[Marxism] Juan Cole responds to dissident pollsters (and my comments)

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Juan Cole defends his judgment that Mousavi was elected president of Iran in
the last elections. He omits the fact that he declared that Ahmadinejad (and
Khamenei) had the support at most of 20 percent of the people. Thus any vote
of less than 80 percent for Mousavi was implicitly faked.

In my opinion, this is an indefensible underestimation of the support for
the Islamic Republic regime, which I do not support. It has no support in
any known facts. The Ballen-Doherty Washington Post report clearly
contradicts this, stating the support for Ahmadinejad at a certain point as
34 percent at one stage in the election campaign, with only 14 percent  for
Mousavi.

In fact, there is a basis for believing in a surge of support for Mousavi,
who I believe (correct me if I am wrong) campaigned across the country and
not just in Tehran,

But the starting point of Cole's analysis (as with Robert Dreyfuss",
although, unlike Dreyfuss, he draws no conclusions about the danger that the
Ahmadinejad supporters represent to all humanity, in contrast to his support
until now for engagement with Iran -- was this only because he thought
Mousavi will win).

I will put my read of the election bluntly. I think the Islamic command (the
Supreme Guide and his circle) decided that they could not afford a Moussavi
victory, a runoff, or even a close vote. They decided on a landslide. I
DON'T THINK THE VOTES WERE MISCOUNTED, I AM NOT CONVINCED THEY WERE COUNTED
AS ALL. I think the results were telegraphed to the counters in every
province as the results. Thus whether or not there was a landslide, The vote
was not stolen. The top leaders themselves may not know who actually won,
and may not care.

Thus it is not excluded that Ahmadinejad won, or won by a landslidem  or
that a runoff was required. And the same is possible.

Finally, I challenge the claim that the vote was between the
proletarian-peasants of South Tehran and environs, and the bourgeoisie,
backed by those wicked students. (Remember Eldridge Cleaver: One worker is
worth 100 petty bourgeois students -- which I always considered useful
advice about how many students I had to bring with me if I wanted to buy a
worker. Well, you never know when you might need one.)

I don't think it is a crime for people to demand bourgeois democratic rights
that they have never had. Nor do I assume that it is a crime to favor
parliamentary democracy when your history includes hardly any experience of
it. In other words, I do not believe that any movement that adopts a color
is a CIA front. And I do not believe that the Soviet Union fell because of a
CIA plot. (Was Reagan the first president to consider PLOTTING AGAINST THE
SOVIET UNION. My, my, 60 plus years wasted by unimaginative presidents.)
Fred Feldman



Noting my skepticism about the announced outcome of Friday's presidential
elections in Iran, readers have been asking me what I think about this WaPo
op-ed by Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR200906140
1757.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 >  pointing out that a scientifically weighted
Project for a Terror Free Tomorrow poll
<http://www.terrorfreetomorrow.org/upimagestft/TFT%20Iran%20Survey%20Report%
200609.pdf >  in mid-May found Ahmadinejad beating Mir-Hosain Mousavi by a 2
to 1 margin.

I have enormous respect for Ballen, PFTFT and Doherty  the New America
Foundation.  

But as a mere social historian I would say that the poll actually tends to
confirm some of my doubts about the fraudulence of the announced electoral
tallies.

The poll did not find that Ahmadinejad had majority support.  It found that
the level of support for the incumbent was 34%, with Mousavi at 14%. 

27% said that they were undecided. (Some 22% of respondents are not
accounted for by any of the 4 candidates or by the undecided category, and I
cannot find an explanation for this. Did they plan to write in for other
candidates?  A little over a quarter of respondents did say they wanted more
choice than they were being given.)

Here's the important point:  60% of the 27% who said they were undecided
favored political reform.  As Ballen wrote at that time:



' A close examination of our survey results reveals that the race may
actually be closer than a first look at the numbers would indicate. More
than 60 percent of those who state they don't know who they will vote for in
the Presidential elections reflect individuals who favor political reform
and change in the current system.' 



That is, supporters of the challenger's principles may not quite have
committed to him at that point but were likely leaning to him on the basis
of his platform.  They were 16% of the sample.  This finding suggests that
in mid-May, Mousavi may have actually had 30% support.  

If Ahmadinejad got all of the other 11% among undecideds, the race would
have stood at 45% to 30%.

Ballen noted in May,


'The current mood indicates that none of the candidates will likely pass the
50 percent threshold needed to automatically win; meaning that a second
round runoff between the two highest finishers, as things stand, Mr.
Ahmadinejad and
Mr. Moussavi, is likely.' 



That is, based on his polling, Ballen did not expect Ahmadinejad to get to
51%.

In fact, the regime has announced that Ahmadinejad received almost 63% of
the vote.  So while Ballen's polling does suggest that it was plausible that
Ahmadinejad could have won a run-off election against Mousavi, it indicated
that Ahmadinejad was unlikely to win a first round.

Moreover, given the PFTFT numbers, all of the undecideds would have had to
vote for Ahmadinejad in order for him to get over 60% of the total vote.
That outcome seems to me so statistically unlikely as to rate as an
impossibility. 

Note that the regime is not merely claiming that Ahmadinejad barely avoided
a run-off by getting 51% of the vote.  They are saying he received nearly
two-thirds of the vote.  No such outcome was predicted by the PFTFT poll--
quite the opposite.
  
So my commonsense, non-technical, historian's comment is that the poll may
well have been sound, and Ballen's original conclusions may also have been.
But the tenor of his WaPo article contradicts the poll in seeming to find a
63% margin of victory for Ahmadinejad plausible on the basis of it.

Particularly puzzling is that he seems to have forgotten his own observation
that the race in May was closer than it seemed, since 60% of undecideds
identified with reform principles.


End



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