Why the media should listen to voters’ ‘wrong’ answers in polls
My colleagues at The Guardian released a poll earlier this week with some truly eye-popping numbers: nearly 60 percent of Americans believe that the country is in a recession, and around half think that the stock market is down and that unemployment is at a fifty-year high. That’s just not true. The country is not in a recession, stocks are up, and unemployment is actually near a fifty-year low. After The Guardian’s fascinating poll dropped, there was plenty of online chatter about how voters could be so wrong about the facts—and who, exactly, was to blame. “Congratulations to the news media on a terrific job of public education,” Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, remarked sardonically on X. The media certainly deserves a portion of the blame: false claims get repeated on major networks (as Fox News’s massive settlement with Dominion Voting Systems shows), and even good journalists get spun, let their biases creep in, and make mistakes. This is also a byproduct of the fracturing of media: if people don’t like what they’re hearing or reading, it’s never been easier for them to seek out (or have an algorithm push to them) a set of facts more to their liking. It is also still early in the election cycle by historical standards, and many voters will never pay attention to the finer points of economic policy.
I called Sabato to ask why he blamed the media for voters’ factually wrong answers on that Guardian poll. He said that Americans have always been a “distracted public,” but that it’s “gotten much worse” in recent years, as the media ecosystem has shifted and partly collapsed. “We often talk about high-information voters versus low-information voters. What we leave out is the no-information voter,” he told me. They’re the ones on social media or watching these crank news shows from the far right.… They actually know less than they would if they didn’t watch news at all. I’m very pessimistic.” That’s all true—but just because voters might not know policy details (or sometimes even basic facts) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to them. To borrow a Trump-era phrase, we should take their answers seriously, not literally.
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