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.
As a rule, I have almost no use for “the vibes” that too many in the news media default to. But I cannot deny that, at least for me, the 2024 election feels eerily similar to 2016, when the news media and pundits, with few exceptions, incorrectly predicted that Clinton would defeat Trump. (I was one of the few public voices who correctly predicted the opposite outcome). It is cliché, but nonetheless true, that the only thing that is certain about the 2024 election is uncertainty. That observation is no comfort when the stakes are so high.
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In an attempt to make better sense of this unprecedented and truly historic election, where we are as a nation, and what may happen next, I recently spoke to a range of experts.
Katherine Stewart is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism."
If Harris wins the election, we will be able to say, “Democracy prevailed and at least we have a further lease on the American experiment.” But if Trump wins, it will be clear that the U.S. is really moving toward an autocratic, cronyistic kleptocracy that will impoverish and weaken us as a nation. That will be bad news not just for four years but for some time to come. This election isn’t just about a set of policy preferences or issues where reasonable people can disagree. The facts are out there and the tragedy is that a large portion of the American electorate has been so propagandized and manipulated.
Have events with Trump and the election played out as I expected? Yes and no.
"In the next few weeks, I expect more ruthlessness, depravity, cruelty, and threats from Trump and the most attached MAGA inner group."
Part of me has always hoped that the American people would simply reject, out of good sense and common decency, the candidacy of a criminal who has attempted a coup. So, at some level, that will always surprise me. But at another level, am I surprised that Christian nationalists are........