President Joe Biden at an Amtrak funding announcement Nov. 6, 2023/WH image

Lisa Van Dusen

November 9, 2023

Aside from all the other impacts in blood, treasure and intestinal fortitude of the world’s current kinetic conflicts — notably in Ukraine and Gaza — they have turned back time on how humanity perceives political power consolidation. In the age of covert chicanery as the power tool of choice for domination games, the comeback story of the year isn’t the British kipper or Donald Tusk, it’s the 20^th-century shooting war.

Most recently, the barbaric Hamas rampage across southern Israel and Israel’s scorched-earth retaliation against the people of Gaza have rewound our collective cognitive schemata of war to, in the former, medieval standards of human butchery and, in the latter, to the 20^th-century hot-war model most impactfully reanimated by Russia, defined by soldiers, tanks, air strikes and mass casualties.

Israel’s Operation Swords of Iron kicked in after the latest spectacular intelligence failure in a century so fraught with them notwithstanding the overwhelming surveillance, hacking, propaganda and narrative disruption capabilities of post-internet espionage — especially Israel’s — that it may be time to revisit the use of the term “failure” in the context of operational aims. From 9/11 to 1/6 to 10/7, so-called intelligence failures have defined the security and geopolitical narrative of this early century.

The global war on democracy that has coincided with that narrative is, once again, embodied in the choice facing Americans in a presidential election. Most of the gains made by anti-democracy interests since the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution coincided with the dawn of the millennium — including China’s economic rise and consequent role in determining political outcomes worldwide, the capture of US democracy by propaganda and performative politics, the degradation both political and economic inflicted on the key democracy of Britain by Brexit — were secured without a shot being fired. Donald Trump did more to harass and discredit the world’s flagship democracy with tweets than any previous bomb-thrower has done through more combustible means.

Those losses for democracy stalled in 2020 when Joe Biden defeated Trump and returned the American presidency to its normal, sane, constitutionally sound incarnation. Biden pulled the United States out of the COVID pandemic and into a recovery that has produced 14 million new jobs, the strongest job growth under any president, ever. The American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (the first major gun law passed by Congress in three decades) and the administration’s activism for reproductive rights via executive order since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 have turned the horrid hourly reminder of Trump’s presidency that elections matter back into an affirmative.

Moreover, at a time when the most important divide in Washington is between not Republicans and Democrats but between pro- and anti-democracy interests, the Biden administration retrieved the White House from its relegation to a backdrop for performative authoritarian thuggery in the “anti-democracy interests” column to its place as a democratic landmark and global symbol of stability rather than lunacy.

If the Republican Party had not already been in the anti-democracy column when Trump was elected in 2016, he would not have been its nominee. Eight years later, the GOP surpasses the corruption-captured US Supreme Court, Fox News, myriad proxy pundits and social media trolls as the most prolific anti-democracy asset afflicting US politics.

Right now, Joe Biden isn’t running against Donald Trump, potential primary challengers, or usual-suspects contenders waiting in the wings for both to soften him up. He’s running against the polls being used to pressure him into quitting before any of that can happen.

The new variable heading into the 2024 presidential election one year from this week is the unprecedented power of polls. In a political context riddled with chaos, uncertainty and unprecedented norm obliteration — including the previously imponderable reality of a twice-impeached, multi-indicted former president running against the incumbent he attempted to keep from office via violent coup — public opinion polls have taken on asymmetrical influence. Right now, Joe Biden isn’t running against Donald Trump, potential primary challengers, or the usual-suspects contenders waiting in the wings for both to soften him up, he’s running against the polls being used to pressure him into quitting before any of that can happen. Just as Justin Trudeau isn’t running against Pierre Poilievre, he’s running against the polls that say — again, counterintuitively — that Poilievre can beat him. Polling is now the most disproportionately determinative driver of outcomes enormously consequential to the freedom and franchise of the same people those polls ostensibly represent.

The last decade has seemingly produced more “polls got it wrong” post-election headlines than were generated in the previous half-century. Polling now regularly portrays a public that has, against its own best interests, decoupled character, competence, basic believability and sanity from electability in some sort of festival of sadomasochistic self-sabotage on the part of voters apparently bent on taking the fall for authorizing their own systemic disempowerment. Can polls that show the competent, honest, patriotic, sane Joe Biden trailing a former president whose list of normally disqualifying offences includes 30,000 lies in office, two impeachments, four indictments, 91 felony charges and a treasonous attempted coup be entirely based on age?

Perhaps the evergreen, often self-serving, “live by the polls, die by the polls” debate over the accuracy and legitimacy of polling should be replaced with one more relevant to the current role of polling in the information sphere, which is now, by definition, the propaganda sphere. With polls now pre-emptively rationalizing and dictating political narratives in addition to reflecting opinion; with election results consistently disproving polls; with, per a Gallup study, 60% of national pollsters in the US having changed their methodology since 2016, (most of those since 2020), and with Gallup’s annual survey of US confidence in public institutions including the Supreme Court, Congress and the presidency (all recent anti-democracy targets) showing predictable declines, maybe public trust in opinion polling should also be measured.

This week offered a case study in the chaos and confusion produced by the seeming disconnect between polls and polls. It opened with shock polls showing Donald Trump beating Biden in key battleground states and an “unnamed Democrat” (that mystery name will be filled in in the Christmas polls) more likely than Biden to beat Trump. The Guardian’s headline provided the best example of the narrative catalyzing that polls perform: Biden faces calls not to seek re-election as shock poll rattles senior Democrats. (The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon ably dissected the propaganda feedback loop of polling/media coverage/polling in July 2022). On Tuesday, the facts on the ground roared back in the form of off-year election results that saw Democrats win key statehouse battles in Virginia and Kentucky, among other victories, propelled by tenacious turnout and the evolution of reproductive freedom as a human rights issue and, apparently, unimpeded by Joe Biden. The post-results distance delineation between Tuesday’s victories and Biden’s electoral viability across a range of headlines, per the aforementioned feedback loop, was noteworthy.

Whether or not you believe Joe Biden should be president of the United States, whether or not, if American, you would vote for him, this isn’t just a campaign, it’s a narrative. And in a time of narrative warfare, there are more players on the field than just the two candidates who ran in 2020.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor and Deputy Publisher Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.