The Twelfth Man - - in Wisconsin?
Regarding the United States Presidential Election of 2020, consider the state of Wisconsin and assume that the ballot count reported to Congress by the usual state electoral machinery was a perfect numerical statement of all legal ballots, and only legal ballots, that were cast. As of December 27, 2020, a reasonably reliable Internet website reported those results as 1,630,866 for Biden and 1,610,184 for Trump. For the purposes of the present analysis, we will neglect the Libertarian and other candidates and will assume that the total number of ballots cast was 3,241,050. Biden won by 20,682 votes (0.638%).
It is desired to develop a theoretical model of how the Wisconsin results might have come about. Suppose that prior to the election, the participating 3,241,050 Wisconsinites, being incredibly civic-minded, had decided to divide themselves into discussion groups of 12 voters each for political discussion and debate before casting their ballots. There would have been 270,087 discussion groups, with 6 hapless Wisconsinites left group-less, assumed to have split evenly between the two candidates, and excluded from further analysis.
If all 270,087 discussion groups had split their votes evenly, then the two candidates would have tied at 1,620,522 each in Wisconsin - - and you thought that the actual voting controversies were a headache! But not to worry, 10,341 Wisconsinites “flipped their votes” in order to give Biden his 20,682-vote margin. We assume that exactly one vote was flipped in each of 10,341 discussion groups (i.e., that 3.8% of all discussion groups broke for Biden by 7 to 5), while the remaining 270,087 – 10,341 = 259,746 discussion groups (96.2%) were dead even (6 Biden votes to 6 Trump votes).
Prior to the election, a widely acclaimed, professional, scientific poll gave Biden a projected 17% margin of victory - - and who are we to suggest any analysis that does not “follow the science”? (See the footnote at the end of this blog post. There were other polls; but the ABC / Washington Post poll will be used here in order to make a clean distinction.) The 17% projected Biden victory would be consistent with all 270,087 discussion groups breaking 7 to 5 for Biden (58.3% to 41.7%, i.e., a 16.6% net preference for Biden). In contrast, the 0.6% actual Biden victory is consistent with nearly all (259,746, or 96.2%) of the discussion groups being dead even (6 to 6).
Who was this “Twelfth Man,” the defector from the projected 7 – 5 Biden poll advantage to the actual 6 – 6 electoral result in 96.2% of the hypothesized discussion groups? (We’re dealing here with Wisconsin, so we assume that this Twelfth Man is not a certain student-athlete at Texas A&M University!) The Wisconsinite Twelfth Man stated to pollsters a preference for Biden, nevertheless supported Trump at the ballot box, and almost gave Trump the victory. This Twelfth Man is proposed to be a Wisconsinite who, being badgered by acquaintances and public media to support a scientifically projected or socially acceptable winner, is inclined to tell a pollster one thing and then to vote differently. This Twelfth Man hopes merely to show the pollster the door and to get about the rest of his life in peace. If this analysis is right for Wisconsin and generalizable to the rest of the nation, then the U.S. electorate is portrayed as split into two nearly equal factions that seem to be largely beyond the reach of rational persuasion: One-twelfth of the electorate will not even answer pollsters accurately, presumably due to fear of some manner of reprisal.
Of course, this analysis has assumed scientific and accurate polling and voting procedures, and has focused on the hypothesized badgered voters who will not publicly state what they think or intend. What would the analysis look like if, heaven forfend, the 17% projected Biden advantage had been a fiction publicized precisely in order to badger voters into flipping their votes or in order to suppress their turn-out? We will not pursue that line of inquiry here.
The Twelfth Man analyzed here would seem to be a modern-day version of Solzhenitsyn’s Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev. (See the October 13, 2020 blog post in this series.) When Vorotyntsev ventured the slightest deviation from the Kadet party line (that of the intelligentsia), the drawing room fell eerily silent. As if hypnotized, Vorotyntsev said no more, “not because he felt he was wrong, but out of fear of saying something reactionary.” Subsequently, he was privately advised that “in educated Russian society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘liberated’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.” Such ingrained self-censorship, or Vorotyntsev effect, severely limited public speech on important issues in late-Tsarist Russia. Today, if a Twelfth Man would venture, during polite conversation, the slightest deviation from some aspect of, say, progressive identity politics, then the ensuing, eerie silence would quickly bid him to say no more, lest he say something reactionary. Today, “in educated American society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘progressive’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.” The modern-day Vorotyntsev effect continues to limit and to distort public speech on important political issues, including those expressed in Presidential polling and voting.
(Footnote: The October 28, 2020 ABC News / Washington Post Poll [rated A+ by those who supposedly know] gave Biden a 17% lead in Wisconsin. See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/wisconsin/, accessed 12-30-20.)