Josh Marshall on the difference between close and uncertain

This has been a recurring theme of the discussions Joseph and I have been having about the election. When the question of how things were going came up in conversations with friends and co-workers, my standard response has been that there were plausible scenarios where either candidate not only wins, but wins by bigger margins than any of the experts have been predicting. 

From Talking Points Memo:

I’ve made this point a few times in recent weeks, here and on the podcast. I’m going to make the point again because I think it’s critical for understanding this election nine days out. We keep hearing that this is the closest election in decades. Polls say that’s right. At least 5 of the 7 swing states are within a single percentage point — fairly meaningless margins statistically. National poll averages are between one and two points — right on the cusp of where most believe a Democratic Electoral College victory becomes possible. But I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. What we have is a high uncertainty election. That’s not the same thing. There’s every chance that most or every race that looks close will veer more or less uniformly in one direction. And that wouldn’t necessarily be because of one late-breaking story, some great decision by one of the candidates or even undecideds all “breaking” in one way. It could simply be because the dominant understanding of the race and the electorate was just a bit off and had been all along.

Even more than usual this year our understanding of this race, from polls, from dominant media narratives, understandings of what happened in the past two elections, is based on assumptions that may simply be wrong. In my way of looking at it, there are a small number of interlocking assumptions about the electorate that make up our understanding of this race. There are plausible arguments that each is wrong. That makes the outcome very uncertain. It also creates a lot of avenues for wishful or motivated thinking.

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Finally, isn’t this how it always is? Electoral fog of war, the inherent uncertainty of knowing how a vast national community of hundreds of millions of people is going to make decisions at the ballot box? Sort of. But not entirely. I think there’s more uncertainty than usual because of 1) rapid changes in the polling industry in response to evolving technology, 2) methodological changes in response to polls twice underestimating Donald Trump’s electoral strength, and 3) the steep and inherent difficulties of separating what about the 2020 election was embedded electoral trends and what was the COVID pandemic. So yes, I really do think there are more question marks, more debatable assumptions packaged into the analyses than usual.