With 36 days left until the November election, many of us greet each day with dread. Now that the buzz of the Harris joy has worn off, we find ourselves nervous and edgy as we check in with 538, Real Clear Politics, The Cook Political Report, the front page of the New York Times, and several other of the surviving serious newspapers in search of some hard data to hold onto in the face of the toxic flood of information coming our way, wave after wave, on television, social media, and elsewhere.
We watch a report on NBC News that American crime is, in reality, way down and then view political reporting across the media landscape about the blunt impact of ginned up hysteria over rising crime. We see an economist somewhere worth paying attention to talk about how immigration is a net gain for the American economy and then read an article about how that doesn’t matter because millions of people believe otherwise.
Many of us laugh (and then scowl) at JD Vance promoting racist bullshit about Haitian immigrants by making up stories and then catch a new report where a series of Ohio residents say they believe that Haitians are eating pets because they saw a picture on Facebook of one carrying a duck. Those beliefs are fact-checked by the reporter, but it doesn’t matter because so many folks just don’t care about facts anymore.
Beliefs and feelings are what drive the train in this contest between team joy vibes and team hate everyone. It is confounding, bewildering, disgusting, and disturbing for those of us who remember when any of the things happening on the right would have immediately disqualified them a thousand times over, but there is not much to do except suck it up, stop bemoaning the death of truth, and get back to work.
It’s a new world where the unimaginably obscene politics of delusion, fear, and deep animus has been normalized.
Which way will the intensified conflict in the Middle East influence the polls? What about the inflation numbers? The impact of the interest rates? The stock market? How will the decimation of Gaza move swing voters? A war in Lebanon? The price of olive oil?
Even the hard numbers that we cling to are no longer safe refuge as they too have been revealed as the false God they have always been. Last week in the American Prospect, Robert Kuttner observed that:
If you follow poll results, you are probably suffering from the latest roller-coaster whiplash. Yesterday, NBC released a poll with astonishingly good news for the Harris-Walz campaign.
Harris is up by five points nationally, 49 to 44. More importantly, her approval-disapproval score has improved by a record 21 points, from 50 percent negative versus 32 positive in July to 48 percent positive against 45 negative in mid-September. Trump, meanwhile, has descended further into negative approval territory. And Harris has gained significantly among Black and Hispanic voters. Whew!
But then, the dawn’s early light brought this depressing news from the New York Times/Siena poll. Trump is ahead, and has actually gained ground, in the key battleground states of Arizona and Georgia, and is slightly ahead in North Carolina.
How can both polls be accurate? They can’t. Here I turn to the wisdom of the indispensable Michael Podhorzer, who astutely points out that all polling is "opinion journalism." Why? Because pollsters make assumptions about who is a likely voter and how to weigh or overweigh different demographic groups. "The ‘opinions’ are not about issues or ideology, but about methodological approaches," Podhorzer writes.
Indeed, rather than a “science,” polling itself is a kind of storytelling with the same sort of selective process and choice of emphasis that comes with other crafted accounts. Like the narratives of history, political “science,” economics, and journalism, all of which are dressed up in the shiny garments of scientism, appeals to authority, and the myth of objectivity, polls are just another fiction based on a particular construct of reality.
Nonetheless, polls have gained an aura of authenticity that they simply don’t deserve. As Rick Perlstein argues about polling in another piece in the American Prospect, “Pollsters might not be able to tell us what we think about politics. But increasingly, they tell us how to think about politics—like them. Following polls has become our vision of what political participation is.”
But even the most earnest of these efforts are simply sketches in time based on stories told in a given instant. Some stories are closer to reality than others but like fiction, they simply lie like the truth. As Rick Perlstein again notes:
Past performance is no guarantee of future results; but past performance is all a pollster has to go on. That’s why much of the process of choosing and weighting samples is … well, you can call it "more art than science." Or you can call it "intuitive." Or you can call it "trial and error." But you can also call it "made up."
What makes all this so disorienting is that, as our cultural fabric has unraveled, we have lost our faith in anything close to a shared story of America. Hence the idea that even “objective” numbers are skewed depending on a pollster’s assumptions is hard for many of us to take.
Thus, we wake with growing trepidation and pray for the best as we make our way through an increasingly menacing world that, as the English poet Matthew Arnold put it,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
All we have left is hope, which, as Percy Bysshe Shelley reminds us, is a moral obligation—even if the polls don’t tell us it is merited.