Beware the Weaponization of Polling
How the media and Trump stand to benefit from the emotional roller-coaster of 'doompolling'
Episode 17 is up! Listen, subscribe, rate and review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever else you get podcasts. It’s also at joshlevs.com.
Since I focus on fact checking the news, I make relatively few predictions. But everything I've seen across all my years in mainstream news and everything I'm seeing now makes me confident that we are about to face something we’re unprepared for: an unprecedented weaponization of polling.
In the coming weeks and months, you will be subjected to a daily onslaught of claims about polls, particularly in the presidential race. Most of those reports will be of no actual use to you. They’ll be intended to manipulate you — particularly to stoke negative emotions like fear, dread, hopelessness, anger, bitterness, frustration.
I explain the types of poll-focused headlines that the pro-Trump right wing media apparatus is likely to push in hopes of taking advantage of the historic circumstances, and turning Democrats against each other. One of the biggest goals will be to get people to not vote at all.
In this episode, I give you tools to help you avoid the emotional roller-coaster.
I also discuss why there are so incredibly many polls: It’s lucrative. The media and polling agencies work together in a cyclical system to enrich each other. And that’s because they know they can get you to click and doomscroll — or “doompoll.”
I mention a tracker at The Hill that offers polling averages. As of this newsletter, it is including 94 polls!
Also in this episode:
Why polls in certain states might be of use to you if you’re considering doing one of two things
An unintentionally funny sound effect meant to remind you of how the news media want you to feel afraid
An answer to a listener’s question about polls of Palestinians and their overwhelming support for the October 7 terrorist massacres by Hamas
An interview with Anat Sultan-Dadon, Israel’s consul general to the southeastern United States, about what it’s like to be interviewed by media that have been pushing lies
More on all that, including links and text to help you call out failures in the news, in tomorrow’s newsletter.
This episode is featured in a new column for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — far and away the biggest paper in a crucial swing state, where Vice President Kamala Harris just had her largest rally to date. Welcome AJC readers!
Here’s my poll polling you about polls:
Great to have you as part of our They Stand Corrected community!
JL