The Daily Beast Podcast - The Vast Majority of American Voters Should Never See a Poll

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

This week on The New Abnormal, MSNBC political analyst and pollster Cornell Belcher talks the science of polls before we all start pulling our hair out. Then we talk to Radley Balko, publisher of Substack page The Watch, about his latest piece discussing how medical examiners shield violent cops from scrutiny. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world. Our new abnormal.

And hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have today. MSNBC political analyst and pollster Cornell Belcher breaks down the science and the art of polling and why the media really shouldn't be showing them to you. Then we'll talk to journalists and publisher of the substack to watch Bradley Balco. We'll talk all about his piece for the New Republic, how medical examiners shield violent cops from scrutiny. But first, let's have some fun. So, Danielle, a once-in-a-century event took place this week. Henry Kissinger died at the age of 100.

You're going to read a lot in places like the New York Times and the Washington Post about his complicated legacy. Don't buy any of it. He was absolutely a war criminal and basically a monster. And I have absolutely no hesitation in saying that. And this is a guy who is responsible probably for the deaths of four. million people in the world. And I don't think you get to be responsible for the deaths of that many people and then be called complicated. And for your legacy to be called complicated. No, he was not a good man. You know, I think that what always happens in this country in particular is the extraordinary

lengths that, you know, politicians and journalists will go to to put someone in a beautiful shining, sanitized light in their passing. In Kissinger, you're incredibly right, was not a complicated man. It's not complicated to say that he greenlit the bombing of sovereign nations, that he was at the hand of ousting a duly elected Democratic socialist that he didn't like. I think that what's really important here is to understand that his impact on our form, policy was so fucking deep that decades removed from his time serving both Nixon and Ford, he had the ears of many a secretary of states, of many of presidents that justified some of the most horrific actions that America would take in other nations that we did not declare war with

because he made the fucking blueprint for it. So I think that when we remember people in their death, we should remember the whole fucking story. And just a side note, I wish that all Americans had access to the type of health care to allow us to live to a hundred years old. Yeah, but I think that's the kind of health care that when the devil comes to collect, you're not happy about it. So I don't know about that. But could not recommend more highly a Spencer Ackerman's obituary in Rolling Stone that has the headline which Spencer himself wrote, Henry Kissinger, war criminal, beloved by America's ruling class finally dies. And that really does sum it up. And the fact that Henry Kissinger's mark on our foreign policy is as large as it is is not a tribute to him. It's a black

mark for America. And the fact that this goes across party lines, Hillary Clinton called Henry Kissinger a good friend and an advisor. Just for whatever reason, we glommed on to this man who did so many horrific things in his life and made him an elder statesman. It's an embarrassment to this country. And I don't care what you read about him in the coming weeks. Anything that doesn't portray him as exactly what he was. And that talks about, oh, he had love affairs or maybe platonic affairs with movie stars and whatever. Responsible for the deaths of probably up to four million people in the world. Yeah. Rest in hell. Anyway. Moving on.

Speaking of American psychopaths. What I find just really amazing is that Republicans continue to be the dog that caught the car. Whenever they are lamenting about, you know, being wronged and all the ways in which America is headed in the wrong direction. And we say, look at the 91 counts that your criminal martyr that you're a criminal martyr that you're, you refer to, by the way, as Orange Jesus. This is new coming at you soon in a book by Liz Cheney. This is what Republicans referred to Donald Trump, that Hunter Biden has been their go-to for the reasons why we shouldn't go after Donald Trump,

but we should put all of our energy in going after Joe Biden and the Biden crime family. And I'm using quotation marks. So as it turns out, Hunter Biden has said, hey, you know what? I would like to testify publicly. You have come at me with every single thing that you could. You've tried to embarrass me. You've tried to embarrass my father. You've done all of these things.

And so let me go and testify before the House committee. And guess what James Comer has said in response to Hunter Biden, I'm certain, you know, through his lawyers saying that he is happy to sit in the hot seat and be pummeled with a ton of questions. He was told, uh, yeah, no, uh, maybe, maybe, maybe you can testify, but behind closed doors. Yeah, it's pretty incredible chairman of the House oversight committee, James Comer is the one who said, no, you have to do this in private. A few weeks ago, Comer said that anyone subpoenaed in this impeachment inquiry could choose

between appearing for a deposition or a committee hearing, which would be public. So he's basically, I know this is a shock to everyone, but James Comer. said something three weeks ago, and he's now saying the exact opposite of it. I know I'm just going to give everyone a minute to settle down from learning that James Comer would do something like this. It is truly unbelievable that they just, like you said, that the fact that they've glommed on to Hunter Biden in the first place, it's so laughable and so inane. And then to like basically say, oh, but we don't want you to testify in public because they know, let's be honest, they don't want him to testify in public because they know

there's no there when it comes to Joe Biden. And I assume what happened here is that James Comer made this grand pronouncement. Oh, no, you could have an open hearing before the committee. He never assumed that Hunter Biden would say yes. And then Hunter's team basically called his bluff and now he's had to back off from it. And it's just, it's so pathetic. They're all just so pathetic. Nobody listening to this needed any more proof of how pathetic they are, but we're giving it to you. anyway. You might need one extra statement to be able to make at Christmas dinner. I just want to say this one thing from the USA Today piece by, I think it's Rex Hupke, but it's entitled, Republicans don't want Hunter Biden to testify publicly because truth is scary.

What he says here is so good. He writes, we believe in transparency, but not the kind of transparency that would allow people to see things under the direction of Representative James Comer, Chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, we have worked hard on our narrative and gone to great lengths to sidestep irritating left-wing speed bumps like facts and evidence. The last thing we as a party should accept right now is an effort by Hunter Biden to directly answer questions and defend himself. That's it. Like that's it completely laid out. We want as a party, the Republicans want the ability to pummel somebody, to degrade their character to drag them through the mud to post pictures of them to leak voicemails between him and

his father to do all of these things but the moment that you say you know what i want to own my narrative and i want you to hear the words that are coming out of my mouth now it's like oh no no that's too dangerous we'll have to do that behind closed doors so then we only give to the public what we want them to hear what we want them to see it's such bullshit and i'm so glad that Comor is being called out for it. Yeah, and that's exactly right, because what they want to do here is have these hearings behind closed doors, and then they'll get out, and they'll go on Fox News and elsewhere. And I was going to say spin, but they'll go on there and lie about what happened in the closed door hearing. And then people like Jamie Raskin on the Democratic side and others will have to go up there and say,

no, here's what actually happened. But at that point, it doesn't matter because, you know, then it's like, well, I don't know. I don't know. The truth is probably some. Somewhere in the middle is what you get a lot of people saying when it's not, when one side just blatantly lies their ass off constantly. But that's what they want. And Comer has tried this with open hearings where he's misrepresented what has happened in the open hearings and he's gotten away with it on places like Fox News, except that he's then easily called out by other people who will say, yeah, here's the tape of what happened. What you just said is a lie. That's what he's learned. The lesson he's learned is he doesn't want that.

tape to be available. Yeah, it's just, we need a new word for hypocrisy. We need a new word for ridiculous. They're not grownups. There are no grownups in the room. These people get a gavel and they just continue along with their circus. And any time that they're met with facts, anytime that they're met with the truth, they run from it. And yet there are people in this country that's still 30% that will vote for them. 30% that believe that, oh, everything that they say, the deep state and this, the other thing, and Biden crime family and Hunter Biden, it took money and blah, blah. But when we put out the facts, oh, I don't know, $2 billion that Jared Kushner got right as he walked out of the fucking Trump administration from the Saudis, let's not look into that.

Let's not have a conversation about that. That's just us being unpatriotic and wanting to take Trump down and on a witch hunt. But a laptop that you've been in control over for, I don't know how long that we've heard about this. and you've come up with zero, somehow we need to still get to the bottom of it. It's just bullshit. And I'm so over them. But good for Hunter Biden for coming out to call their bluff. Yeah, absolutely.

And I guess we'll see what happens with it now. God, there's so much going on with this right now. The actual crime family, the Trump's, as always, when you hear something happened with Donald Trump in a legal proceeding, the first question you always have to ask is which one? Mm-hmm. It used to be, oh, the federal one. Which one? Oh, no, no, no. It's one of the state ones. Which one? The case in New York, sorry, again, one of the cases in New York, which is the $250 million civil fraud case against Trump, Donald, and the Trump organization, a gag order has been reinstated against Donald Trump by the state appeals court. The gag order from Judge Arthur and Gorin had been appealed and Trump side said it was unconstitutional. And the state appeals court on Thursday said, no, it's not unconstitutional. So Trump is back under gag order again, which he will absolutely no doubt violate.

And Gorin has told him that at a certain point, it's going to end up with him in jail if he keeps violating these gag orders. We've talked about this on the show before. That would be nice to see. I'm not sure we're going to see that. But who knows? This is really a test of how far a rich and powerful man can push the legal system. Are we waiting for him to push it to somebody pulling a trigger? Is that what we're waiting for?

Because that's what's going to happen. It pisses me off that not, but what, several months ago was former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's husband attacked in his home. Why was he attacked in his home? Not just because the person was, you know, quote unquote mentally ill, but because they were hopped up on the bullshit that comes out of the mouths of people like Donald Trump, people like the Republican Party, egged on by Fox News and Newsmax. Every time that there is an incident, and I mean, you can. go through them, where people have lost their lives, where we're reading the manifestos of people who commit horrific acts of violence over the last several years, what have we found? What's the connective tissue here? Maga. So every time that Donald Trump puts out a post on his broke ass

social media site, it is a signal that he is throwing up it as a flare to anyone and everyone who is listening, who believes him, to say, go do my bidding, these people are hurting me and they're not just hurting me, they're hurting you. So you have to take action. Can this possibly be happening in America? It's his constant refrain. So I'm like, what are these judges waiting for? Because we say this all the time, if it were you, if it were me, if it were anyone. I honestly believe at this point, if it was any other politician, they would be in jail by now. But Donald Trump, for some reason, who causes the most severe threat to our country, continues to walk free. Yeah, and it's important to note that the gag order does not prevent Trump from talking about either Judge Ngoeran himself or Lettisha James.

What it does is it prevents them from going off on court staff and I think on families of Judge Nguyen, for example, because Trump tweeted nasty stuff. stuff about his wife. In one of the court filings, they said that both the judge and one of his clerks, remember, a lot of this started with Trump being mad at one of Judge Engoran's clerks. The court filing noted that both Judge and Gorin and the clerk had gotten tons of quote unquote credible threats, according to NBC News, because of the rants that Trump was going on and that in the case of the clerk, she was doxxed her personal cell phone number, her personal email addresses were compromised. She was getting harassing, disparaging comments and anti-Semitic tropes, surprise, surprise. And all those, that number of threats went up when the gag order was

initially lifted before Judge Nguyen had to reinstate it. The argument from Trump's attorneys, because this gets to what you were just saying, Danielle, the argument from Trump's attorneys is that the Constitution does not permit Judge and Gorin to curtail Trump's speech simply because people may react to things that he says. That is their argument. I'm not even saying they're incorrect. They are certainly correct up to a certain point. But it's interesting to note that their argument is basically, hey, if we say something

about how the judge or the judge's law clerk is anti-American or calls them vermin or whatever, and somebody acts on that and commits violence against them, that's not our fault. We didn't tell them to do that. So that is their track. But it's also that they clearly just, they don't give a shit. And not only do they not give a shit, you could easily argue that they want this stuff to be happening. We're just living in extraordinarily dangerous times. And I think that it is so important rather than fucking covering Biden's age.

And just to what did Lawrence O'Donnell say the other day on MSNBC, Donald Trump is only 36 months younger. Like he put it in months terms, you know? like you do with a toddler. Right. He's only 36 months younger. This is not the issue that we should be talking about. It's the fact that this man is continuing to ferment political violence and make it our norm. Because what Donald Trump is doing is just laying the blueprint of how people will act moving forward.

Now, I believe that everyone else will be a part of the fuck around and find out time, but I'm still waiting on the find out. part of Donald Trump's fucking around. Yeah. Folks, I am very happy to welcome on to the new abnormal Cornell Belcher, who I'm certain you have all seen. He is an award-winning pollster. He's an NBC and MSNBC news political contributor and author.

And Cornell, I often say to everybody who listens to me on my shows that I do not take a lot of stock in polls. And why is that? Because they disappointed and blew up my life and everyone else is in 2016. However, that being said, these recent poll numbers around President Biden's favorability dropping below 40% have me deeply concerned, as they do many folks. And so before we do like a deep dive into how concerned we should be this far out from the presidential election. Just give us the 50,000 foot elementary review on like what the science is of polls before we all start pulling our hair out. One, thank you for having me on your show.

I appreciate it. I appreciate the opportunity. A couple things. One is polling is both a science and an art. And the science of it is based in getting a random set. of a given universe. And if it is truly a random sample of a given universe, it should be representative of that universe. The art of it does impact the science. Because truth of the matter is, a lot of college students with some statistical background and certainly have taken survey methodology

can get the science right. But good polling isn't just about the science. It's also about the art. and when you see polling off, it's not the science that has gone wrong. It's the art. And that's what makes for poor polling. Corne, what do you mean by that? What I mean by that is if you look at where polling has been a huge miss, it hasn't been because of the science. It's been because of the art. And the art comes from one's view of the world and how they see the world. For example, In 2012, and I was a part of both Obama campaigns in the historic 2008 campaign and the fall of historic 2012 campaign. In 2012, a lot of the Romney team really did think that Mitt Romney was going to win the election. And we saw them doing things and going into state and pouring money into states that was a real head scratcher to us because we understood that that state was blue, you know, broke for us in 08 and was going to stay with us.

But what they had different was their view of what the electorate was going to be. And that's where if polling goes wrong, it goes wrong. Understand that in 2008, approximately 11% of that electorate were voters who had not been consistently participating in elections before that time. And that electorate was disproportionately younger and browner, right? It really was a reflection of the emerging American electorate. We changed the face of the electorate. in 2008. And by the way, that was what Barack Obama wanted to do. One of the first conversations

at a table within Senator Obama and some of us who would come on in the campaign, he talked about building a movement and building a movement that expands the electorate and make the electorate look more like the face, the changing face of America. So Barack Obama wins a majority in 2008, and he wins that majority in 2008, face a great deal on how that electorate change by dominating that new electorate. What people like to think of as some great racial and post-racial breakthrough in 2008 wasn't so much of a racial breakthrough as it was a demographic breakthrough, because if you look at the portion of the percentage of the vote that Barack Obama got among white voters is the same percentage of the vote that John Kerry got among white voters

four years earlier while losing it George Bush, right? The difference was about five or six million more young and brown people. Right. So that was a phenomenon, right? But what the Romney campaign, I think, thought was that they would have an electorate that looked a lot more like the Curry Bush electorate than it looked like the McCain-Obama electorate, right? And that's where they were wrong. In their universe and their modeling, in fact, looked like that John Kerry Bush electorate, Mitt Romney would have been president. Because understand at the same time, Mitt Romney ran up a score among white voters that was larger than what Ronald Reagan did and was was in 84 when his historical land sweep election.

So that's where polling was, so it's about the assumption. It's about the universe, right? So that's the art. We actually knew in 2012 that an electorate was going to look very much like. 2008. So I want people to understand the fundamental science of polling as a sound as it has ever been. Are there challenges to it? Absolutely there are challenges to it.

But there are also opportunities to it. Look, sitting beside me right now, I have this remarkable. piece of technology that I don't know why we call it a cell phone anymore because I barely use it as a phone, right? It's a remarkable piece of technology. And you know what I can do today that I could not do, say, in 2004, 2002 in those elections, that 18, that 20-year-old student, right, that 20-year-old Latina walking around the campus of UNLV, I can reach them today. In 2002, 2004, I could not, right? So I think there's actually more opportunities, but there's more challenges to it as well. And I have to pivot to 2016 because you brought up 2016.

Please, 2016 and frankly 2020, because I also want to talk about 2016 in terms of, oh, Hillary Clinton is projected to win. Obviously, that did not happen. But projections and polls are telling us, oh, she's ahead, she's ahead. And then in 2020, the red wave, right? The red wave that wasn't. So I want to talk about both of those. So go ahead.

2016 sort of goes back into the point that I was just making. The polling wasn't wrong, wasn't so much wrong in 2016 as the narrative was wrong. And I have a larger critique and problem with the media and the press and how they're using polls or misusing polls, which I'll get to in a moment. And I can beat upon the media and press because I'm also part of the media press. The problem with much of the polling that was done in 2016 that was focused on was the fourth two-way race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. And the fourth. forced two-way race, you know, trial ballot between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton was garnering close to a majority at the end, depending on the poll, right? She did have a notable lead on Donald Trump in the forced two-way going into the election. The problem was, and for many of us who do it for a living, for campaigns, it was never a forced two-way inside the actual ballot. The third-party voting, and we saw this, especially among that, what I call the Obama continuum, those younger, more diverse voters who, do not closely align themselves with Democrats while they are appalled by Republicans.

They don't closely align themselves with Democrats. They were Obama voters more than they were Democratic voters. You saw that coalition erode. And that wasn't eroded because they were breaking for Donald Trump. It was eroding because they were protesting their vote. And you can see that in battleground after battleground. No more were any clearer than what you say, I say in Wisconsin. Where if you look at the third party vote in Wisconsin, it is almost spot on the

percentage that Hillary Clinton was off of Barack Obama's performance in Wisconsin. So if you also look at Donald Trump's performance in many of these battleground states, except for Ohio, Ohio being an outlier. But in most of these battleground states, Donald Trump didn't do anything particularly remarkable because he's a point or so different from what Mitt Romney did in most of those battleground states and lost. So this reason wasn't even about Donald Trump. It was about our failure to coalesce, engage.

And excite, frankly. And bring that coalition back home. So I pushed back on this idea that the polling was wrong in 2016. I think the narrative that we were driving in 2016 was wrong and that the media was driving. But in most of the polls that didn't, was not a force two-way between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, you saw how close that race was. And look, Donald Trump was going to get his 46, 47 percent. He is, right?

I've seen it in a couple elections. And by the way, in this upcoming election, you know, I kind of know what he's going to get because I've seen it play out a couple of times now. But my larger critique is that the media and the news outlets, they're focusing too much on poll. Because they use it because it's a way. I mean, let us be clear that they use it in that way because it presents a horse race. It presents something like the kind of excitement that you get when you're, you know,

in Vegas and gambling. It's like, watch the numbers. Watch the numbers. Who are you betting on? This is when politics becomes sport as opposed to here's how we're trying to educate the citizenry about the people that they are choosing to represent them in their day-to-day lives. It's like, let's all go buy a lottery ticket. And either you're betting on number one or you betting on number two and let's see who wins. That to me is even the whole idea of, you know,

Kornacki and the big board on MSNBC. It's like it isn't really about explaining how these states are looked at and their electoral votes and what have you. It's just about the race of it all, the excitement and the adrenaline of it all. which personally, I think people are fatigued from. You've absolutely nailed my critique, right? That's spot on. Amen. I don't say amen, but it's become sport, right? And a couple of things.

One, your folks who listen in might be surprised to know this. But polls actually, they weren't created to nail a horse race. They were not. Right. That's not a predicate for polling. Polling has gotten pretty good, I think, at nailing on horse race with some bias in there about depending on who's actually doing the polling. But it has become entertainment.

And it's become a way to drive a story. I'm a poster, and I'm appalled at how often polling is used in the media to drive a story. I think it's lazy. I don't think you're doing the public any good by using polling to drive a story. I say to you, every time you see a poll in the newspaper or online, would the public be better served by looking at that horse race? And as you're pointed out, it's become like a game, it's become entertainment. Would they be better served with the press telling us what does this tend to position on an issue mean to you and your family, right? That is actually sort of hard work.

It's easy to do entertainment, which is what's happening. And the other piece about polling, which I am also guilty of in my profession, and I think it's terrible, but you see it all the time. It's campaigns will now use polling to drive a narrative, a story the way they want, right? They'll put out some polling data in a state that shows a. race close, right? The race is 45, 43. So there's a real chance for this race to flip here. Give us more money. Right. And I think that that is what has become of politics. It's the gamification of it all. Because what I tell people to understand about polling, and you may or may not like this, but what I say is that it is akin to me of a weather report or a horoscope, which gives me some

general idea of what may or may not happen, but you should probably be prepared. The weatherman is telling me that there's a chance of rain, and that chance is around 30%. And I'm like, do I want to risk getting wet? Maybe I'll pack an umbrella. I'd go further than that, because I'd say to you that you shouldn't see a poll. I love you, but you should probably never see a poll. I think the vast majority of American voters should never see a poll. Polling are strategic documents that are internal for strategy. And we've now started. using poll to your point for the gamification of politics. So most people should never actually know what the polls say or even care what the polls say because the dynamics of it are still unfolding

and it shouldn't mean anything. So this is where I think polling gets a bad name because people misunderstand it and it's being misused. There's a major newspaper that I won't name that I think about a month out from the election in 2020 and the presidential election 2020 had said, you know, Biden leads Florida. And underneath that, when you look at it, it's a three-point race, right, in Florida. But to the average voter, which means it's basically a toss-up, that race could go any way because no one's at a majority. But for the average reader who looks and says, oh, Biden leads Florida, so Biden's going to win Florida according to the polls, which is not what that means at all. So when Biden doesn't, in fact, win Florida, oh, my God, the polls are terrible. The polls are wrong, which is a failure on our part, actually. dive into what the data means and how, in fact, to use polls. So that's the real sort of critique

and problem I have with so much of what the media is doing around polling. And why I say, right, you know, even as a pollster, I say the average voter, it should be rare to never that the average voter sees a poll. I started out by saying Biden has dropped below 40% in his approval ratings. The trajectory seems to be continuing to go down. What if, anything should we take from that 11 and a half months out? This is what we should take is that each candidate and campaign has a set of problems and hurdles that have to solve for. This is, to me, Dejaveau, because I was having the same conversations with reporters going in 2011 when some of the same polling that you're talking about right now with Biden also had Barack Obama

losing to Mitt Romney and close races with Michelle Bachman, which no one even remembers who the hell Michelle Bachmillas, right? I mean, I do, but, you know, I'm a nerd. Right, right. The St. Poles had Barack Obama. And there were literally people writing op-eds about Barack Obama shouldn't run for a re-election, right? And whether or not Barack Obama was toast. It's almost like there's no context, right? We have no contextual political sense in this country. So I will say to you now, the same thing I said reporters then. Well, let's start with this, right? And this is where I tell most of my clients, especially early on about poll when I get back polling, which you should never see, is that the least important number in a poll is the horse race number. Again, the least important

number on a poll is a horse race number. Why is that? It's because we are literally going to spend millions of dollars to change that number. With the entire campaign, we're going to go on an entire campaign to move that number. And you know what? We've got pretty darn good at moving it back and forth. We're going to try to move it. Our competitor is going to try to move it. And it's really a clash of can persuade, congeal, and mobilize that electric. So why are you paying attention to a horse race right now? As we know, it is not at all predictive of the future. And again, we're going to spend, well, in the case of the presidential race, they're going to spend a billion dollars to that number. What the polling does tell you is, okay, what are the challenges that we have

to account for in building our campaign? And when you look at, I'm probably going to get too, Two in the weeds here, two in the sort of a campaign hack weeds here. But, you know, you've got a, you've got a smart audience. And so when I look at the polling, and again, I think some of the polling out there is just bad polling. But when I look at sort of overall the polling out there that I see right now, which, again, doesn't look dramatically unlike what I saw with Obama. As from a campaign eye, a couple of things. One is, and I told a reporter this the other day, is that I actually think there's a lot of good news in the polling out there for Biden right now. And that's because when you look at, even when you look at that New York Times reporting and the aggregate data, I think Biden was at like 39% support among white voters. I think that's great news. Again, I'm going to answer my own question. Quino, why the hell would that be great news? Because he's only going to get 41% of the white vote. Right.

So he's damn near at his ceiling with white voters. At best, we're going to get 41, maybe 42% of the white vote, right? Newsflash to America. and even those who don't understand this, but a Democrat has not won the white vote since LBJ signed the civil rights legislation and said there goes the South, right? So when a Democrat, you know, Barack Obama, Biden, 42%, maybe 43%, that's good. That's the ceiling. It has been. So where Biden really has to make up the difference is among these younger, more diverse cohort of voters. And again, it's the Obama continuum. And what I understand about, though, that

that cohort of voters, is that when you look at where Donald Trump is, from a policy standpoint, everything from the environment to health care, he is fundamentally mispositioned for those voters. And on the even the African-American piece to me, which I have to say, just take a moment because it really kind of pisses me on the narrative that's being driven out there somehow. Because by the way, this is a continuing narrative because I've heard this now for two or three cycles now, how Republicans are going to do, are doing much better among minority voters, particularly black voters. and then election comes and they're not, right? And so this ideal that Donald Trump is garnering 22% of the black folk,

it should be as insulting to you the public, to sort of the conscious public and students of politics, as is to me as a pollster, because let me understand this, it doesn't pass a common sense test. Why it doesn't make sense is because we don't even have that percentage. What you're saying is that there is an imbalance in terms of how we're looking at the percentage

that he could possibly gain, being the percentage of the population and like the inroads that he's going to be able to make. I will leave it there today, Cornell, but I will love, love, love, love to have you back on very soon. Just let me know. This is a conversation worth continuing to happen. Fans of NCIS recently mourned the passing of David McCallum,

who played the show's beloved medical examiner, Dr. Ducky Mallard. Ducky followed in the footsteps of other portrayals of Emmys in popular culture, from TV's Quincy to Patricia Cornwall, K. Scarpetta. People of science who seek only the truth of a person's manner of death and whose work and trial testimony helps convict the guilty and spare the innocent. But real life, as usual, isn't so tidy. And as the great journalist Radley Balco asks in a piece at the New Republic, what if the life and death determinations that we think are governed by scientific principles

and careful deliberation are susceptible to the prejudices, misplaced incentives, and inherent bias of a broken system? Unfortunately, the conclusion he comes to isn't the one we would all hope for. And Balco, who has a great substact called The Watch, joins me now. Radley, thanks so much for being here. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. So let's start with a February 2021 study published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences entitled Cognitive Bias in Forensic Pathology Decisions. What did this study entail and what did it show? So the idea behind the study was to see how much extraneous sort of outside information could affect a medical examiner's conclusion about a manner of death. And so what they did was they took a bunch of medical

examiners and they gave them all identical autopsy reports. But half of them were given an autopsy report which said that the deceased was a black infant who had died in the care of the mother's boyfriend. And the other half were told that the deceased was a white child who died in the care of a grandparent, a grandmother. And so they wanted to see if these two variables had any influence on these medical examiners, a manner of debt determinations, given that everything else, all the medical information about what was found on the child and what the autopsy showed was the same. And it shouldn't, right? So they chose these variables for a reason, which is that black children who die are more likely to be classified as homicides than natural deaths or accidents.

And a stepfather or the love interest of a mother is much more likely to kill a child than a grandparent is, and particularly a grandmother. But none of that should impact how. how we look at a specific case, right? We don't convict people because they belong to a certain demographic group or their victim belong to a certain demographic group. So what the study found actually is that the medical examiners were much more likely to classify the death as a homicide in the group of the black child and the boyfriend of the mother. I think it was about four times more likely.

That's really disturbing because what it suggests is that as you give more outside information to a medical examiner, it can influence what ought to be a sort of science-based objective manner of death determination. And we found this in other areas of forensics as well. The study of fingerprint analysts that found that they were more likely to find that a fingerprint was a match if they were told that the suspect had confessed to the crime. Well, that shouldn't have any bearing, right, on whether the fingerprint is a match or not. We found this across a wide variety of forensic fields. Studies have found that this extraneous information can bias and effective decisions. Medical examiners were supposed to be sort of in a different class because

they're doctors, they have medical training, they're not part of the law enforcement apparatus, or at least they're not supposed to. This study, and two more that have since followed have showed that they are susceptible to cognitive bias like everyone else is. So, okay, with all that in mind, one of the things you point out in your piece is that when medical examiners perform an autopsy after a death that is deemed suspicious, they have to make two determinations, the cause of death and the manner of death. So first explain the difference between these two things. Sure. So cause of death is a medical determination, and that's where you'd look at the body and you find signs that a person died from a specific condition. So, you know,

in a suspicious death, a cause of death could be something like blood loss, blunt force trauma, some sort of suffocation or lack of oxygen. So these are medical determinations that are made based on medical information and medical evidence. Manner of death is how the death happened. And that's where you classify something as a homicide or a suicide or natural causes or an accident. And this is much more subjective. And it's essentially a legal determination. This is where you, somebody talks to the police, they talk to, you know, investigators. They may even look at witnesses. They may look at other forensic evidence like blood spatter or shoe print evidence. It's not based on medical information. And the U.S., the United States is actually the only country in the world in which medical

examiners are asked to make a manner of death determination. In most other countries, there's essentially what's called a coroner position. We have coroners in the U.S., but it's much, much different. corner in places like the UK is a trained lawyer who's gotten specific training and has specific expertise in doing death investigations and can factor the medical information with the non-medical information in a way that, you know, lets them determine a manner of death. Here, we just ask medical examiners to do it. And that's a problem because they are susceptible to cognitive bias. They're susceptible to pressure from law enforcement and other groups and often requires them to act outside of their area of expertise. And what we found is that, you know, medical examiners, you know,

they can get this wrong. And whether a medical examiner determines a death as a homicide or natural causes or an accident often determines whether or not somebody's going to go to prison. And so it's a really profoundly consequential decision that we're leaving, you know, to people who, while well-intentioned, aren't best equipped to make it. Yeah. And let's talk about what happens because this seems to get exactly to a thing that you hammer home in the piece, when a medical examiner has to investigate a death as a result of a police action. The whole point about matter of death, and including something you just said, is whether something is classified as a homicide or not,

is up to the medical examiner. Tell us the story of Damien Cameron. Yeah, so Damien Cameron was a young black man in Mississippi. His body was brought to the state crime lab. He's from Rankin County, and he'd been arrested by several deputies in Rankin. County. And during the arrest, witnesses said that they had knelt on Cameron's back for, I think it was over 10 minutes, an extended period of time. So, you know, sort of echoes of the George Floyd case.

And the Mississippi State Medical Examiner did the autopsy and concluded that the manner of death was undetermined. This is what a medical examiner will point to when they don't think there's enough evidence to say anything else, right? They just fall back and undetermined. But the problem with that is an undetermined classification is usually enough to head off any further investigation, right? Because if a prosecutor can't get the medical examiner to get on the witness stand and say, yes, a crime occurred here, no matter what evidence they find, is going to be hard to commit a jury. Usually an undetermined classification is enough to head off any sort of further investigation. And that's what happened in this case. So we fast forward about a year later, one of these same deputies who knelt on Damien Cameron's

back, was arrested for basically torturing to black men, torturing them in pretty horrific ways, sexually humiliating them, putting a gun in their mouths. And in one case, apparently, they claimed the gun accidentally fired and severely disfigured one of these two men. And actually, there's a New York Times, a long New York Times piece today that I highly recommend looking into the history of these deputies. They called themselves the goon squad. And they had this long history of torture, you know, waterboarding people, beating them, tasing them. It's really horrific. But, you know, the point in my piece was that if the medical examiner had made the correct determination in Damien Cameron's case, there probably would have been a criminal investigation if she would determine

it was a homicide. And, you know, maybe we could have spared the citizens of Franken County a year of these deputies terrorizing them. And the deputies have since played guilty to federal civil rights charges. They're all in prison now. And since then, three separate medical examiners have looked at the original autopsy and said that the Mississippi medical examiner should have said that this is a homicide from the start. Unbelievable. And you write about, you said earlier that medical examiners are not part of law enforcement, or at least they're not supposed to be, but you write about the often cozy relationships that these MEs have with police departments and prosecutors. Yeah, so a lot of times the medical examiner will be part of the crime

lab, which will be under the auspices of either the state attorney general or sometimes it's a state police. And so, you know, you have a bureaucratic structure there in which a medical examiner sort of has to answer to law enforcement. So there's going to be subtle pressure or even sometimes overt pressure on them to deliver results that law enforcement wants to hear. The prosecutors want to hear in order to win a conviction. I mean, we're talking about Mississippi. You know, I've spent a good part of the early years of my journalism career reporting on. the death investigation system in Mississippi from about the 1980s through the 2010s, in which prosecutors would contract autopsies and criminal cases out to private medical examiners.

And one medical examiner in particular down there was able to corner the market and basically had a monopoly on autopsies in Mississippi because he told prosecutors what they wanted to hear. So he would get future referrals because he was compliant and then would testify to that on the stand. This guy single-handedly did somewhere between 1,800 and 2,500, autopsies per year in Mississippi, which if you do the map, you know, 365 days per year, that's pretty remarkable. Wow, that's unbelievable. And this, I think, brings us back to the study we talked about earlier. There's an absolutely chilling quote in your piece. Is there anyone in our profession that has not at one point or another quipped about spinning the wheel of death

and picking one? So who is it that said this? So this is the medical examiner named Brian Peterson, who at the time was the chief medical examiner for the city of Milwaukee. And this was to in a list serve to other medical examiners, a group called the National Association of Medical Examiners that has a list serve that people can pose freely to. And he was responding to this study and he was angry about this study because he thought it cast aspersions on his profession. By the way, the study really doesn't. It doesn't accuse anyone of racism. Basically, the study says that medical examiners are human like everybody else, that they're susceptible to cognitive bias and so they should take steps to diminish it, you know, to make it as uninfluential as possible

in their work. And in fact, one of the studies lead author, Etiel Droar, is a cognitive scientist told me that when he's, he's done similar studies in other areas of the medical profession, and it's been welcomed because doctors want to know when they're getting things wrong because, you know, they want to do well by their patients. And instead, you know, in this particular study, that the reaction, which we can get to, was pretty severe. And so one of the chief critics was this guy, Brian Peterson. And Peterson, by the way, was also a consultant for Derek Chauvin's defense at his criminal trial for murdering George Floyd. Peterson also became a leading critic of the study. And then Peterson himself has an interesting history in Milwaukee.

He has testified in a number of cases in which he attributed deaths of black men in police custody to things like sickle cell trait or excited delirium, which are these really questionable diagnosis, that essentially sort of let police off the hook for abuse that leads to death of people in their custody. I want to ask you about more reaction to the study. But before I do that, the sickle cell trait is something that popped up in your piece more than once. And I think it's a little bit of It even came up in the George Floyd case? It did. So sickle cell trait and excited delirium, excited delirium can happen to anyone.

Sickle cell trait conveniently for police officers only happens to black people, right? Because sickle cell is a disease that affects the black community. And so the theory is that black people who carry the sickle cell trait but don't manifest the symptoms so that have the recessive gene, I guess, that they're uniquely susceptible to dying suddenly when restrained or when running or exerting some kind of physical exertion. And there's really no evidence for it whatsoever. It's like Excited Delirium. It's a condition that it's just sort of emerged, tends to clear police officers of any wrongdoing.

Excited Delirium was actually heavily promoted by the Axion, the company that makes tasers, paid a lot of medical examiners to help advance this idea that, you know, if you're being restrained by police and you have, you meet a number of symptoms that you can, could suddenly die through no fault of the police. So neither of these conditions, you know, have ever been recognized by groups like the American Medical Association or, you know, major psychiatric professional organizations. They were recognized by some minor medical groups, which helped give them, you know, a footprint in the court system and let people testify to them. But at this point, there's no serious, reputable medical organization that still recognizes

either of these. And I'll just throw this in. That's kind of interesting. One thing I've noticed in looking through legal databases for cases. in which excited delirium in particular is mentioned. Now what we're overwhelmingly seeing, after seeing it used to excuse police abuse in case after case after case, now we're seeing plaintiffs who are suing police officers for civil rights violations

are citing excited delirium because they're claiming, well, look, if this is a real condition and it's been around forever, then these officers should have been trained to recognize it and they should have taken steps to prevent it. And the fascinating thing is the courts are much more willing to entertain that the excited delirium is made up

in those cases than they were in the cases where police were using as an excuse. Amazing, but I suppose not surprising. So let's go back to this study and you briefly mentioned that the reaction to the study was not necessarily great. Describe what some of it was. Yeah, so to set this up, I mean, Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Rann ran the study, said he had presented similar findings to other areas of other medical specialties where he had found cognitive bias. And they had been, you know, mostly well received and the feedback was welcome. And so a lot of cases, you know, there was the test itself, like what would happen when these medical examiners were given these two autopsy reports. But then the second test was really how they reacted to it.

Were they going to react like other doctors and medical professionals had by welcoming it and saying, okay, well, what can we do to fix this? Were they going to react like other forensic specialties, you know, which are primary law enforcement, reacted, which is to lash out of the authors and kind of go ballistic on them. And it was the latter. A trio of doctors in particular led a charge against the authors of the study. I think four of the co-authors of the study were medical examiners themselves, and they were all subjected to ethics complaints were filed against them. You know, these people went after their jobs.

They were roundly sort of criticized in really harsh, unusual terms on the name listserv. It got to the point where even the editor of the journal where the study was published, felt the need to write an editor's note, basically saying he had never seen a reaction like this before, given how sort of intensely personal it was. And, you know, I was fascinated by this reaction. And so I talked to some people like Peter Newfound out at the Innocent Project and Dr. Dora himself. And they said something of which I thought was really interesting, which is that in other medical specialties, doctors work with the living, right? If your treatment is wrong, if you're taking the wrong course or if you misdiagnosed something, you're immediately going to be told that you're wrong, right? Because the patient's going to get worse instead of better.

And so there's a kind of corrective there that's also a corrective on your own ego. You know, it instills a little bit of humility in you. Well, medical examiners only work with the dead. And there is that that corrective mechanism doesn't exist. And unless, you know, they give a diagnosis that's basically contradicted by DNA testing somewhere, which is rare, they're never really told they're wrong over the course of their entire career. There's no sort of ground truth in these cases. It's basically they, you know, the state runs with whatever the medical examiner says happened. And so for the first time they were being told that a significant number of their colleagues were getting it wrong using kind of the tools that they all used. And so they didn't react well to that because they hadn't heard it before. I think there's probably something to that. Yeah, and I guess you could also point out that, you know, to go back to Brian Peterson's quote about spinning the wheel of death and picking one, which I assume by one, he means manner of death. Yep. It's a lot harder to do that with a living person. Right, without getting sued at least.

Right, exactly. But that quote to me was just so chilling. Before you go, I'll ask you, given the reaction to the study from within the profession and the way our system is set up where oftentimes medical examiners work closely with police departments or with prosecutors, Is any of this fixable, or at least given the vagaries of human nature, is it minimizable? Or are we just stuck with this? So there are some things we can do. We could do what the rest of the world is done and make manner of death a legal determination made by somebody who's specially trained in investigating death. We could make the whole forensic science expert witness process less acrimonious and less adversarial, which is also what's done to most of the rest of the world.

So instead of having two experts contradicts each other, in which case the jury just goes with whoever they find more convincing. And by the way, you know, the ability to be persuasive to a jury is not necessarily, you know, the same set of skills that it takes to be a good scientist, enforce. Right. You know, we could find other ways to insert expert testimony into, into our trials. We could work to shield medical examiners more from influence from law enforcement. I think they should be outside. They should report to an agency that has no law enforcement sort of mission. Dr. Dorr suggests something that he calls linear.

sequential unmasking, which is a mouthful for basically what's saying is that they should only expose themselves to evidence as it becomes more evidence as it becomes necessary. So you do your autopsy first. Then if you need to talk to police after that, after you've already documented your autopsy and your observations in a very sort of neutral way, then you talk to the police and they tell you what they found and then you sort of mingle what you found in the medical autopsy with what was found at the crime scene. And that opens you up to, you know, later somebody can go back and trace your steps and say, well, you know, this thing you found, the autopsy doesn't match, you know, the evidence found at the crime scene. So it's a way of separating the evidence so that it can be scrutinized

later. And that seems to be probably the most workable of these solutions because it required the least drastic changes to the current system. Yeah, that's really interesting. So basically, they would start tabula rasa with just, here's a body. Tell us what you can ascertain scientifically. Well, and what was really amazing to me when I first started on this beat and looking into this stuff and stuff in Mississippi was that I was shocked at how often police and prosecutors are present at autopsies, where they're talking to the doctor as the doctor's doing the autopsy. And it was just sort of standard procedure. And nobody really saw a problem with it. And I asked, let's say you already had a suspect and, you know, they'd already been arrested before the autopsy because of the evidence.

Would you allow the suspect's defense attorney to be present during an autopsy? And they're like, no, of course, not. Don't be ridiculous. Right. But the same reasons why they wouldn't allow a defense attorney to be read than the autopsy that they wouldn't want them to corrupt the doctor or, you know, influence the doctor's decisions certainly applies to the state. But the problem is that medical examiners are seen by prosecutors as sort of part of their team, not as these sort of objective, you know, scientists are supposed to get it to truth. And you really see this a few times when a medical examiner does work with the defense because, you know, they disagree with the prosecutor. In some cases, you know, a medical examiner will go outside their jurisdiction and

testify for the defense in some other county or some other state. And that just drives prosecutors crazy, you know, because they just don't think that should ever happen. They think the medical examiner should be part of the state's team. And I think that's a, you know, that is not how jurors see it. They see them as these objective, you know, arbiters of truth. And we need to recognize, you know, the misplaced incentives, you know, that may be biasing their decisions. Absolutely. Radley, thank you so much for being here. I encourage everyone to read the full piece at the New Republic. It's fascinating and kind of scary at the same time. Radley, thanks again. Yep, my pleasure. Andy Levy.

Danielle Moody. Andy Levy, how are you closing out this good, good week in America with your fuck that guy? So I've had a couple of guests on to talk about the company, schoolastic books, and how they haven't been necessarily doing a great job at protecting their authors from book banners and the likes. But in this case, I want to talk about a woman named Lana Burkhardt, who testified before a school board in Texas and told the board that when she was, 11, she read a book published by Scholastic that introduced her to quote unquote a single kiss. And she then went on to claim that this was directly responsible for her developing a debilitating

addiction to pornography. I can't. Okay. Good. Keep going. There's a great newsletter called Popular Information by Jud Legum. And in a piece there, which is what I'm using to cite this now, a piece by a piece by Legum and Rebecca Crosby pointed out that she said that this book, again, that portrayed a single

kiss, made her look for other books that gave her pleasure, that led to internet searches, and that by the time she was 13, she was a porn addict. The reason she brought this up is, is that she wanted access restricted to a book published by Scholastic that's called drama that also has an image of two people kissing. And she also argued she went further and said that all scholastic books should be removed from the schools and the schools should stop hosting scholastic book fairs because children needed to be protected from sexual obscenity. Okay. So you're thinking, ah, here's just this crazy, random woman who decided to show up at a school board meeting and testify. And if you only knew what had been reported and what had happened,

that that's what you would think. But the folks at Popular Info did some nice digging and figured out that this woman, Lana Burkart, is an employee of a company called Brave Books. Brave Books is a right-wing company that has set themselves up as an alternative to Scholastic, because they think Scholastic is part of the, you know, what part of the plot to indoctrinate children into the ideas that we should treat queer people with respect and dignity and other awful things like that. And, you know, teach Black history in America and stuff like that. So this woman is actually the public relations coordinator for this company, Brave Books. She never disclosed this.

She just presented herself as a concerned parent or a concerned woman. So if I fuck that guy for this week is obviously this woman, Lana Burkart, and this company, Brave Books. And I'll just toss in for good measure everyone else that wants to ban books, censor books, prevent children from learning facts about the world, etc. And I also should point out that one of the book's brave book sells is called Pause Off My Canon. And it's written by Dana Lash, who used to be a spokesperson for the NRA. The book follows the story of a gorilla named Bongo, who was shot at with a coconut canon by a villainous hyena. So fuck all those guys.

I like to think she was talking about me when she wrote that. Oh, God, Jesse. That was so good. Andy, I'm going to give it to you. I didn't even go yet, but I'm giving you the award for this week's fuck that guy. Because holy shit. That was an incredible, extraordinary story of pure fuckery. And again, you know, it would be funny if it wasn't that fact that one person,

one person can object to a book and then they be. all be removed from a school district. Yeah. Right. It would be funny if this wasn't actually happening. And because of this woman's, I mean, the creativity in the connecting of the dots of her own life and the lack of embarrassment to tell this story like is just,

it's extraordinary. The lengths that people will go to stop critical thinking of our children because they are afraid of critical thinkers. And that's facts. God. Now mine feels kind of of lame. No, I have an idea what it's going to be, and I think it's pretty good, but let's hear it. Who's your fuck that guy? My fuck that guy is not a stranger to fuck that guy at all. Ted Cruz, who is a man that reminds us that you should have to take a test to become a senator.

Like, you should. Like, this is where I think testing would actually work and, you know, funnel out the idiots. But Ted Cruz, and this is written by the advocate, has introduced a bill. Because we have nothing, I just want to be clear, we have nothing important going on in this country. We have nothing important going on around the world. That Ted Cruz would find himself introducing a bill, quote, limiting pronouns and names, despite going by his own chosen name. So the advocate writes this, that Ted Cruz, whose legal name is Raphael, Edward Cruz, introduced a bill in the Senate titled the Safeguarding Honest Suss.

Speech Act. The irony. The legislation proposes prohibiting federal funds from enforcing policies requiring federal employees to use preferred pronouns or names other than an individual's legal name. Like, is there just no ability to have any self-reflection? Was there no one that tapped him on the shoulder and said, hey, Raphael, maybe don't introduce this bill because, yeah, We don't call you Senator Raphael Cruz because you indeed changed your name and how you want people to somehow find it within themselves to respect you, which no one really does. But nonetheless, these are just not serious people. They are not serious people. They do not have the ability to deal with the seriousness of these times.

This is what Ted Cruz's office thinks is worthy of their time and a bill to be. be introduced. It's just so stupid. And I know that we use that word, but I just don't know what else to call him. And, you know, again, their whole obsession with pronouns, their obsession with gender identity, the trans community, non-binary folks is just, it's ridiculous at this point that you would go this far, that when people are just saying, hey, provide me with some respect. If I tell you, my name is Danielle and that's what I want to be called, then like, just do that. Why is it so difficult for them? Why is that so hard to respect people and provide them with dignity that you have to create this type of hateful legislation?

When you yourself have the audacity to change your name. I'm sick of their bullshit, but for that reason, Rafael Cruz is my fuck that guy. You really touched on a thing that has always baffled me. It's like you don't understand the notion of someone being transgender. Okay. Even given that, what does it cost you to call someone by the name that they would like to be called? What does that cost you? I don't know.

It costs you nothing. It costs you absolutely fucking nothing to be a polite person and to say, oh, that's the name that you like to be called. Okay, then I will call you that name. Like, I don't understand the mindset. I can't even put it into words because I just don't understand it. It literally does nothing to you except show that you're a person who is polite. And why wouldn't you want to be a person who is polite to someone who has done no harm to you? I just don't get it.

And, I mean, he is so gross to begin with. I think the advocate nailed it here. And I think from now on, at least on this show, we have to refer to him as Raphael Cruz. going to call him by his legal name. Yeah. Let the record show. Yeah. Fuck that guy.

Fuck that guy. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast

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