Many years ago, I fell in love with the word preposterous. Some words latch on for no reason, except we like the sound of them, like Zuazua, the name of major thruway in downtown Monterrey. I came to love that street-name when as a young boy the family would cross the Río Grande at Laredo and Nuevo Laredo to visit the family in México. In the mind of a child, I surmised that Zuazua had to be Zorro’s wife.
Preposterous comes from a Latin word that means out of order, not right. The Emerson College Poll that showed Julián Castro receiving 1.6 percent of the vote in a Texas Democratic presidential primary election is just that, preposterous. The word absurd is also apt. Absurd has its roots in Latin, too, and gives voice to the word sordo in Spanish, which means deaf.
Let me make sure I read this right: The Dallas Morning News paid the Emerson College polling operation to put their ear to the ground and survey Texas Democrats so that if they went to the polls today Julián would get less than two percent of the vote.
I cannot even begin to say how preposterously absurd this is.
I know something about polls, having worked for a polling firm in Miami. But I also worked as an editor at a newspaper. A reporter once handed me a story that seemed – at the touch – outlandish, or out-of-this-world. On the other hand, when I was a columnist on the opinion side I one morning turned in a piece that the copy desk did me the favor of sending – going over my head – to the editor who after lunch came into my office and closed the door softly behind her. ‘I’m not sure about this,’ she said sweetly. Re-reading it, I was chagrined. The column, gratefully, did not run, saving me large measures of grief.
So people make mistakes. I know newspapers are short-staffed these days but did Emerson College just e-mail their results and the Morning News slapped a table into print the same day? A poll that shows Joe Biden at 27.7 percent; Beto O’Rourke, 19; Bernie Sanders, 15.7; Elizabeth Warren, 13.7; Pete Buttigieg, 7.2; and Julián trailing Kamala Harris and Andrew Yang – Andrew Yang, ladies and gentlemen – but tied with Corey Booker at 1.6 percent?
I know a lot of words but I cannot think of anything beyond preposterous and absurd to describe this folly. What about zany? I remember one afternoon when CNN, doing daily tracking in Bush-Gore 2000, reported a poll from the night before that had Gore up, as I recall, by 22 points. And they put it on the screen for millions to see. Sometimes something is just not real. If CNN had reported that day that the north and south poles had moved somehow fantastically to within one mile of each other, that would have been more believable.
One of the problems with a poll like Emerson’s is obvious even to the unschooled: The sample of just 400 Texas Democrats was too small. It is hard to get a good read of market as diverse as Texas by asking only 400 people. It can be done, but 800 would be safer. You can poll 400 people in homogenous Iowa and get a good read but not Texas. And, of course, there was no focus group data to append any semblance of reality.
Perhaps Emerson is right if people are not wanting to throw away their vote, a concept I have always found precious because it is nuts. Perhaps Julián is running the wrong kind of campaign. The tragedy in El Paso certainly helps Beto O’Rourke in Texas, even after his performance immediately after the massacre and the ensuing sadness. He was, as expected, maudlin, even borderline theatrical.
So a former mayor of San Antonio and former member of the Obama Cabinet from Texas, whose congressman-brother Joaquín of the same surname is as much in the news, would not get more than two percent of the vote in a presidential primary in which perhaps as much as 50 percent of the voters casting ballots might be Hispanic/Latino?
Especially as Hispanic/Latinos circle the wagons?
Perhaps Emerson would want a do-over and get it right?
Not a crazy idea.
Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor and assistant state editor of The Austin American-Statesman in Texas.