Monday, August 26, 2024

Trump, Kennedy and the NYT -- making the “All Else Equal” Fallacy when things are really, really not equal

[This appeared in a slightly more skeletal form as a Twitter thread early Sunday morning.] 

The “All Else Equal” Fallacy: Assuming that everything else is held constant, even when it’s not gonna be.

We will see how this pans out, but I think most of the mainstream media is badly misreading the implications of RFK Junior's announcement. Josh Marshall and some other outsiders get it, but the NYT et al. are likely to be at least one step behind on this yet again. The standard analyses we've been seeing are based on some big (and I suspect unlikely) assumptions. If these assumptions are wrong, and we are already seeing some indications that they are, then their conclusions, while not necessarily wrong, have no support.

What we have here is a variant or perhaps a first cousin of the all other things being equal fallacy. Specifically in this case it is the idea that you can gauge the impact (or even most of the impact) on the race just by looking at the 4% currently supporting Kennedy.


If Kennedy had quietly dropped out of the race, privately informing all of his supporters (no, I don't know how that would work either) rather than making a high-profile announcement and if no one other than those supporters had noticed, then the straightforward analysis being done by political analysts would make sense, but that had already not happened by the time these analyses were being performed. Kennedy and Trump made sure that this was big news, The remaining 96% of voters are watching this show and paying close attention, particularly in tho GOP. This changes messaging and strategy on both sides and (as you'll see in a minute) policy on the Republican side. All other things are never equal.

Both MAGA and the Trump campaign are making a very big deal of this.



 

From a story I had to go looking for on the NYT (they are definitely pushing this as another "no big deal" story):

Conservative sites, more than a dozen of which prominently featured the news on their home pages, saw the news as a win for Mr. Trump. They argued that Mr. Kennedy’s decision could reshape the race by turning Mr. Kennedy’s supporters into Mr. Trump’s, and by shifting the attention of Americans away from this week’s Democratic National Convention.

...

Though polling suggests Mr. Kennedy’s decision is unlikely to significantly shift the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Mr. Trump, many conservative commentators said the decision could swing the contest. Ben Shapiro, the editor in chief of The Daily Wire, said in a livestream after Mr. Kennedy suspended his campaign that the announcement, which was made during a speech in Phoenix, could “dwarf” the positive impact of the Democratic National Convention for Ms. Harris.

The Washington Examiner, a conservative news site, published multiple news articles on Friday that argued an endorsement from Mr. Kennedy would boost Mr. Trump’s campaign.

Haisten Willis, the site’s White House reporter, wrote that the decision “eliminates the third-party threat to the G.O.P. and could push momentum back in Trump’s favor as polls show a tight race against Harris.”

In an opinion essay titled “R.F.K. Jr. and Trump Offer a Good Fit” published on the site on Friday, the writer Brady Leonard said that Mr. Kennedy’s endorsement offered an alliance that not only helped Mr. Trump’s odds in the election, but also made sense ideologically.

The article was very he said/she said. Notably, it only cited two organizations on the left and one of those was Slate.

As far as I can tell, other than a brief reference to Trump "embracing" Kennedy, the NYT hasn't published anything about how this is already affecting the campaign and Trump's platform, which is pretty big news to sleep on.

DJT Friday:

"That is why today I am repeating my pledge to establish a panel of top experts, working with Bobby, to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases, including auto-immune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and more."

And this.


To understand the impact this announcement is having on MAGA, you have to imagine the emotional roller coaster they have been on the past couple of months. After the debate, they thought they had the election sewn up. After the assassination attempt they thought they had a divinely ordained landslide on their hands. From their perspective, the past month has been an absolute gut punch. Just as they were about to hit their post-convention peak, the world turned upside down on them. Suddenly everything was breaking for the Democrats and against them. Fox news people were clearly getting worried. Supporters were starting to panic.

Then comes RFK Jr. and suddenly Trump world has someone to pin their hopes on.

Ms. Trump was being accurate if you replace "American people" with "Republicans." From their viewpoint, it was an enormous party thrown by the popular kids mainly to make fun of the losers. Now everything was about to change.

Conservative hacks immediately jumped on the bandwagon.


 

 




NY Post


 

Then came this.

It didn't actually suggest a Trump/Kennedy ticket, but it got people thinking. The idea of Kennedy replacing Vance was met mockery from non-MAGA Twitter.


 

Not sure where the third party stuff comes from.

As the weekend stretched on, the tone of the jokes changed.


As far as I can tell, no one of any standing in Trump world explicitly suggested the switch, but the way they talked about Kennedy had to make Vance a bit nervous or at least unappreciated. It didn't help that JD Vance seemed to disappear into another dimension the moment he stepped out of that doughnut shop.


Vance's job is probably in no danger but it looks like both his dignity and his role have shrunk even more.



While Trump is promising to make RFK Jr a central figure in the campaign and in his promised administration.

Lots of talk about a cabinet position and some of the calls are coming from inside the house.

How will this play out for the Trump campaign? I'm inclined to say badly but, of course, I don't really know. I do know that the messaging and the policy stances of the Trump campaign have changed radically over the past seventy-two hours and those changes are likely to have a substantial impact (in some direction) considerably greater than whatever fraction of 4% the analysts at the NYT,  538 and the rest are talking about.

One last note. It's after midnight on Monday. I just checked the NYT.


They are already late to this story, but based on past history, when they catch up, they'll claim they were the first ones here.

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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousAugust 26, 2024 at 12:25 PM

    Thanks, msm. Keep paribus-ing that ceteris!

    ReplyDelete