Assessing The Assessments

In several articles this year, this blog has broached various topics in a predictive sense and/or has asked questions about then unknowns. This post endeavors to evaluate those assessments with a discussion of how the matters addressed in those posts have developed in the ensuing days or months.

THE WISCONSIN EXPERIMENT

Earlier this week, this blog post detailed the drama that unfolded surrounding the April 7, 2020 Wisconsin judicial election.  In the post, it posed the question being asked by Wisconsin Republicans – were GOP voters more likely to show up during a pandemic?

Based on the results finalized just hours after the blog post was published, the answer was a resounding no.  To the surprise of most astute political observers, the “Democratic” judicial candidate in Wisconsin won a resounding victory over her “Republican” opponent by an impressive 10%.  Prior to the Covid 19-related machinations, such a result would not have been shocking (though maybe a bit more favorable to the “Democrat” than anticipated), as the left-leaning candidate was perceived to have the advantage of a contested Democratic primary also being on the ballot.  But with the late noise regarding in-person voting and the potential for it to shake up the race, the unknowns regarding turnout increased substantially (and with it the hopes of Wisconsin Republicans).

With the votes totaled, however, there exists no evidence whatsoever that GOP (or rural) voters were more likely to brave a pandemic to cast their ballots.  In the election itself, Wisconsin cast roughly 1.55M ballots, of which 1.1M were mailed absentee votes.  The 450,000 in-person vote total was not dramatically different than expectations, and almost certainly did not shift the race to the GOP in a meaningful way.  There is even some speculation that the GOP push to keep April 7 in-person voting might have swung some centrists against the “Republican” judicial candidate (though that is difficult to prove in either direction).  Bottom line, betting on your side to “brave the pandemic” more than the other side appears to be a bad wager.  And accordingly, if the pandemic looks like it may make voting more difficult come late this summer, look for increased flexibility from Republicans regarding methods of alleviating such concerns.

To share one other note, this blogger consulted with a very well-connected political observer with deep ties to the Midwest political scene.  He suggested that the public should take very little from Wisconsin’s April 7 election as to what happens with President Donald Trump on the Wisconsin ballot in the fall (and this observer is not in any way biased towards Trump).  The same observer also suggested that Trump’s position is stronger than believed in Michigan but also weaker than perceived in Pennsylvania.

INTO THE TRUMPOCALYPSE

In this article from January 2020, this blogger projected Joe Biden to be the Democratic nominee to face (and ultimately beat) Donald Trump in the fall.  By no means was that a bold prediction (and the writer will admit to believing Bernie Sanders had taken the mantle as the most likely nominee for the 7-10 days from a bit before to immediately after the Nevada caucus, largely because Biden performed so badly in both Iowa and New Hampshire).  However, the prediction that Biden would emerge from the pack after a crushing South Carolina win after a rough start really held up.  In fact, the direct quote was as follows:

“While the first few primary results are very uncertain (and Sanders has a realistic shot of sweeping Iowa and New Hampshire or packaging a win in one with another victory in Nevada), the reader should ultimately expect a Biden victory on the back of a dominant South Carolina showing in late February, followed by a strong run of performances on Super Tuesday and throughout the rest of March 2020, when a crushing number of both southern and large, diverse states (such as Texas, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio) cast their primary ballots in Biden’s favor.”

THE CORONAVIRUS COMETH

While summarizing the entirety of the article here would constitute a wasteful undertaking, this piece made a number of “reasoned assumptions” about the virus, most of which turned out to be accurate and one of which was substantially wrong.  In particular, the piece’s emphasis on weather and regional difference (suggesting that places like Arizona and Texas were primed for a much different outcome in the face of Covid 19 than was New York City) turned out to be prescient.  And yes, for the naysayers, weather is almost certainly a factor in spread, and it remains a regular bemusement watching statistical expert Nate Silver – of the popular “538” website fame – subtly nudge his readers in this direction a few times every week.

However, the post did considerably err in one aspect of the discussion, specifically the mention of the disease “petering out” in other localities.  This observation was based primarily on the data from Wuhan, China (which ultimately reported less than 100K cases).  This blogger assumed that, while the Chinese data wasn’t reliable, the misreporting (i.e., lies) by the Chinese government did not distort the data by more than a few hundred thousand (in essence, an 80K case total might have been 240K to 320K, but not worse).  At the present time, any trust in the Chinese numbers, which could have easily understated the problem by well in excess of 10x, was severely misplaced.  Accordingly, it appears that a widespread lockdown of some length, using it as a “timeout” to blunt the spread of the virus, was largely warranted.  Whether that lockdown still maintains much utility in Dallas, Texas; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Tampa, Florida; or anywhere in Wyoming (which currently has a per capita death rate of 1/290th of New York state) constitutes a much harder case to make, especially in light of the massive economic consequences likely to arise from the Covid 19 response.  In effect, it’s past time to treat Covid 19 as the regional phenomenon that it has been since the beginning, and to adjust our responses based on state and local conditions.