When I spot Stephen Farnsworth, he’s sipping an Americano and framed almost completely by a newspaper broadsheet — The Washington Post’s World News inside pages, to be precise.
It’s a Thursday morning in October — just about three weeks before election day — and Farnsworth’s schedule has precious few openings this time of year. Fortunately, I booked one of them to discuss, among other topics, his career pivot from journalist to political scientist, his special academic focus on the laughing matter of politics and, of course, the upcoming presidential election.
Below is a transcript of our hour-plus-long conversation at Fredericksburg’s Agora Downtown Coffee Shop, edited only for length and clarity purposes. A podcast version of the interview is available to stream above.
Joey LoMonaco: Thanks for meeting with me. I have heard your name thrown around in elections going back several cycles, you know, I guess. How long have you been in Fredericksburg?
Stephen Farnsworth: I started at Mary Washington in…95. Fall of 95. And other than a few years at George Mason, I’ve been here ever since.
JL: Have you been doing political science that whole time? What was your path prior to, you know, joining the academy, I guess?
SF: Yeah, so I worked as a journalist for 10 years before I went to graduate school. Mostly at the Kansas City Star. I also had a reporting fellowship with the Washington Bureau of the L.A. Times.
And then worked temporarily for a couple of newspapers in Vermont, where I grew up. My undergraduate degree was from Dartmouth, and I went to work for internships right out of school. I graduated kind of in the teeth of the Reagan recession, and so it took a while to find a permanent reporting job. But in the end, it worked out pretty well.
JL: Did you cover politics, or did you cover all kinds of things?
SF: Well, you know, my coverage was mostly politics. At the Kansas City Star, I started out covering the Kansas City, Kansas city government. And then the Jackson County government in Missouri, which includes Kansas City. And then Kansas City, City Hall, which was basically the top metro job at the paper.
And then I became a national economics correspondent for Fairchild News Service, which is a collection of business newspapers in D.C. And then went to graduate school at Georgetown. I was a bit worried about the future of the journalism business.
JL: Justifiably so.
SF: And made the move in part because I didn’t feel like it offered the kind of security that makes sense as you get older.
JL: You’ve been very much vindicated.
SF: Oh, it was much worse than I thought it was going to be.
JL: So I guess, did you ever have a political awakening or something in your personal life? Growing up, was there a flashpoint for you that made you very interested in politics? Or was it something that you had a passing interest in all along?
SF: I actually was more interested getting into journalism than politics. I was very interested in the way in which journalists can tell the public what they need to know to evaluate politicians. I was a kid during the time of Vietnam and Watergate, and so I saw a lot of journalism holding deceitful politicians to account in that era.
And so I found it a particularly interesting thing to observe. And then as a journalist, of course, covering politics, I often gravitated towards those stories that were focused on accountability for government. Is the government using the taxpayers’ money wisely? Is this program paying off? And so I found various areas to do investigative work that basically called into question some of the assumptions that the government officials were making as they were proceeding.
And then I had to make the transition into graduate school because of concerns of the economic future of journalism. I was really only interested in political science as a discipline and in American politics.
JL: It sounds like not only transferable skills, but a certain amount of overlap in your approach. It seems like there’s some analysis that you still get to do as a political scientist?
SF: Yeah. A lot of my work looks at presidential communication. And so I’m very interested in what the government says and how well or how poorly that goes over with the mass public.
JL: So communication to the public at large.
SF: The reality is that in the time that I’ve been studying this stuff, there’s been so many changes in the media environment. And that’s required politicians to either adapt or be kind of left behind as new technologies come along and they have to figure out ways to deal with it.
JL: Well, I mean, you have Trump and Kamala both going on wildly popular podcasts and eschewing some legacy media interviews.
SF: I think it’s clear that the legacy media doesn’t represent the greatest, most effective use of a candidate’s time right now. When you’re thinking about who you need to reach, people who are not reflexively going to vote for you or vote for the other candidate, you’re talking about people who are kind of casual consumers of news at best.
There are people who would maybe listen to the late-night comedy shows, they’d listen to the podcast. They would get their news in unconventional ways. Too often, I think, in the past, politicians have thought about the world of political junkies and sort of coordinated their campaigns with an eye to how to make it work for that political junkie environment.
But those are not persuadable voters. And so it makes a lot of sense, I think, to go into these venues. Now, lately, I’ve been doing a lot of research on political humor. I have two books now out on political humor.
JL: Okay. So what’s political humor?
SF: Well, political humor is basically looking at the late-night comedy shows. And how they talk about politics. And part of that, of course, is looking at how politicians might make jokes and try to connect with that. Because increasingly we see a lot of the conversation about politics focusing on information that’s not even true.
I think the biggest challenge for us in our society is the disinformation explosion that we see here. I mean, part of it, of course, is being caused by the choices individual politicians are making. They will simply say what they wish were true.
And you also have a lot of foreign actors. And so, you have a great deal of deceit in discourse today. Politicians have always sometimes been truth-challenged. But the stream of falsehood that’s now out there is just unbelievable. And it has real-world consequences.
I mean, if you don’t think when COVID first hits in 2020 that it’s serious, you’re putting yourself at risk. You’re putting your family at risk. You’re putting your parents, your kids, everyone you know at risk.
JL: Sure.
SF: And when the vaccine becomes available, if you think that’s a joke, then once again, you’re creating more serious health care crises for people you know and people you care about. And so as you sort of go through the narrative of disinformation relating to COVID, for example, disinformation that came from the very top. We had a president who was talking about injecting bleach and horse pills.
JL: Ironically, my wife got prescribed that [Ivermectin] for a skincare condition, a small dose, like a topical thing.
SF: Well, maybe that works.
JL: We had a great time because it got delivered by a very sketchy, prescribed, but got delivered by a very sketchy pharmacy delivery service.
SF: And I was like, yeah, so you’re a 2020-era Trump voter. And so, you know, the single biggest problem now is trying to keep up with the falsehood. I mean, journalism, particularly in its financially precarious state, doesn’t have the kind of resources to compete with the lies.
It’s so easy to tell a lie. You just go out and say something that’s not true. Like there’s a connection between 5G wireless networks and COVID.
You know how long it takes a reporter to debunk that? It’s immense. And so you end up with a really, really damaging dynamic where you have people who believe that despite all the evidence that there was a pandemic, that this was some sort of effort.
JL: I covered an event, so I still was at the paper [The Free Lance-Star]. It was in 2000. I want to say it was 2020 or 2021. I know I was still wearing a mask outside, so it had to be probably 2020. And it was a “Plandemic” event that they had at Old Mill Park with like the author of the or like the creator of that video and some of the politically adjacent party groups in the state.
God, it was so sketchy. But I was there and I like just very unironically wrote what they said. And it was like biting.
In my opinion, it was like biting satire by just quoting them. There was no editorializing. There was no commentary. But I was literally just writing what was going on on the stage and in the crowd. And to me, it was, like, better than ‘The Onion.’
SF: Right. And in many ways, humor is the vehicle that can really point out the absurdity of some of the claims.
I mean, you know, consider the 2020 election, for example. OK, 60-plus court rulings demonstrating that the election was conducted fairly. You have every governor, every state legislature, every actor at the state level making decisions about what was legitimate, gave their electoral votes as the popular votes of those states dictated.
And so there is absolutely zero evidence that the election was stolen and a mountain of evidence that it was legitimate. In fact, it was the most audited, closely scrutinized election in American history.
And yet to this day, you only have you have something like two-thirds of Republicans who think that Biden was not legitimate. And Trump continues to bring it up. And Republicans who dare say that that Biden won are defeated in primaries, forced into retirement or otherwise drummed out of the party.
And so you end up with a situation where deceit pays off politically. And that’s a really, really dangerous thing. I mean, we simply cannot have a democratic society that works if half the people in the country think if my side doesn’t win, it was illegitimate.
JL: So, being as clued in as you are, how don’t you just submit to nihilism and just like throw yourself off an overpass?
SF: Well (laughing), I’m not ready to go there…
JL: I want to say it like you’re probably more keenly aware of how much deceit there is and how I guess feckless the efforts to combat it are to this point. Like how do you keep kind of chugging along as a political scientist in that environment?
SF: Well, I mean, there are some interesting efforts that are being done globally to combat this, as well as in the United States. I do think that political humor, the late-night comedy shows are a very effective mechanism for pointing out the absurdity of some of the false claims that are being made.
So it’s not like all is lost.
JL: Do you have a favorite? Did you like Trevor Noah, Colbert?
SF: The show I like the most is John Oliver, where you see a deep dive of 15 minutes or so on some policy issue. Very cogent journalism at times on these late-night jokes.
You have an extensive conversation about a topic that might not lend itself to humor at first blush. But by telling people about the details of a policy, you can educate people in a way that can point out the absurdities of the falsehoods and make them better consumers of political content. I think that it’s a very useful supplement to the kind of fact-checking and other things that are going on.
I mean, when we think about conventional journalism and how traditional media or newer media are trying to handle the tidal wave of falsehood, they’re moving in the direction of how can we fact-check this and fact-check that. And that’s all very well and good. But you know what? It doesn’t deter anyone.
As soon as one lie is debunked, a new lie is offered. And so it is a challenging and perhaps futile game of catch-up.
JL: The Washington Post had a “Pinocchio” system years ago.
SF: They still do. And the Washington Post identified 30,000 lies that Donald Trump told during his first term as president.
That did not deter Donald Trump from telling more. It did not deter his supporters from believing him. You could simply imagine, in the case of former president’s supporters, that they simply dismiss everything that the Post has to say as illegitimate because they don’t want to hear it.
The reality is that late-night humor can be a way to get at some of that material and connect to voters who might not be all that sophisticated in their understanding of real policy details. You have a reality that our elections are decided by the people who don’t pay that much attention. The people who pay the greatest attention to politics have already decided which side they’re on.
And they’re not persuadable. And so the question is, what do you do with that sliver of voters who are not reflexively belonging to one party or the other? And what we know about those voters is that they tend to be cross-pressured. They might agree with the Democrats on social policy and the Republicans on economic policy.
Or they might be politically indifferent. Maybe they’ll show up if they care, if someone really motivates them. But maybe they won’t. And so those are the voters that the campaigns are wise to try to reach. They’re also the audience for late-night comedy. It skews towards under 30.
JL: I’m just now aging out of it. If you think about it, I’m 33, and I’m just not staying up late enough for it anymore.
SF: But you’re not watching it live. I guess YouTube clips. (Yeah, I mean, these guys all have vigorous social media presence.
I think a lot of people are going to be watching John Oliver on Monday at work. Or, you know, with social media, you have the ability to pass peer-to-peer jokes that you found particularly compelling.
The New York Times runs a column overnight, every weeknight, on the jokes that were told on Colbert and Fallon and Kimmel. So there are all kinds of ways that you can get to this stuff without staying until 11.30. Because I don’t know that people watch much of anything live anymore.
JL: I mean, I feel like the 2016 cycle I definitely did. But yeah, the last eight years or so, not as much. Well, do you have a course load? Do you teach several political science classes at UMW as well?
SF: I mean, I have a regular run of courses relating to elections, the presidency, media, and some other things.
JL: So like a lot of professors, you split your time teaching, producing work, writing, whatever.
SF: Yeah, I mean, I teach my classes, I do my research, and every now and then I get opportunities to do something a little different. Like I had that Fulbright [Scholar program] in Warsaw last spring.
JL: So what was that like? I’m vaguely aware of what a Fulbright…
SF: There’s a competition. I had a sabbatical, and I used that sabbatical to finish up a couple of books I was working on, a political humor book and a disinformation book. And then the spring semester, I was at the University of Warsaw in their American Studies program, talking about presidential communication to undergraduate and graduate students who were very interested in the United States.
JL: Fascinating time in Polish politics too, right?
SF: Yeah, well, you know, I’m not an expert in Polish politics, but in many ways, their experience is a lot like ours. It’s a pretty divided country between the left and the right. It’s pretty much 50-50.
And what’s different, of course, is that the Russians are right next door. I was constantly amazed in Poland at the efforts that Polish people were making to help the Ukrainian crisis. At one point, they had something like 3 million Ukrainian refugees in Poland, in a country of 40 million people.
That would be like 30 million refugees coming to the United States, I mean, you know, in terms of the magnitude. And, you know, they put people in school gymnasiums, they put them in spare rooms in people’s houses, garages, any place they could find a place to stretch out a bed when this crisis first started. And, you know, Europe has given a lot of these Ukrainian refugees status that will allow them to work during this war.
You know, they have like a temporary green card. And so they can, you know, if they have relatives in Germany or France, they don’t have to stay in Poland. The Ukrainians can move to places where there are family members and be, you know, working in these economies.
And, of course, Poland is immensely engaged with NATO. And it’s, you know, devoting a significant amount of resources to preparing and assisting Ukrainians.
Yeah. Because, you know, the Polish…
JL: Like you said, you’re right next door.
SF: Well, the Polish vision is, you know, if Ukraine ceases to be an independent country, we might be, if not next, close to next.
And so, you know, the reality is that a country in that precarious geographic location is going to pay a great deal of attention to what’s going on in the United States. There’s great fear in Poland that the U.S. will not continue to focus on Ukraine.
JL: Abdicate that role.
SF: Yeah. And there are certainly among some Ukrainians a sense that perhaps the reason that Hezbollah attacked was to draw attention from Russia and their invasion of Ukraine and redirect American policy.
JL: Are you referring to October 7th or more recently?
SF: There are Ukrainians who were… and Polish folks who were thinking that this was, you know, that Putin and other authoritarian leaders kind of pushed Hezbollah into it now.
Because it might take the pressure off the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And, you know, in some ways, you know, America has now less focused on Ukraine than it was because of what’s going on in Israel and Gaza and Lebanon.
I mean, I don’t have first-hand knowledge of, you know, what Putin is thinking
JL: But to hear that that’s a very real sentiment over there…
SF: Well, I guess, like, Polish history with Russia is fraught, to say the least. And so there’s going to be a high level of anxiety, suspicion, and disapproval when Russia becomes expansionist again. How could it be otherwise?
JL: So let me ask you this. You know, I’ve seen over the years, you know, you quoted in a number of political stories. When did your expertise start to get tapped as someone that people would go to as a source?
SF: Well, you know, we conduct surveys on Virginia politics in our state-wide surveys. And we study election returns in terms of the changing nature of politics in this region and in Virginia. And so, you know, some of those kinds of things draw the interest of reporters. You know, I’ve worked a lot with Steve Hanna, a professor in the Geography Department. Looking at sort of visual representations of politics, you know.
I think that’s something that can really work with today’s students. You know, rather than have data tables to illustrate visually the changes.
JL: What’s an example of a visual illustration of elections?
SF: Yeah, well, you know, a cartogram. This is like with the Electoral College, when the states are expanded or shrunk to represent the number of electoral votes. We do that with votes cast in Virginia. And so, you know, when you look at your traditional map of Virginia, and you see all those red counties in South Side and Southwest Virginia, looks like a very red state.
But if you increase the size of the political jurisdictions to match the votes cast, it’s a very different view of Virginia. I’ll send you some examples of that when I get back to the office.
But it’s a way, I think, that we can illustrate how Virginia is changing. And quite frankly, the challenges that Republicans are facing in the suburbs. I think that it was a lot easier for Republicans 30 years ago when the suburbs weren’t as big, and they weren’t as democratic.
JL: As someone who grew up in the suburbs of Virginia 30 years ago, I would tend to agree.
SF: Where’d you grow up?
JL: Woodbridge.
SF: Woodbridge, oh yeah. Well, Prince William is exactly where we’ve seen the big changes.
JL: Oh yeah, I’m a microcosm. Do you consider yourself an elections expert? How have you seen yourself referenced over the years?
SF: Well, I leave it to others to define me. If they want to call and talk to me, that’s fine. In terms of my research, I’ve written and had published work on Virginia politics: political communication, public opinion, the presidency.
There are things that I really don’t know well. I’m not an expert on international dynamics. And so, my training, my expertise, my research is primarily about domestic US politics.
Particularly as it relates to public opinion, media, presidential communication. And then, of course, I do a significant amount of work on Virginia. Which, you know, there aren’t that many scholars who focus on Virginia. And there are maybe, at most, a dozen of us. And a lot of us are all doing other things too.
JL: So, I guess, what are your plans for November 5th? What do you plan to be doing on election night?
SF: Well, usually, I get a lot of media calls.
JL: Just charge your phone, I guess.
SF: Usually, on election night, I work with a local DC TV station. They call me several times throughout the evening.
And then I do other things as warranted. In many ways, Virginia was sort of the belle of the ball with the electoral college.
JL: We’ve lost our lovely purple hue.
SF: Well, the thing is that Trump is not a candidate that necessarily works well in Virginia. He’s not palatable. You’ve got too many Republicans who are suburban, moderate Republicans.
JL: You’ve got to put someone into an AI generator and churn out a Derrick Anderson. That’s what I always think about it. Derrick Anderson is like, if you gave an AI chatbot a prompt for what you would think would be palatable to suburban Republican voters.
And Trump’s not that. And Corey Stewart’s not that. That type of candidate.
SF: Right. If you look at the most successful Republican candidate of the last 10 years, Glenn Youngkin. Glenn Youngkin, as a candidate, was very, very deliberately not all in on Trump.
As a candidate. And he offered an appealing, moderate Republican vision that worked in the suburbs. Now, you don’t necessarily win Fairfax County, no matter what kind of Republican you are.
But if you can bring the margins down, then the advantage in the rural areas that Republicans have. And then you bring the margins down in Prince William.
JL: You can win Stafford County.
SF: Youngkin, the governor, has governed in a much more conservative way than Youngkin, the candidate, offered as a message. And then, of course, with respect to the 2024 campaign that’s going on now, Youngkin, perhaps mindful of the fact that his term is over in another year, is kind of looking at the world of this campaign with respect to the possibility of another opportunity.
The truth is that a Virginia governor, pretty much any of them, could be in a presidential cabinet. You know, Virginia is a major state with major policy issues.
They’re always looking for another job. Terry McAuliffe could have been a governor.
JL: As soon as that happened, I said, ‘Hey, that was a retread. That was a horrible idea.’
SF: But after his term as governor, he could have been in the cabinet…
JL: I’ve been thinking. We’ve been talking about a lot of change a lot, of just how much politics, the means of consuming… We talk about all these you know — is there anything you can point to as a constant from the time that you became interested in politics to now that just, like, never changes?
SF: It’s almost as if the one thing that you can count on is change. You know that every time it’s something new you know though. You know when I was it was a kid you basically had television news, and you had your three networks and that was where you were really thinking as a candidate, as a politician, as a news consumer this is where you have to go to know what’s going on or to tell people what you want.
And now, you know you think each cycle it’s somewhat different. You know there been election cycles that were like Fox News cycles or Twitter cycles or Facebook cycles or podcast cycles which I think is the shape of the 2024 campaign. And so all these different dynamics mean very different messaging. I mean you simply cannot use your traditional TV attack ad on an iPhone. People recoil if they see this kind of harsh stuff two feet away from their face. It doesn’t work the same way as it would on a TV screen so you have to retool.
And the accountability that comes with trying to get your story told in the media is very different than just going on social media and saying what you think and there’s nobody there to critique you.
JL: I mean that’s something that I’ve grappled with a lot, is, like, sometimes people don’t need us in the strict sense of ‘need.’
SF: I would say if anything people have been forced to become their own editor. In the modern environment, you know, once upon a time there was a certain level of credibility attached to something that actually got aired on broadcast or published, but now when you’re thinking about like what’s on Twitter or what you post on Facebook, you don’t even know that the person who’s posting it is the person.
This could be a Russian troll pretending to be.. and so you have no no basis for believing anything which is part of the goal of misinformation because if you can convince people that nothing is true, then they’ll believe anything or they’ll disbelieve everything even the things that are true and so you know it’s you know it’s the deck the deck is very much stacked in favor of falsity.
When you think about it, if you can convince people something that’s true is false or something that’s false is true, you can get them to give up on believing that anything is true.
SF: I showed my students the other day the Howard Dean ‘scream’ of 2004. This is the one where Kerry won the nomination, and he said you know ‘We’re gonna go to New York and New Hampshire and Minnesota” he screams ‘you know’ and that was seen as too deranged to disqualify him and so you know when you think about like what was disqualifying then and what is disqualifying now you know there really needs to be a level of credibility or accountability if you say something that’s false, that’s that should be a problem for you as a political candidate.
JL: So I agree with you. I agree with you lockstep on this whole line of thought, but if conventional fact-checking doesn’t work, if shaming a la carte doesn’t work, then what is the solution?
SF: If I were advising the Harris campaign, you know, I would go all in on the fact that Trump is lying all the time. I think that you know when she does her interview with Fox News you know as you saw yesterday she brings it up from time to time she says these things are not true you know, but that’s the reality you know it’s like you can’t really tell people they’re being played for suckers.
But you can say this is what he said, this is what the facts are sure, know that you can’t trust him and then and then say it again and say it again. Say, you know, pets are not being eaten in Ohio. The unemployment rate is low, inflation has come down, the realities of tariffs involve immense tax increases to consumers.
I mean it seems to me that the Republican Party is really painting itself into a corner with Donald Trump. If you think about politicians like you know Mitt Romney or John McCain the previous nominees, these are people who were who had something to contribute, who had you know effective, largely truthful messages that that spoke to real challenges. If anything, McCain and Romney were much more effective in their understanding of the international environment than Barack Obama
JL: I remember Mitt Romney talking about Russia being our biggest geopolitical threat…
SF: McCain the same thing. You know, when in the 2008 debate McCain’s best two minutes were when he was talking about the Russian invasion of Georgia.
I think that, you know, the big challenge for the Republican Party is how to get back to a professionalism and a credibility that could be a powerful asset.
JL: My theory on this is that Trump is such a singular figurehead, a singular cult of personality that when he exits the scene, it will regress to the mean necessarily in that regard. Now there might be some collateral with the damage of the way that things are done, but it will as soon as he dies or leaves politics I don’t know, it will just necessarily regress to what it was before.
SF: I think a lot of it’s going to depend on the outcome of the election. I mean if Trump if Trump wins obviously this vision of republicanism will last beyond. Sure, if Trump loses but doesn’t lose by much, there’ll be a credible argument to be made that it was just simply a message. You know if you had a Trump messenger that wasn’t say not be convicted of crimes, sure then maybe it would work better so you know it’s going to be hard I think for Republicans, say Nikki Haley Republicans to really take control of the party unless the outcome is really, really bad for Trump.
And I don’t see that happening. This looks to be a 50-50 election. It will be close enough that the Trump-style vision will remain a key part of the Republican conversation.
It’s not unlike what happened to Republicans in Virginia. For a long time, the Republican Party of Virginia was very, very conservative very tight with evangelical politics and you know that worked for them in the days of George Allen and Jim Gilmore. But as Virginia changed, the Republican Party had to change, too.
And so what you saw with Glenn Youngkin it’s a very different kind of a candidate who presented himself as a vision of moderate republicanism that wasn’t problematic in the suburbs.
Youngkin’s nomination occurs because the Republican Party was tired of losing and so they structured the system to make sure that the true pro-trump Republicans didn’t get the nomination.
JL: Like Amanda Chase
SF: Right and so you know by structuring the nomination system to make sure that Republicans could offer a candidate with mainstream appeal, the Republicans were able to turn the tables on what had been a run of Democratic successes in the legislature and in statewide elections in Virginia.
But it took a series of losses for the Republican Party to get to that point. Parties change when they have to. It’s the same story with the Democrats and Bill Clinton you know the Democrats got tired of losing
JL: I guess that goes to your point that the constant is change.
SF: I mean that’s one of the things that I’ve always really liked about political science as a field of study. You know I like literature, but I wonder how much you could say about Shakespeare or John Milton when scholars have hundreds of years’ head start on the people alive today. Whereas in political science, we can talk about the latest election, which is very different than the election before and so on.
JL: I’ve never thought of that, I have never considered that. I wanted to ask: the reliability, the accuracy of polling is something that I know has been… not good the last few cycles. What are the next evolutions to more accurately predict how these things are going, how these elections are going?
SF: Well I think polling is a problem for a number of reasons. I’m personally most troubled by non-response patterns. Certain kinds of people are more likely to answer polls than others yeah and you know we can do various statistical techniques to weigh respondents and things like that to try to end up with a sample that looks like the country or looks like Virginia. But you know we really don’t have a lot of information beyond sort of basic math, numbers to give us a sense of who’s not answering.
Let me give you an example. We know a lot of people do not pick up the phone if they don’t recognize it. Now that skews younger okay. So we know that, for example, it was and we’re sampling a survey that it’s tough to get younger people into our sample.
And so we can adjust the sample to give us a little more weight to younger voters but maybe there are very specific things about like the kinds of young people who are answering. Because you don’t know what you don’t know, right? If the person doesn’t pick up the phone what do we know? We only know they didn’t pick up the phone
Ultimately, I think that people expect too much from polling. Any pollster who’s honest will tell you that we’re dealing with approximations. Even the most professionally conducted polls with the best of intentions and the most objective assessments may still be at some distance from where the reality is.
We’re also dealing with snapshots at a point in time: what a poll says in October may not match up with what happens on Election Day; in part because things are in the news every day that [impact] the outcome. I think a lot of people who are freaking out day by day over the polls are really expecting a lot more from polling than polling will ever be able to provide.
Some of my friends who are not involved in polling, you know, they’re asking me, “What does this mean? Where’s this all going? Can you make me feel comfortable about the outcome I want?”
And it’s like, no I can’t. The reality is that this is a jump ball election and all of the polls tells us that, and anyone who is looking at this and thinks there’s some sort of ironclad determination that’s coming out of this survey environment. It’s just not.
JL: Let’s end on a cheery note. What are you heartened by?
SF: I always tell people if you want to study something optimistic, you should pick music or something.
JL: There’s a series of Russian symphonies that would beg to differ.
SF: Fair enough. But you know I think I think ultimately you know what we have in this country and it’s something that’s always been sort of gratifying to me is the capacity for change. You know, sure, we make mistakes — every country does — but our system is really built towards the capacity to learn from those mistakes.
You change your leaders, you change the definition of your party, you change. The kind of people who run those kinds of things can adjust to changing sentiments, changing issues and we can you know find our way over time.
