Le Pen Closer Than Ever to the French Presidency (and to Putin)
Roger Cohen, the reporter on this piece, is out of his mind with paranoia. This is not the first time (see below).
...Le Pen is closer than ever to her cherished goal of becoming president of France, having narrowed the gap with President Emmanuel Macron...
So I paused that article to read "narrowed the gap".
The latest polls, published before the debate, give Le Pen 45%...to Macron’s 55%. That was on April 20, two days ago. I went back to "closer than ever," today.
With polls showing Le Pen gaining about 44.5 percent of the vote to Macron’s 55.5 percent, she is within range of the shocks that produced Brexit and Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2016. As in Britain and the United States, alienation and economic hardship have fed a French readiness to gamble on nationalist dreams.
If Le Pen wins, which is not likely but possible...
That is a deliberate scare tactic by Cohen, directly drawing parallels between the Macron-Le Pen poll gap and the Brexit and Trump '16 poll gaps. And his parallels are not true. This is from 538 in 2016:
And this is from the Financial Times in 2016:
Cohen's statistical analogy between the Macron-Le Pen poll gap and the Brexit poll gap is even more incorrect, off by 9.1%.
It also is flawed structurally. You see those names on the Brexit ballot? What are the names? "Remain" and "Leave." The Brits were not voting for individuals, they were voting for a concept. And they had the fantasy of the unknown vs the reality of the known. They could doll up, and they did, their fantasy however they wished--the British Health Care Service would be flush with cash and the doctors flushed with the bloom of greater service at cheaper prices.
Although Cohen's article was published today, April 22, it was published at 3 a.m. and uses pre-debate (pre-April 20) polling numbers. The Guardian today has an article that includes polling from Thursday, April 21, and Friday, today, April 22:
Polls published on Thursday and Friday after Wednesday’s fractious live TV debate showed Macron’s score stable or rising at between 55.5% and 57.5% and Le Pen’s between 42.5% and 44.5% – a lead for the incumbent of between 10 and 14 points.
So: Roger Cohen, New York Times: Le Pen "closer than ever", "narrowed the gap". The Guardian: "Macron's score stable or rising." Of course Cohen can't find a recent analog in a major Western democracy that had a polling error of 10-14 points--because such a polling error doesn't exist!
Finally, I promised another example of Roger Cohen's paranoia. This was the one I was thinking of. From 2014, "The Great Unraveling," Cohen titled it, which after I read it would describe Cohen. Written in Dickensian style,
It was a time of breakup. The most successful union in history, forged on an island in the North Sea in 1707, headed toward possible dissolution — not because it had failed (refugees from across the seas still clamored to get into it), nor even because of new hatreds between its peoples. The northernmost citizens were bored. They were disgruntled. They were irked...
The reference is to the Scottish independence referendum held on September 18, 2014. Same inane qualifier "possible." The final polls before the referendum included four that sampled on days including Sept. 17. Their average was +4.9% for "No," no to leaving Great Britain. The result of the referendum was +10.6 for "No" an average polling error of 5.7%.
Cohen ceased being a New York Times columnist in 2020. Whether that was voluntary on his part I do not know. He has been the Paris Bureau Chief for the Times since. The Times should get rid of Roger Cohen entirely.