The Power and the Money

The Purple Rose of Texas is here

All eyes are on Texas.

I love Texas! And I have for a very long time. Maybe this dates back to a trip to Dallas to visit my stepfather back in 1986? Or maybe there’s just something about the state that I like? The food? West Texas? (Yes!) The Germans? (Hell, yes!) The Tejanos? (Double hell yes!) The state’s utterly insane history? The weird way Texans know about their state’s utterly insane history? I can’t say. I know that I’d be happy to live there, and that’s weird for a die-hard New Yorker like myself who only likes Washington because it has a subway system.

So it gives me more satisfaction to imagine Texas turning blue than it would for, say, Georgia. (Although MARTA, hey. And Atlanta does have the best BBQ in America.) It makes me want to believe that things like the below really are astonishing:

Something astonishing is happening in Texas. It's hard to know what it will actually mean for the result, but it's highly likely that the number of early votes will eclipse the *total* number of votes cast in 2016. The tally is already up to a whopping 91% of the total 2016 vote.

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) October 29, 2020

The turnout numbers do not yet mean that we have a revolution in the Lone Star State. The polls may mean that we’re seeing a Lone Star revolution, but not one big enough to put Biden over the edge without some luck. But not the turnout data, not yet anyway.

Start with the fact that registrations in Texas are only up from 78.2% of the voting age population in 2016 to 78.5% in 2020. If turnout rises back to 2008 levels (59.0%, versus 56.7% in 2016) then we will see the number of total votes cast rise from 9.0 million to 10.0 million. As of yesterday, the total number of early voters was 9,009,850 . That would be about 90% of our “expected” turnout. (Today is the last day for early voting.) That is way up from the 4,497,431 (or 52%) recorded in 2016. 

But ... we do not know is how many of those voters are new and how many have simply decided to vote early due to Covid fears or because early voting has expanded. It is quite plausible that all those early voters simply means that fewer people are going to show up on Tuesday. If we wind up with a turnout of 10 million voters, then Biden-Harris will need to snag basically all of the 1.0 million “new” voters. 

Is there any good news in the data, then?

Well, one solace is that the Democrats do not really need to snag all of the new voters. Lots of people have either passed away or moved out of the Lone Star State. The actual number of new voters will be larger than 1.0 million. A reasonable back-of-envelop calculation (which assumes that people who die or move out-of-state vote the same as all other Texans) would cut the share of new voters that the Democrats need to win to 70%.  

In other words, it is plausible (but not likely) for Democrats to win the state without a massive turnout surge. Consider the number of votes that major party candidates have attracted over the past 44 years. The number of Republican votes has been basically flat since 2004:

Let me note two weird things in the Texas data. The first is the jump in turnout from 1972 to 1976. First, why was turnout so incredibly low in 1972 and what caused it to spike in ’76? Federal action under the Voting Rights Act? The 26^th Amendment? It’s weird.

The second is the gyrations in the voting-age population (including non-citizens) as a share of the total population. It goes from 73% in 2008 to 69% in 2016 before shooting back up to 74% in 2020. For a state with more than 20 million people that seems like a lot of variation in birthrates or migration. 

TLDR: the turnout surge in Texas means less than you think it does. But even if Texas does not go blue, as is likely, purple Texas is already here. 

Propaganda in the age of artificial intelligence

Have you ever watched television commercials from the 1950s? They seem crude and unpersuasive, even silly. Political propaganda from the 1930s even more so and don’t get me started on print adverts from the 19th century. They actually persuaded people?

Well, yes, they probably did. Our culture has evolved in the presence of ever-more sophisticated advertising. Our defense mechanisms have also risen; ads either have to very sophisticated or do nothing more than present basic information in order to succeed. (See “Len the Plumber” for an example of the latter. All it does it tell you that you can get same-day service at that number; considering the cost of searching for a same-day plumber, it gets business despite presenting no information other than that it exists. And an annoying earwig to make sure you do not forget.)

New technology, however, allows for new ways to get around our cultural immune systems. We have seen the rise of Fox (cable television being the technology)  and fake news (going through social media). But two things are about to make the situation incredibly worse. (Hat tip: Will Baird.)

1. It is getting easier and easier to fake video of people saying things that they never actually said. It is no coincidence that the researchers at the link used footage of President Obama to create their fake clip. 
2. It is getting easier and easier to automate fake online comments and reviews, aka “crowdturfing.” The authors propose some potential fixes which might work for review websites ... but maybe not so much for social media. 

I am fairly sure democracy can survive these innovations. I am also fairly sure that democracies will work less well and lose legitimacy because of them. My worry is that our cultural immune systems will never adapt, or worse yet, adapt by crawling into our own epistemic fortresses.

The 2020 election is shaping up to be awful; 2024 more so; and I do not want to think about 2028 or 2032, when my children will be able to vote. 

Anyone able to provide an optimistic counterargument? Surely some techno-optimists are left, or any form of optimist, really.