On Wednesday night, the unnervingly successful US edition of one of the UK’s exports, Mail Online, published an exclusive about a poll. “Donald Trump opens up big lead in our election model,” began the headline which, this being the Mail, could rival Moby Dick for concision. The actual text of the story then began: “Kamala Harris may have enjoyed her most successful campaign weeks, according to our JL Partners/DailyMail.com election model which shows Donald Trump opening up a 10-point lead.” Do try to keep breathing.
There are a number of things one could query about this. The assertion that things may all be downhill from here for Harris is true, but only in the trivial sense that this is theoretically possible for all of us, all the time. (Don’t think about that too much, it doesn’t help.) Polling, exclusive or otherwise, has nothing to do with it. More ridiculous, though, was the claim that Trump has opened up a ten-point lead. From this, you might reasonably conclude that the polls had found that the race stood at, say, 55/45. But no: actual polls continue to show Harris with a small but steady lead.
That ten-point lead is actually in the exclusive model produced for the Mail by JL Partners: it gives Trump a 55 per cent likelihood of winning the Electoral College. That’s not great for those of us who care about democracy, or the Western alliance. But it’s nowhere close to the meaning of the phrase “ten-point lead” in English as it is conventionally understood. No matter: Trump himself tweeted it anyway (“EXCLUSIVE: DONALD TRUMP OPENS UP BIG (10 POINT) LEAD IN OUR ELECTION MODEL”). That may in fact have been the point. Rest assured that if I could think of a way of getting someone to tweet my work to 91 million followers, I would absolutely use it.
By a staggering coincidence, on the same day the Mail published its exclusive, the Guardian ran an opinion piece about the dangers of filter bubbles. Under the headline “Elon Musk’s Twitter coup has harmed the right. They are now simply ‘too online’,” the sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo described the transformation of what was once the world’s public square into a right-wing echo chamber, then blamed it for a number of baffling aspects of the Trump campaign. Attacks on the world’s most popular pop star. Conspiracy theories about Haitian immigrants eating family pets. JD Vance.
This is all very well if the goal of the exercise is to own the libs, or to persuade them to decamp en masse to Bluesky. It may not be quite as effective if the goal is to win votes. “Such extreme messaging does cater to the Maga… crowd of true believers,” writes Gerbaudo, “but it comes at the electoral cost of potentially alienating large swaths of the moderate voting-age population.” It’s also, he could have added, why Tim Walz’s simple assertion that these guys are weird has proved so effective. Because, as will happen to anyone who spends too much time in the wrong bits of the internet, they are.
On this side of the Atlantic, of course, we’ve been here before. An entire right-wing media ecosystem – promoting narratives, ideas and people, with limited interest in how popular they are with the actual electorate – has been driving the Tory party into increasingly weird territory for years. (The Mail itself has never, so far as I can tell, recanted its front page greeting the disaster of Trussonomics with “At last! A true Tory budget”.) How else to explain the fact that one of the few moments in the interminable leadership campaign to have broken through to a wider audience involved Kemi Badenoch’s assertion that she was “not afraid of Doctor Who”. This, to anyone who doesn’t spend their life immersed in online culture wars, must be as baffling as it is bizarre.
What is missing from that contest is any honest accounting for what actually went wrong. When asked about it by the Spectator, the consensus among the four remaining candidates is that the party was not conservative enough. That may go down well with party members, and win praise in the Daily Telegraph or GB News. Actual voters, though, may wonder why they aren’t mentioning the cost of living, or the slow-motion collapse of the state. Echo chambers are useful if you want to promote a message. They’re of no use whatsoever if you need to find out what people actually think.
Trump may or may not win the Electoral College in November: if he doesn’t, it seems probable that misleading headlines like that from the Mail will feature in his attempts to contest the result. But what does seem likely is that he will lose the popular vote for the third election running. Since the 1980s, indeed, a Republican presidential candidate has won more votes than a Democrat only once, in 2004.
The fact that the US right also spent those decades constructing an entire parallel reality through its media is not the only reason for that. But it surely can’t have helped. The Tories should beware.
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