The stupefaction of political polls

Suppose that every candidate still challenging Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary announced today, before a single voter laid a hand on a ballot, that they will withdraw immediately and concede the election to the former president. That would be good news for the Trump team, to be sure, but would it be a fair, democratic outcome for Republican voters?

It’s hard to argue that it would, and yet through the past year pundits, political analysts, podcast hosts and political editors have been hammering home the message that the 2024 Republican primary is over and Trump is the nominee. Columnists in the New York Times and Washington Post have even criticized the candidates for refusing to drop out. The New Yorker’s political podcast argued that those candidates were in denial for thinking they had any chance, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s multiple criminal trials and other court proceedings.

To hear this reporting, there seems little reason for voters to bother. This is a major ethical blind spot for our largest news organizations and, given the signals Trump is sending about what his prospective second term would be like, a reckoning over this style of reporting is long overdue.

The basis for declaring Trump the “frontrunner” is opinion surveys, which constitute a longstanding problem in political reportage. For gauging sentiment and understanding of issues, they are useful. With candidacies, however, they create an illusion similar to stop-motion animation: Each poll represents responses to a question at a particular moment in time, asked of a sample of people. More polls follow, and the results of various polls are compared to one another as time and events progress, creating the sense of a race where some are leading and some fall behind, even when we are months away from the one poll that is supposed to matter most, the election itself.

This is why they call it “horserace reporting,” which gives journalists stories that can be produced quickly with appealing graphic illustrations; but whether they admit it or not, it also distorts the process long before voters are permitted to decide.

The sensational reporting on who is up or down, who respondents say they like and plan to vote for, most certainly influences fundraising; and fundraising and positioning in polls both influence who is invited to candidate forums. Several conservative candidates with appropriate experience and policy proposals worthy of debate never got their shot to introduce themselves and their ideas to 2024 voters.

Amid discussions of how journalists still flub their coverage Trump (and the movement that, for the moment, still holds him as its champion), there ought to be urgent discussion of this, probably unwitting, service journalistic practice provides to the designated frontrunner.

At the very least, major newsrooms should be asking one another why they have spent 2023 telling Republican voters their participation is irrelevant as an irrefutable matter of fact. It seems dissonant with the alarms being sounded by these same departments about the threat to democracy Trump presents. At its worst, this punditry could be classified as voter suppression.

Iowa and New Hampshire Republicans will be allowed, at last, to express their will later this month. By then, one hopes they still have choices.