Various media outlets are struggling with recent polls that not only show President Trump at the same popularity as this time last year but actually rising in states like Ohio. When one poll found him leading by 7 points in battleground states, John King warned his viewers to “be careful not to invest too much in any one poll” especially amid the coronavirus. While Biden leads in other polls, the situation is certainly not unique.
The media seems to be confused. It was not supposed to work this way. With unrelentingly negative coverage of an impeachment, a pandemic, and an economic collapse, voters were supposed to be angry. There is even a psychological model for such social cognitive learning known as “Bobo the Clown” and, while this experiment by the psychologist Albert Bandura was done 60 years ago, recent polls suggest that conditioning does not work quite as well in politics as it does on playgrounds.
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