Here’s to Count Binface, the intergalactic space warrior who became what the narrow-minded mainstream media is calling “Britain’s most successful comedy candidate” by winning 26.9% (9,455 votes) in the Clacton by-election, up from the 95 votes he got when he ran against now Prime Minister Andy Burnham in June.
As someone who’s been similarly maligned, having served as Campaign Manager, alongside Designated Human Eric Hensal, for Murray Hill Inc., the first corporation to run for Congress, I stand with Count Binface!
Here’s the op-ed we wrote for Politico, and here’s the campaign video which caught the attention of the Washington Post and led to me being quoted on the front page.
And here’s my appearance on cable news. I didn’t have a garbage can over my head, but I did manager to look shifty, on account of not knowing where the camera was.
But Count Binface left us in the dust—space dust. Here’s what one reader here called the “second best political spot” he’d ever seen. (What was the first, Daniel?)1
The Guardian published a visual guide to the careers of Nigel Farage and Count Binface that began by putting this conversation in the right perspective.
Nigel Farage has been standing in British elections since 1994, when he narrowly beat Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony party into fourth place in a Commons byelection. He was elected five times to the European parliament before achieving his goal of abolishing his seat.
Finally, after 30 years of trying, he was elected to the Commons as member for Clacton in 2024. He resigned that hard-won seat in July after a parliamentary inquiry was launched into a £5m gift he accepted from a Thailand-based businessman shortly before the general election, but is standing again in the resulting byelection on Thursday. The other major parties are not putting up candidates, so the chief contenders, according to the limited polling, are Farage and Count Binface.
For more about the Monster Raving Loony Party and Screaming Lord Sutch, see my column about watching the BBC coverage of the July 2024 election, including the Running of the Clerks—and follow the links!
Nigel Farage is a dangerous man who stirs up hate by taking advantage of voters’ distrust of politicians, alienation from politics and grievances against a system that perpetuates economic inequality, which he blames on immigration.
Why shouldn’t an intergalactic space warrior be the one to call him out? As a corporate candidate running for a real Congressional seat2, Murray Hill was able to frame our serious message about money and politics in something easily understood—the nuts and bolts of a political campaign, rather than the ivory tower of reformers.
We knew that people were fed up with politics, and we wanted to show why they should think about caring again.
Which brings me to Francine Hong, and the widely reported failure of Democratic Socialism. Or is it still a clear and present danger? It depends on what you read.
But read this.
How the Polls Got It So Wrong in Wisconsin
The article explores why a candidate who seemed to have a 20-point lead on Election Day ended up losing. It makes two important points.3
Polls expected more young voters to show up
Even after an internal poll found that Mr. Crowley was trailing Ms. Hong last week, his campaign manager predicted that polls would not reflect the primary results.
In a memo to supporters on Aug. 5 obtained by The New York Times, the campaign manager, Garren Randolph, argued that Wisconsin surveys overrepresented voters between the ages of 18 and 45. In some cases, polls expected twice as many young voters as actually showed up to vote in 2018 and 2022. Ms. Hong was strongest among young voters, according to the internal poll.
Across elections, primary voters tend to be older, and Wisconsin is no exception. Older voters and moderates were also more likely to remain undecided until close to the end, Mr. Franklin said, based on his polling data.
And also
Hong’s supporters may have been more eager to respond to polls
Chaz Nuttycombe, executive director of the firm State Navigate, which conducted polls in Wisconsin, suggested that Ms. Hong’s early and enthusiastic supporters may simply have been more willing to respond to polls, thus skewing the results.
“One candidate’s supporters were just more eager to answer the poll,” Mr. Nuttycombe said.
Read this great analysis from Dan Pfeiffer in which he says,
However, the assumption that this is all just another giant polling error is based on a misunderstanding of how polling works. I know this is a hard pill to swallow, but polling isn’t designed to tell us which candidate is going to win. It’s supposed to tell us which candidate is winning at the moment the poll is taken. It’s a snapshot in time. Crowley, who had left and then reentered the race, was gaining, and Hong, who was under tremendous scrutiny, was floundering in several high-profile interviews. There was undoubtedly a lot of movement in the final days. If you compare the final State Navigate poll to the results, you can see what happened.
A story in National Journal headlined “Horse-Race Polls Are Not Fixable” said,
“The entire concept of polling depends on having a set population from which one can take a random sample and get a generally representative snapshot. Pre-election polls have no existing population—the election hasn’t happened yet, and voting isn’t compulsory in the U.S., so we simply don’t have a population of who voted until all the polls have closed on Election Day.”
“We can’t remedy that. The population of voters will never exist prior to the election. Expecting polls to be able to consistently, accurately predict an election is asking more than is statistically and theoretically possible.”
Campaigns that are counting on the youth vote are rolling the dice. I believe that strategy worked for Zohran Mamdani and it probably helped defeat the 78-year old, 14-term Congressman John Larson in Connecticut. But as I wrote in my Tip O’Neil-quoting column here,
The left will continue to win in greater numbers than they used to, because there are more people who embrace left-wing ideas and they are better organized than Eugene Victor Debs. But don’t write off the “Democratic establishment.” Most Democrats are winning their primaries the old-fashioned way, by knocking on doors, energizing their base, and meeting voters.
Polling done by Ipsos for FiveThirtyEight before the 2020 election showed that 78% of young people said they planned to vote in 2020.
But according to the Census, voter turnout that year was lowest among those ages 18-24, at 51.4%.
Before the 2022 election, 40% of Gen Z voters told Harvard’s Institute of Politics that they intended to vote.
The actual turnout was 23%, according to CIRCLE, the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
And in 2024, 42 percent of Gen Z voted, but voters over 50 were still in the driver’s seat—63.1 percent in 2022, and 52 percent in 2024.
Politico quotes Cyrus Beschloss, Generation Lab’s founder and CEO, making a similar point:
“Young people are voting at just obscenely low rates,” Beschloss said.
Why am I saying “I told you so” about Francine Hong? Because her lead may have been inflated by false hopes about Gen Z turnout, and the impossibility of knowing in advance who is going to turn out on Election Day.
And as I said in that May column, “we still have to convince more people that in fact, change does not happen on their phones and their votes matter.”
Fads like Democratic Socialism may appear to be solutions, but they fall apart in the light of practicality and a realistic understanding of American politics. If this was a parliamentary democracy, there might be room for a third party like that, but we’ve got two and that’s not going to change.
And Democratic Socialists (many of whom would be at a loss to define what that means), are not going to remake the Democratic Party.
In the meantime, we need more ways to get people’s attention about what’s wrong with politics. Thank you, Count Binface!
At one time, most people thought it was Tony Schwartz’ famous “Daisy Spot.”
sort of…read that Politico column.
Well, the Times cites five, but I like these two.
Yes, the Daisy spot. And also up there is Paul Wellstone's "Looking for Rudy" spot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfZuplTlu4M Also, only shown once as an ad.