The Weekly Sift

I don’t want to talk about polls this early in the campaign. One reason I began blogging in the first place was to fight the news media’s fixation with horse-race coverage of political campaigns. News reports ought to be giving voters the information they need to make their decisions, but instead they create a hall-of-mirrors effect where voters learn about what voters think, rather than about the underlying situation or the candidates’ plans, visions, and records.

But this week an outlier poll came out showing Trump with a ten-point lead over Biden — most polls show a neck-and-neck race — and it seemed to be all the weekend news shows could talk about. At a moment when Trump is pushing House Republicans to shut down the government and impeach President Biden, nobody is talking about that. Instead they talk about polls. It’s crazy.

Anyway, though, I sense that we’re all worrying, so we might as well talk: What about those polls? Should we be anxious? Is there any point to fretting over them? That’s the topic of this week’s featured post: “About the polls”, which should be out around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary has substantive issues to cover: the looming shutdown, new corruption stories about Senator Menendez and Justice Thomas, Rupert Murdoch’s retirement, and a new opportunity for the Supreme Court to crash the country. That should be out around 11.