Rule #1 of election years: Ignore the polls
Last month’s special election to replace George Santos in New York’s Third Congressional District made for a very telling case study.
Here are just a few of the nail-biting, dread-stoking, “ermahgerd-we’re-all-screwwwwwwed!” headlines I encountered prior to that February 13 election:
Ah, yes. The quintessential, all-American, ubiquitous “tight” race—one that Democrat Tom Suozzi went on to win by…checks notes…eight points, at least double what any of the polls were predicting.
Given this remarkable overperformance in a special election in a year in which Democrats are supposed to be in deep, deep trouble, you’d think the mainstream media would be at least mildly chastened by such a result—at least enough to make them say something along the lines of, “Okay, okay…maybe we were (and are) wrong about some shit.”
Nope. Here’s just a sampling of how they followed up. (By the way, I love the description of “winning streak,” as though this is a card game and Democrats’ performance amounts to nothing more than a random string of good luck.)
I mean, really, you truly cannot make this shit up.
I have to hand it to this guy. Not only did he correctly predict the outcome of the NY 3 election (in fact, he underestimated it, too), but he totally called how the media would react to it in the aftermath.
And yet, if you think about it for just a moment, it was all so predictable.
I bring this up now—and finally decided to write about it—because I’m sorry to report that while sipping my coffee on Saturday morning and paying my obligatory daily visit to the New York Times (yes, I’m a masochist), this is what greeted me:
Ermahgerd we’re all screwwwwwwed!!!!
Note, in particular, this: “Days away from Super Tuesday, Democrats’ concern grows after new poll…”
…“After new poll.” After.
So, the Times is basically giving away the game here: “We create the news instead of report it. We set the narrative instead of respond to it.”
Like any responsible, ethical journalist would do, right?
Perhaps in Moscow.
That’s exactly what polls are. A media outlet like the New York Times pays (or perhaps their terminology is, “partners with”) another outfit to run a poll like this one, and then they plan, in advance, to broadcast the result as though it somehow constitutes “news” or a “breaking development,” when in fact it’s nothing more than prefabricated clickbait. (I can almost see the internal emails between editors at the Times: “Let’s run this as top story on a Saturday, when many of our readers aren’t working, so we get more eyeballs on it.”)
Which begs the question: Why do media outlets do this?
I mean, I totally get why political campaigns do internal polling. If you’re a candidate for public office, you need to know where you stand. You need to know where you’re doing well, what your weak points are, and where and how to invest finite resources. Obviously taking a pulse on public sentiment at a given point in time is a hugely important tool in this regard, because otherwise, you’re flying blind.
But when a media outlet like the New York Times, or CNN, or the Washington Post, or Fox News commissions a poll that they then practically beg readers to click on, it’s not “news” at all. The status of a political race would be no different if the poll had never existed.
Nor in any way does it lead to a more informed or educated populace, because it’s not actual journalism, and it’s not meant to be. It’s not a headline born from reporters finding an actual story, tracking down leads, interviewing sources, or doing any original research; instead, it’s purely a regurgitation of the results of a survey of a tiny sample of voters that, again, they paid for with the express intent of later making it a “news” headline.
So why do it? Well, for starters, the mainstream media is utterly dependent on and addicted to clicks—because those sweet, sweet clicks equal even sweeter revenue. And what better way to entice readers to click than by telling them that a pathological narcissist, compulsive liar, known sexual predator, and remorseless criminal who is under more than 90 felony charges at both the state and federal levels is on track to regain the presidency?
They know that people are apt to click on a headline that draws either their curiosity or (much more likely in this case) a strong emotional reaction. It’s sort of like the terrible, fiery car crash on the highway; you just can’t help but gawk at it as you drive by.
Secondly, for reasons intrinsically related to the first point, every election year absolutely must be a horse race, and the media will stop at absolutely nothing to ensure that it both becomes one and remains one until the very last polling place closes on Election Night. This is why “but his age!!” is the new “but her emails!!”
It’s also why Democrats can defy expectations in virtually every major race since 2022—including the midterms that year when, as far as I know, none of the “experts” apologized for getting the “red wave” narrative completely wrong—and all we get from our trusted news outlets is: “Here’s why this is bad news for Joe Biden.”
Please, please, please click!
Let me be clear about something: I’m not saying the New York Times poll is wrong. Nor am I saying it’s right. What I am saying is that it doesn’t matter, and it’s not worth wasting your time on, because it has no more predictive power than you do. It’s a snapshot. That’s it.
Indeed, flash back two years ago to this very moment in 2022. The prevailing wisdom at the time was that Democrats were headed toward catastrophic losses later that year in the midterm elections.
I certainly bought into it. In fact, here’s what I wrote almost exactly two years ago, on March 19, 2022: “…Democrats will be wiped out at the ballot box in the midterm elections later this year. They’ll lose in places that you might not think they could possibly lose; 2022 will make 2010 seem like a good year for them in hindsight.”
Not a bit of that actually happened. I was totally wrong. But at the time, it seemed like a pretty good bet, just like it seems a good bet now, at the very same point early in an election year, to conclude that Joe Biden will lose in November.
Which is why it’s so critically important to remember at moments such as these that polls are just a ploy for clicks and engagement. Why else would the media spend money on them? I’m going to repeat this once more: They are not news. Quite the opposite.
And the narrative they set can be very, very wrong. And if it is, few if any of the journalists and editors behind it will admit that they screwed up, or promise that they’ll do better in the future. Because, hell, it got people to click, read, engage, be pissed off, and be afraid at the time, right? Which means it served its purpose and paid off fully for them. Why would they apologize for that? That was the whole point.
There is plenty of reason to be concerned about the 2024 election, and for that reason, everyone must participate and vote.
But I simply cannot escape the sense that the storyline we’re being fed for 2024 is a movie we’ve all seen before, and for that reason, everyone would do well to simply take a deep breath right now.
If you’re one of the two or three people who keeps track of what I post to this publication, you’ll note right away that I’m seemingly contradicting myself, because here’s what I had to say back in January.
This is intentional—because in this, the season of unrelenting clickbait poll headlines, I am not at all immune to doomscrolling, and ironically, I’ll likely need to come back and read this very post myself repeatedly.
