I try not to get wound up about polls. This far out from a presidential election, thereās plenty of time for events to affect popular sentiment, even in a tight race between two overly known candidates. And a shift by 1 or 2 percentage points could be decisive. Asking people what they might do in six months is somewhat useful but not necessarily determinative in a close contest. But what is worth following are polls that show us how voters are thinking about the world. And one recent survey was a doozy and, for Joe Biden fans and Democrats, perhaps discouraging.
A Politico-Morning Consult poll asked respondents which presumptive presidential nominee āhas done more to promote infrastructure improvements and job creation.ā Forty percent said Biden, 37 percent Donald Trumpāa virtual tie. (Twelve percent said the two men had done the same.) This showed much of America is ignorant or willfully wrong. Biden successfully pushed for a bipartisan bill that yielded $1 trillion in infrastructure investments to bolster bridges, roads, transit systems, and more. Trump, when he was in the White House, declared āInfrastructure Weekā several times and ended up passing nothing. It even became a joke about his administration. Yeah, another Infrastructure Week, Trump in a truck blowing the horn. So the score: 1,000,000,000,000 to zero. Yet half the public does not know or understand thatāor wonāt admit it.
Likewise, Biden has outscored Trump on job creation. In the first three years of their respective presidencies, 15 million jobs were created during Bidenās administration, and 6 million were created during Trumpās (pre-Covid) stint. In this comparison, Biden does benefit from the post-pandemic rebound. Still, facts are facts (unless theyāre alternative facts).
What does this one polling question indicate? It might be that the pain of inflation (which is still hitting many Americans) colors overall attitudes about economic matters. This untethered-from-reality response might also reflect that Trumpās incessant braying (and lying) about how great the economy was on his watch works. Heās a pitchman who never stops slinging his slogansāand far too many voters are enthralled with him and absorb his spin as The Truth.
In another question in this poll, a decisive majority (61 percent) said they believe the economy today is much or somewhat worse than it was four years agoāthatās when the economy was in a freefall because of the pandemic that Trump was mismanaging. There are plenty of possible explanations. Again, the persistent trauma caused by the post-pandemic inflation. Or maybe the tendency of people to regard the past more positively than the present. Objects in the rearview mirror may look better than they were. (George W. Bush, who launched a misguided war that caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and that destabilized the Middle East, left office with a dismal 34 percent approval rating. In 2018, 61 percent of Americans had a favorable view of him.) Whatever the reason, many Americans are misjudging present and recent realities.
Are some doing so because they fancy Trump and, thus, accept the false information he peddles? Or do they support Trump because they hold mistaken beliefs about basic matters? It might be a bit of a chicken-and-egg dynamic. In any event, too many donāt have their facts straight. Thatās a problem.
This is yet another indication that our political-media system is broken. Not that we needed another sign of that. The embrace by millions of Trumpās Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to the machinations of the Deep State, the media, Democrats, voting machine companies, and foreign adversaries (China! Venezuela!) was proof the system was kaput. A January poll showed that 30 percent of Americans still say Bidenās victory was illegitimate. Folks who believe Biden conspired to steal the election are unlikely to credit him with doing better on infrastructure policy or job creation than Trump. But there are many beyond this group whose views also are not tethered to reality. Thatās obviously a problem for democracy. If voters do not possess good information, they are less likely to render good decisions.
Pondering this, I thought about the recent interview Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, gave to Ben Smith, the editor of the online outlet Semafor. Smith began by asking Kahn why the Times does not see its job as stopping an authoritarianāthat would be Trumpāfrom taking power. Putting the question that way allowed Kahn the easy out of proclaiming the importance of an independent media, and he replied, āTo say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people voteāthatās essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidateās agenda.ā
The challenge for the media now is not whether to become a mouthpiece for Biden but how to structure its coverage to meet the urgency of the moment. Though Kahn in this interview insisted that his paper has fully covered Bidenās infrastructure bill and other legislative accomplishments, it has pounded the issue of his age, focused overly on the horse-race elements of the presidential contest, and not consistently highlighted Trumpās authoritarian impulses and excesses (while at times publishing important pieces on this).
I donāt want to pick on the Times, and in these days of fractured media, one newspaper, even the most important one in the nation, certainly is not responsible for shaping all public attitudes about Biden, Trump, and the world. Yet I noticed in Kahnās remarks an unwillingness to acknowledge that this is a particularly difficult or perilous time and that standard practices might need a rethinking. Itās fine to declare the value of independent media that entails, as he put it, āhard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters.ā But what is the media to do when a threat to democracy is being fueled by so much misinformation and baseless beliefs? Is covering both sides in the same standard fashion sufficient?
Of course, this is a question for others in the media. And Biden and the Democrats could be doing better on the messaging front. The Democrats can always be doing better on the messaging front. (Iāve been writing this for, uh, decades.) They ought to learn from Trump on thisāwithout adopting his disingenuous ways. Moreover, the complete transformation of the GOP into a Trump cult that reinforces his many false statements and narratives further perverts and undermines the national discourse.
If a third of American voters or so are stuck in Trumpās false realityābelieving that he won in 2020, that his economy was the best ever, and that heās a brilliant and honest leaderāthereās not much that mainstream media coverage can do to change that. But the existence of this lost-in-Trump America makes it more crucial for major journalistic outlets to steadily provide for the other two-thirds a clear picture of the Biden-Trump comparison and whatās at stake. Trump and his autocratic crusade benefits from misinformed voters. The fight for the nationās democratic future depends on decreasing the size of that portion of the electorate.
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