Meanwhile, The New York Times, in classic Times fashion, rushed this week to run a story on how the Kenosha protests are supposedly changing swing voter attitudes as the article quoted various voters but provided no empirical evidence. Axios also recently ran a mostly data-free article that warned Trump could win again with no new polling trend or other detailed warning sign.
It's possible the pundits will be right. It's possible President Trump will see some political benefit, including in Wisconsin, from this week's developments in Kenosha. But until we see any hard data in presidential race polling in Wisconsin that reflects that, we really don't know. All of these aforementioned assertions are based not on facts or real evidence but rather in amorphous feeling, concern-trolling, and vague caricatures these pundits have of average voters.
In 2016, many of these DC media voices underrated the President's chances but now they're falling over themselves trying to overcompensate for that by constantly searching for any narrative that might show Trump in a more competitive position than reality shows.
So far, the average of public opinion polling in Wisconsin shows former Vice President Joe Biden with a 5.9% lead as he stands at 49.2% share of the vote. In the other most critical swing states -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona -- Biden enjoys leads of 5.3%, 7.6%, and 3.7%, respectively, and he is at 48-50% in all three states.
While swing state polling underestimated Trump support in 2016, those same polls also showed an unusually large number of undecided voters, Hillary Clinton was in the low-to-mid 40s, and well-known third-party candidates were on the ballot. Today, none of those items are true.
As has been relentlessly noted by experts at FiveThirtyEight and elsewhere, Biden also has far better favorability ratings than Clinton and his national lead has been more robust and more stable. There are also far more 2016-non-voter/2020-Biden and 2016-Trump/2020-Biden voters than there are non-voter/Trump + Clinton/Trump voters despite Axios' discussion of Trump possibly attracting rural, white working-class voters who didn't vote for Trump in 2016.
None of these statistics are presented here to encourage complacency. The stakes of this election are obviously enormous. We know all too well the feeling of certainty that a Democratic presidential nominee seemed to have it in the bag against Donald Trump only to then unexpectedly lose to him.
Rather, these statistics and these facts are presented to cut against the media-created narrative that Trump has suddenly found an opening. Voters overwhelmingly prefer Biden to Trump on handling of race relations. It's clear too that Trump's words and actions on this front have only hurt his campaign so far this year.
Reporters like Mitchell create their own narratives (that the Trump message "is taking") and then declare that a narrative has been formed (political scientists have written about this phenomenon). They then construct a whole arc and a booming perception that was not there before; the media did exactly this successfully with the Clinton email story in fact. They take Trump's bait on issues like this so easily that it makes you worry more that the media constructing these false narratives will do more to help Trump than the actual events on the ground.
It is this same media-driven fear-mongering, based in their flawed perception of the average Wisconsin voter, that dominated the Democratic primary campaign. In CNN and MSNBC analyses of the primary debates throughout 2019 into early 2020, pundits warned that Democratic candidates lest not move too far left at risk of offending the sensibilities of The Wisconsin Voter (TM). Meanwhile, there apparently, in their view, is no consequence to Trump spewing absolute vile that does actually offend voters he is actively losing.
So as these pundits sounded the alarm on proposals like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, they created narratives about the supposed unpopularity and political risks of these ideas. They claimed The Wisconsin Voter would be turned off by such radicalism.
As such, these same media-created narratives helped drive down support for those proposals. As support for these ideas declined, so too did support for progressive candidates in the primary. Subsequently, Democratic primary voters concerned about "electability" (and worried about The Wisconsin Voter) backed Joe Biden.
Fast forward now to the general election and we're seeing the same media bed-wetting, "Dems in disarray" coverage applied unfortunately to Black Lives Matter protests. Never mind the outrageous injustice Jacob Blake was subjected to and how that should be at the forefront of our attention. Instead, media figures aim for provocation and for focus on what The Wisconsin Voter will think (but not Black Wisconsin voters concerned about their lives, mind you, whose turnout will be critical this fall).
So far, the data does not back them up here. However, by creating narratives that didn't exist before and then declaring them emerging narratives, the media may succeed in bringing about that very electoral result of which they warn. Let's hope not. The best case scenario, as a friend noted to me this week, is that it does not lull us into complacency about the election.
