We often think that people who see the world differently from us are delusional. Sometimes that is true, other times it just indicates that they see the world differently than we do.
We can safely say that Simon Rosenberg is in the first camp: totally delusional.
This is an incredible read. All the polls are unskewed — after the interviewee threatens to walk away from the interview, naturally.
I wonder how widespread his views are among the Biden campaign staff. https://t.co/svavYyyMgR
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) May 24, 2024
Rosenberg is firmly in the camp of pundits who is convinced that Joe Biden is in great shape for the 2024 election, and he sells this fantasy on his blog Hopium and to the viewers of MSNBC. And, more importantly, to the people who are running Joe Biden’s campaign, who apparently share his opinion that everything is going great in Joe Bidenland.
The New Yorker’s latest issue features an amusing interview with Rosenberg. What is striking about it is how immune Rosenberg is to reality checks—so immune, in fact, that he threatens to walk out of an interview with Isaac Chotiner, the magazine’s writer.
Rosenberg places all his chips on the “pollsters were wrong in 2022” argument–a red wave was predicted and failed to appear. This argument has a flaw though–the red wave analysis was only somewhat based on polls, which actually were more accurate than usual. The consensus that a red wave was actually not backed up by the polls–it was a mirage.
As FiveThirtyEight makes clear in their piece, “While the polls in a few closely watched races—like Arizona’s governorship and Pennsylvania’s Senate seat—were biased toward Republicans, the polls overall still had a bit of a bias toward Democrats. That’s because generic-ballot polls, the most common type of poll last cycle, had a weighted-average bias of D+1.9, and polls of several less closely watched races, like the governorships in Ohio and Florida, also skewed toward Democrats.”
I’m ending the interview. I’m ending the interview because what you’re doing is ridiculous.
Wait, wait—why?
Because I have definitive proof that what you’re saying is not true. And I don’t care. I know what FiveThirtyEight wrote. I live this every day. And so, the point is what you’re saying is wrong. I am on record saying that what FiveThirtyEight has written is incorrect, and I’ve given you definitive proof otherwise. So if you want to keep coming back at this, do it. But this has become one of the most ridiculous interviews that I’ve ever done my entire professional career.
Oh, O.K. Sorry.
This exchange takes place near the beginning of the interview, giving you a flavor of the entire thing.
Accept what I am saying, or we will be done. Refusing to address counterarguments is hardly a good persuasion technique.
Rosenberg’s argument is that the Republicans have flooded the zone with polls, distorting the averages, and created a false narrative that Trump is doing well. Biden is actually ahead, or in position to be ahead, once the public wakes up to the reality that he is a really good president and Trump is a VERY BAD MAN.
I saw you said, “Trump to me, is a much weaker candidate than he was in 2016 and 2020.” Can you talk more about that?
Much weaker.
Tell us more.
So, I think, first of all, his performance on the stump is far more degraded. He’s clearly diminished. He’s far more erratic. He’s making a lot of mistakes that are hurting the campaign when he speaks. Second, his agenda is far more extreme, more dangerous, and will be far easier to exploit by the Democrats.
According to a CNN poll in April, fifty-five per cent of Americans say that they think Trump’s Presidency was a success, compare that with 2020, when his job approval was around forty-four per cent on Election Day. In November, 2016, his favorability rating was thirty-four per cent in Gallup. Now his favorability rating is in the low forties.
Right. So, the assumption with everything I’m telling you is that it is what I believe is going to happen as the campaigns are prosecuted over the next five and a half months. There are six things now that are true about him that were not true in 2020, that all voters are going to come to know in the following months—they are that he raped E. Jean Carroll in a department-store dressing room [Trump, who has denied the allegations, was found liable for sexual assault in a civil case.]; that he oversaw one of the largest financial frauds in American history, and has been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for that; that he stole American secrets, he lied to the F.B.I., he shared those secrets with other people, it’s the greatest betrayal of our national security by a former President in all of American history; he led an insurrection against the United States, he led an armed attack on the Capitol, and he’s promised to end American democracy for all time if he’s in the White House in 2025; he and his family have corruptly taken more money from foreign governments than any family in American history; and sixth, and this is really important, is that he’s singularly responsible for ending Roe.
Rosenberg apparently believes that the case against Trump has yet to be aired to the public, which is perhaps the key to his delusion.
If only everybody knew that Trump is an Orange Man, and that Orange Man is bad.
There is absolutely, positively, and without doubt, no person who is going to cast a ballot in 2024 who has not been inundated with propaganda about how singularly bad and dangerous Donald Trump is. There is no amount of money spent on ads, no increased TV coverage, and literally nothing that could be done to increase the volume of this message.
If all Joe Biden needs is to convince people that Donald Trump is, after all, not the pure, innocent, civil man we all believe him to be, then good luck. I think we all have an opinion about Trump and no new information will change it.
You presented a case, that I happen to agree with, about why Trump is very dangerous. But his Presidency, as I said, is still seen as a success now by the majority of Americans.
But this is what a campaign is for. This is what a campaign does.
He already led that insurrection, and his favorability rating is back now above where it was in the past. I know you can say that the campaign will deal with some of this stuff, and perhaps it will, but how do you understand these numbers?
It’s my belief that, when you prosecute all of these things, and establish this basic idea that Joe Biden has been a good President, and the country is better off, which is manifestly true—that in the prosecution of all of this, Trump will fall down, and we will win.
One of the places you could prosecute this case that you’re putting forward—with the largest audiences—would be debates. The Biden White House only wanted to do two debates, not the customary three. How do you understand that choice?
I think it was Trump that made the decision to go to two debates, wasn’t it?
No.
The interview is delicious in its own way. It gives you a window into the mind of a person whose bubble is so opaque that he thinks that people can’t see the world differently if they just knew what he did. If we could only force everyone to watch MSNBC all the time, the world would be different.
Don’t misunderstand me; it is conceivable that Trump loses this election–but if he does it won’t be because voters suddenly discovered that January 6th happened or that Biden really is a good president. This election will be won or lost in the trenches, fighting for every ballot.
But public opinion? It’s pretty fixed. Everybody knows Biden sucks, Trump is a jerk, and that the world is on fire.
And that the world is on fire because Biden is president. The polls aren’t skewed against Biden.