Steve over at No More Mister Nice Blog has an interesting take on the numbers Trump's so-called campaign manager and number cruncher, Brad Parscale, keeps conjuring in the face of actual results.
Part of the magic and wonder of our bounteous perpetual campaign industry is the constant barrage of numbers generated by pollsters and consultants, some internal to the candidates and campaigns, some of them independent observers such as corporate news organizations. All of them should be taken with huge rocks of salt, not only because the participants frequently have vested interests in the outcomes, but because the outcomes themselves are so fluid and active, especially a full year out from the elections, months before the primaries and the holidays and the 4Q numbers and all that.
But in the Peter Drucker sense of "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it," the numbers should provide guidelines and benchmarks for the politicians and their campaign staff to make adjustments.
There's something odd about the way Trump's "administration" and the 2020 "campaign" tend to generate, observe, and manage their numbers in general.
One example is the unemployment rate, typically the U6 numbers, which Trump whined about during the 2016 campaign, calling them fake. And of course, the second he gets in, they're his numbers, and they're improving slowly but steadily, so suddenly they're "real."
Nothing has changed, obviously, in how the numbers are derived; they are no more "real" or "fake" than they were when they were Obama's numbers. But the point is that Dear Leader is not interested in the real-world economic conditions that determines how those numbers are arrived at. He just knows he likes them.
Another consistent example is the internal poll numbers, the ones Trump regularly tweets about how 94% or 95% of "Republicans" approve of his great and unmatched wisdom. That number does not even closely jibe with the actual numbers, which are still at comically high Saddam Hussein levels, but have slipped recently, from 88% to mid-70s in the recent polls I've seen.
Now, we can cynically assume that many administrations of either party might choose to make the highest available numbers public for prole consumption, while still knowing what the "real" numbers are. But there's no indication that there's any such separation; in fact, all the reports are that the terrified WH minions frantically bring Dear Leader sheaves of carefully massaged numbers in order to placate him. It's very much a bunker mentality where numbers are used to tell you what you need them to tell you, rather than to see them for the empirical data that they are.
In other words, it seems like neither Trump nor Parscale is able or willing any longer to discern how to use their data properly, in order to fine-tune their approach and viability. The good news with that is that by the time they do believe what's in front of their eyes and make necessary corrections, it may be too late to avert a blowout. The bad news is that if anyone has proven time and again that they can fuck up a sure thing by going into a prevent defense, it's the Democratic Party.
Part of the magic and wonder of our bounteous perpetual campaign industry is the constant barrage of numbers generated by pollsters and consultants, some internal to the candidates and campaigns, some of them independent observers such as corporate news organizations. All of them should be taken with huge rocks of salt, not only because the participants frequently have vested interests in the outcomes, but because the outcomes themselves are so fluid and active, especially a full year out from the elections, months before the primaries and the holidays and the 4Q numbers and all that.
But in the Peter Drucker sense of "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it," the numbers should provide guidelines and benchmarks for the politicians and their campaign staff to make adjustments.
There's something odd about the way Trump's "administration" and the 2020 "campaign" tend to generate, observe, and manage their numbers in general.
One example is the unemployment rate, typically the U6 numbers, which Trump whined about during the 2016 campaign, calling them fake. And of course, the second he gets in, they're his numbers, and they're improving slowly but steadily, so suddenly they're "real."
Nothing has changed, obviously, in how the numbers are derived; they are no more "real" or "fake" than they were when they were Obama's numbers. But the point is that Dear Leader is not interested in the real-world economic conditions that determines how those numbers are arrived at. He just knows he likes them.
Another consistent example is the internal poll numbers, the ones Trump regularly tweets about how 94% or 95% of "Republicans" approve of his great and unmatched wisdom. That number does not even closely jibe with the actual numbers, which are still at comically high Saddam Hussein levels, but have slipped recently, from 88% to mid-70s in the recent polls I've seen.
Now, we can cynically assume that many administrations of either party might choose to make the highest available numbers public for prole consumption, while still knowing what the "real" numbers are. But there's no indication that there's any such separation; in fact, all the reports are that the terrified WH minions frantically bring Dear Leader sheaves of carefully massaged numbers in order to placate him. It's very much a bunker mentality where numbers are used to tell you what you need them to tell you, rather than to see them for the empirical data that they are.
In other words, it seems like neither Trump nor Parscale is able or willing any longer to discern how to use their data properly, in order to fine-tune their approach and viability. The good news with that is that by the time they do believe what's in front of their eyes and make necessary corrections, it may be too late to avert a blowout. The bad news is that if anyone has proven time and again that they can fuck up a sure thing by going into a prevent defense, it's the Democratic Party.
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