I hate stories about polls. Sometimes, they’re a necessary evil but as First Draft publisher, I discourage poll posts. The MSM is obsessed with polls, but I regard them as a substitute for critical thinking. Make that lazy substitute for any kind of thinking.

Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast has written an anti-poll piece for The Hive that has me buzzing. The title says it all, Let’s Stop Treating Polls As Actual News Events.

The polls have been wrong so many times that you would have thought the MSM would have noticed. General election posts a year out are as useless as nipples on a dude.

I recently mentioned John Glenn’s failed 1984 White House run. In retrospect, it looks like folly but in the summer of 1983, Ronald Reagan looked beatable. That’s why the Dems had such a strong group of candidates including Fritz Mondale, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson as well as the Mercury astronaut. The moral of the story is that Reagan won in a landslide because he was a great candidate and, more importantly, the economy improved.

Enough of this walk down depressing memory lane. Back to the astute Molly Jong-Fast:

“Polls may fall into the category of pseudo-events, a term coined in 1962 by Daniel J. Boorstin and defined as something that “planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced.” Just like polls, a pseudo-event’s “relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous.” (This idea was recently discussed by on John Dickerson on Slate’s Political Gabfest episode on polling episode). In this way, a poll may be more like a press conference, something that is created to shape a narrative.

There are other problems with polls, according to Margaret Sullivan, the media critic and recently named executive director of Columbia University’s journalism ethics center. “Polls are, by definition, horse race coverage, which focused on who’s up or down, not substance, ignoring what Jay Rosen calls ‘the stakes,’” she told me. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say never write a poll story but, in general, journalists are bad at predictions and should do some more meaningful reporting instead.”

Rosen has been out front this presidential election cycle with an “organizing principle” for journalists: “Not the odds, but the stakes.” The focus, he argues, should be “not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for American democracy.” Placing too much emphasis on polls can shift the political conversation from critical reporting about what’s happening—such as the impact of Biden’s administration’s policies or Trump’s authoritarian plans for a second term—to predictions about what may happen a year later. “

Jay Rosen nails it in the quote within the quote: “Not the odd, but the stakes.”

I’d rather be staked to the railroad tracks by Snidely Whiplash than read another horse race story. It’s time to consign the polls to the glue factory where they belong.

The Snidely Whiplash line solves the mystery of the featured image. The damsel in distress is not meant to be Molly Jong-Fast. As far as I know she has a Fear Of Flying, not a fear of cartoon villains.

Since the polls are just second hand news, the last word goes to Fleetwood Mac: