What You Need to Know About Politics 5/24

My analysis of stunning new polling spotlighting how ill-informed Americans are and a roundup of must read stories.

Photo by Kayla Velasquez on Unsplash

Americans are woefully ill-informed. That’s the only conclusion one can reach from a bunch of new polls that are chronicled in the links section below.

According to a new Harris poll for the Guardian, 55% of respondents think the economy is shrinking, 56% think the U.S. is in a recession, 49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, and 49% believe that unemployment is at a 50 year high. A whopping 72% also say they think inflation is increasing.

There is only one problem. NONE of those things is true. The market went up roughly 24% in 2023 and is up another 12% this year. The unemployment rate is under 4%, a near 50 year low. GDP is growing and there hasn’t been a recession since early in the pandemic year of 2020. And the inflation rate is dropping — down to 3.4% in April.

It’s no wonder President Biden’s approval ratings are so low: 58% of those polled said the economy is worsening due to his mismanagement.

Other recent polling indicates that Americans’ false perceptions aren’t limited to the economy. Seventeen percent of respondents in a recent New York Times/Siena battleground states poll (the Philadelphia Inquirer cosponsored the Pennsylvania poll) said Biden was more responsible than Donald Trump for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the elimination of the right to an abortion. That included 21% of those who supported Biden in 2020 and now aren’t planning to support him in 2024.

This belief, too, is demonstrably false. Five Supreme Court justices supported the decision that overturned Roe. All five were appointed by Republican presidents — one by George H.W. Bush, one by George W. Bush, and three by Trump. Biden had nothing to do with the decision — and no mechanism for stopping it. That’s how the separation of powers works.

This data indicates that it’s very possible Biden could lose in November because people’s perceptions about the economy are flat out incorrect and many voters have little grasp of what is happening in our politics.

The media is almost certainly at fault for the misperceptions about the economy. In an interview with colleague Lora Kelly, Rogé Karma, a staff writer at The Atlantic detailed the findings from a recent Brookings report about media coverage of the economy:

Starting in around 2017, media coverage becomes more negative than the fundamentals would predict. And then, after Joe Biden takes office, that gap widens even more. One of the stats that blew my mind from the study was that from 2017 to 2023, the media’s “negativity gap”—the gap between economic reality and media coverage—was nearly five times larger than it was during the previous three decades.

This finding indicates that what people have heard about the economy in the media has led them to think it’s in dramatically worse shape than it is. The media really ought to look at the Guardian poll and totally overhaul how it covers the economy. Good economic news can’t be a 30 second story, while bad news warrants weeks of detailed coverage about how it’s hurting average Americans.

On some level, it makes sense that Americans are ill-informed about things in 2024. After all, while the internet has made it easier than ever before to find information, search engines and social media do a poor job at distinguishing between information and misinformation. That means people stumble upon a lot of misinformation that might be convincing, even while being false.

One of the tweets of the week details a huge disparity in the head-to-head matchup between Biden and Trump depending on where the respondents to an April NBC poll got their information.

Trump crushed Biden among those who either didn’t follow political news or got their news from YouTube and Google. Those who got their news from social media and cable news also favored Trump, albeit by far narrower margins. Meanwhile, Biden led with those who got their news from digital websites and had a big advantage with those who got their news from the national networks. Additionally, his lead among those who got their information from newspapers was massive.

This hints at the solution for a better informed populace: we have to convince people to read newspapers and digital news sites. First off, print news tends to provide far more detail than television news or social media. It also usually covers significantly more topics. And it’s much less likely to be sensationalist than cable news or that posting from Uncle Lou on Facebook that sparked a family text chain.

The chasm between Trump’s huge lead among those who don’t follow political news and Biden’s massive lead with those who read newspapers also indicates another problem: Americans have to tune in, however distasteful politics might be. Ill-informed citizens do great damage in a democracy. In this case, they may well threaten American democracy itself by electing Trump because of misconceptions. (Though as I argued in a Smerconish.com piece this week, these misperceptions may point to an opportunity for Biden to rapidly increase his standing as the campaign progresses).

What else is included in the links roundup below, which contains 35 stories from 25 different publications and five tweets?

For this roundup, I included a bunch of really meaty looks at the politics in important states. The topics include what the Democratic Senate candidate is doing in Arizona to try to win over Latino men, a profile of the far right Republican extremist running for Superintendent of Public Instruction in North Carolina, and several articles on the civil wars tearing apart Republicans in Texas and Michigan. There is also a fascinating feature on a school board member in Texas who ran as a right wing crusader, and then actually sat down and read the curricula she thought threatened kids. She changed her mind and was stunned by how her former allies reacted.

Additionally, I’ve included a section with 11 pieces on the presidential race, including the data discussed above, as well as stories on the state of play in several crucial states, a look at Trump’s little known — but highly effective — campaign manager, and a clear eyed assessment of what checks might exist on Trump if he wins another term (spoiler alert: while it’s not as dire as some have asserted, it certainly isn’t reassuring). There is also a breakdown from a Pennsylvania-based pollster as to why he thinks national pollsters are getting his state wrong, and an op-ed in which the former Republican Lieutenant Governor of Georgia explains why he’s backing Biden.

The links are also broken down into sections on abortion, the Supreme Court, and the media, as well as a general section. In the abortion section, there is must read data on state-by-state attitudes on the topic, which reveal just how broad the pro-choice consensus is in America. Another article provides a sobering look at what abortion bans mean for average Americans, especially those struggling economically. The general section contains fascinating profiles of both parties’ leaders in the House — Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — and much more.

Finally, I’ve got a story guaranteed to make you smile, which is a rarity in 2024.