Let's Play Statistics!

The Starting Point for Buyer's Remorse

We all know the infamous Mark Twain quote:

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Some of those “statistics” come from polling. If you’ve been reading my Substack since the beginning, you’ve read my multi-post diatribe on ALLLLLL the reasons that polling is imprecise and often very wrong. If you haven’t, they’re in the archive.

But we can look at some polling/statistics from just after the election, understanding the limitations, as a historical record that we’ll be able to use when we are all saying, “I told you so” sometime next year.

Let’s start with this juicy tidbit from YouGov¹. They polled the same people every week or so in the run-up to the election, and then just after.

67% of Don the Con voters predict that by May 2025, inflation will be lower. It doesn’t matter if the 67% is correct, it could be 60% or 70%, but it’s a high enough number to seem close enough to accurate. They believe this because they believe that tariffs will bring down prices.

They are tragically incorrect.

In the aggregate, tariffs and their impacts will harm the MAGA minions far more than they will harm most of the Harris voters. Chris Murphy, the junior Senator from Connecticut had this to say:

His point relates to messaging, and trust me, I’ll be talking about that in later posts, but for right now, look at the discrepancy between states’ median incomes. Democrats won higher income states, and Rethuglicans won lower income states. Certainly, there are rich MAGA minions, and poor Democrats. But overall, the higher one’s income, the higher the probability that one voted for Harris.

People with higher incomes will be less impacted by higher prices than people with lower incomes. It should be obvious that if a household is bringing in $250,000/year, a grocery bill that goes up $20 is less impactful than if that household is bringing in $30,000/year and faces the same $20 increase. And grocery increases are absolute, they do not vary due to income level, like tax rates do.

When prices go up, we eventually end up with inflation. If Jerome Powell sticks to his guns that he won’t resign if asked to, we can expect increased rates as the Fed works to bring inflation back down. Remember, the last time the Orange Menace threatened to fire Powell, he was ready to go to court.

How much inflation? Between 6% and 9.3% by 2026. Source. In addition, there would be decreases in productivity, and decreased GDP. Source.

This chart shows what that means in real life: Source.

Remember that a 6.3% impact hurts the lowest quintile a ton more than 1.4% for the top 1%. Leave a note in the comments if you want to see the math. Info on quintiles is here.

I bring this up because I think Buyer’s Remorse will hit the MAGA minions first in their pocketbooks. I’m cynical enough to believe that most MAGA minions will not care if their wives and daughters die because of ectopic pregnancies, or other problems during pregnancy. I’m misanthropic enough to assume that most MAGA minions will not care that there is no more public education. And I know from the depths of my soul that MAGA minions will cheer as bad things happen to immigrants, PoC and LGBTQIA+ human beings.

But when the cost of beer coffee goes up? BUYER’S REMORSE.

Remember — and I will keep telling you this over and over — we will triumph by sticking together and DOING THE WORK. As the MAGA minions get gobsmacked by what they voted for, they will be more willing to HEAR what we have to say.

Tomorrow’s post is on “meeting the moment” with concrete things that all of us can do immediately. We need to be set for when the MAGA minions are ready.

A final note: if there is a specific topic that you’d like to see me cover, or if you have a question, please put it in the comments.

1. In the interest of full disclosure, I was a participant.