DID CELLPHONES CHANGE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY MORE THAN THE INTERNET?

My argument is that cellphones caused the polls to be wrong in 2016 when Trump ran against Clinton. And polls being wrong encouraged the Republican Party to disconnect from reality.

I always thought Trump had a good chance to beat Clinton. Trump was an unknown, and Clinton was a weak candidate based on basic things like being a blue-state senator. An unknown number has a good chance to be larger than a known small number.

The polls were weird in 2016. It is hard to second-guess the actual level Trump versus Clinton, assuming that is what respondents are telling pollsters. But the ups and downs were suspicious to me, relative to my understanding of what people cared about. The Clinton email story, and some other things, moved the polls more than it should have.

Then a few days before the 2016 election I was walking my dogs late at night, and I saw a cat behind a fence. A moment later I realized it was a plant. I suddenly realized what the pollsters were doing, talking to a few people and extrapolating them wrong, and I became certain Trump would win the election based on their error.

There has been a lot of weird stuff since Trump won, and that distracted me from thinking about why the pollsters did what they did in 2016. They weren’t just trying to be smart and innovate. They probably did not calibrate their innovations wrong because of bias against Trump. More likely, pollsters were making honest efforts to overcome it being hard to contact people on cellphones, since the traditional process of calling people on landline phones no longer worked.

So to the pollsters, there was some unknown group of people that were hard to reach on cellphones, that were going to influence the election. What Republicans learned, was there was some unknown group of angry people who disagreed with the mainstream media, and tapping into that group of people would win elections. The 2016 election was portrayed by one person (Ann Coulter?) something like “the headline versus the comment section”. Meaning there was the fake narrative being pushed on you by the media, contrasted against what millions of people really believed.

This taught Republicans to ignore the mainstream media and the polls, and try to find where the angry people were. So it wasn’t just that Twitter gave life to waves of nonsense, which then elevated grifters and people like Matt Walsh and Candace Owens, the more so the more resonant their statements were with the impulses of some group of people. It was that the polls and the media being wrong in 2016, gave Republicans license to pander to whatever crowd made a lot of noise on Twitter, a sort of intellectual underpinning to it. So Twitter filled in the vacuum left by landline phones.

The polls and the media being wrong in 2016 enabled any Republican to tell any other Republican going forward “the polls and the media are lying to you, and this is what is really going on”. And that could be whatever the angriest dumbest guy thought, the most opposite of the New York Times. Or it could be what some right-wing faux intellectual thought, or it could be what some old-time Republican like Newt Gingrich or Thomas Sowell thought. In any case, it was never likely to be the reality of what a majority of voters thought.

This enabled Republicans to misread the importance of Black Lives Matter in the 2020 election. BLM resonated with a lot of white suburban people, because cops are psycho liars. And things like Heather McDonald’s “War on Cops”, and the OJ and Casey Anthony verdicts and the Big Mike Brown story, had encouraged this real problem. White suburban people had firsthand experience with there being something wrong with the justice system. But Republicans were convinced it was all just whipped up by the media, and they knew what the majority of white people really thought. People like Newt Gingrich told Republicans to bet all their chips on “tough on crime”, the casino game that always made Republicans rich off Democrats.

Then long after Trump lost in 2020, Republicans were still paying 10% in betting markets as long as they could, saying Trump would win. January 6th has been a major event influencing politics, and it was enabled by pollsters and the media being wrong in 2016, because pollsters did not know how to reach cellphones. The angry people in 2020 were not BLM protestors, but people whose small businesses were shut down during the pandemic. Republicans did not run to the front of the anti-vaccine mob because they aligned with traditional Republican philosophy more than Black Lives Matter, but because it fit the model of a mob of angry people ignored by the polls and mainstream media.

I used to get most of my political news from Breitbart. But I stopped, when Breitbart started writing stories about the most outlandish and obviously wrong polls as reality. Breitbart began selling a world to its readers that was disconnected from reality, the more disconnected the better. Breitbart turned into a mill constructing stories that fit the theme that the polls and media are wrong, and the angriest position is right. Today, one of those narratives is that all the crime statistics reported by police are incorrectly underreporting crime, and violent crime is secretly way up and everyone will vote to save themselves from being murdered in front of their houses.

At a casual glance, this appears to be a product of Twitter. Twitter seems to have corrupted people like John Lott to saying incorrect things for clicks. But if polls hadn’t been wrong in 2016 because pollsters were trying to deal with cellphones, the idea of elevating nonsense on Twitter would not be the religion of the Republican Party. This is what turned the Republican Party into populists and a lot like Democrats, trying to find that mass of angry people who don’t read the New York Times. If the New York Times hated abortion, Republicans would find the mass of contrarians on Twitter who love it, even if it was all green-haired lesbians from NYU.

This is probably why Republicans were surprised by the political results of abortion bans, despite Republicans themselves not seeming to actually be pro-life or Christian in their philosophies. They were told by some guru that the majority of Americans oppose abortion. Even with advance notice from a Supreme Court leak, Republicans did nothing to sell pro-life positions, because they didn’t see a need to. They thought they were simply moving to where their secret majority was already lurking.

Republicans no longer debate public issues productively, because their ideas targeting who or what they are debating with, and what they need to persuade people of, are inaccurate. They don’t know what their base really thinks. And it all goes back to 2016 when pollsters disconnected from reality because they did not know how to poll cellphones.