OPINION:
This is your biennial reminder that you should take all survey results from here to Election Day with a grain of salt, always keeping in mind that those who paid for the survey research have a vested interest in the election outcome.
You should ignore surveys that sample only “adults” (like the recent Newsweek or ABC surveys that showed — surprise! — Vice President Kamala Harris up by half a dozen points). At this point, even those who sample only “registered” voters should also be ignored. Be careful about the margin of error, too. The margin of error for a random sample of 400 voters is 4.9 percentage points, not the 2.4 percentage points that was reported recently in connection with a survey of swing states.
Finally, do your best to ignore surveys sponsored by the media. They are designed to drive copy and give their reporters something to do, not necessarily find the truth.
You can’t blame the media for trying to make survey results sound more exciting than they are. Despite the excitement and breathless reporting, the contest has been static for six or seven months now and is likely to be that way for the remaining 90 days. No candidate has managed to sustain a lead outside the margin of error either nationally or in the remaining handful of swing states.
Oddly enough, most of the surveys seem indifferent regarding why the race is close. With respect to what voters have identified as the two dominant issues — the economy and immigration — former President Donald Trump has a commanding advantage over anyone else. There is no doubt that his presidency was manifestly better than President Biden’s, whether your preferred metric is economic growth, international peace, the southern border or whatever.
That suggests that the closeness of the race is not just about policies or campaign mechanics.
In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells a story about a farmer who planted a wheat field that was later oversown with weeds by an enemy. The farmer, knowing that pulling the weeds would also damage the wheat, allowed them to grow together until harvesttime, then harvested the wheat and burned the weeds.
Usually, this story is offered as an explanation for why sinners and saints live more or less as equals under God’s sheltering providence. Maybe. But maybe the story is really about each of us as individuals. We have been given God’s graces, and each of us has allowed weeds to grow in our lives. In “The Gulag Archipelago,” Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn captured this: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.”
The election remains close because Mr. Trump (like all of us) has flaws, but (unlike most of us) makes little effort to hide them. Americans prefer their presidents — who are, of course, the head of state as well as the chief executive of the federal government — to do a more thorough job of hiding the line that separates the good and evil in themselves.
Mr. Trump won’t change. Billionaires, especially those past middle age, see little reason to alter the formula that got them to where they are. Who can blame them?
That leaves it to the voters to decide whether the harvest is worth the weeds, whether the line between good and evil is in the right place. A significant number of voters are obviously struggling with those questions.
• Michael McKenna is an award-winning columnist with The Washington Times.
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