the mainstream media has some vested interest in reelecting Trump. Because it would be good for ratings and page views.

And, therefore, the MSM (and I suppose people like me) are doing everything they can to sell a narrative that Biden is in deep trouble and Trump might win — when in fact Biden is in fine shape and is going to win again.

Polling, under this theory of the case, is either a) being influenced by a flood of GOP pollsters trying to cook the books or b) badly analyzed by reporters who are too lazy or dumb to do anything but go along with the entrenched narrative.

Which is an ethos! And one with a significant, built-in support system — like my reader from the start of this post. He wants to be told that things are going well for Biden, that all of this concern being reported (and all of these bad polls) are just plain wrong!

Writing that is good for business. Democrats badly want to believe that things are going to be ok. That Biden is going to win. That nothing the media is talking about really matters. Because Democrats won in 2022 when no one thought they would. And have over-performed most polls in 2023 and 2024. They will, in fact, pay to be told all of this.

Like I said, it’s an ethos!

And Simon is a Democrat! Who is trying to build his Substack following! Add it up and it makes perfect sense that he is selling Hopium.

But, that’s not me. I am not a Democrat. I am not a Republican. I am a journalist.

And, as such, I am not going to tell you what you want to hear because it will make you a) like me more and b) become a paid subscriber to this newsletter.

That WOULD be an easier road! And a more lucrative road!

But that’s not why I started this Substack. I started it — and continue to write it — because I want to be your trusted guide through the morass of modern politics. Now more than ever, we need people who can tell you what to pay attention to, what to ignore and, most importantly, why.

I don’t see it as my job to tilt the news — or my analysis of the news or the polls or, well, anything — so that you feel better about things. I have taken a position of radical honesty since CNN laid me off — about myself and my struggles as well as my views on American politics.

My promise to you has been — and will always be — that I will tell you how I think things are in American politics. If it looks good for Biden, I’ll tell you that. But, if it looks good for Trump, I’ll tell you that too. I don’t have a monopoly on right ideas. But my conclusions won’t be drawn because I prefer one side to the other. Or because I want to drive up my paid subscriber numbers.

Because if I ONLY give you the news you want to hear then how are you going to have a 360 degree sense of what is really going on in the country? You won’t!

Like it or not, Donald Trump can absolutely win the presidency. That’s not a prediction. It’s just a fact.

And I will continue to bring you facts — without fear or favor — between now and November. Because that’s what I am selling: Transparency and authenticity.