As we move closer to the actual day of our vote the media is still struggling with ways to report Trump and his minions….there have been many excuses for the acts and words of his adoring throngs…….the worse aggravation has been the media and all those damn polls.
The American people are being smothered by public opinion polls. Every day there seems to be some new poll expected to give precious insight into the presidential horse race that the news media is so obsessed with. As I try to decipher what these polls mean, I often find myself muttering, “Will someone please save me from this troublesome priest?”
In the aggregate, the polls now show that Kamala Harris is leading Donald Trump nationally in the popular vote. However, she and Trump are basically tied in the key battleground states. Focus groups and other data also show a very close race. This is because the American people are politically unsophisticated and are easily manipulated to believe things that are not true. Democracy, by design, is messy and the politically ill-informed have the same number of votes (one) as the politically savvy and engaged.
Contributing to the confusion is how the mainstream news media’s unhealthy obsession with polling has created a type of tunnel vision and myopia where other lenses — that would likely provide better insights — for understanding the Age of Trump and the larger democracy crisis have been mostly ignored. The Washington Post’s Jen Rubin recently summarized “five major media fails”:
1. Ignoring Trump’s mental decline (until the last few weeks of the election). 2. Excess focus on meaningless polls. 3. Failure to engage historians and psychiatrists to provide context for Trump’s fascism and narcissism 4. Fixation on more details from Harris, demanding none from Trump 5. Consistent negative/inaccurate portrayal of the economy 6. Fueling Trump’s constant lies by asking Harris and others to respond.
In a recent essay at The American Prospect, Rick Perlstein echoes Rubin: “Even as the resources devoted to every other kind of journalism atrophied, poll-based political culture has overwhelmed us, crowding out all other ways of thinking about public life….The Washington Post’s polling director once said, ‘There’s something addictive about polls and poll numbers.’ He’s right. When we refer to ‘political junkies,’ polls are pretty much the junk.”
There is also the empirical fact — a very inconvenient one for the news media and the political consultants and polling firms — that presidential public opinion polls have been wrong for many decades.
https://www.salon.com/2024/10/15/brain-flaws-understanding-maga-as-an-epidemic-disease/
The last sentence is the most compelling…..polls have been wrong for decades….and they are probably wrong this time around.
And that is the name of that tune!
Please make your decision from knowledge not some made up stats that is used to sell papers.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”