See update for August 18, 2024, at end of post.
Overconfidence, perhaps?
“[Donald] Trump’s only rally this week [August 4-10], meanwhile, was in a state [Montana] he won by 16 percentage points four years ago rather than a November battleground. Facing new pressure in the race from a candidate with surging enthusiasm, Trump on Thursday called questions about his lack of swing state stops ‘stupid.’
“‘I don’t have to go there because I’m leading those states,’ he said. ‘I’m going because I want to help senators and congressmen get elected.’”[1]
I don’t like opinion polling anyway because poor response rates severely and unpredictably skew samples. But as the crisis of Joe Biden’s campaign was playing out, my mother and I were talking about internal polling, the polling politicians commission privately.
There are lots of problems, in addition to the response rate issue, with internal polls. Inherently, they’re run by people who want to keep their jobs, which means to some degree that they must flatter their employers, the politicians. There are a number of steps pollsters can take to skew results for sycophancy, including priming (this entails a sequence of questions which get respondents thinking—cognitively and emotionally—in ways that skew their responses to subsequent questions), framing (this is the emotional content attached to anything in the questions), and deploying statistical wizardry, such that the method is tailored to produce desired results.
Real researchers are, of course, unimpressed. The term of art for questions along these lines is “attacks on validity,” with validity understood in a strict sense in logic of not even getting to the question of whether such results are right or wrong, but rather, whether the method was followed correctly.
Donald Trump is widely believed to be, and certainly exhibits the characteristics of a narcissist. I rather strongly suspect he believes his own internal polling, because (surprise!), it’s telling him what he wants to hear.
That’s an Achilles’ heel.
Update, August 18, 2024: It’s a coincidence too bizarre to be believed.
Joe Biden had a problem with real progressives who would like the U.S. government to respond to human need, in Gaza and here at home. He turned in a terrible debate performance and was driven from the race over questions about his cognitive capacity. [2]
Donald Trump also appears to be losing cognitive capacity,[3] though this may be difficult to distinguish from raging narcissism.[4] And he has a problem with his paleoconservative right flank, which is complaining that he is taking mainstream positions to win mainstream votes. There is one difference: Donald Trump’s right flank will still vote for him; their complaint is about his campaign, which has been pressing him to drop the apparent raging narcissism and try to sound like a normal human being.[5]
I’ll tell y’all a secret: The man needs, at the very least, a psychiatrist. He won’t drop the raging narcissism because he can’t, at least not without a lot of help and probably a lot of serious medication. All the horrible stuff you’ve heard about lithium as a psychiatric treatment? I’m not a psychiatrist but I’m thinking that might be a starting place.
Another difference is that where the Democrats could turn to Kamala Harris, the Republicans have no viable alternative to Trump. This race is looking more and more like it’s Harris’ to lose.
[1] Matthew Brown, “Donald Trump headlines Montana rally after plane was diverted but landed safely,” Associated Press, August 10, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-trump-tester-sheehy-senate-b2030ef3b1249cafaeb21b755721920c
[2] John Heilemann, “The Biden-ing of Donald Trump,” Puck, August 18, 2024, https://puck.news/trumps-punishing-new-split-screen/
[3] John Heilemann, “The Biden-ing of Donald Trump,” Puck, August 18, 2024, https://puck.news/trumps-punishing-new-split-screen/
[4] David Benfell, “Is Donald Trump losing his marbles?” Not Housebroken, August 9, 2024, https://nothousebroken.substack.com/p/is-donald-trump-losing-his-marbles
[5] Drew Harwell, “Far-right influencers turn against Trump campaign,” Washington Post, August 18, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/18/trump-campaign-nick-fuentes-groypers-hard-right-criticism/