The Eternal, Interminable Election Season

I saw a headline a week or so ago that suggested it’s going to be a “brutal” election year in the US. This came on the heels of the news that Nikki Haley had conceded to Donald Trump in her bid to be the Republican Presidential candidate this year. As with most headlines, my first thought was that it was just dumb. The election cycle doesn’t ever seem to end, and it’s only brutal if you allow yourself to buy into the media’s lazy, reactionary obsession with meaningless polls and their refusal to contextualize much of anything.

Let’s start with polls. Polls are extremely important for political leaders to do internally because it keeps them in touch with the needs of their constituents and provides feedback on their job performance. Some of our leaders actually care about this, though a growing number seem more focused on other agendas. The other polls, where some news network or polling group do whatever it is they do to generate national opinion polls are largely a waste of time. They allow the media to focus on shiny objects that are akin to the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz – a lot of flash and noise but not much substance.

Americans just don’t spend a lot of time paying attention to issues, so polling them doesn’t necessarily yield meaningful results. Too much of the time they don’t understand how government works or what the processes are so they blame this person or that person for something they have little to do with. They also tend to find their flavor of information and just run with it, even if the source(s) are information they choose is more entertaining than informative. There are many examples of this, but people who only watch Fox News tend to believe Donald Trump won the 2020 Presidential election and Joe Biden somehow stole it from them. This conspiracy theory has been disproven by red states and blue states alike, Fox was sued for nearly $800 million and found guilty of spreading false narratives, yet they continue to push that narrative and their viewers believe it. Polling them about an election (or most anything else) is a total waste of time. They live in an alternate reality.

The same can be said of people who only watch MSNBC. Rachel Maddow is one of the most brilliant people in the news industry, but her stubborn insistence on doing all-Trump-all-the-time cured me of being an avid watcher. There are just so many more important things at which she could aim her impressive intellect, and we would better off for it. Instead, the low-hanging ratings fruit is all she feeds her audiences so I have long since tuned out. That’s not what news is supposed to be. MSNBC doesn’t fabricate news altogether, but they do resemble a broken record hour after hour, night after night.

Add all of these factors together and you can see why the polls are very often completely wrong. Hillary Clinton was a lock to win the 2016 Presidential election, so assuredly so that I didn’t even watch the coverage on election night. I couldn’t believe America would elect a failed reality TV guy anyway, but elect him we did. The 2018 mid-terms elections were supposed to be a red wave, with Republicans easily taking control of the House and Senate. Instead, that party’s stubborn insistence on pushing an unpopular agenda resulted in more of a blue wave, with Democrats winning in Republican strongholds like Kansas. Again, polling turned out to be a waste of time.

Finally, the issues that determine presidential elections are extremely difficult to foresee, and probably won’t arise until the last few weeks before the election. Again, people aren’t paying attention most of the time. Like a dog seeing a squirrel, they will turn their heads at some distraction at the last minute and that distraction can determine the outcome more than any substantive policy initiative. The years, months, days and hours wasted on discussing polls turn out to be nothing more than an enormous waste of time.

The other, extremely infuriating way the media fails us it by refusing to contextualize much of anything. They report what some politician says, they report the response of another politician and never ask a follow-up question or point out that one is either lying or wrong. Texas Governor Greg Abbott would have you believe that there is a crisis on the southern border, but the mayors of the cities along that border disagree. The news shows up for the little half-mile stretch where Abbott has strung barbed wire and placed razor wire covered balls in the middle of the Rio Grande River and they act like that’s the entire border. If they walked half a mile in either direction they would see there is no border crisis. It’s wide open, including the gates in the little piece of wall Trump had built, and there are no illegal immigrants teeming across in droves. The media doesn’t bother to take that half-mile trek.

Another current example can be found in the House of Representatives, where Representatives Jim Jordan and James Comer have been on a 15-month fishing expedition to try and impeach President Biden. They didn’t have a reason to do it, other than they were told to do it by the former President. Earlier this week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did what the media should have been doing all along. She called out a “witness” for testifying about absolutely nothing. Watch it. It’s fabulous!

Again, this is where the media fails us. The former President and current Republican nominee for 2024 is a career criminal and spends more time in court than he does on the campaign trail. The current President is a life-long public servant who has never faced any kind of criminal proceeding, but the media has to do this both-sides thing and somehow equate Trump’s crimes to Biden’s …. ummmmm … I don’t know, his dog biting a secret service agent or something. It’s not my fault I don’t have a great example – Republicans can’t find anything he’s done wrong, either.

Going back to the headline that got me started on this…well…rant, no, I this doesn’t have to be a “brutal” election year. In all honesty, the campaign season shouldn’t even start before July, when the two parties hold their national conventions. There is absolutely no reason for the news to run any more polls, much less focus on them incessantly, before August or even September. We have many more important subjects on which to focus, from climate change and the war in Gaza to passing the bi-partisan border bill and combating corporate America’s greedflation.

The media has failed us, and the best way to send them a message about their failure is to simply turn them off.

(BREAKING NEWS!!!! Princess is having cancer treatment!!!! My life is so much more complete now. Go away, Google alerts.)

-B