Tom Bonier and Simon Rosenberg, f*ck you!

Their "hopium" throughout early voting, and using expensive data to do it, was extremely deceptive.

Nine days before Election Day, I did a live stream in which I said that Donald Trump would win the election. I had Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and North Carolina going to Trump. Yes, I had Georgia going Democratic, and I was pretty bullish on Wisconsin and Michigan, but still had Trump winning.

After making this electoral projection, all I heard was the same thing…”Tom Bonier said this”, “Simon Rosenberg said that”, and so on. I was absolutely inundated with people, both online and in normal conversations, talking about how these two were saying that everything was alright for a number of reasons. Whether it was cannibalism of Election Day Republican voters, or Democrats “voting on Election Day”, both of these so-called “data guys” did everything to say that the Democrats were looking good, and not to worry.

Now, I’ve been pretty happy with my nowcast models over the years. They have predicted Florida spot on since 2016 (and were again spot on, only 1.1% off the actual results). I knew that applying my partisan model to other states would be a new challenge. Still, I felt confident that my Nowcast model would do just as well as they did in Florida. And, well, in the end they did (NC only 0.1% off and PA by 3.2%, showing the problems early).

Even with that being the case, I was still getting bombarded, in every direction, with “Tom Bonier said this”, “Simon Rosenberg said that”, and their whimsical theories as to why Democratic numbers were “not as bad” as it seemed. Day after day, comment after comment, it would just not end.

Then I started watching what Tom Bonier tweeted. The only thing that I knew about Bonier before that is a claim that he made in mid-October that there were “no mail-in ballots in Georgia” counted, even though they had been counting them for days (maybe even weeks by then). That should have been my first huge red flag. Still, I started to see how he was trying to drive people to his website to “look at the data”.

Now, I don’t know if there was anything wrong regarding his data, it all seemed to be fine. However, it was his pontification of the data that started looking weird. Instead of being straight forward with what was happening, he spent his time trying to make the data fit the Democratic narrative by adding a lot of caveats. “Super voters doing this”, “Election Day voters doing that”, “Democrats voting on Election Day”, and so on.

As I have already written about this in my last article about Jen O’Malley Dillon, when Democrats start talking like this, I get scared. It’s as if they are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. They are trying to justify numbers that look bad from the outset. Still, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Tom Bonier, and Simon Rosenberg were making all of these claims, and I started wondering why.

It’s at this point where I questioned myself. Was I wrong? Was I looking at the data incorrectly? Surely, these three have a mass of data in which they can formulate their opinion, while I only have the numbers coming directly from each state’s election website. The Harris campaign is a multi-billion-dollar campaign, and TargetSmart (the company that Bonier advises) is a multi-million-dollar corporation with access to tons of data, such as the voter file from most, if not all, states. On top of that, they have people who can look at numbers and figure out what is going on. They might even have access to individual attitudinal data as well.

These people and organizations had all these resources, yet what they are saying didn’t line up with any empirical evidence. They were making guesses about “Democrats voting on Election Day”, with almost every poll that asked questions about voting method showed that Election Day was favoring the Republicans. Nothing they were saying lined up.

It was at this point that I abandoned myself. They MUST know more than me. They HAVE more data than me. They KNOW that people are voting on Election Day! I need to change the way that I’m looking at this.

That’s when these charlatans reeled me in.

It was at this point that I started accepting the narrative that Democrats are going to vote on Election Day, and that the Republicans were cannibalizing their voters. Now the numbers, which had looked bad, now looked better with the Bonier-Rosenberg tinted glasses. Okay, I see it now, Democrats are fine. Democrats are okay. So, all of the swing states look okay!

And then Donald Trump won.

Of course, on a personal level, I was pissed off. I was on track to getting only two states wrong (Wisconsin and Michigan, which is another thing to talk about). If it wasn’t for this little worm they put in my head by these so-called “data experts” (yes, go wild with the RFK Jr. jokes), I would have probably had Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia going for the Republicans. But now, I listened to all the bullshit coming from these people, and I learned my lesson.

But that’s just me. What Bonier and Rosenberg did was not just political malpractice to the highest degree, but also manipulating the trust of voters. Whenever I said something bad about the Democrats’ chances, a Bonier-Rosenberg quote would pop up. These two guys, as well as O’Malley Dillion, brainwashed a lot of people into thinking that Democrats were in good shape. Hell, I, the most cynical of all, even fell into their Stockholm Syndrome trance!

But it wasn’t just voters or casual observers that were royally screwed, but I’m sure a number of campaigns in these swing states, whether for Congress, state legislature, county government or city government, probably listed to them and said “Oh, Tom Bonier said that voters will turn up on Election Day, so we are still doing okay”.

Tom Bonier and Simon Rosenberg deceived EVERYONE!

As someone who has worked in politics, the sad thing is that they will probably be able to continue as if nothing happened. They will continue to grift, give bad information, and, as Simon correctly titles it, giving them “hopium”. This is the Democratic Party political world, where “hope” is a stronger commodity than “facts”.