THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 25
COMMENT
PEOPLEMACHINES
“
S
tay out of American elections,”
Bernie Sanders warned Vladimir
Putin, after U.S. intelligence officials
informed him that the Russians are
meddling in the Democratic Presiden-
tial primaries on his behalf. They’re still
shilling for Donald Trump, too, setting
up fake social-media accounts and
spreading fake news, which apparently
bothers the President no more now than
it did the last time around. But it is diffi-
cult to defend the integrity of Ameri-
can elections against foreign interfer-
ence when Americans have come to
accept so much domestic interference.
Michael Bloomberg is attempting to
buy his way to the Presidency and, while
plenty of people have complained about
it—“That is called oligarchy, not de-
mocracy,” Sanders said—no one has
done anything about it, and it was the
Democratic National Committee, not
the Internet Research Agency, that made
it possible for Bloomberg to purchase
a place in the debates.
Before 2015, when Fox News put
Trump at the center of its debate stage,
and asked him the lion’s share of the
questions, polls had never been used to
determine which major-party candi-
dates would be allowed to participate
in a televised debate, or where they
would stand, or how many questions
they would get. Reputable polling or-
ganizations, including Pew and Gallup,
did not participate in this charade; poll-
sters at Bloomberg Politics were among
those who complied. Four years later,
notwithstanding how badly this worked
out for Republicans, the D.N.C. de-
cided to use the same method, a deci-
sion that doomed the slow-starting cam-
paigns of the likes of Michael Bennet
and Julián Castro. If the method nar-
rowed the field, it did not improve the
calibre of the candidates. And almost
no one blinked an eye.
Nearly every major polling outfit
miscalled the 2016 Presidential race.
Most did a lot better at predicting the
2018 midterms. Still, a majority of Amer-
icans don’t trust polls. Polls measure
something, but it’s often the wrong thing
(fame, money). They’re like S.A.T. scores.
The problem isn’t really their accuracy;
it’s the damage they do. When modern
polling began, in the nineteen-thirties,
George Gallup claimed that it rekin-
dled the tradition of the town meeting,
but most members of Congress consid-
ered it to be, as one wrote, “in contra-
diction to representative government.”
In 1949, the political scientist Lind-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
say Rogers complained that “pollsters
have dismissed as irrelevant the kind of
political society in which we live and
which we, as citizens, should endeavor
to strengthen.” Democracy requires par-
ticipation, deliberation, representation,
and leadership—the actual things, not
their simulation.
Tweeting is to talking what polling
is to voting. Twitter was launched in
- Straightaway, people began using
it to wage political campaigns. Barack
Obama’s 2008 campaign used it to raise
money. Conservatives used it to under-
mine the press. “Using Twitter to by-
pass traditional media and directly reach
voters is definitely a good thing,” Newt
Gingrich said, in 2009. A lot of people
thought, and still do, earnestly, that Twit-
ter is good for democracy. “Twitter is
one of the places where you actually
have your own soapbox,” a user said, in
- Twitter dubbed the 2012 race “The
Twitter Election,” and, two years later,
published “The Twitter Government
and Elections Handbook,” which de-
scribed Twitter as “a real-time measure
of public opinion.” Just as Gallup had
done decades earlier, Twitter advertised
its platform to politicians as “The Town
Hall Meeting... In Your Pocket.”
All this happened even as a growing
body of empirical research demonstrated
that the more politically charged the
tweet, the more likely it is to reach a large
audience, that people who get political
information from Twitter are radicalized
by the experience, and that Twitter, like
Facebook, serves as an excellent medium
for propaganda. So wholly did the tiny
world of Twitter seem to be the world
that, in 2017, the Supreme Court ruled,
