No video released yet but the right wing blog-sphere is already claiming it’s AI. Put on your seat-belts and keep your hands inside the car at all times.
No video released yet but the right wing blog-sphere is already claiming it’s AI. Put on your seat-belts and keep your hands inside the car at all times.
Yea, I kinda hate that attitude, too, honestly. True enough that polls are already like trying to read tea-leaves, and there’s ample motivation to play games with the results to skew a particular way. But people tend to apply that analysis selectively so that they don’t have to confront the possibility their candidate/political calculations aren’t popular. When our media circles are being blasted with petty reporting about one candidate or the other taking a dookey on stage or whatever-the-fuck, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep expectations reasonably close to reality because you’re ignoring about half the signs and granting too much weight to the signs you actually do see.
The race is neck-and-neck, by just about any reasonable projection. But the margin of error is something like ±3/4%, and that’s assuming a healthy sample and is just a snapshot that is still weeks away from election day. A poll on the day of the election that has Harris -1 in Michigan could end up being Trump +3 or vice-versa, and that’s completely within the margin for that poll.
But if you’re not even hearing what’s being said on the opposite end of the spectrum, let alone actually trying to understand what’s being said, then you’re gonna be completely taken for a ride come nov 6. For 6 months after the election, analysts and most Americans will be scratching their heads trying to understand what happened (win or lose) because people just have no idea what the other half of the country is actually feeling. And when people are sure they had it right, and then have those expectations flipped on the day, that’s when you get people storming the capital or spending years prosecuting foreign interference that was completely out in the open the whole time.
I appreciate and agree with most of your post, but I disagree that we are all so disconnected from each other’s feelings. Perhaps it’s a regional thing, but many of us have relatives, if not friends, who deeply disagree with our politics. We not only get exposed to the others’ views through social interactions, but we also absorb any political media they have on in the background on holidays and other get-togethers. Some of us also want to understand what the other end of the spectrum is exposed to and seek out some content from these sources for a variety of different reasons.
I don’t understand the mindset and thinking of people in my life that are so far on the other side when it comes to these issues, but I don’t write them off or feel disgusted by them as people unless and until they start promoting hate speech in most cases.
I’m also not experiencing any delusions about inevitable outcomes on election day. I’m preparing for either reality, but I’m more actively preparing myself for the opposite outcome of what I’m hoping for. Lemmy does a great job of reminding me how possible this is in comment sections every day.
I’m doing what I can by helping and encouraging friends, coworkers, and my partner to vote. He even requested an absentee ballot after months of telling me he wasn’t going to vote. I didn’t push, and I don’t consume most news media when we’re together. He has just had a harder time ignoring the evidence of his eyes and ears lately.
Nothing is decided. If we care at all about not feeling the gut punch that was November 9th of 2016, if not worse, then we should do what we can to prevent that from happening again.
We don’t experience the same media onslaught as they do. We might hear their perspective from talking to them, but we don’t understand the extent of the warped reality they experience, and we don’t understand how the same news events get communicated to them very differently.
Just looking through the reporting shared here, you get the distinct feeling that Trump is on the decline and he’s in big trouble. But any other media environment paints an extremely different picture - and any alarm or skepticism raised here in the comments is not very well received. The polls that show trump extending leads in swing states are suddenly not at all unbelievable once you anonymize your internet browsing and see what’s being presented to the median american.
I’m just commenting on what I see. The vibe here feels very similar to 2016, and I’m bracing myself for the media collapse that happens the day after.