Polling has turned the US election into a game. We need to take a reality check

An analysis of the number of polls conducted towards the presidential election does well to convince the mundane that it appears more of a sport relating to personalities rather than what these polls should ideally be doing – seeking out policies.

In Washington DC, I record time with polls and palpitations. The polls never stop, they are heart palpitations inducing, and frustrating to say the least. National polls, swing state polls, tiny county polls based solely on 12 votes destined to decide an election, polls that are based on a partisan goal to demoralise the other side.

There are polls on whether a candidate makes an impact of inspiring confidence, showing compassion, giving leadership. I have seen this kind of behavior where, when we get a poor poll result, the next one we seek is one that is telling us the numbers we want to hear. I have also found how when months after a good one I will be on the lookout for a bad poll to burst the bubble or to deflate what ever inflated ego I may have at the moment and remind myself of the ‘real world’.

But the polls never do quite take you to reality as any political aspiring mind would actually expect. Instead, they shape it. This is not about what the polls are saying or how they were compiled – that isn’t the issue at all; no, the great question here is how the polls represent what we feel about politics.

Polls turn politics into a race, into a game, into a sport of opponents. Who’s up? Who’s down? How have they worked to beat each other? What does it tell about their personality? Are seen as bullets with which a politician demonstrates his prowess in how he can mislead or intimidate the opposition – not as promises.

And what kind of politician will dominate this world where political speech is simply a sport? A candidate like Donald Trump for instance.

The Communications professors also first observed this correlation: when politics was presented as a game of moves, there is shift in the level of the voters’ pessimism.

This was around mid 1990s, when one could see the media breaking down the conflict between the US president, Bill Clinton and the speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, the precursor to today’s identity politics.. As Jamieson and Cappella noted, the media was giving more attention to how the two were fighting than what they were fighting for – which, in most cases, was on health reform.

The coverage concentrated on who was winning, indugled in the language games-war, focalised the performance and appearance of the politicians, bestowed a new importance on polls.

A coverage of this sort triggered people’s pessimistic view about politics by making politics look as if it is a game between different selfish players; it also worked on people’s pessimism around the media.

Decades later, this “spiral of cynicism” is all around us: from the exploding popcorn of polls, to the headlines. After Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly compared him to a fascist last week, the Wall Street Journal wrote: “Harris turns Trump’s former chief of staff’s words against him in bid to disqualify him too”.

The contest over whether Trump is a fascist or not was distilled down to pointing out a figure of speech. Thanks to sociopolitical drama which believes that all politics is a sick joke and the MSM does not care for the concerns of the voter, all over the world this has led to the rise of presidents who seek to dismantle the entire frontal of democracy.

It is not a coincidence however that this turn started in the early 1990’s, as the cold war was over and the major philosophical arguments on policy appeared to have reached their conclusion. Instead, politics was reduced to scenery entertainment, the time of Blair, Clinton, Zhirinovsky, Yeltsin etc. And the media started overreporting to overload that substituted the politics of ideas with personality and strategies.

The reality show became the leader of the entertainment agenda in the 1990s too. First, it emerges from earlier attempts at observational documentaries which aimed to learn more about society through filming people constantly in their domestic environments where they would might become unaware of the cameras and thus behave less artificially.

It quickly became the opposite: It was a circus which had all behaviour staged for television. The participants somehow managed to do the most disgusting things in-order for them to instigate scandal and gain publicity.

Thus, American political TV debates began to follow the same logic. It’s just that in a busy primary debate, the candidates get a little slice of the time. The only way to force another candidate to give them more is to insult them as badly as possible and thus force them to insult you in return. If you are attacked then you are furnished with more time to defend yourself.

So you got debates rather with extremely smart participants who think that insulting the other participant personally will enable them to gain more attention. This is exactly where the debate stage was laid out for reality show host Trump.

The design of most social media has followed the same incentives: rewarding taking the most extreme and often nasty statement coming to generate attention. And Trump has done just that too.

The nineties is when WWE really thrived, with it cabaret wrestlers performing undoubtedly staged fighting gestures, in which violence is performance. Trump was always a fan of WWE and even participated in ‘professional wrestling bouts’ and was in WWE hall of fame.

This year the 1990s wrestling star Hulk Hogan gave a speech at the Republican National Convention: Trump comes out to the theme of the Undertaker, who, at the height of WWE, was the ‘bad guy’ to Hogan’s ‘hero’. Most of Trump supporters interpret his words using the cultural collection of WWE. Ok, so yes, Trump does say some things that sound very-authoritarian – but it is just a game.

But can we ever get back to reality? As far as goals or objectives are measured, the issues turn to rather than strategies. We can and the same polling used to identify effectiveness of communication can help in this respect as well. When pollsters recently offered voters policies and not personalities to vote for in this election the majority including trump voters preferred Kamala Harris’s polices.

When the methodology of information presentation is altered, identified forms of partisan polarisation disappear. We can also create varied types of TV political debates and while retaining the aggressive spirit of competition; channel it towards positive achievement instead of curse.

Take the following twist; Are there different ways of approaching a policy problem and how would a team of eight persons comprising four from each party in parliament go about implementing their ideas creating a coalition government during the course of the debate?. We could also scale social media platforms that algorithmically take notice of the similarities in the kind of politics that people disagree to formulate policy solutions that are equivalent. Such platforms are already being used in Taiwan Currently, health promotion information and intervention for adolescents and young adults are being delivered online.

Of course, there is an interest in leaving the real world in the wake of the disgusting circus of politics. But if we can’t face facts, others will force us Facing the facts are better than having the facts faced to us. This month at the Wilson Center in DC, Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute, and Sam Cranny-Evans of the Open Source Centre took everybody to the dark side and explained how Russia develops and delivers its weapons.

In the slide show seen a few hours earlier the untouched satellite imagery showed munitions factories where freshly cleared tracts of land are prepared for weapons production. According to the sources, Vladimir Putin is gearing up for a very big war. China’s arms production is now on a wartime basis. They are not playing.