Have you ever wondered why we at ‘WhoWhatWhy’ so rarely cover individual polls? Here’s why.
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Mainstream media organizations often rely on polls to gauge the state of the economy. That is foolish bordering on irresponsible because it does nothing to inform audiences and often may achieve the opposite.
Presumably, they do this because these are easy stories to write. Putting together a 400-word article on how people feel about the state of the economy is simple… but also completely useless, which is why you will never see us at WhoWhatWhy do it (just like we didn’t write a single story about an election poll all year).
There are two main reasons for why these stories are less than productive.
The first is that most Americans are stunningly ignorant about the state of the economy. And even that’s an understatement. Half of them can’t answer simple questions, like whether the US is in a recession or whether unemployment is high or low right now.
They are equally clueless about what tariffs are and what effect they would have on the economy, or about the impact on food prices of deporting millions of farm workers.
So, why should any journalist waste time on writing about what Americans think when they lack the required information?
It’s like asking preschoolers whether they believe that Filipe Jacinto Nyusi has been a good president of Mozambique, or the villagers of a lost tribe in the Amazon whether they think that Max Verstappen deserved to win the Grand Prix of Qatar on Sunday.
But there is another reason why no poll on the economy is worth discussing: Even if voters had that information, partisanship is now so bad that many of them would not answer questions based on facts but rather based on how they are told to feel and how their responses fit in with their ideology.
Here is a great example from Monday.
According to a Gallup poll, the Economic Confidence Index rose from -26 points before the election to -17 points afterwards.
That 9-point improvement can largely be attributed to Republicans whose attitude about the economy approved by a whopping 29 points.
This partisan effect can also be observed to a lesser extent among Democrats, whose confidence in the economy dipped 10 points.
We see the same dynamic play out in other polls.
This really shows how brainwashed voters of all stripes have become.
It seems very likely that even Democrats who felt the pinch from high inflation sometimes said they were doing better than they were in reality. Conversely, even Republicans who were doing great probably gave a bleak view of the economy.
We see this in other areas as well; for example, how Trump supporters felt about the integrity of elections. When he told them that the 2020 race was stolen, two-thirds of them agreed. Now, however, after his victory, they think that everything ran smoothly this year.
The point of all of this is that media outlets should stop conducting and covering polls that are completely meaningless because they never reflect the reality of a situation but rather just how people feel about it.
Even worse, the answers often depend on how voters think they are supposed to feel about something… depending on what they heard at the last Trump rally, on Fox News, or on MSNBC.
And that’s why you won’t find these kinds of stories here… because we want to inform our readers, make them think, and help them make up their own minds.
