US Presidential Election: the biggest loser (so far) is the credibility of the chattering classes
by Martin Sewell, Archbishop Cranmer:
It has been a long night for those of us who regard ourselves as ‘political junkies’ with a penchant for following US presidential elections. Some months ago I issued a rather low key tweet predicting that President Trump would be re-elected, but wobbled about a month ago before concluding that this would still be the case.
Although it was a minority position, I did find a few people with whom I confided this heretical belief. To do so in the UK places one in a minority, not least because as I sampled the media, it was very hard to find any evidence in the public sphere that that intuition was right. The polls were unanimous: the BBC American correspondents betrayed a visceral dislike of the President, and it was rare to find a knowledgeable US commentator being interviewed who could advance a credible case for the outcome that appears to be emerging.
On election night, I could not bear to watch the complacency of the usual news channels, but by chance followed another tweet to a YouTube channel where an analyst by the name of Richard Baris (‘People’s Pundit‘) was gathering the data and carefully explaining the significance of each small change in reported turnout and prediction in real time.
With each state being considered, a map appeared with each county displayed, and within each data cell he could relate the present situation to previous elections. It was an extraordinary performance. Rarely do ordinary people encounter the power of ‘big data’, but from early evening the young Mr Baris was able to explain why a large majority for Joe Biden in postal votes in certain counties was in fact bad news for his campaign. He should have been doing better if the polls were right… and so the story unfolded through the night.
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