Saturday, March 05, 2016

Manufacturing Reality

As I've written before, the obvious even seemingly coordinated attempts to create frontrunners of the week in the Republican primary by the press have been hilarious. It was a real thing in 2012. Practically every candidate did have a moment when polls legitimately showed them surging or even being the temporary frontrunner. This time the press just made it up. Jeb was the presumptive favorite, Rubio the favored notJeb, and then everyone else would SURGE by hitting 6% in the polls or whatever. It's Fiorina's week! Kasichmentum! Christie's coming to town! Watch out for Gilmore! (okay at least that last one didn't actually happen, or at least I didn't notice if it did). The point is that these narratives were usually entirely unsupported by any polling. I'll concede that polling isn't everything, but it's almost all of the useful information we have about this stuff. To just throw it out the window is to write politics fanfiction. Which I guess is what they're paid to do.