New York Times Coverage Will Not Determine the Winner of this Election

Nor will rumors about immigrants eating cats

It feels like the high of the DNC is starting to wane, and a goddamn NYTimes poll on Sunday brought reality crashing back down to Earth. That poll showed Trump up by one point, nationally, and it was also an aberration among polls.

But it also reminded me of a NYTimes poll in October 2022, also an aberration, that showed that Gen X had suddenly gone deep red and that independent women voters — who had favored Democrats by 14 points in September 2022 suddenly favored Republican voters by 18 just one month later, although nothing had changed in the political landscape. The level of grief that stupid poll provoked in 2022 is hard to overstate.

Of course, the original September 2022 poll proved correct, and the Democrats fared well in the midterms. That should be comforting, except that it also reminded me of that massive lead that Biden had nationally in 2020 — over 5 -7 points in many polls — and yet, he still only squeaked out a tiny victory in the Electoral College. No polls right now show Harris with a 5-7 point lead nationally.

Still, it really does illustrate just how bad polling is at predicting winners. Unfortunately, that also means that we cannot take comfort in polls, that there is really nothing between now and November 5th that we can turn to to calm our nerves, except good old-fashioned drugs and alcohol (I’m kidding. Mostly).

Our moods do, however, fluctuate depending on the vibes, and it’s been quiet lately, as though everyone is waiting on tonight’s debate to decide where our vibes are at. I don’t have a great feeling about the debate, not because I think that Harris will perform poorly — I think she’ll wipe the floor with Trump — but because I don’t think it will matter. This is what the Trump campaign does best — it manipulates the media into zeroing in on the one meaningless mistake his opponent makes instead of the geyser full of lies that he tells.

No one has been able to effectively combat that, and I am curious to see if the Harris campaign has figured it out. What they do have working for them is that the media seems to be finally paying attention to Trump’s age and cognitive decline, or at least the NYTimes managed to write about it yesterday. If Trump rambles incoherently as he did in the last debate, maybe the media will highlight it more.

Again, not that it matters. I do find it ironic that we are always beating up on the NYTimes, the Washington Post, etc., for their false equivalencies, for both sidesing every issue, and for not highlighting all of Trump’s many, many deficits as a candidate. It’s not that they don’t deserve the criticism; it’s that it doesn’t matter. You know who reads the Times, the Post, and who watches CNN? Not Trump voters! I promise that there is not one single regular NYTimes reader who has not already made up their mind about who they’re going to vote for in November. I also promise you that almost all of them — except for the very wealthy — will vote for Kamala Harris.

We have to figure out how to win that tiny slice of undecided voters — people who don’t read newspapers or watch CNN or even Fox News (because they’ve also decided who they will vote for, too). The Trump campaign reached out to those voters yesterday by floating a baseless rumor that Haitian immigrants are eating our pets. J.D. Vance (and some other politicians) repeated the baseless rumor. Does it matter that it’s completely false? No! Not to the undecided voters who see the news on Facebook and don’t know the difference.

The Democrats are not going to be able to win the war for those who believe that immigrants eat cats and that schools are forcing kids to have gender-reassignment surgery in the cafeteria. Thankfully, most of those people don’t vote. However, we have to turn out every Harris voter, and to do that, we must maintain enthusiasm. To do that, we cannot get into political fights about immigrants eating cats.

Getting into stupid fights doesn’t excite anyone. We need to be dancing to the polls, so we must not just remind voters about what’s at stake — Democracy! — but what a Harris presidency can mean.

I was having a conversation with a woman about five minutes before I sat down to write this post about how hard it is for young people to buy a house. She said, “You need a 5 percent down payment, and for a $500,000 house, that’s $25,000. " We talked about how my kid—who wants to be a school teacher and will probably leave college with a bunch of debt—will have no chance in hell.

I thought it was Kismet that she used that exact figure because I told her Harris is literally offering a $25,000 grant to first-time homebuyers to make those down payments. But, we reasoned, “sellers are just going to raise the price of their homes by $25,000,” and because we both came from underprivileged backgrounds, we were both like, “Who fucking cares?!” What matters is getting your foot in the door. What matters is making that down payment. It doesn’t matter if the house is $500K or $525K. Because once you own a home, and once you start building equity, you’re all set. This woman was excited about this policy because she had bought her first house with a $10,000 government grant very similar to the Harris grant, only she had to prove that she’d made improvements to the house once she bought it. Otherwise, it was free money, and thanks to it, she has been able to parlay it into a better house every five or six years.

Anyway, that’s a very boring conversation, except to say that this woman — and I have no idea who she is voting for, except that based on past conversations, she probably hasn’t given it much thought — was excited about an actual concrete policy that would make a difference in actual people’s lives.

That’s my very long way of saying: Forget Trump. Everyone knows everything there is to know about Trump, no matter what the NYTimes reports or doesn’t report. Either they care or they don’t care. They don’t care about existential issues; they care about real things that can make a difference in their lives, like all those electric car credits we can take advantage of when the interest rates finally come down … unless Trump wins and takes them away. Or the child tax care credits Harris will provide for lower-class families and middle-class families, too. That’s money! In your bank accounts! For middle and lower-class families! To buy heat pumps, fix the roof, buy groceries, and for things that matter! Meanwhile, Trump wants to lower the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent.

How does that help us? It doesn’t! Look: Trump is going to make up a bunch of the same lies he’s told a million times and repeat them tonight. Ignore it. Pay attention to what Harris says, what she proposes, and what plans she has for this country. Trump and his ridiculous tariffs would be a terrible steward of this economy. He would only exacerbate the wealth gap. Harris will continue Joe Biden's work to close that gap. Kamala Harris has a plan! Donald Trump has baseless, made-up bullshit about immigrants eating pets.

Forget Trump. Forget who “wins” the debate. Forget how the New York Times covers it. Learn from it, and take what you learn to the people in your lives who don’t care about politics and who think it’s all just a big personality test. Tell them how a Harris presidency can benefit them. That’s what most people really care about the most: What can these candidates do for me?