With just under a year until the election, incumbents are concerned about the latest poor poll for the president. The New York Times even wonders if the president is “toast” as concern spreads throughout the progressive community.
While this may sound familiar to anyone who has read about President Biden in recent weeks, I am referring to the polls and headlines facing President Obama in the run-up to the 2012 election, which, in case you forget, he won quite easily despite trailing Mitt Romney in the polls long before the vote.
Over recent election cycles, polls have increasingly become a central focus of media reporting on campaigns, particularly presidential races. And that is unfortunate. Average voters should rarely see or hear about polls because they are not particularly relevant or actionable to them.
However, in many ways, polls are driving the media's political narratives. Polls are no longer part of a news story; he is the news.
The problem is that horse racing numbers can drive almost any narrative that politicians or journalists see fit, regardless of whether it is accurate; Let's look at the media frenzy of the great “red wave” of the 2022 midterm elections, which of course turned out to be the opposite of the truth. The mainstream media's coverage of the campaigns from that point of view is not only erroneous but also irresponsible.
Such coverage is doing to politics what modern cooking shows have done to gastronomy: turning it into something like a sports competition in which much of the substance that might serve the viewer – such as how to cook any thing – is lost when covering dramatic culinary competitions. Likewise, instead of helping voters make informed decisions based on differences between candidates, pundits (including me) spend a lot of time defending or against a candidate based not on their policy positions but on their standing on the issues. surveys. What's lost is what the candidates' different backgrounds, beliefs, and policy positions might mean for voters' everyday lives.
I understand why polls have become a media obsession. People have always wanted to be able to predict the future, and unfortunately, polls are being misinterpreted as a political crystal ball.
But predicting the future is not what surveys are for. “Polls are neither designed nor capable of doing what people want most: predicting election winners,” Monika McDermott, a Fordham University professor who studies political psychology and public opinion, told me. “There are too many variables at play in any election to perfectly predict the election. But the media and news consumers find horse racing numbers exciting and easily digestible, and that's why all the attention is focused on them.”
So covering the horse race not only fails to provide voters with the vital information they need. It also spends an inordinate amount of time covering something that has little bearing on what is going to happen.
When working on campaigns, I often tell my clients that the horse race number (the one that shows how one candidate is doing against another) is the least important in a poll. That number is what campaign researchers spend time and resources to understand how to change, and we change it. In fact, a presidential campaign will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to change that number. So as a pollster, I'm not obsessed with where my candidate stands in the direct comparison; I am focused on the issues and messages that will allow me to move that number.
In a two-person race, no candidate with less than 50% support is truly safe. If you don't have a majority, there are enough voters who can be persuaded and determine the outcome. So while the headlines scream that Trump leads Biden and the chattering progressive class panics, it really doesn't matter much that Trump leads right now. The advantage at this point, when the arguments and contrasts of the campaign have not yet been made, does not predict who will be the final winner.
This is particularly true in a presidential race. Ronald Reagan was trailing in public polls before his re-election, as were Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama. But in the end, those national campaigns found compelling contrasts, effective attacks on his opponents, a story about his achievements in office and a vision for the future that eventually attracted voters to them.
That's what good campaign polls really do: they explore how an attack affects different voters to understand how to target an ad. Determine where support is weak among grassroots voters and how to show them that the candidate is fighting for them. It tests the most effective political proposals to contrast them with an opponent and thus mobilize undecided voters.
While horse racing numbers are fluid and changing, voters' core values and beliefs are not. Good pollsters look beyond the top line to understand how voters give meaning and order to their lives so we can show them that our candidate can be trusted.
Good campaign coverage should be governed by similar principles. The average reader or viewer does not get any useful information from sensational headlines telling them who seems to be winning or losing right now. How about we use more of those resources to explain what each candidate's election would mean for people like them? That's the kind of information that would lead to more informed voting and ensure that the best candidate wins.
Cornell Belcher is president of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies and a political analyst for NBC News. He was a pollster for the Democratic National Committee and Barack Obama's presidential campaigns.
