Confidence Men

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 17, 2024

 

Last weekend I was chatting with some Trump-supporting relatives about the election and we landed on the topic of crossover voting. 

 

Your guy is cutting into Kamala Harris’ margins with some core Democratic groups, I told them. Black voters, Hispanic voters, union members—they’re all moving toward MAGA.

 

They nodded contentedly. They were well aware.

 

But Trump is also losing votes on the right, I added. The last New York Times poll had Harris nearly doubling her support among Republicans in the span of a month, on the cusp of double digits. That’s why Liz Cheney and other conservatives have been invited to appear with her on the trail. The old-school Reaganites who supported Nikki Haley in this year’s primary might be willing to go blue with a nudge from people they trust. 

 

You should have seen the look on my relatives’ faces. And you should have seen the look on my face when I saw the look on their faces.

 

They know that I’m supporting Harris, after all. The idea of a conservative crossover vote for Democrats shouldn’t be difficult for them. It was sitting in front of them, in the flesh.

 

And they know that I write for The Dispatch, a publication that wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a market for Trump-skeptical commentary on the right. They know who Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg are. “Republicans Against Trump” shouldn’t come as a shock.

 

But it did. A few Dispatch-ian weirdos aside, it was inconceivable to them that any right-wing voter might view the Democrat as the lesser evil in this election. Telling them that Cheney Republicans could swing a tight election to Harris was like telling them that a tribe of Bigfoots might emerge from the forest and cast the deciding votes this year.

 

And as I thought more about it, that analogy seemed apt. Given their avid consumption of a certain cable news network’s programming, they’ve seen about as much evidence that anti-Trump conservatives exist in meaningful numbers as evidence that Bigfoot does.

 

Can you guess, dear reader, which cable news network I mean?

 

The fact that Fox News and other right-wing outlets have given short shrift to anti-Trump sentiment within the GOP isn’t an oversight. It’s an element in a larger strategy, I think, to convince Republicans that another Trump defeat will be inexplicable except as a product of fraud. Despite this having become the closest national election in modern American history, populist media of all stripes is straining to instill a sense of confidence about victory in its patrons so overweening that a Harris win can only leave the right with the same sense of incredulity as my relatives had last weekend. Any potential explanation for why Democrats won fair and square—Harris won a lot of crossover voters—needs to be marginalized.

 

They’re priming their audiences for the next coup attempt, which is surely coming if things don’t go Trump’s way three weeks from now. The more inexplicable a Democratic victory seems, the more extreme the measures Republicans will be willing to condone to prevent Harris from taking office.

 

The invincible man.

 

Simon Rosenberg is a left-wing political strategist and even more of an outlier-ish weirdo on his side of the aisle than Dispatch conservatives are on ours. That’s because he’s an optimist.

 

Liberals don’t do optimism. Especially in elections, and especially when Donald Trump is on the ballot.

 

Rosenberg is the exception, though, enough so that he calls his newsletter “Hopium Chronicles.” He spent most of this year arguing that Joe Biden was in better shape against Trump than doomsayers believed, then transitioned seamlessly after the switcheroo to arguing that Harris is in better shape than doomsayers believe. On Wednesday he floated a theory to that end: “Right-aligned” pollsters are flooding the market with unrealistically rosy numbers for Trump to obscure the truth about a steady Harris lead, he speculated.

 

I’m skeptical. It’s true that MAGA-friendly Rasmussen has Trump doing better than most other national polls, but Marquette Law School’s survey is respected and they have the race tied. Fox News’ polling bureau is also well regarded and its latest data, released just yesterday, puts the Republican up 2 points. That’s greater than his margin in Rasmussen.

 

It’s the same story in Pennsylvania. Right-aligned firms like Rasmussen, Trafalgar, and InsiderAdvantage have Trump performing conspicuously well, leading by 2-3 points, but the Wall Street Journal and Emerson are credible and neutral and they also see him ahead by 1. The difference between “biased” and unbiased pollsters just isn’t enough to conclude that there’s something suspicious in the data provided by the former.

 

But I’d be lying if I said Rosenberg’s theory isn’t kicking around in the back of my mind. Is it so hard to believe that the right-wing polling industry might now be operating in the same way that the right-wing media industry has for the last eight years, pretending that Trump is vastly more popular than he is and conniving in various ways to make Republicans believe it?

 

It’s on my mind because Trump’s minister of propaganda has lately been running a scam not unlike the one Rosenberg imagines, for the similar purpose of convincing Republicans that victory next month is much more probable than not.

 

“Trump now leading Kamala by 3% in betting markets. More accurate than polls, as actual money is on the line,” Elon Musk told his 200 million social media followers on October 6, touting the latest numbers from the website Polymarket. It was pure nonsense. Betting markets aren’t representative samples of the population like polls are; they’re, well, markets, and not very efficient markets, either.

 

There’s no reason to think Polymarket’s clientele mirrors America’s electorate in all relevant particulars, especially with Musk flogging the site to his right-wing fans. And many who “buy” Donald Trump at Polymarket will do so disproportionately to their voting power, needless to say. Trump and Elon have gigantic cult followings and cultists have always been willing to use money to express the depth of their devotion.

 

So what happened after Musk’s tweet was predictable. As cash flowed into Polymarket from Musk’s Trumpy admirers, the Republican’s “odds” of victory on the site rose. But instead of recognizing that for what it was, a sort of electoral “meme stock” being bid up by a determined hive mind, populists interpreted the surge the way their idol Elon had instructed them to—as a scientific measure of Trump’s rising probability of winning. Check Musk’s platform today and you’ll find various influencers touting Trump’s ballooning lead on Polymarket as proof that he’s running away with the race, with some seemingly interpreting his 60-40 lead as a harbinger of his likely popular-vote margin.

 

Everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works, as the saying goes. Musk is counting on the fact that his populist fans don’t know how betting markets—or polls, or elections, or much else—work. And maybe they really are that stupid. Elon, however, is not.

 

The game here, plainly, is to mislead right-wingers into believing that Trump is invincible so that a Harris “upset” next month seems that much more improbable and suspicious. Elon had already gotten out in front of the coming “rigged election” frenzy by demagoguing the risk of immigrants voting illegally en masse, but his Polymarket hoax is ingenious insofar as it harnesses the enthusiasm of his own fans to create the pretext for crying “fraud.” The more he hypes betting markets to populist rubes, the more money will be placed on Trump, the higher Trump’s “odds” will rise, and the more dubious a Harris victory will seem.

 

Musk is every inch a right-wing media mogul, caterwauling endlessly about the bias of liberals to win his audience’s trust while he goes about deceiving them and withholding information from them more aggressively than the other side does. He’s building up their confidence in a favorable political outcome on false pretenses in order to make an unfavorable outcome unfathomable and ultimately intolerable. He’s a confidence man, in every sense.

 

Speaking of which, let’s talk about Fox News.

 

Editing reality.

 

On Wednesday, a few hours before Bret Baier’s showdown with Kamala Harris, Fox hosted a town hall with Trump that it hyped as having “an audience entirely composed of women.” The former president was greeted with a standing ovation when he came out; attendees seemed “enraptured” by him, per a reporter for The Independent who spoke with some afterward.

 

That seemed newsy. The polls will tell you that American women are breaking hard against him, yet here was a crowd that appeared to adore him. Maybe women would turn out to be another constituency, like blacks and Hispanics, who are quietly peeling away from Democrats beneath the surface.

 

Or maybe not: It turns out that many in the audience for the Fox event were from local Republican organizations in Georgia. The first woman who was called on to ask him a question was the head of one such outfit, in fact.

 

And that was no coincidence. “We got a personal invitation from Fox News” to attend, a member of a local group confirmed to The Independent afterward.

 

According to CNN, one woman in attendance prefaced her question by telling Trump, “I proudly cast my vote for you today. I hope they count it.” Fox aired their exchange but edited that part out. At another point, Trump asked the crowd who they were voting for and they began to chant his name, but that too was cut from the program. Never once did the network disclose to viewers that what they were watching was functionally a Trump rally, not a conversation with undecided voters.

 

“If CNN pretended to be conducting a Kamala Harris town hall while stocking the crowd with Harris supporters and editing out some of the more blatant evidence, Donald Trump would threaten [government] retaliation,” Media Matters’ Matt Gertz observed. True, just as it’s also true that the legions of media watchdogs who populate right-wing infotainment would have been incensed by the stunt had it come from a network they weren’t hoping to be employed by. But one can profess only so much shock here: Fox’s nature as a propaganda organ for Trump and the GOP has been blatantly clear to outsiders since the winter of 2020-21.

 

It’s not clear to loyal Fox News viewers like my relatives, though, any more than it’s clear to a fish that it’s wet. I suspect they don’t have the foggiest idea that Trump is getting clobbered by Harris among women in polling, and if they do have an inkling of it they’ve been conditioned over the years to disregard bad news in polling as “fake.” If they watched Wednesday’s town hall, they probably came away believing that women like him a lot, far more than the biased mainstream media wants Americans to think. And that was why Fox aired it, of course: Since 2016, the singular purpose of right-wing propaganda has been to convince Republicans that populism generally and Trump specifically are The People’s Choice, wildly more popular than they’re cracked up to be.

 

They should feel confident in his impending victory, then. Enough so that if the numbers on election night are disappointing, particularly among women, the fix must be in.

 

Exaggerating how much voters like Trump is one way to make him seem more popular than he is. Another is to hide the things he says and does that might reasonably cause voters to dislike him. Fox News was also guilty of that on Wednesday—and, amazingly, got fact-checked on it by Kamala Harris herself in real time.

 

During her interview with Bret Baier, Harris pointed out that Trump is far more given to disparaging Americans on the other side politically than she is and cited his fascist comments about the “enemy from within” as an example. We asked him about that at today’s (ahem) town hall, Baier interjected, cueing up a clip of Trump from the event in which he innocently denied that he’d ever threatened anyone.

 

But the clip Baier showed omitted what Trump had said just before he gave that denial. Trump had complained about the “enemy from within” again and left no doubt that he was referring to Democrats in doing so, citing former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff by name. Harris had been right about him and Fox News had the proof on tape—but rather than inform their viewers of it, Baier and/or his editors bowdlerized the clip of Trump to make it seem like she was smearing him.

 

And Harris knew it, and called him out on it in the moment, to her credit.

 

“Last night Baier showed everyone that he’s not actually an innocent, straight journalist trapped inside a malignant organization,” Jonathan Last wrote on Thursday. “He is in the business of propaganda.” That’s correct, and the business of propaganda is reassuring right-wingers that all objections to Trump and his program flow from blind partisan hatred, “Trump derangement.” That’s why anti-Trump Republicans are treated like Bigfoot even though they might be a key bloc next month. And that’s why Kamala Harris was treated as though she were hallucinating when she called a demagogue a demagogue.

 

The consistent message to Fox News viewers is that all reasons to oppose Trump ultimately lack a rational basis and therefore they should feel supremely confident that he’ll prevail next month—never mind that Republicans woefully underperformed expectations in the 2022 midterms, with the Trumpiest candidates on the ballot stinking up the joint from coast to coast. And so, if he doesn’t win, his apparent defeat must have an ulterior explanation.

 

They’re stage-managing the steal that Republicans will attempt next month if the vote doesn’t go Trump’s way, nothing more or less.

 

And so I end with this: Where are all the defamation lawyers right now?

 

Nothing Fox News did on Wednesday was defamatory, and I assume the network’s lawyers will keep it on the right side of the legal line this winter, not wanting to shell out mega-millions in another massive defamation settlement. But the more excitable dregs of Trumpist media may not be able to restrain themselves unless they’re reminded that America’s tort lawyers are watching and licking their chops. It would be an act of civic hygiene for a group of attorneys with the relevant expertise to publicly warn right-wing infotainment’s least scrupulous propagandists that there will be financial consequences for their next round of libel against election workers, public officials, and so forth. 

 

They should speak up now. Appeals to decency won’t deter populist miscreants from trying to wreck the country but threatening their wallets might.