Exit polls explain only so much

People who never believed Gaza counted in the first place are determined to negate its impact in the 2024 election. By doing so, they compound their error.

Image source: TheIthacan.org

In this period just after this massive election result (epoch-changing, really), I am seeing some of the most disingenuous arguments. In such a volatile time of public opinion, it’s dangerous to let bad narratives set in place.

There is a certain contingent on the left that does not want to face the fact that Gaza as an issue had an impact on the election. They didn’t think it was important months ago, so they certainly don’t want it now to have had any effect on the election outcome — they’re dedicated to the issue altogether not mattering at all.

One of these people is the founder of the site Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas. On the site, he goes by the username Kos. Back in the day, he would interact more often with the other users, but lately he has written a smattering of essays here and there, akin to op-eds. (In Daily Kos parlance, those essays are called ‘diaries.’)

Near the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza as payback for October 7th, Kos wrote an essay that in effect told readers not to bother with caring about the Palestinian death toll.

Excerpt from “War Update: Not all civilian deaths in war and conflict carry equal moral weight” (Daily Kos diary by Kos, October 10, 2023).

 What Kos really was saying was that some lives were worth more than others. Either way, his pronouncement set the tone for the site, where few users wrote diaries critical of Israel throughout the entire length of this conflict.

Indeed, Kos has belittled any suggestion that Gaza would have an effect on Democratic politics. But to the degree that it registered with him at all that the issue would have ramifications, he argued that those who were truly concerned with Palestinian lives should wait until after the election to talk about it.

Excerpt from “Here's why pro-Palestinian protests targeting Harris will backfire” (Daily Kos diary by Kos, August 13, 2024).

That’s some pretty serious cynicism. “There’s an active genocide going on, but don’t talk about it! Wait three months, and then maybe we can put that on the table. Maybe. But not now, even though people are being incinerated and crushed to death every day! Not now. Wait.”

Now that Kamala Harris has come up short — in a historical and total defeat — Kos is looking to explain her loss. He’s taken two editorials in recent days to do just that. In one of these, he encapsulates the Gaza issue thusly:

Excerpt from “What went wrong: Part 1” (Daily Kos diary by Kos, November 8, 2024).

This is the height of bad faith from someone who never valued the loss of Palestinian lives to begin with. He’s looking to minimize by obscuring the impact of these non-Harris voters.

Back in February, during the Michigan primary, the Uncommitted movement made its hasty debut. It had three short weeks to organize voters so as to demonstrate that Gaza might impact their vote in the general election. The movement was designed specifically to send this message. Organizers hoped to get 10,000 people as a proof-of-concept. 

More than 101,000 voters marked “uncommitted” on their primary ballots. This was far in excess of what organizers would have called a success. Biden ignored this result and instead put out a statement attempting to lure Nikki Haley voters into the Democratic coalition.

I’ve gone through these numbers before. Suffice it to say, in 2016 Trump took Michigan over Hillary Clinton by about 40,000 votes. In 2020, Biden triumphed over Trump by about 150,000 votes. There are more than 200,000 Muslim- and Arab-American voters in the state of Michigan alone. They weren’t the only ones upset about Israel’s actions in Gaza — students and persons of color also expressed their reservations — but there were concentrated areas of Muslim- and Arab-American voters in the state, particularly in the city of Dearborn, which could impact local results.¹

As I said, other groups were expressing their displeasure, too. Students came out en masse this spring to physically demonstrate against the Biden administration’s stance on Israel’s unchecked destruction of Gaza. What did the administration do? Instead of siding with the students’ right to express their viewpoints by exercising their right to assembly and speech, Biden personally construed those demonstrations to be rank bigotry at their core and gave his blessing to the show of force embodied in the riot-gear-wearing police deployed to bludgeon these students into compliance.

The smearing of student activists is what enables their brutalization.

It was one of the most boneheaded displays I’ve ever seen. These were the same young people that Biden would need for his re-election. Student movements have always been at the base of liberal and left-leaning politics; but, more to the point, campuses are nodes where the youth vote organizes and turns out. Destroying the organizing capability of students right before an election season was the height of short-sightedness. (This was especially true in the case of those who were assaulted by police; that type of thing tends to radicalize a person, rendering them suspicious of state power. That’s not what one wants if one wishes such students to participate in a ritual that upholds state power.)

In any case, Democrats were warned by those in the Uncommitted movement (as well as the Abandon Biden movement) that if Biden continued to back Israel unconditionally he would feel backlash at the ballot box. This was not a secret.

But note how Kos dismisses the impact of these voters. He disingenuously points to exit polls to try to argue that their impact was negligible.

News flash: People who stay home don’t get exit polled. Thus, there is no way to gauge how much Gaza mattered to the overall public, because exit polls will not reflect those who stayed home. According to news reports, the Detroit metro area lagged in turnout. According to ABC affiliate WXYZ Channel 7 in Detroit:

Despite the record turnout [across the state of Michigan overall], some places like the city of Detroit actually saw fewer overall voters turning out to the polls. In the 2020 general election, the city saw 50% of registered voters casting ballots. In the 2024 general election, around 47% of registered voters cast ballots in the general election. Although the number of registered voters rose between the two elections overall, voters participating decreased by about 11,000 votes.

We don’t know why they stayed home. But we can presume, considering that 15 million more people voted for Biden than came out to vote for his handpicked protégé, that some of those people were disillusioned or dissatisfied with the Democratic Party. And we can assume that for some of them Gaza was a significant factor — we simply don’t know how many. We won’t know unless some special (and thus expensive) polling is done after the fact.²

As for Michigan, the Guardian reports, the impact of certain communities indeed affected the state’s voting trajectory as a whole:

Kamala Harris received at least 22,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years ago in Michigan’s most heavily Arab American and Muslim cities, a Guardian analysis of raw vote data in the critical swing state finds.

The numbers also show Trump made small gains – about 9,000 votes – across those areas, suggesting Harris’s loss there is more attributable to Arab Americans either not voting or casting ballots for third-party candidates. [...]

The drop in Democratic support in Hamtramck, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights – three Michigan cities with the nation’s largest Arab American and Muslim populations per capita – represent nearly 27% of the 81,000-vote difference between Harris and Donald Trump’s tallies in the state.

27% is not minor. That’s more than a quarter of the votes that figured a loss for Harris. Now take into account the number of 2020 Democrats who simply stayed home this time, some of whom presumably did so because they could not countenance their own party aiding and abetting a genocide.

Note that the Guardian also said:

[An] analysis, based on nationwide exit polling by the Council on American Islamic Relations, found 53% of Muslim Americans voted for Jill Stein. The same poll showed 21% of Muslims cast a ballot for Trump and 20.3% for Harris.

That 20.3% just about matches the amount of support for Biden among Arab- and Muslim-American voters as measured in November 2023. 

The Uncommitted vote told the Biden campaign in February that this was a danger for them, and Biden (and later Harris) decided not to attempt to gain these votes.

There’s another contingent who wants to find people to blame for the election outcome. This contingent believes that people who didn’t vote the way that those in the contingent wanted them to deserve special scrutiny. The folks in this contingent are the people who — taking the warning that I and others were telling them for months — are turning that warning on its head and using that to assail voters for utilizing their vote as they saw fit. It’s an amazing feat of pretzel logic and some of the most profound tone deafness I’ve ever seen.

“Be Careful What You Vote For, or Muslims in Danger?” (Daily Kos diary, November 10, 2024).

Note that the author of this essay quotes Kos’s statistics instead of coming up with his or her own analysis. Kos is wrong, as he misconstrued what exit polling data could tell us; thus, this author’s take, derived from Kos’s view, is similarly wrong.³

More to the point, aside from revisiting the statistics, is this idea that “[t]he time for protests (vote or otherwise) is not a presidential election.” That’s a value judgment, for one. The whole point of “one person, one vote” is that that person decides what to do with that vote. Voting is an expression of that voter’s agency.

But besides that, the fact remains that Uncommitted launched as a movement during the Democratic primaries to alert the party that this very issue was a point of fracture. They warned Democratic leadership all the way back in February that, if things continued the way they were, the party might stand to lose this many votes. In Michigan, that was 101,000 votes, around 13% of the primary vote. In Minnesota, following on the heels of Michigan’s primary, voters there went for Uncommitted at 19% of the primary vote. Elsewhere in the country similar patterns arose.

Biden is determined to miss Uncommitted's message

So no one can say that the party was not aware of this possibility. Democratic leadership simply did not want to face it. They didn’t want to acknowledge that their strategy in the Middle East was going awry, so they couldn’t acknowledge that they needed to make a course correction. Thus they just ignored the issue altogether.

By doing that, they stuck a hand in the face of all of these voters. In effect, they said that they would not hear them on this very dire and dear issue — but when it comes time to vote, they had better swallow their feelings and fall in line. Do people hear the presumptiveness in that? The arrogance?

And the nerve to say “Remember the Muslim ban?” Does this author think that the people targeted by such an odious policy could forget? Statements like these reveal a buried but very live condescension toward people who, ostensibly, are not in the same demographic as the person saying such things. That condescension is borne of a form of bigotry, in my estimation: Don’t these Others know what’s good for them? Why don’t they just think?! How stupid of them. It’s classic; and it’s disturbing how many people are expressing such sentiments without catching themselves.

It would have been great had the Democratic coalition of 2012 and 2020 been able to hold the line and deny Trump re-entrance to the White House.⁴ But that didn’t happen. And it’s important to realize two things about the Gaza issue in particular.

1. Gaza indeed was important enough to impact the election. That should have been acknowledged months ago.

2. Harris could have won these voters over by distancing herself from Biden’s policy. This election was always going to be won on the margins in such a polarized environment, and Harris and her team, implicitly or explicitly, decided that they could forgo these votes — just as Biden had made a similar calculation earlier in the year.

Team Biden rolls the dice

1. Consider also sentiment and momentum. These are intangibles that nonetheless make their mark upon an electoral contest. While Arab- and Muslim-American voters had supported Biden by more than 70% in 2020, by November 2023, their support had cratered to less than 20%. Nationwide, that may not have made much of a difference, but in certain areas, it absolutely would.

When people talk about their preferred candidate, that’s akin to the advertising equivalent of word of mouth. Word-of-mouth advertising is considered the most influential type. People on the ground saying that they would not vote for Biden would absolutely have an effect, especially over a yearlong period (if we’re starting in November 2023).

2. The reason why pollsters like exit polls is because the population in which the pollster is interested is gathered all at one spot and are readily available to gauge opinion. This minimizes polling expenses and provides quick results that are amenable to fast analysis. This is the opposite of what would need to be done in order to find out why people stayed home. One would have to find out who didn’t vote, try to track them down, give them incentive to share their opinion, and then attempt to perform analysis. That’s a losing proposition.

3. There’s a lot more that is illogical in the author’s hot take. A vote for a third-party candidate was not a vote for Donald Trump, no matter how much that was taken as gospel in Democratic quarters. It is a shame that many folks in the Democratic camp don’t see that that construction was a way of corralling votes. But, clearly, Jill Stein (as well as Cornel West and the other third-party candidates) differs from Donald Trump. Certainly, if Kamala Harris can say, “I’m not Joe Biden,” one can surely say that Jill Stein is not Donald Trump! They’re different people. And the reasons that any one voter would have for affirming those people with their vote are different in each case.

Additionally, the jumble about wanting to punish candidates for European anti-Semitism and “warring tribes and sects in the Middle East” says more about the author’s belief system rather than what may have been going on in the minds of any of these voters. That kind of reductive argument does real disservice, not only to the living people casting the votes but to the actual cataclysm that is occurring in Gaza right now, as we speak. It’s a dismissive swipe.

4. This is a tragedy if only for the fact that now he probably will never receive the full measure of the punishment he was set to receive from the criminal justice system. We will leave a horrendous legacy, where future generations will honestly be unable to understand why it was that we failed in this regard. (Of course, history being written by the victors, it’s actually more frightening to think of what the history books of the future actually will say to justify this period.)