The Dispatch Podcast - Johnson & Johnson Vaccine on Hold

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

This week, the FDA decided to pause the Johnson & Johnson vaccine following reports that six women—of the nearly 7 million Americans who have received the J&J vaccine—developed serious blood clots after getting the jab. Is pausing the vaccine worth the tradeoffs? Will the FDA’s move fuel vaccine hesitancy? Sarah, David, Chris and Jonah give us the scoop. Today, our hosts also chat about New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s latest piece on what Bidenism owes to Trumpism, the GOP’s First Amendment retribution against woke corporations, and what Democratic pollsters have learned from their poor electoral forecasting leading up to the 2020 election. Show Notes: -“What Bidenism Owes to Trumpism,” by Ross Douthat in the New York Times. -“Confronting 2016 and 2020 Polling Limitations” by Pew Research Center. -“How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations” by Shane Goldmacher in the New York Times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined this week by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Chris Steyerwalt. We've got plenty to talk about today. We're going to start with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. We have a Ross Douthit piece. What Bidenism owes to Trumpism that we'll dive into? The First Amendment and Retribution and what happens when all of the Democratic pollsters get together and say, are bad? Let's dive in. But before we do that, I do want to talk about a correction we have from last week. We'll talk about it at the end. But just for those who listened to last week, please do stay to the end. We pride ourselves on some fact checking here. Let's start with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, though. this week, the FDA decided to pause the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. It is set off, I mean, chain reaction undersells what this has caused. On the one hand, folks are saying that this was incredibly small odds. Only six patients out of roughly seven million who have gotten the Johnson and Johnson vaccine have reported blood clots and that the FDA overreacted, that their overreaction

has caused fear. It has caused folks who are maybe on the fence about getting the vaccine to say, you know, look, they rush this that shouldn't have been on the market to begin with. On the other hand, folks are saying, yeah, but look, look how careful the FDA is being. That should give you confidence that they have done their homework, that they take this job seriously and that they didn't, for instance, not pull the Johnson and Johnson vaccine when they were concerns just because of the potential public reaction. Even so, a lot of folks second-guessing the FDA's decision today to approve the vaccine in the first place, to pause it now, and that six patients out of seven million either means we don't have all the facts or that the FDA just did something really bizarre. Jonah, what's your take?

All of the above. I think it's, I agree. It's a weird, I think it's a weird. I think it's a weird decision and I think I still kind of feel I called it yesterday on Twitter that by the end of the week

they're going to revise this is my guess. If not the end of the week then fairly soon and say if you're in one of these risk groups maybe you should get Pfizer or Moderna but it just epidemiologically

and statistically we had a little bit about this in the morning dispatch you take bigger risks driving to the vaccination center than you do taking the vaccine in terms of just, you know, the chances of dying on our highways. And it feels to me, we don't know everything yet, although the morning dispatch piece was, you know, fairly exhaustive and informative, and that's why people should describe to it. But it feels sort of like the CDC and the FDA are in their own

heads a little bit. You know, it's sort of like, it's like when you start second-guessing yourself and you're worried way too much about how you're perceived that you start making weird decisions, because this just feels like a weird decision. And the way in which the spin was almost instantaneous that this proves how the vaccines are safe because it shows you how much care we take about this stuff, almost makes it feel like public relations considerations were too big a factor in it. But, I mean, that's how it feels to me. David, this feels the comparison.

You're going to laugh or roll your eyes or throw something through the screen. But this feels a little like Jim Comey's October press conference where he felt like he had to come back out and say like, oh, God, we found this laptop. We're going to have to go through it now related to the Hillary Clinton investigation, which just set off this chain of events that was only stupid for the FBI, for the Department of Justice, and undermined faith in those institutions in the country

for just the average public. Here we have the FDA in their heads to Jonah's point about, well, gosh, if we don't do it and they find out, then it would be really bad. So let's just do it quickly and early, even though, again, taking them out of their word, six out of seven million, first of all, of course, you have a much higher rate of blood clots from having coronavirus. Right. Birth control pills. I mean, all sorts of other things have a much higher incident of blood clots. Did they just comb me this?

So when I first heard the news and I saw the statistics, I tweeted impulsively. it happens on occasion Sarah I occasionally tweet impulsively and I called this incompetent shockingly incompetent I think and then I thought about it and I thought was I'm being uncharitable and wait a minute

these are people who are trying hard to do the right thing and they probably went through a process and agonized over it and the more I thought about it I still stand by the tweet because I you know part of this is the old law where you stand is based on where you sit. And I'm coming at you from the great light green region of

America. So this is, if you go to the New York Times COVID vaccine tracker, they're tracking the uptake of the vaccine by color-coded map. And the dark green areas of the country are where people have taken a lot of the vaccine and the light green areas of the country or where people are not taking the vaccine. So I am surrounded by people not taking the vaccine. There was a big article just a couple of days ago about how Mississippi, Alabama, other countries and countries, cities and the states in the south, I'll get it right, states in the south are just, people aren't taking the vaccine. Tennessee is one of them. And what you're seeing is just a total loss of cost benefit analysis. And I just felt like when you're talking about a one in a million chance, one in a million

million chance, if that, of a blood clotting event when you take this vaccine, which is, as Jonah said, as you've said, it's so much less dangerous than the drive to get the vaccine. It's less dangerous than a host of other medications. It's less dangerous than coronavirus itself. There just was a real need to read the room here. And there are a range of options other than saying, we're going to take this away. We're going to take this off. because the result of that is not in – I feel like only in a boardroom that is completely

divorced and separated from a lot of vaccine hesitant people, does the message we're taking this off the shell or we're going to remove this from distribution, send a message of, look how careful we are with this vaccine, take it when it comes back in a few days. And I just don't think that's the message that's sent. Okay, but Chris, put yourself in their shoes. You have six reported cases of blood clots and you want to look into it. Let's assume that as, you know, doctors, they think they do need to look into this. So then the question is, do you tell people you're looking into it?

Or do you keep that a secret, the fear being that folks find out later that you were looking into it while not warning the public? And then if you're going to look into it, do you just tell people, we're looking into this, but keep taking it? Or we're looking into this and we're going to pause people. taking it? Like, what are they supposed to do? Well, I think barring evidence to the contrary, we have to take them at their word, right? Unless we can find, unless we can find something else to undercut that, then I have to assume that they think this is what's necessary. I think that,

David, the reason that they did it is because they're thinking about your neighbors. I don't think that they did it ignoring your neighbors and the light green swaths of the state. of the country, but because they're very concerned about all of the people who are very concerned. So the answer from a scientist and the answer from a public health official is more diligence to be stricter, to be more careful, cautious, and earnest. I certainly take your point that for people who were not inclined to get vaccinated, being told that there are serious risks associated with the vaccine, will not cause them to take it. What we don't know is there's a marginal number of people. Let's think of them maybe as

persuadable voters. So there are people who might or might not get the vaccine. We don't know how large a group of people that is. And we don't know who's persuadable, which way or the other. So we could sit around all day or the FDA could sit around all day and say, well, if we don't say it, are we not addressing questions? If we do say it, are we increasing this stuff? I think you just have to, what is it, do right and fear no man. So you just hope that the FDA is following their protocols and following their rules and proceeding through it. And right now, I can't second guess it because I don't know nothing about nothing. David, I think Chris has the right point here. What were they supposed to do at the point that they needed to look into this and what was going on?

Pause it, keep it a secret, or tell people they were looking into it, but tell them to keep taking it anyway. Well, I think, you know, what you do is you say, we're looking into it. There are three available vaccines. If you have concerns that you don't want to run the one in a million risk and you're a woman who is 18 to 48, you can run the one in a million risk if you want to or you can go to Moderna or Pfizer. I think that that's your answer there. Because what we're talking about here is something that's a very, very remote risk that has only been seen to show up in a specific population where JNJ is one of three options. And I think that what they did was they chose the least best option.

And look, I don't, I'm not questioning their goodwill. I mean, look, we've seen an awful lot of people who are very smart in government think very hard about a problem and come to the exactly wrong conclusion about what to do about it. That's my view of what happened. It's very smart people, thought very hard about a problem, and then came to the wrong conclusion about what to do about it. And it came to a conclusion that I think that even if it was calculated to reoculated to

reach exactly the population I'm most worried about it, it's going to have the opposite effect with that population than they're intending to have. Because if what we do is we have this pause for a few days and everyone freaks out, like everyone's freaking out, the message that's going to be sent is, well, they just caved to the media. They just caved to the media. Now they're feeding it back to us. Can I ask you a question? If this is the theory of the case, why are my people in West Virginia vaccinated like crazy, right? Why is West Virginia all vaccinated? And our cousins in Tennessee aren't getting vaccinated.

That is a really good question. But what's happening empirically in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia is there's just a lot of untaken vaccine. Right. And so it's not, but what I'm saying is there's something else that's going on here other than just that. because culturally they're the same? No, they're not because not they're, the deep south has the two populations most reluctant. African American, that's true.

African American and white evangelical. So those are the two populations most reluctant are concentrated in the same states. And West Virginia is not, doesn't have that same, that same demographic. All right, Jonah, who's winning this argument? Well, no, no, no, I want to float a theory, but I, I, heaven forfend that Jonah Gold,

of northwest Washington, D.C. and primarily upper west side of Manhattan would cast any aspersions on the fine and wonderful people of West Virginia. But one theory that does come to mind, having looked at some of the sort of welfare and poverty issues that West Virginia has, is that there is much more interaction with state agencies. And a level of comfort with those agencies. And so there's a level of trust, and there's also a level of eye-to-eye peer-to-peer, but, you know, person-to-person persuasion that goes along with being able to convince people, hey, look, you know, you know me, you need to get the shot kind of thing. Well, and I think that's, I think that's very true, but I would also submit that poor whites

in Appalachia are poor whites in Appalachia, whether, because it's not like East Tennessee is unfamiliar. The TVA, people who live around TVA dams or Oak Ridge are unfamiliar with the federal government and the New Deal mentality. The Hillbilly America, as J.D. Vance is proving right now, are cool with the government. They like it, and they're fine with it as long as it's giving them free stuff. Well, and one thing, though, I think the outstanding performance of West Virginia is a little bit of yesterday's news because Kentucky has now passed it. Virginia has passed it. Pennsylvania has passed it.

And it's now, you know, at least one dose is a 33.7 percent, fully vaccinated, 24.4. And you're starting to look more like Tennessee, 30.4 percent. Are we still beating Tennessee? That's my only question. Well, I mean, yeah, a little bit. Scoreboard. We got it. Well, this is when I grew up in Kentucky and now Kentucky is beating West Virginia.

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Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com dispatch. That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. All right. Moving on. Jonah, you flagged for us this piece by Roth's doubt that what Bidenism owes to Trumpism. The Biden agenda tries to seize the populist opportunity that Trump let slip away. Why'd you pick this as your topic today? well in part because we felt like doing Afghanistan pullout without Steve here would be like talking about Aquaman without David here and we had to pick something else

I know I think look and I I think Ross is on for sure onto something and and it's interesting how there's this new piece in the Atlantic that sort of makes the same case about how It turns out that you can have a broad left-wing consensus around Biden if you explain to them that he's like FDR and not like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. And I think that's interesting.

And I think, but more broadly, you know, one of the things that people like me and several other people that we know, and including some we're talking to right now, warned in the Trump years that one of the things that Trump was doing was basically sort of. of like going at the pillars of the ideological framework of conservatism like Hercules with a hammer and knocking them out. And what Biden's program is doing is basically exploiting that. You know, when the Trump GOP for four years basically made the argument that big sweeping spending, direct payments to people, all of these things are fine without consequence that the GOP needs to be aimed at the white working, or the working class and downscale economically and less educated voters and all that kind of thing.

And they basically prepped the battle space for Biden to come in and actually have a coherent program doing a lot of that stuff. And people forget that FDR and LBJ, yeah, they were liberals. They were also nationalists. And the New Deal was a nationalistic program, if ever there was one. And now we see, you know, as Ross points out, that conservatives, Republicans and conservatives are very difficult time offering broad, sweeping, ideologically coherent rebuttals to what Biden is trying to do. and most of their complaints are sort of technical or semantic rather than, you know, questioning the very

premise of what Biden is trying to do. And I think that that's, you know, that is going to be defining our politics for a good while now, at least it seems to me. Brother Starwalt, do you disagree? Do you take exception to the Douthoutian analysis? Not at all. I would only add a couple of points of emphasis. I thought his point about Biden is to Trump as Reagan is to Carter seems counterintuitive on its face. But when you think about it, it is true, especially as it relates to he cites Volker and tight money policy to beat inflation and taking the medicine. And all of the things that Reagan was able to maintain that Carter had already plowed the ground on so that he could get people like Tip O'Neill. he could get Senate Democrats to come over to his way of thinking. So there's, I think Ross takes a narrow, provable, demonstrable chunk, but there's also this other big piece. And the other big piece is free money is very popular.

People really like it. And the idea, I think one of the things that conservatives suffered from going into the Trump era was the belief that conservative precepts were popular, right? they are not what they are unpopular less spending right fiscal restraint duty and all of that stuff is not as popular as the new deal precept right so we have we have the republicans trying to be a linden johnson and robert bird's party right uh they're trying to regain the white working class we have republicans who are going to take the white working class as socially conservative fiscally liberal. This is not a new idea. It's also Richard Nixon did it too. This is not a big,

this is not a new innovation in any way. The thing is that conservatives sense Taft and Coolidge and the beginning of time are always the ones fighting against this thing. And in their tradition, they fight within the Republican Party to try to get Republicans to do things that they believe are constitutionally appropriate and that are, that produce good outcomes in the long term. so the stupidity of the of the what is the the journal called american greatness is that what it's called the the stupidity of trying to reverse engineer some sort of cogent political philosophy out of trumpism because what trumpism is is spend it give it do it on the fiscal side and then a lot of semiotics and cultural culture war stuff on the other side and that's just what it is and that's what all

guys are doing now. Sarah, do you take exception to that? I mean, you've been talking about how the Republicans have figured out on a message anything for a while. Is this just a messaging failure, or is it a profound cataclysmic failure on the first order that will spell the doom of our civilization and yield the living, envying the dead? So when I read some Ross Douth at pieces, and I think, like, oh, man, I hadn't really

considered that. I wonder where he starts, like where the nugget first planted in his brain. And when I read this, it's funny that you say that because that's the nugget that I actually wondered if he started yet. This, you can tell these moves are well suited to the political moment because the Republicans don't know how to counter them. They're stuck betwixt and between, unable to fully revert to their pre-Trump positioning as deficit hawks, who would believe them anymore, and unsure how to counter Biden when he just

seems to be making good on Trump's promises. I wonder whether Douthit was sitting there trying to explain why Republicans were having so much trouble and had this like, ah, but this and this and this and came up with this theory, which the part that I think the exception that proves his rule here

is the immigration debate where he says, this is the one area that's not going to fit this. Biden's coalition won't permit him to co-op Trump's hawkishness or even revert to the policies of the Obama era. So it's the Biden White House that's caught between approaches,

trying to deliver both a humanitarian welcome and enough border security to keep the flow of migrants manageable. I mean, that's undoubtedly true that the Republicans have a problem when it comes to 90% of the Biden agenda and clearly the Biden White House has a problem because they have not figured out

what to do messaging-wise, policy-wise, nothing on immigration. The question is, though, to brother Steyerwalt's point, this new but not that new coalition that Democrats thought they had a lock on that Republicans are now biting into with like large teeth marks everywhere.

I left a hunk of cheese in my fridge in college and I came back to find just like a bite of the cheese missing. Like not cut, just like teeth marks in it. It was a real mystery at the time. So that's what I'm picturing in my head, like a hunk of cheese. Did you go to college? with Starwold? There would be no cheese left.

Don't act like there would be cheese left. That one was sort of amazing about it. If you're going to take a bite out of the cheese, take the cheese, man. Booze may have been a factor in this outcome. I wonder how successful the Biden adopting Trump approach will be when it does have to leave out things like immigration,

if that's the constituency you're trying to reach. Because that constituency, they want border security. They are not for open borders. They are not for, you know, to use another area. They're not for police reform. And so to the extent that Biden wants to adopt the Trump legacy, but with competence, he's not going to be able to win over the same voters. And so then the question is, okay, but which voters is he trying to reach and which voters

will he reach? Because the Trump voters, they ain't coming along with Biden. Right. So, David, that raises the point that, that could be fine for Biden to extent in that leave behind sort of a rump of the Trump voters to vote Republican. But as we saw with this new poll, I think, out this morning, you know, Biden's approval rating is pretty high, including among Republicans, you know, given historical past. Doesn't this sort of like the problem of taking spending in deficits as an issue for Republicans,

once you take that off the table? Isn't this all arguing for sort of to Sarah's point? that culture war stuff is just going to get even more exaggerated because both parties need brand differentiation and and that's how that's the only place the GOP can go now is not on spending, not on populist economics, but on, you know, whether it's Dr. Seuss or whatever, that kind of stuff instead. Well, it's also not only where the Republicans can go, but if everyone is believing that you spend a lot of money, it's also kind of where Democrats go because that's You know, Joe, to the extent that Biden, as popular as he is right now, has a political problem, or to the extent a political problem will manifest itself, I think it will be a white progressive political problem where he has a portion of his coalition that has moved far to the left of another portion of his coalition, happens to have disproportionate influence because it has disproportionate access to elite circles, and is demanding things that outside, to the rest of the of the American world sometimes seem odd, strange, what's going on here. I mean, there's

a reason why we have had a lot of conversation in the last several months about, you know, for example, biological males playing sports with repeated references back to track meets in Connecticut in 2017, because this is the kind of thing that I think the Biden coalition is vulnerable on. And I think immigration is an issue that's not, it's both culture war and economic, but that's also an issue where there's going to be some vulnerability. So if I was going to pinpoint where Biden had vulnerability, it's what, to what extent is he going to go on the cultural stuff as far left as

that white progressive part of his base wants him to go? And that's going to hand everybody all of the culture war ammunition they could want. While in the meantime, through, you know, parliamentary maneuvering and arcane Senate rules, he's passing through economic legislation that's just massive and arguably will have multi-generational effects in the United States of America. In the meantime, that culture war ammunition, both sides are going to keep giving it to each other. I mean, what's interesting to me, and this is something that I think deserves a lot more exploration, is as the Democratic, white progressive Democratic coalition has gotten much more secular and much more liberal, you've seen African Americans vote steadily a little bit more and more Republican, much more, you know, especially black men. And you're going to be creating a really big cultural gap here within the Democratic coalition.

between that hyper-secular, hyper-cultural, hyper-culture-war-focused white progressive, educated wing of the party, and black Democrats who are some of the most religious people in the United States of America. And that's going to create a tension there that if the Republicans maybe spend a little bit less time making it look like one of the things that they're trying to do is figure out different ways to make sure only the right people vote may be able to really exploit. Now I know listeners don't say, well, actually these Republican initiatives are doing this and this. I know. I know. But tell me, why are all of these new voting laws pouring out of red state legislatures right now? These are in response to the stop the steel lie. And so there's a

real opportunity there for Republicans that some of their own culture warring might make them miss. all right let's move on to our next topic david the first amendment retribution this sounds like an a o topic and yet here we are on the dispatch here we are here we are we're going to be more political than legal though i think so political slash cultural so let's turn back the clock uh to the years 2010 to 2014 when iPhones were small and a now extinct species known as constitutionalist conservatists stalked the land. 2010, if you remember, Barack Obama gives the State of the Union speech where he condemns the Citizens United case,

which recognized corporate free speech rights in the political context. Justice Alito, perhaps foreshadowing the spicy Alito that Sarah, you and I have talked about, visibly reacts negatively to Barack Obama condemning Citizens United. 2012. Chick-fil-A is found out to be run by Gasp Christians, and all of a sudden, there are governments across the land that are seeking retribution against Chick-fil-A. There's a bichot, if you remember, where conservatives bought all the chicken out of Chick-fil-A. I remember 2014 debating a progressive constitutional law scholar at Vanderbilt Law School and facing the withering scorn from the Vanderbilt law students in that room about the very idea

that a corporation could have values of any kind. And now here we are where one of the central animating forces of the Republican Party, or part of it anyway, seems to be what can we do to punish woke capitalism for expressing its corporate values? Here's a tweet from J.D. Vance, raise their taxes and do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons. We can have their American Republic or a global oligarchy, and it's time for choosing. So what was he upset about? A group of companies were getting together to try to oppose some of these voting laws. Their plan was to use, quote, public statements, support for federal legislation, and involvement

in voting rights legal action. All of that's completely First Amendment protected activity. we've seen Holly and Cruz have come out hoping to revoke Major League Baseball's anti-trust exemption through legislation. Why? Because it's bad policy? No, because Major League Baseball took its All-Star game out of Atlanta. So, Sarah, was it always free speech for me and not for thee? Was it always that? Or am I just being too cynical? I think this is a little like the point that people like free stuff. Yeah. People have always liked free speech when it's speech they agree with. People have never

been that big a fan of free speech when it's speech they don't agree with. To use an example in the non-free speech context, you have John Adams defending the British soldiers after the famous shot heard around the world in Boston. The Boston Massacre. After the Boston Massacre. Oh, you're right. After the Boston Massacre. That was not a popular. thing to do. It wasn't like a whole bunch of people lined up and were like, well, actually, our criminal justice system depends on the criminal defendant having a robust advocate. No. But John Adams did it. That's what makes him the hero is because he did something unpopular. Fast forward 200 years or so. And you have the Nazis wanting to march in Skokie.

Again, we don't remember that case because everyone was like, of course we should let the Nazis march in Skokie. No, nobody wanted to let the Nazis march in Skokie. letting the Nazis march in Skokie was this huge statement of like, wow, we're really for free speech, even the most loathsome kind. Those are unusual examples that we hold up to our children as the values that we want to have because they're rare, because the vast majority of people, including people on this podcast, no doubt, have trouble in the heat of the moment distinguishing their emotions from their principles. And so, yes, David, it was always free speech for me, but not for thee,

because that's how the human brain works. That being said, I do want to make one slight, you know, thing here, which is the antitrust exemption that Major League Baseball has had was a, you know, political coziness to begin with. It was based out of politics and government capture. And so the fact that you then make your captors angry, and so you lose your coziness and government capture, that doesn't really offend me at all. Okay. I don't have much to add on the free speech side of this. I have much rage about the general way in which conservatives, Lots of conservatives are, I would argue, be clowning themselves in the way they're talking about corporations right now. Like when you see J.D. Vance, who's a smart guy, I don't know him well, met him, like them, good book, blah, blah, blah, blah.

His tweets are absurd on their face, flatly absurd on their face. When he says, lower the taxes of the good corporations and raise the taxes of the bad corporations, How in the world is that different than a progressive saying, we want to reward corporations that are championing diversity and inclusiveness and are fighting climate change, and we want to punish ones that aren't? If the idea is that policymakers, however, on whichever side of the ideological aisle, get to pick which companies they think are the good guys and which ones are the bad guys, There is not a dime's worth of difference in terms of principle between the two parties then.

I also, Jonah, just to underline your point, thought it was a very weird retort. So, J.D. tweets the thing that y'all read, David replies, this is unconstitutional. And J.D. replies, at least I'm trying to do something. That's a weird response. Yeah, I agree. I mean, like, there's, it's, there's so many of these things. that it, that, it reminds me a little bit of like the Anthony Blinken thing where China says America sucks and is racist and all that kind of stuff. And Blinken's response says, we never said that we didn't have problems, right? Like, you point out that something is unconstitutional and

the response is, well, my heart's in the right place. I don't give a rat's ass where your heart is. And the idea that conservatives can go, I mean, go back, you know, the time frame that Dave's talking about with commercials, with, with the free speech stuff is the exact same time frame where conservatives, we're talking about crony capitalism and picking winners and losers and Cylindra and all that kind of stuff. And now the new hotness from so many people on the right is we can use the same techniques and methods that we have condemned in progressives for a century, but because our motives are pure and our ends are desirable, all of the things that we said are problems with the idea of the cult of expertise, the high X knowledge problem,

picking winners and losers. Those go out the window because we're going to pick the good companies to support with industrial policy or the bad companies to punish with tax cuts. Conservatives have been saying for my entire lifetime that when you raise corporate taxes, you're really hurting consumers and workers. Well, that argument doesn't become untrue when you apply it to woke corporations. It's still true. You're still punishing workers and consumers.

and I just find that the intellectual incontinence of all of this maddening. Chris, are we letting the left off the hook a little bit too much here because there's a little bit of roll reversal going on on that side of the aisle right now because I remember just, you know, as I said, people were outraged at the idea that Hobby Lobby can't have religious beliefs. hobby lot what are corporate values what are you talking about well i want to uh yes uh i want to read to you the headline uh new york times deal book headline uh today uh it is snark snarkalicious the CEOs who didn't sign a big defense of voting rights subhead hundreds of leaders and companies signed a letter opposing strict limits they did not and then it goes through why didn't

Walmart sign? Why didn't that, you know, why didn't you sign? Why didn't you? And the CEO or whomever of Walmart said, you know, we don't do partisan politics. The letter that these CEOs ended up signing is meaningless, right? It's flummery. You know, we stand for, we stand for goodness. We, you know, we're against, it's like Judge Smales, you know, you want to be good, not bad, Danny. And so it's a whole lot of so what, but it's the pressure that the companies face because if they don't, then they're going to face hostile actions on their boards. There's a lot of envy, right, on the right. The idea that you would punish Major League Baseball by taking away the antitrust exemption

that they have for something not related to antitrust. Or Marco Rubio says we should help organize, we should help unionize Amazon so that Amazon will stop discriminating against conservative or people who have ultra theories on transgenderism or whatever. It seems appropriate when we're talking about J.D. Vance and the right-wing populists, I want to borrow from the grand, well, maybe not the granddaddy of them all, but one of them, George Wallace, who would say about this, there is not a dime's worth of difference between J.D. Vance and Elizabeth Warren when it comes to this stuff, right? We get to pick who wins and who loses,

and we can use the power of the government as we determine to punish the people who we don't like. And the only difference in this, you know, is revisiting the original point when we're talking about Jonah was there is no difference. It's just which side are you fighting for? And this is the point of conservatism in America is that it is often rejected, it is usually rejected, and that the conservatives have to keep stepping forward

and saying, we cannot expand the power of the government to punish people with whom its leaders disagree politically because the government changes hands and having the power is wrong before anything else. And that understanding of human nature is unpopular and I get it, but it is, it is the work that goes on forever. Can I ask a question? Chris, did you pronounce Utre, Outra? Is that how you pronounce that?

Are you shaming me for my pronunciation? I had never known it was wrong until now. I was wondering if there was a different word that I missed. But anyway, I, you know. No, that's fine. I bow to your superior urbanity. That reminds me the time when I actually corrected someone, very embarrassingly, in law school, who pronounced Hutzpah, and I said, oh, you mean chutzpah?

I have a weird tendency of sort of Spike Jonzing my way through conversations, and I'll grab a word that is sort of the next word in the dictionary that is adjacent to the word I want. And I once in a meeting, someone suggested someone for this TV show was producing, someone suggested having Ed Koch on. And I was like, well, does he really have the kind of academic pedicure that we're looking for? He does. I've been getting grief about that for 25 years.

He has the right pedicure. So it is Utre? I believe it is Utre. But I could be wrong. All right. I will, I will, I will, I will, hove it. For listeners who can't tell us apart, they now know you're the guy who pronounces it that way. And Outra versus Utre.

I can't wait to hear about the emails that you two are about to get over this. Now that, now that, now that I'm at AEI, I need to step it up and have better pronunciations. I think that's correct. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a small track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events

subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. slash Yannex. All right, well, Chris, let's put it to the test. Last topic is to you. So the five biggest democratic polling firms signed on to a joint statement,

the title of which could have been, our bad, please explain. Well, the five largest Democratic polling firms are putting together or are put together. I don't know where we are in the process now, a letter basically saying, we missed. And duh, because here's what we know. The two big misses for polling in 2020 were the size of Biden's margin, or three big misses, the size of Biden's margin, the generic ballot in the House, and some state polls. Now, other state polls were good, right? Georgia polling was good.

Arizona polling caught the clothes at the end. There are a lot of success stories from polling on the state level. Although when like half are successful and half are way off, do you really credit the successful ones for being successful or that luck is luck? And yes, of course, some are going to be right. If some are wrong, it doesn't mean it's science. Well, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. know, the idea that, yes, you can have polls that are correctly conducted and some are predictive

and some are not, that is true, right? You can have polls that are correctly conducted and sometimes they will be true and sometimes they will not be true or they will not be predictive and it doesn't make them bad polls necessarily. But here we're talking about places where you have big margins that were shown for Biden, places like Michigan and Wisconsin where you're looking at a series of double-digit numbers, and it comes up to be substantially smaller versus places where it was very predictive. I think, you know, for their part, the Democrats identify Trump shyness, which is what a great piece from Pew that you mentioned in your newsletter this week. A great piece from Pew talks about the response problem that they're having

with Republicans. Republicans have always been less likely to respond to polls. That's always been true, but the numbers are dropping. I have it right here. It is of the raw, unweighted sample. So this is before you start waiting to try to get a sample that looks like the electorate went from Republicans were 45% in 2015, 40% in 2018, and 38% in 2020. So this is a trend that is continuing. And so Democrats are right to talk about that. They're blaming Trump for it, but it is something that predated Trump, and I would expect will continue. One other thing that they talk about, and I think this is interesting, and I want to know more about it, how does coronavirus how does abiding by or not abiding by coronavirus restrictions, how did that affect the 2020

polling? One of the things that Democrats put forward is that since Republican states and people, individual Republicans may have been less COVID restricted themselves or in their jurisdiction that that may have affected whether they were available on landlines and all that stuff. But there is a serious problem in polling and we and Democrats are are really struggling now with what the question is. I would just commend that pew piece to everybody. It's definitely worth a read

because we've got to figure out what comes next. So I think I sort of gave away my take a little bit there, my question to Chris, I just don't see why we think that the polls that get it right are actually right. Like we credit the, we say that the wrong ones are wrong, and we try to find all the reasons that they're wrong, but then we assume the ones that are right, got it right for the right reasons. And that's where I think that we're maybe making a bit of an assumption on that front And I think that there's a problem with polling in general, even the ones that happen to get it right sometimes, of the samples that they're able to get, the types of people who are willing to participate in a repeated survey.

So to look at the Pew one, for instance, these people stay on their panel for years. Well, who are the type of people who like to stay in a panel for years and take a poll every few months from Pew? They might just look kind of different from everyone else. Well, they explain that and talk about the drop off if you control for other variables that they talk about that. That's true. And they have done a, you know, again, they bring a whole lot of smarts to weighting their samples. But that's the problem, right? When you have to wait samples at all, you're waiting them.

But you understand why we have to wait samples, right? I do understand why you have to wait them. But that doesn't mean that you're going. to ever be able to weight them well because that's the art to the science well look i think one of the things we have to do is understand that polling is not an exact science right this is a probability this we're in the space of probability and there is certainly art uh involved yeah that's the part though that i think yes there's probability but there's more than probability when you add in waiting because when you add in art, you have a problem.

But by your reasoning, then we just should not do polling. I think we have a big problem with polling. And I don't think that all of these afteractions that we're seeing and autopsies and everything else, you know, I'll read you pews, retiring overrepresented panelists. Okay, well, that goes to their waiting, calibrating the political balance of their panel using a relatively high response rate survey offering mail and online responses. All right, that goes to who gets in the panel.

Testing an offline response mode. So now we're basically doing the census. In paneling adults who prefer mail to online, the old people, developing new recruitment materials. Okay, those all sound like good ideas. I'm for them. And the Democratic pollsters have sort of similar versions of this, but they're tinkering on the outsides of what I think is a much bigger problem.

And I guess the point that I would like to see more of them make is, even when they get it right, that could have been still not science. That's still art. That still has problems in it. How would you, how would you, a judge which were good poles and bad polls?

By, this is unfair to all the pollsters, right? But by the fact that the general number of polls that got it wrong means that the ones that got it right. Like when you're looking at a bell curve of polls, and it turns out that the polling was on the outer end of the bell curve, that doesn't mean you should assume that those polls were better run. It might mean that those polls were just on the outer end of a bell curve

and the whole bell curve needed to shift over. They should have also been wrong. I don't want to belabor this anymore. Too late. Yeah, exactly. So I will just say that you and I should probably talk about this more because I'm interested in your idea and certainly would like to hear more about it.

I'm going to shift it just ever so slightly to a slightly different point, which is I don't know the intricacies of polling the way either of you guys do, but I take Sarah's point that the poll could have the right result, but for the wrong reasons, in the same way that the harospices of ancient Greece, when they cut open a bird, and to augur the future, right? They could have gotten what the weather of next week is going to be, like, correct.

That doesn't mean that looking at bird in trails actually can predict the future. I use the octopus in Germany at the German aquarium that picks the right outcomes. And this is the argument against stuff like Magellan, or what was the Republic right-wing, the Georgia pollster the last cycle? Oh, that crazy guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So where it's like, well, Rasmussen was done, and it's like, yes, it has to use the correct methodology, though. Being correct is not proof of your excellence. That's why we insist on good methodology.

Okay, but that octopus was excellent, and how dare you besmirch his excellence? He was a genius. Chris, you've got to be careful. Sarah's a huge octopus, octopi stand and is obsessed with octopi. Well, they're very smart. You've got to walk gingerly around these topics. No, but the thing I was going to say is that in Washington, one of the things that I've picked up, I have observed over the years, is that if you have to do polling stuff, do it for corporations

for their marketing things, because you don't actually have to be all that accurate. Because you can tell a corporation, oh, it turns out that 73% of Americans prefer traditional. catch up. And if the real number is like 69 percent, who gives a rat's ass, right? It's directionally correct. And the problem that we have is our, it seems to me the problem we have with political polling is our expectation is of incredibly specific. When elections are won by a number to the right of the decimal point sometimes, polling is just not capable of that kind of precision. It can be directionally correct. if the methodology is right, but getting the, you know, in a binary system where you either

win or you lose if you're one vote over the 50% mark, we expect of polling more than it can deliver on a regular basis, particularly in presidential polling. And so I, you know, Sarah was sort of half joking saying get rid of polling. Get rid of polling. I mean, I think it would be really interesting if for like five years we did an experiment where there was no polling and politicians I had to kind of like guess where the voters were based on conversations and other forms of input that used to be defining our politics. I think that would be a healthy experiment. And it would make cable news a lot more interesting or healthier or something.

Do you think? Do you think I don't think that would make it any healthier at all? Well, look, like French fries are healthier than pork rinds. I'm not saying it's health food. That's also not true. Really? Well, first of all, Jonah, Why are you trying to put me out of a job?

I got kids in school, man. But I agree very much with the idea that the way that people consume and understand polls leads to the frustration with the polling, right? So people say, well, you said he would win by nine. He won by five. Your poll is, you know, and all of that stuff. So the way that polling is presented, consumed, and analyzed is a big part of the problem. that is true. But I think Pew, and I just point back to Pew here again, they are talking not

about polling about what's coming up in the election, but what do Americans think about what they want? And one of the other advantages about your ketchup analogy, in politics, we know that people who like spicy saracha ketchup don't respond at the same rates as the regular ketchup consumers, and that creates different kinds of problems. And all this stuff has to be addressed. Absolutely. Absolutely. I have nothing to add to this. I would just say, and only Jonah will get this reference. I just felt like I was watching two MCRN engineers debate the efficiency of the Epstein Drive. And I just am listening and learning. The phrase Epstein Drive seems problematic right off the face to me, just right off the bat. The term Epstein Drive seems bad, but I'm not going to go. Well, I mean, I think, I think what's her face from AFT? Who's their head of AFT?

Randy, Wine Garden. Yeah, she doesn't like the Epstein Drive because it's, it's, it's, it's an object of the ownership class. And we don't need to get into that. Epstein's mother not available. All right. Last thing. Last week, Steve brought up a, you know, media point. And in that conversation, I mentioned this piece by the New York.

Times how Trump steered supporters into unwitting donations. And I noted that the New York Times never mentioned that Act Blue had a recurring donation box, as did some of the leadership committees and Democratic campaigns. And I thought that was egregious that they hadn't mentioned it. Several listeners emailed, and I am so grateful to all of you, that in fact, the New York Times article very much did mention it. And I just want to read what the New York Times included. The use of pre-checked boxes is not unprecedented in politics, and Winred said it was simply adopting tactics that Act Blue put in place years ago. Act Blue said in a statement that it had begun to phase out pre-checked recurring boxes, quote, unless groups were explicitly asking

for recurring contributions. Some prominent Democratic groups, including both congressional campaign committees, continue to pre-check recurring boxes regardless of that guidance. Still, Democratic refund rates last year were only a small fraction of the Trump campaigns. I just want to tell you guys, that was just a big screw up on my part. I had read the article twice. I'd even done a word search to look for Act Blue to find this. I don't understand why I missed it. We really pride ourselves in getting this stuff right and not just sort of having outrage, punditry. So I want to apologize to everyone and say that try better next time. Yeah, I want to apologize too, because I echoed your comments about this. And I didn't see that in

there either, and it actually made me think that maybe they updated the story to add that stuff because of pushback, but you said you looked at it in the Wayback Machine, and apparently it was there all along. At least in the first mention from the Wayback Machine, it's already there. Now, it's a 4,000 word piece. It was long, and this is, you know, towards the end of it, it's one paragraph. I don't know. I don't know what else to say. I think I just missed it. Yeah. I'm holding out hope there's a conspiracy, but absent any evidence, I'm going to apologize to because it's a screw up. And seriously, it gave me so much faith in our listeners that I got these handful of emails that people listened to what we talked about, went and read the article for themselves, for their

own conclusions, saw stuff that we missed. And email was like, hey, Sarah, you missed this whole paragraph. I mean, my God, we have the best listeners. Yay, thank you. So with that, We extra appreciate all of you guys this week. We'll look forward to having you around again next week. Until then, have a good one. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place.

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