I don’t want to hear it
You can’t turn on the television these days (or even listen to those Twitter pundits who are trying to get booked for TV guest spots) without hearing about how this election is suddenly “tied” or “tightening” or “Trump is gaining” or however they want to phrase it. This then leads to hand wringing performance art about how lamentable it is that Trump is gaining while he’s falling apart cognitively. It’s enough to scare you and paralyze you with fear until you’re not good for anything but staring at your screen for the rest of the election cycle – which is the point.
If you step away from the political media bubble for a minute and look at the real world stuff, you’ll see that (with partisan junk polls excluded) the polling averages haven’t actually changed over the past month. Kamala Harris still has the same small but consistent lead, on a national and swing state level, that she had a month ago. So what’s all this suddenly doomsday hype based on? NOTHING.
It’s just that this election has fallen into a bit of stagnation of late, with no real movement in the polls, no more debates, and no real changes in messaging, and so the media has decided it has to invent reasons to jar you into gluing yourself to your screen. Remember, the Republicans and their allies only manufacture these junk polls down the stretch because they know that the entire political media class (including MSNBC) and nearly the entire election analyst class will eagerly latch onto these ratings-friendly fake polls and treat them as if they’re real.
Remember, the media’s only goal is to drive ratings. These cable news hosts that you think of as your friends? They’re literally getting paid to goad you into staring at your screen for as many hours per day as possible, by whatever means necessary. That’s their job. They get paid millions of dollars to goad you into staying tuned in all day because your collective eyeballs bring in billions of dollars for the networks. The minute you lose track of this fact, and start taking in cable news as if it had any connection to reality, you’re lost.
You don’t have to make my word for it that the media is trying to bamboozle us down the stretch for the sake of boosting ratings. All you have to do is look back at last time. The polling averages and the election forecasters were all calling the 2022 elections pretty much correctly, until the final month when they couldn’t resist the opportunity to use the Republican junk polls to bring more attention to themselves. Suddenly, with a month to go, the entire media was shouting “red wave” and the election forecasters were suddenly shifting races from “Lean Democrat” to “Toss up” based solely those junk polls. Now the exact same thing is happening in the final month of 2024. The media and forecasters very likely had this election correct until recently, but now they’re making a point of getting it wrong for effect. They don’t care how foolish they’re going to end up looking on election night; they’re counting on most of you forgetting about it and turning around and giving them even more ratings in 2025 and 2026. It’s a never ending game that won’t end until you stop watching.
So I don’t want to hear any of this nonsense about how the polls are shifting when they’re not. I didn’t fall for it in 2022 and I’m not going to fall for it in 2024. The polls have their own serious problems to begin with, but the real problem is that the media keeps lying to us about what the polls are even saying. Imagine if the sports news channels kept trying to mislead you about which teams were in first place in the division. It’s that egregious. It’s disqualifying. And there’s no reason to watch it.
Not only is staring at your screen bad for your psychological health, it’s also a phenomenal waste of effort. The talking heads can lull you into believing that you’re going to lose, and the only way you’ll win is if you keep staring at your screen all day every day. But when you step back and think about it, that’s total nonsense. In reality the opposite is true. If you’re staring at your screen, you’re not out there doing anything to try to help get more votes for your side. So staring at your screen is the least “vigilant” and most lazy thing you can do.
At this point I’m getting a lot of questions about the polls, and I can tell that all of these questions are coming from people who have been spending way too much time listening to MSNBC and/or the Twitter pundits who are trying to get booked on MSNBC. With all due respect, I’m asking you to stop asking me about the polls, or any other fearmongering narratives you’re hearing. My response to such questions is that if you’re worried about winning the election, do something about it. Go phone bank, or go get your like minded friends and neighbors registered to vote. Unlike staring at your screen, which accomplishes nothing, that kind of real-world action will increase our side’s odds of winning. So turn off your screens, put in the work these final fourteen days, and let’s win this.
