Thread by @jonworth

This may be dangerous, but I am going to attempt a thread about the US election

Take this with a hefty pinch of salt, because I do not know much about US politics

But that's the point

Neither do you, probably

The difference between being a political analyst and a political polemicist is that the former should actually help contribute to our understanding, while the latter will use any opportunity or lever to defend their line or their side.

The problem is that analysis is hard.

"How could Trump perform so well, given so many Americans have died from COVID?"

People thought Trump was doing his best?
People doubted Biden would do better?
People believed in conspiracy theories about it?

Or something else altogether? That the Democrats scaled back their ground game due to the pandemic, and the Republicans did not? (a point @StatisticSingh raised)

In short: we don't know.

"People cared about the economy rather than COVID!"

Generally along the lines of this:

https://twitter.com/pisaniferry/status/1323887816351322113

But who are those people?
Are they assessing the economic question objectively?

Is it *actually* that Trump was saying the right things about the economy (tough on China), while actually not doing the right things?

Considering the state of the US economy: we don't know.

"Biden ran a lacklustre campaign! [Insert another name here] would have been better!"

How do you know?

Sure, some other candidate might have been more energetic, or have a stronger ideology, but are you sure that would not have turned off others?

Also turnout was - by American standards - solid. Biden might end up with more votes, total, than Obama did in 2008.

Was this actually more about Trump's vote holding up well than it was about Biden doing badly? We don't know.

A caveat here: the Democrats lost a handful of House seats, but likewise picked elsewhere in other states. If this were only about the quality of the Presidential candidate this would logically have not happened.

"The pollsters got it wrong!"

Yes, at first glance it looks like they did - or at least some did in a bunch of the tightly run races.

But do we know why that is so? No we don't yet.

"It was all down to the online activity by Republicans!"

Even here we don't know the impact. Republicans might have had better organic reach, but the Democrats invested more in online advertising. At the moment: we don't know.

There may be other arguments that can be made. It was due to voter suppression. It was due to some fuzzy notion that Trump is on Americans' side, and Democrats are not. That a Democrat candidate is assessed according to different criteria to a Republican one.

We don't know.

And yes, you can always fall back on the old nugget - a Democrat may win the popular vote, but not the electoral college - system is broken! 😳

🤷‍♂️ Kudos for raising that, but what are you going to do about it? Because Republicans sure are not going to change the Constitution!

So please, please be careful.

If you're an editor or employed by someone to commission analysis, avoid it falling into the trap that what you get confirms a pre-conceived view of the world.

That's confirmation bias, and we don't want that. With that we *never* learn.

So be annoyed or angry or disappointed or whatever about what happened.

But don't jump to conclusions about why it is so. We all did that in 2016, and look at what happened in 2020.

I don't know the combination of factors at play here, and it's OK to say so.

/ends