Time to start ignoring the polls?

If the polls ringing out 2023 are to be believed, Donald Trump, despite multiple indictments and a clear record of incompetence, leads incumbent president Joe Biden in the presidential race. In addition to a CNN poll in mid-December giving Trump a 5 percent lead over Biden in Georgia and 10 percentage points in Michigan, both states that Biden won in 2020, there have been other polls that show even Nikki Haley, who is fighting Florida Ron DeSantis for the number two slot in the Republican race—which Trump still leads despite his legal problems (or perhaps because of them—leading Biden in the polls.

The constant drumbeat of Biden’s poor polling numbers is eerily reminiscent of headlines in 2019, like Joe Biden Will Lose a General Election to Donald Trump. There were even polls in 2019 that declared Biden would lose the Democratic primary.

Even the so-called mainstream media prints this. And, one would think that after the disastrous poll prediction that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry Truman in the 1948 election, which led to the famous Chicago Daily Tribune headline, ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’, that the media would have learned its lesson and be a bit more circumspect, cynical even, of poll predictions. But, alas, they’ve apparently learned nothing.

It appears that the media is not only ignoring the disaster of 1948 and 2020, but the recent midterm elections, and realizing that it’s not the few hundred people who respond to a poll that decide elections but the millions who finally decide to go out and vote.

In the November 2023 off-year election, for example, Democrats, many of whom espouse policies similar to Biden’s, won in some unexpected places. The Democratic governor in ‘red’ Kentucky won re-election. In purplish-red Virginia, with a Republican governor, Democrats took full control of the legislature. They solidified their control in places like New Jersey and Pennsylvania by focusing on issues that voters care about, issues like labor rights, the environment, and the right of women to control their own bodies. Democrats didn’t do so well in rural areas but continue to dominate in most major urban areas. Even in deep-red Mississippi, the poster child for backwardness, a Democrat only narrowly lost in the race for governor.

You see little analysis of this in the media, though. It’s all doom and glow and an excessive focus on the incumbent president’s age. Little mention is made of his possible challenger’s age and physical condition. Trump, despite his claims of perfect health, is, in the words of a friend of mine, ‘one Big Mac away from a massive coronary.’ As for his mental ability, the stable genius still has trouble forming complete, coherent sentences—and has the nerve to pick at Biden’s stuttering during his youth.

Forget the polls, folks. Like flying an airplane and trying to follow the instruments rather than looking at what the darn aircraft is doing in real time, we risk going into a stall. What really matters is getting as many people as possible out to vote. Constantly printing doom and gloom poll results is not the way to do that. Nor is paying attention to those polls.

Forget the polls. Pay attention to the issues.