The Brooklyn Rail

In 1971, I wrote an essay on the history and future of public opinion polling. I concluded then that public opinion polls were here to stay, but “any process based on the imponderable phenomenon of public opinion can strive to be a useful art, but never an exact science. Despite public misconceptions, polls can really do no more than reflect the intentions of voters at a given moment in time; the next moment the intentions are likely to change.”

Even though polls are notoriously unreliable, Democrats and others who recognize the imperative to beat Trump are nevertheless currently in a frenzy over polling numbers, three weeks out from the election. Conservative never-Trumper Andrew Sullivan has announced that the Dems are in big trouble, because at this point in the election cycle in 2016, Hillary Clinton was six points ahead of Trump; in 2020, Biden was ten points up; and now in 2024, Harris is only 2.6 points up nationally. Sullivan concludes that “we could well be looking at the first victory in the popular vote that Trump has ever won.”¹ On October 12, the headline on the front page of the New York Times read “Black Voters Drift from Democrats, Imperiling Harris’s Bid, Poll Shows.” One of the emails I get from the Harris/Walz campaign every day arrived under the tagline, ”Unfortunately, if the election were today, we might very well lose.” As a cruel kicker, a new New York Times/Siena College poll shows Republicans poised to take control of the Senate with probable wins in Montana, Texas, and Florida.

Most current polls say the entire country is split right down the middle concerning the upcoming election. The two sides are more and more estranged, and are not talking to each other. They’re also consuming completely different information (and mis- and disinformation) about the candidates and the issues, from completely different outlets. As they used to say in the nineteenth century, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” The news media is responsible for much of this, or at least complicit in it. And social media has added a whole other level of fraudulence and rancor to the situation.

Donald Trump is the super-spreader and ultimate benefactor of this mind-virus and it has made him, in some ways, the most successful politician of the twenty-first century, even though he is now mostly intent on monetizing grievance and rage and avoiding prison time.

The death of Ethel Kennedy this month, at age 96, marked the end of an era in American politics. When her husband Bobby ran for president and was assassinated in 1968, a certain kind of idealism in politics was dealt a mortal blow. Another figure from that period, Roy Cohn, went to a lot of trouble to train his protégé Donald Trump to embody and market the antithesis of Bobby & Ethel’s idealism. Unfortunately, one of Ethel Kennedy’s last memories was of her grandson Bobby Kennedy, Jr. capitulating and bowing down to Trump in an astonishing act of generational cynicism and nihilism.

Social media has created an attention economy in which rage, resentment, and retribution are more attractive and much more lucrative than truth. Charlie Warzel published a piece in The Atlantic last week titled, “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is,” which begins by focusing on the abhorrent torrent of falsehoods unleashed on victims of Hurricane Milton and aid workers trying to help them, and the reality-fracturing that engendered:

This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation  opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world. But the misinformation crisis is not always what we think it is.

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”²

We have moved into an era in the United States in which almost half of the voting-age population has accepted theories (about immigrants, gun violence, and the results of the 2020 presidential election) that are not evidence-based, but are nevertheless the basis for their political decisions and beliefs. The grounds for belief have shifted to immaterial and mediate sources that are often impossible to name. Aesthetic and cultural terms have overtaken evidentiary and historical terms. That is not going to change overnight.

And all of this activity is going to go into overdrive following the election. After the polls close on November 5, we probably won’t know who won for several days, because of delays in counting from Pennsylvania, Arizona, and other states that take longer to count votes. Trump will almost certainly declare victory on November 5th, and try to do everything he can to invalidate the ongoing vote-counting process. Ninety-seven lawsuits have already been filed, with Republican Party involvement, to question election results. These lawsuits are of course concentrated in swing states and key counties like Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where the Republican National Committee is trying to force officials to count ballots by hand, based on debunked conspiracy theories about corrupted voting machines.

Time is slowing down; can you feel it? These last three weeks will last an eternity. They are, in the end, the ultimate test of American democracy. Can it endure? Can we protect it? Will Americans stand up to the threat, or succumb?