The latest narrative about how Donald Trump is magically winning

| 6:00 pm EDT August 29, 2020
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There’s still plenty of time until election day and plenty can happen, so it’s more important than ever that we be vigilant about things like voter registration, turnout, phone banking, and volunteering. But the reality is that the Republican National Convention was one of Donald Trump’s last best chances to change people’s minds about him, and it ended up being a complete failure for him.

The jarringly low TV ratings for the Republican convention make clear that most people have lost interest in what Donald Trump has to say one way or the other. That’s a problem for Trump, because the polling averages show that he’s behind by the same roughly eight points that he’s always been behind (serious people only ever look at the polling averages, and not individual polls). Worst of all for Trump, instead of trying to do something to turn things around, he’s busy tweeting about how his convention’s TV ratings were secretly great, and he’s claiming that everyone is lying about it. In other words, he’s completely adrift.

But a completely uninteresting Republican convention and a stagnant eight point race don’t exactly make a political analyst’s job easy. When the real story is “This race isn’t competitive and nothing seems to be changing,” it’s difficult to get people to stay tuned in to cable news, or to get people to click on political articles. So the worse things get for Trump, the more contrarian takes we’re now seeing about how Trump is somehow magically winning.

Because you’re all so stung by what happened last time around in 2016, you’re inclined to listen to anyone who tells you that the sky is falling in 2020. You might even believe you’re being “vigilant” by reading every doomsday article that comes along which claims that because Trump is way behind in the polls and has total lack of a strategy for turning things around, it means he’s actually in prime position. That’s like trying to argue that the football team that’s down by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter is actually in ideal position to win. It’s gibberish. But they’re counting on being able to scare you into reading it, which means they hit their page view quotas for the day.

Here’s the thing. If you take the time to dutifully listen to every pundit who tells you that Donald Trump is somehow magically winning, that’s not vigilance. That’s willful gullibility. This kind of baseless crap is written specifically so you’ll be scared by it, then tell everyone else to be scared by it, and make it go viral. In the meantime everyone will have wasted a day passing around a total nonsense article, instead of spending that day on things that are actually vigilant, like voter registration and phone banking.

The people who write these doomsday clickbait articles are laughing at you for falling for it. You’re giving them free page views, and all they had to do was come up behind you and yell “Boo!” If you stop panic-reading and panic-sharing this kind of doomsday nonsense, then the worst of pundits will have to stop writing it. Then we can get back to actually working on winning the election, instead of fretting away the huge advantage over Trump that we currently have.