My original intention this week was to take a deep dive into the Senate seats up for grabs in this year’s midterms. Before I get to that, though, there’s an issue I sort of danced around in my last two articles previewing the 2022 elections related to polling, and, more specifically, if we can trust campaign polls.
In those two articles, I provided you with a synopsis of the factors political scientists and serious political pundits take into account when trying to, if not predict what could happen in the upcoming elections, at least get a sense for the direction the elections are headed in. Some of these factors are endemic to elections in general (i.e., the fact this is a midterm election, the president’s approval rating, the basic competitiveness of individual seats, etc.), while others are factors specific to the 2022 elections alone (i.e., inflation, the end of Roe, the pandemic, an unhinged former president with a cult-like following who has all but announced he’s going to run for president again, etc.). But there’s another, more direct way to get a sense for the trajectory of these races, and that’s by looking at polls of the races themselves. A site like RealClearPolitics keeps a running tab of all the publicly-released polls they can find for every Senate, House, and gubernatorial race in the land.
Yet some question how reliable those polls are. First, let me dispel one common criticism of polling, which is that pollsters don’t question enough people (usually only a few hundred out of populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands if not millions) to accurately represent the public at large.
The thing to understand, though, is that’s kind of the point of polling: Figuring out the views of the population at large based on the views of a smaller sample of that population. It would be very costly and time-consuming to ask millions of people what they intend to do.
More to the point, though, statisticians have learned you can get a pretty good idea for the opinions held by a large group of people simply by surveying a much smaller yet representative sample of that population. The two most important elements to that science are a.) Making sure everyone in the population you are surveying is eligible to be selected so you don’t end up excluding certain groups from your sample; and b.) Making sure those selected for your survey are selected randomly so you don’t end up biasing your results in favor of the views of the non-random group selected for the survey. (This famously happened in 1936, when the magazine The Literary Digest predicted Alf Landon would win that year’s presidential election with 57.1% of the vote. Landon ended up winning 36.5% compared to Franklin Roosevelt’s 60.8%. How did that happen? Rather than base their predictions on a random sample of the American population, the magazine instead asked their readers to voluntarily complete the survey. It turned out those most interested in filling out the survey were Republican. The Literary Digest folded eighteen months later.)
It’s at this point, though, that the science of polling becomes something like an art, with pollsters trying to figure out how to design their surveys to yield the most accurate results possible. For example, pollsters just can’t contact people on landline telephones anymore because that would exclude people (presumably a disproportionate number of younger people) who don’t have landlines. By the same token, pollsters just can’t contact people via cellphone, either, as that would tend to exclude a presumably older and perhaps poorer portion of the population. Consequently, pollsters need to consider how they contact people and how many people they contact via a particular method. They also have to think about when they contact people, as people are generally available to answer the phone at different times of the day depending on when they work. But those are just some examples pollsters have to account for; there are many, many more factors they need to think about.
Savvy pollsters may peak at their results to see if those they’ve contacted are actually representative of the population at large and alter their samples accordingly. Perhaps the most famous example of why this matters happened in 2004, when exit polls on Election Day predicted Democrat John Kerry would beat Republican President George W. Bush. The Bush camp was pretty dejected until Bush political advisor Karl Rove sifted through the poll results and found women overrepresented in the sample when compared to anticipated turn-out models. When that got balanced out, Bush fared much better in the polls, which the final results bore out. To account for such a possibility, pollsters may adjust their samples if they find their random selection of respondents isn’t representative of the population at large. They have to be careful when they do this—there may be a reason a group is under- or overrepresented in a poll based, for example, on how motivated the members of a group are to vote—but it’s generally an accepted practice.
That brings up another aspect of the art of polling specific to electoral polling: The difference between “eligible voters,” “registered voters,” and “likely voters,” and deciding what constitutes a “likely voter.” It’s a much easier task to poll eligible voters—you simply ask the respondent if they’re over 18—and since pollsters can get their hands on voter registration lists, it’s also relatively easy to poll registered voters. It becomes harder to poll likely voters, though. To begin with, it’s more time-consuming because you have to ask someone an additional question. It’s also hard to determine who qualifies as a “likely” voter, particularly if someone says, “I might vote” that they’re a 3 on a 5-point scale gauging their interest in voting. Furthermore, a lot of people don’t like telling others they’re not interested in voting since that makes them look like a bad citizen, which can skew the results. To account for that, some pollsters ask respondents questions to see if they have the characteristics of a likely voter (i.e., if they’ve voted before, their age, their income, etc.) That has the potential to be misleading, too, however, especially if a group acts in a way that doesn’t correspond with a historic trend. Regardless, good pollsters focus on likely voters and try to solve this dilemma.
But back to the initial point, which is the belief among some people that the sample sizes polls employ to gauge public opinion are too small to provide a good snapshot of the population at large. This may surprise many, but in a population of over 5000 people (which every political poll you’re going to see between now and November is dealing with) you actually don’t need a fairly large sample size to get accurate results. Whether you’re dealing with 10,000 people or 100,000,000 people, if you survey about 400 people, you can count on a margin of error of +/- 5%, which isn’t bad, particularly considering that increasing that sample size to 1000 will only earn you a 1-2% drop in the margin of error. Beyond 1000 people, the margin of error won’t drop much below +/-3%, meaning there’s diminishing returns for increasing the sample size at that point. (Only in-depth, super comprehensive surveys like those conducted by Pew would want to expand their sample into the thousands of people.) So after you get above a few hundred people, sample size really doesn’t matter. What does matter are the scientific and artistic concerns related to methodology that I raised earlier.
Yet that doesn’t eliminate the concerns some have today with the reliability of polling. Since 2016—when pollsters had predicted the UK would vote no on Brexit and Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump—the polling industry has been in something of a crisis. Pollsters concluded their polling models underestimated Trump’s support either because their models did not account for the unique voters Trump mobilized or because their surveys under-polled Trump’s supporters. (Some believed respondents had a tendency not to report their support for Trump because of the social stigma attached to him. Others hypothesized Trump voters by nature had a tendency to avoid participating in surveys they perceived as extensions of the political establishment or were just hard to reach.) Pollsters were relieved, then, in 2018, when the adjustments they made to their survey methodology predicted the outcomes of those midterm elections fairly accurately. But then 2020 came along and pollsters yet again significantly underestimated Trump’s support in an election that turned into something of a nail biter (Biden won the popular vote handily, but Trump came a few thousand votes shy in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona of flipping the Electoral College in his favor.)
Understandably, all this has Democrats on edge. Their polling against Republicans in the upcoming midterms has improved quite a bit over the summer. Some Senate surveys indicate they’re blowing out opponents in races that should be closer (i.e., Pennsylvania and New Hampshire) and holding their own or in the lead in races they should probably be losing in this midterm environment (i.e., Arizona, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Wisconsin). But Nate Cohn of the New York Times wrote this week the warning lights should be flashing for Democrats:
But in this case, good for Wisconsin Democrats might be too good to be true. The state was ground zero for survey error in 2020, when pre-election polls proved to be too good to be true for Mr. Biden. In the end, the polls overestimated Mr. Biden by about eight percentage points. Eerily enough, [Democratic Senate nominee Mandela] Barnes is faring better than expected [against Republican Senator Ron Johnson] by a similar margin.
The Wisconsin data is just one example of a broader pattern across the battlegrounds: The more the polls overestimated Mr. Biden last time, the better Democrats seem to be doing relative to expectations. And conversely, Democrats are posting less impressive numbers in some of the states where the polls were fairly accurate two years ago, like Georgia.
Democrats are desperate to know what’s really going on. Could it be the backlash to Dobbs and the threat posed to American democracy by Donald Trump really are overriding the economic fundamentals (namely, high inflation) that would ordinarily result in an electoral thrashing in November? Or should we just expect the polls from here on out to consistently underestimate Republicans’ level of support? Or, since these are midterm elections, might the polling turn out to be as accurate as in 2018, when Trump’s name didn’t appear on the ballot? Or, since Trump is now practically synonymous with the Republican Party brand, should we expect the sort of polling error that occurred in 2016 and 2020 when the ballot did include Trump’s name? Or was the 2020 election so weird—held in the middle of a pandemic when millions of Americans could suddenly vote from home—that we shouldn’t even use it as a baseline for gauging future turnout?
Of course, it’s also possible the polls have not only accounted for last cycle’s polling error (as pollsters did in 2018 following 2016) but that they’ve actually overcorrected, meaning they’re underestimating support for Democrats. If that’s the case
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight recently made an argument along those lines, noting (among other things) it is hard to predict polling bias in any one election cycle by examining bias in previous elections and that Democrats in special elections this year have actually performed better than the polling anticipated.
So what does that mean? Are Democrats too optimistic heading into the fall? Or are they too pessimistic?
The first thing I would note is something I mentioned earlier, which is that despite its air of objectivity, polling is still a human endeavor that requires the exercise of human judgment to account for the uncertainty and unpredictability that is always present in human affairs. I’m not arguing here that pollsters are intentionally skewing their results or flying by the seat of their pants when they’re designing their surveys. Quite the opposite, in fact: I think it’s fair to assume the nation’s major pollsters are very meticulous when it comes to methodology and survey design. It’s just that they’re trying to measure a human activity that contains a lot of uncertainty and using their best educated guesses to account for that. They’ve got to determine, among other things, what makes someone a “likely” voter, what proportion of their respondents should be from either party given the context of a midterm vs. presidential election, if there are certain groups they’re in danger of missing, etc., etc., etc.
We could demand that pollsters use past elections as models for their surveys (which, in fact, they do already; it gets them about 90-95% of the way when it comes to survey design) but every election cycle is different and pollsters working today are focused exclusively on predicting the current election rather than telling us how past elections would have been decided by today’s crop of voters. They need to account for variables unique to the current election cycle.
In normal elections, this might only require small adjustments to a pollster’s methodology. If you’ve been following election forecasters over the past month, however, you’ll notice they’re really hedging their bets, as a number of high-profile variables unique to this cycle—chief among them Trump and the issue of abortion—have the potential to add a significant degree of volatility to our politics. Pundits are working overtime to determine if these factors really are reshaping expectations for the midterms or if they’re just generating a bunch of noise within the expected electoral pattern. And let’s face it: Ever since that escalator deposited Trump in the middle of our national Id back in the summer of 2015, many assumptions people harbored about American politics have been upended. That’s put a lot of political analysts on guard.
As for me, I’m not paying as much attention to polling this cycle as I have in past elections. It’s not that I think the pollsters are bad at polling but that there is reason to believe there are variables in play this cycle that introduce a fairly significant margin for error in the polls’ findings. Maybe Democrats really are defying midterm expectations. Or maybe that’s all a mirage. I don’t know, and if I did, I wouldn’t be confident I actually know what I know. What I do know is that based on recent history and (mostly) controlling for variables like candidate quality, issue valence, the Trump factor, or any kind of midterm/economic/party drag, there are some elections I simply expect to be more competitive than others:
Senate (Close races): Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin
Senate (Wave races): Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, Utah
House: Too many and too obscure to list. The added complication is that most of these districts are “new” in the wake of the latest round of redistricting. A list of competitive seats can be found in the final chart on this page.
Governor (Close races): Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin
Governor (Wave races): Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oregon, Texas
So rather than obsess over where these races stand on a poll-by-poll basis, every time I see a poll reporting on the state of a race, I’m just going to remind myself these races should be competitive and leave it at that. Not getting my hopes up or down this time around based on a poll trying to make sense of this political environment.
(That said, given the variables in play this election and the way they could scramble the outcome, I think voter enthusiasm, voter turnout, and get out the vote [GOTV] operations will play a major role in deciding this contest. One thing we know about midterms is that way fewer people tend to vote in them than in presidential elections:
That gap between presidential-election turnout and midterm-election turnout leaves a lot of room for both parties to add voters to their column in midterm elections. Since Republicans are already out of power, they presumably already have the motivation to head to the polls. But Democrats have an issue—abortion—that can help maximize their turnout as well. The presence of Trump could boost both Republicans and Democrats, as we saw in 2018 and 2020. It will be interesting to see if voters maintain the enthusiasm to vote they exhibited in 2018, which really was extraordinary given recent trends. A major x-factor: The resumption of the 1/6 hearings at the end of September, which I believe have the potential to demoralize Republican voters and complicate the messaging of Republican candidates.)
Let me give you one more reason not to pay attention to the polls: It’s good for your health. You’ll feel a lot less stressed. What if I told you the four most recent polls out of Ohio concerning the Senate race there reported D+6, D+1, R+3 and R+5? Which of those polls most accurately reflected the views of the Ohio electorate? Isn’t the poll with your preferred outcome the one you really want to trust? How would you research these polls’ methodologies and models? How would you know the assumptions about the electorate incorporated into these polls were the correct assumptions? Wouldn’t it just be easier to stick with what we know (a conclusion these polls apparently support): That Ohio will probably be a competitive race this cycle? And if you knew one poll has Democrat Tim Ryan up 6 and another poll has Republican J.D. Vance up 5, what exactly would you do with that information? Or would you only feel more uncertain about the race? And wouldn’t the next poll only add to your uncertainty? Maybe you’d feel more certain about the outcome the closer we get to the actual election, but at that point, why not just wait for the actual results?
Polls aren’t intended to persuade. They’re informed acts of fortune telling attempting to predict an event we’ll know the outcome of soon enough. They don’t have much utility for a citizen in a deliberative democracy. So my advice: Save yourself the stress and just ignore them. The polls you’ll want to pay attention to are the ones that close on Election Day.
Signals and Noise
Despite falling gas prices, inflation remained stubbornly high this month.
I don’t quite understand this, but it’s something economists are starting to sound the alarm about: “Bond Market Volatility is as High As It Was In the 2008 Financial Crisis as the Fed Accelerates the Runoff of Its $9 Trillion Balance Sheet” by Matthew Fox, for Market Insider.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC) has proposed a ban on abortions after 15 weeks. While congressional Democratic leadership has ruled out that proposal, I don’t necessarily think a 15-20 week ban is a bad idea nor one Democrats ought to reject out of hand. (You can read why I think that here.) More significantly, however, Mitch McConnell has squashed Graham’s proposal as well, revealing how fraught the abortion issue is inside the GOP. Some Republicans, like former Vice President Mike Pence (whom, BTW, Trump this week ruled out as a future running mate) have called for a national abortion ban with few to no exceptions. Others want to leave the issue up to the states. Graham may have landed on a compromise position, but it’s one that clearly makes his party squirm.
(Before continuing, so long as we’re on the topic of Senator Goose, here’s what he dished about MAGA Maverick a few days after the House began an impeachment inquiry over the Ukraine scandal:
In reference to a group of evangelical supporters, he said Mr. Trump told him, “Those f***ing Christians love me.”
Goose called him a “a lying motherf***er” who’s still “a lot of fun to hang out with.”
In his estimation, “[Trump] could kill fifty people on our side and it wouldn’t matter.” And it wouldn’t matter to Goose either.)
Sen. Marco Rubio (FL) has signed onto Graham’s abortion bill. His opponent in his upcoming Senate race, Rep. Val Demings, said in a statement via her spokesman, “Marco Rubio has never been shy about his support for extremist abortion bans and criminalizing doctors, and cosponsoring this federal ban is just another step in his fight to take away women’s freedom. As a 27-year law enforcement officer who investigated cases of rape and incest, Chief Demings is committed to protecting Florida’s women and girls. Floridians will hold Rubio accountable for his out of touch stance in November.” Rubio’s campaign replied, “The radicals here are Democrats like Val Demings, who supports abortion up until the moment of birth — which only a few countries like North Korea and China allow — while expecting taxpayers to foot the bill.”
West Virginia has banned nearly all abortions. Abortion would only be legal in the state to save a pregnant person’s life or in cases of rape and incest so long as the victim reports the crime. (My question: What if the victim reports the crime but does not name the alleged assailant? Or if the police do not charge the alleged assailant? Or if the alleged assailant pleads not guilty? As soon as I finished typing this, I learned less than 1/3 of sexual assaults are reported, only 16% result in an arrest, and only 9% result in a conviction.)
The state of Louisiana bans abortion unless the mother faces a substantial risk of death or impairment or if the pregnancy is termed “medically futile.” Yet a Louisiana woman carrying a fetus suffering from acrania (a non-survivable condition in which the fetus does not develop a skull) had to travel to New York to get an abortion after doctors feared they would run afoul of Louisiana’s law if they performed one.
Here’s what Ohio Republican nominee for Senate J.D. Vance said about abortion a few months ago (Warning: The third sentence is a doozy): “Let’s say Roe v. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion in 2022 − let’s say 2024. Then every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. Of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity… If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening because it’s really creepy? I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually.” I think his use of the word “creepy” there is projection.
Also, J.D.: Are you aware of something called “Cincinnati chili”? Perhaps not, so I provide a picture:
Anyways, this chili heaped on spaghetti noodles topped with what appears to be a whole bag of shredded cheese is apparently a beloved foodstuff in the state of Ohio. Out-of-staters may disagree with that notion (not that it is “beloved” but that it is a “foodstuff”) but the thing is there are probably people (disproportionately Reds fans) in California who would hop on a plane I can only presume has been chartered by Hardee’s aficionado Mike Lindell (I imagine the FBI lying in wait for weeks) to consume the dish OG Deadspin writer Albert Burneko has memorialized as “diarrhea sludge.” And I’m fine with that. You want to have an argument about whether abortion should be regulated at a national or state level, go right ahead J.D., but I think your argument against federalism should amount to a little more than “IT”S THE BOOGEYMAN!” Didn’t your Ivy League education teach you that?
Don Trump “ReTruthed” this imaQe on his QTruthSQocial AQQount last Q.
Trump also recently called-in to a small rally held at the DC jail in support of the 1/6 rioters imprisoned there. The person who answered his call was the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the rioter killed that day by a Capitol police officer as she attempted to breach a doorway leading to the House chambers. Two days after Trump’s cameo, the loser pictured below in the “Camp Auschwitz” graphic hoodie
got sentenced to 75 days in jail by a DC court. Have to wonder if he’s one of the guys Trump intends to pardon/is financially supporting.
Here’s Sean Hannity earning a D in Persuasive Speaking 101:
By Andrea Bernstein, for ProPublica: “For Donald Trump, Information Has Always Been Power” (“Ever since the FBI came out of Mar-a-Lago last month with box after box of documents, some of them highly sensitive and classified, questions have wafted over the criminal investigation: Why did former President Donald Trump sneak off with the stash to begin with?…I’ve covered Trump and his business for decades, and there’s something…people around him have told me over and over again: Trump knows the value of hoarding sensitive, secret information and wielding it regularly and precisely for his own ends. The 76-year-old former host of ‘The Apprentice’ came up in the world of New York tabloids, where trading gossip was the coin of the realm. Certainly sometimes he just wanted to show off that he knew things about important people. But he also has used compromising information to pressure elected officials, seek a commercial advantage or blunt accountability and oversight.”)
News clippings? What, is this guy into scrapbooking or something?
This advertisement, which can be found in six red states, is petty:
This, meanwhile, is both petty and cruel: “DeSantis Claims Credit for Sending 2 Planes Carrying Migrants to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts” Jonathan Chait of New York has a few extra details: 1.) Because Florida does not have a land border with Mexico (and thus few undocumented immigrants setting foot for the first time in the United States in Florida), DeSantis sent staff to Texas to lure migrants onto a plane with the promise of expediting their paperwork in Boston. All of that, of course, was a lie; 2.) DeSantis gave FOX News exclusive coverage of his stunt; and 3.) When someone on social media noted the least DeSantis could have done was notify Martha’s Vineyard he was sending fifty people in need of assistance to their island, his spokesman said it was no different than what a human trafficker bringing people to the United States does, which Chait points out means that DeSantis appears to have as much “interest in safeguarding human welfare [as] an illegal smuggling operation does.”
Here’s Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark with more on the morality of DeSantis’s actions.
DeSantis’ dishonor flights may have also violated Florida law, as the flights did not originate from “this state” (read: Florida.)
Also, most of the passengers on the flights were from Venezuela. DeSantis should explain to his Venezuelan, Cuban, and anti-communist constituents why he isn’t aiding refugees fleeing a nation’s socialist autocracy.
For more on DeSantis, read Matt Flagenheimer’s profile in the New York Times. Flagenheimer describes DeSantis as the “more disciplined heir” to Don Trump. DeSantis is definitely a more savvy politician than Trump, which also makes him more dangerous.
But Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times disagrees: “He may be a more competent Trump in terms of his ability to use the levers of state to amass power, but he’s also meaner and more rigid, without the soft edges and eccentricity of the actual Donald Trump.” Bouie sees DeSantis as a poor imitation of Trump.
“You take the most conservative colonels, you promote them to general. Not because the ideology is important, but because the conservative colonels will be able to leave the ideology aside.”—Arizona Republican nominee for Senate Blake Masters
Also illogical: When asked in March about a subversive thinker more people should know about, Masters said, “Theodore Kaczynski.” Yup, the Unabomber.
By Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report: “Democrats Winning Over the ‘Meh’ Voter” (“Democratic Senate candidates have been consistently outpolling Biden’s job approval ratings in their states. And, when it comes to the House, the share of voters who say they would vote for a Democrat for Congress is anywhere from 1 to 8 points higher than the percentage of voters who say they approve of the job Biden is doing. For example, the most recent Quinnipiac survey showed Biden’s job approval rating at 40 percent, yet 47 percent of voters said they were supporting a Democrat for Congress in November. In other words, many voters who are unhappy with Biden are nonetheless committed to supporting a Democratic candidate in November.” More: “[A]mong the 17 percent of voters who say they ‘somewhat disapprove’ of Biden, 43 percent say they are planning to vote Democratic this fall, compared to 29 percent who say they’ll vote Republican. In other words, those who are ‘meh’ about Biden are voting for Democrats. This is not something that we’ve seen before.”)
Not a good look, for Congress, particularly congressional Democrats: More members of the House have voted remotely because of “the pandemic” in 2022 than in 2021. As Sam Brodey’s article for The Daily Beast puts it, “A policy that was originally intended as a way to keep members of Congress working in a pandemic has, ironically, turned into a way for them to avoid showing up in Washington for work.”
Virginia’s Republican Attorney General is creating an “election integrity” unit.
But…ELECTION FRAUD ALERT! The FBI has arrested the Rensselaer County (New York) Elections Commissioner for fraudulently obtaining and filing absentee ballots for eight individuals without their permission. The Elections Commissioner is a Republican.
Here’s a reality check: A recent Axios-Ipsos poll found roughly 30-40% of all Americans hold anti-Democratic beliefs and Democrats are often as likely as Republicans to hold these beliefs. It doesn’t necessarily surprise me, but I think there is a lesson here about how leaders need to be careful about indulging these impulses.
Texts have revealed that former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant (R) helped steer $5 million earmarked as welfare funds to a project to build a volleyball facility at the University of Southern Mississippi spearheaded by Brett Favre. Bryant had earlier said he had nothing to do with the project. Approximately $77 million from the fund were misspent in total, and the official overseeing the project has pleaded guilty to 13 felony counts related to the scandal.
All accounts indicate Putin’s army is reeling in Ukraine. Here’s something from a retired American general to ponder: Might Russia be on the verge of collapse?
Europe may have another far-right prime minister soon in Giorgia Meloni, who would also be Italy’s first female prime minister. There’s a little more pragmatism to her approach, but she’s still a fire-breather on cultural issues. Also, in Sweden, a far-right party with neo-Nazi roots received the second-highest number of votes in their recently concluded parliamentary elections and is poised to become a power broker in their national government.
I’m all for this: From Business Insider, “The US is Moving One Step Closer to Letting Americans File Their Taxes Online for Free Directly to the IRS, Cutting Out Private Companies Like TurboTax and H&R Block”
Yvon Chouinard, the founder of outdoor apparel maker Patagonia, just gave his company away by transferring his family’s ownership to a trust and non-profit that will ensure Patagonia’s $100 million in annual profits will go to fight climate change. Is this a new business model?
I wrote about Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge last week. Here’s a better article by David Schoenfield of ESPN on what Judge has accomplished this season and how it compares to other momentous seasons (i.e., Ruth in 1927, Mantle in 1956, Yastrzemski in 1967, etc.)