- by New Deal democrat
There’s no important economic data today, so let me post something that I meant to write about over the weekend before I was distracted by real life.
In his book “Sapiens,” Yuval Noah Harari writes that
[M]any people [ ] prefer history to be deterministic. Determinism is appealing because it implies that our world and our beliefs are a natural and inevitable product of history….[But h]istory cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic…. [H]istory is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system. Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system….Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately. Markets, for example, are a level two chaotic system…. [because the better the history of a forecasting system, the more it will become a ‘nowcast,’ as people front-run the prediction].
Politics, too, is a second-order chaotic system…. Imagine … some political scientist in association with a computer wizard have developed an infallible algorithm [that predicts the political future. A politician on the losing end of that prediction, for example, would take pre-emptive measures to ensure that the prediction does not come to pass….]
(Sapiens, pp. 239-241)
This is exactly what happens with political polling, and the fate of poll aggregators is a case in point. Nate Silver was initially very successful. But soon, players with other interests reacted to his system. First, and with increasing frequency, partisan pollsters ‘flooded the zone’ with junk polls, forcing him to weigh pollsters by accuracy, and even to develop a slew of alternate and inconsistent forecasting systems. But those junk polls also influenced voters to decide that either a race was competitive, or that one candidate was sure to win or lose. And now we have seen the rise of outright fraudulent polling, to the same end.
The net result has been that these poll aggregations have been increasingly off-target. For example, Sam Wang famously said in 2016 that “It is totally over. If Trump wins more than 240 electoral votes, I will eat a bug.” (and to his credit, he ate a honey-dipped cricket on CNN four days after the election.
What happened in 2016, essentially, was that “everyone knew” Hillary Clinton was going to win. And because “everyone knew” that, some voters felt free to stay home. Others felt free to cast a protest vote for Trump. Clinton herself felt free not to campaign in the “safe” upper Midwestern States. And most notoriously, FBI Director James Comey felt free to hold a press conference announcing a renewal of a criminal investigation into Clinton while early voting was already underway!
Now in 2026 we are being told that Democrats are heavily favored to take the House, and more likely than not to take the Senate. We are being told that early turnout is heavily in favor of Democrats, and that especially Hispanic voters are turning out in those areas.
But we are not just the passive recipients of these messages. We should fully expect that both potential voters and likely non-voters are going to *react* to that message as well. For example, might some Democratic voters in swing States relax? Will GOP operatives flood likely GOP voters’ mailboxes and social media feeds with horror stories about the big early Democratic turnout, thus driving more tenuous GOP voters to the polls to counter that early trend? Or conversely might a significant chunk of the public decide that they want to show up to be on the winning side, or turn a wave into a tsunami?
We don’t know. But what we *should* know is that the very act of publicizing all these polls and early turnout models is going to significantly affect the ultimate result. Ask Brazil, where reporting and polling after the first round of balloting that Bolsonaro was almost sure to be elected drove a massive outpouring of votes for Lula.
For my part, I am hopeful. But I am thoroughly discounting all of these polls and dissections of early voting.
A century ago, early industrial psychologists ran a study of factory workers. They found that, e.g., increasing the light on the factory floor made the workers more productive. But it turned out that, more than anything else, it was the act of *observing* the workers that was the chief reason that the altered their behavior. Because, as a fan of Star Trek, to put Harari’s observation in Ferengi terms, “Hoo-mans are a clever species. When you observe the hoo-mans, they always observe back.”
