G. Elliott Morris deservedly trashes the once-reliable Harry Enten for feeding the ad-supported eyeball-gluing misinformation beast. & it leads me to harken back to the true Glory Days of Nate Silver…
The wise G. Elliott Morris is very unhappy with CNN’s Harry Enten.
Why? Enten is now deceiving his viewers on TV in order to serve their ad-supported eyeball-glueing mendacity-serving business model:
G. Elliott Morris: Is Trump “doing what he promised”? <https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/is-trump-doing-what-he-promised-weekly>: ‘I don’t normally devote the lead slot in this weekly roundup just to disagreeing… but I’m going to make an exception…. Harry Enten claiming Trump is “doing what he promised” and “might as well be called Steady Eddie” in the eyes of the public… that public opinion about Trump has not changed since 2024, and later implies he could win again if a hypothetical do-over happened today…. The three most relevant quotes…. “Go back to October of 2024, 44 percent of the American public viewed him favorably. Now, despite everything, look at this, 43 percent…”. “The race for Congress, Dems versus Republican margin…. It was plus three Democrats at this point a year ago. Now it’s plus four…. We had [this] a year ago, and it was not good enough for Democrats to take control…”. ”52 percent, the majority of Americans say that Donald Trump is doing what he promised…. Trump has basically the steadiest favorable rating this much through a presidency of any president on record… Good enough to get him reelected…”…
Two things going wrong…. Cherry-picking… results… almost entirely driven by which polls he’s selecting, the questions he’s using, and the timeline used for his comparison.… [For example,] the president’s job approval rating—a number which is more predictive than favorability of things we care about, like midterm and presidential election outcomes—is significantly worse than it was at the start of Trump’s term….
[And] our average of polls at 50+1 shows a 7-point swing away from Republicans on the generic ballot since the start of Trump’s term, when the GOP was up 3 vs Democrats….
Yes, 52% of Americans say they think Trump is “doing what he promised.” But Enten implies that this is somehow a rosy figure for “Steady Eddie” Trump…. [But[ many people think Trump is “doing what he promised,” and they do not like it….
Since the directional informational content of the question is low… the implied 50% benchmark is nonsensical….
On any given day, according to Enten, the sky is either falling for Trump or he’s destroying the competition…. Sensationaliz[ing] findings to keep viewers engaged… baked into the business model…. But… with public opinion… changes are slow and the story is pretty obvious, and often boring. A segment that says Trump has been slowly losing ground since the start of his presidency, and Republicans are probably heading for a midterm loss, is not going to hold an audience for long…
So let me harken back to The Day. Remember: Back when Nate Silver showed up, it was a complete and total breath of fresh air. Why? Precisely because Nate did not do the excited IMPORTANT BREAKING NEWS NEWS!! panic-octopus embarrassed-penguin parade dumpster salsa dance-dance.
