“Big thing tonight,” I said to my brother. “You watching it?”
“You mean the game?”
“There’s no game tonight,” my niece says from the couch. “It’s Tuesday.”
“Games start on Thursday,” my sister-in-law said from the kitchen.
“You lazy, uneducated Americans and your obsession with sports.”
“Hey, sports builds character in kids,” my brother said. “Teaches them about competition. That the only way to succeed in life is to beat the other guy’s face in. Right, Lorie?”
“Yep.”
“Wanna beat the other guy’s face in, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“If people got as excited about politics as they do sports, this would be a whole different country,” I said.
“People get excited about politics,” my brother said. “Just the other day someone on Facebook told Carrie they were going to look up where she works and go down there and show her why Trump’s sexual assault charge wasn’t as bad as she keeps saying it is.”
“Please tell me he’s kidding about that,” I said to her.
“Kind of?” she shrugged.
“But, I mean, if people got as active about it—and I mean invested—as they do about football,” I went on, “this would be an actual, functioning democracy here.”
“What are you talking about?” my brother said. “You seen the line on tonight’s debate?”
“He doesn’t mean that kind of investment,” my niece said
“I think Kamala Harris is going to go in there and she’s going to sound like an actual politician when she speaks,” my sister-in-law said, “while Trump is just going to sound like…well, Trump.”
“That’s what got him elected in the first place,” my niece said. “Not sounding like every other politician out there.”
“Yeah, but this ain’t 2016 anymore,” I said. “Too many people know he’s a f—up by now.”
“I just don’t know about this Harris woman,” my brother said. “I hear she pretends to be black. And I just can’t have any politician representing me who’s disingenuous in any way, shape or form. So.”
“She’s a waffler, is what she is,” I said. “But enough people are scared of Trump coming back, so they’ll gobble them waffles up if it’ll keep his large behind out.”
“She’s honest. Straightforward,” my sister-in-law said. “Didn’t you see that CBS interview?”
“Look at what your boy said about it.”
“Who’s my boy?”
“Bernie.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said she’s just trying to tell people what they want to hear. And he’s right. She’ll be another Joe Biden in there. No more, no less.”
“My money is on the broad, though,” my brother said. “I think she’s gonna mop the floor with the palooka.”
“It’s not a boxing match,” my niece said.
“Hey, I follow what the better-looking-than-me people on the television tell me,” my brother said. “And the 1,000 people that get interviewed for the polls they conduct—them, too. I base my understanding of politics on that. So, please. Talk to the hand.”
“Pollsters don’t even believe those polls,” I said. “Neither do the pundits. But they get paid to pretend like they do. Like it means more than it really does.”
“Oh, so like every other job in the world?” my brother said.
“What do you mean?” my sister-in-law said.
“People want to believe in it. Feel informed. And news organizations have something to sell people, in the run-up. It’s a bunch of vague nonsense. The experts’ll tell you that. If you buy them a few beers.”
“No, what do you mean about the pollsters not believing in them? The experts?”
“Well, it’s about calibration. Turns out, if it’s predicted Kamala Harris has a 60 percent chance of pulling it out, for that prediction to actually have been calibrated properly, there would have to be 100 elections of Trump versus Harris, and she’d have to win 60 of them. It’d also take somewhere from 30 to 2500 years to determine if one forecast is better than another. These people are like a bunch of grade-schoolers, just shouting out answers. Grade-schoolers who happen to be really good at math, though, so nobody really questions it.”
“But isn’t that true of the weather, too?” my niece said. “Or, like, anything that gets predicted?”
“Nah, they got millions of observations to take their predictions from,” I said. “There’s way more data. These, you just got the one. Every four years. You can’t compare them.”
There was a pause. “So, who do you think’s gonna take home the belt tonight?” my brother turns to me.
“It’s not a boxing match!” my niece said.
“But, wait,” my sister-in-law says, “If no one really knows how it’ll affect the outcome of the election, and the experts don’t really know or care, then isn’t all this is…is just a fight between two people? For the general amusement of an audience?”
“Games start on Thursday,” I said.
