The fallout from former President Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden last night has blotted out the news-media sun just over a week before the election.
Or, wait — maybe it was the Washington Post canceling its endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris that blotted it out.
Or all-in Trump supporter Elon Musk opening up a direct line to Vladimir Putin.
For those who expect American politics to conform at least somewhat to the past two and a half centuries of history, the 2024 campaign cycle seems unsettling, an even stranger and more radical break than we’ve seen before. But if you look at what’s driving these changes — a transformed media landscape, the increasingly tenuous link between policy and public sentiment, a sea change in how pollsters track the American public — you can see that it’s not quite a break, but the emergence of a future that some have been living in for years.
James Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The Conservative Futurist,” compared the state of affairs to that predicted by the writer Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book “Future Shock,” which argued that societies experience profound disorientation when exposed to “too much change in too short a period of time.”
“He basically predicted that the pace of change and information would become so overwhelming that it would psychologically destabilize people,” Pethokoukis told DFD. “Looking at our current campaign, whether it’s social media or three-hour podcasts with candidates, it’s hard not to think Toffler was onto something with his concerns about information overload affecting society’s psychological well-being.”
Look first at media, where the transformation is the most immediately obvious. Both the Trump and Harris campaigns have aggressively courted “new media” outlets in an effort to connect with younger voters deemed unreachable by the traditional newspaper-and-broadcast circuit. Last week Trump appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast with its roughly 15 million listeners, where he boasted about his retrofuturistic, neo-McKinleyite economic agenda.
Harris has appeared on the hugely popular “Call Her Daddy” and “All the Smoke” podcasts in a similar attempt to reach would-be voters otherwise unplugged from the political media ecosystem.
That very ecosystem has seen its own transformation over the past several years, as Twitter, the de facto water cooler for the national news media, became X, the moderation-light grievance vehicle for Trump’s second-biggest financial backer, Musk. For a major channel of news dissemination to be owned by not just an outright partisan, but someone actively campaigning and registering voters for one side of the ticket in a presidential election, is a huge departure from the media environment most Americans have grown up in — not just from the increasingly faint norms of the 1990s, but even the most recent election in 2020.
Polling is maybe the most reliable driver of that news and media cycle, and it has experienced its own transformation over the past four years — driven to some extent by communications technology and the divergent ways Americans use it.
Taken aback by repeated underestimations of support for Trump in 2016 and 2020, pollsters have made a wholesale overhaul of their methodology, as The New York Times’ Nate Cohn has described at length. Two decades ago, polling was a matter of calling people on the phone and asking them questions. Near-universal caller ID and the death of the landline have demolished the reliability of that method, with pollsters scrambling to identify who reliably answers the phone, or how different groups of Americans prefer to communicate.
This cycle, by taking polls by text or mail instead of by phone and weighing them by an arcane, controversial metric called the “recalled vote,” the polling industry has thrown out the playbook in an attempt to capture public sentiment more accurately, with repercussions that won’t be clear until early morning Nov. 6 (at the soonest).
Then there’s policy — ostensibly the whole point of this enterprise. After a lengthy, inconclusive debate among wonks and analysts over why public sentiment hasn’t seemed to match rosy on-paper news about the American economy, both the Trump and Harris campaign have put increasingly ambitious policy proposals on the table in attempts to woo voters — often straying from the basic positions of their parties in doing so. This is how one finds Trump speaking unexpectedly of “family caregivers” at his Sunday rally, or Harris attempting to persuade Black men with pro-crypto rulemaking.
Trump, ostensibly the champion of America-first industrial policy, also trashed the CHIPS and Science Act (in his Rogan appearance, at that) as a giveaway to “rich companies,” comparing it unfavorably to his own tariff-heavy economic agenda. Compared with the hype around artificial intelligence and other future technologies, however, this campaign has been surprisingly light on debate about them.
If this election seems historically uncertain, with (new and improved!) polls showing a dead heat nationally and in the swing states, the future it delivers to America might be even more so.
Musk’s outsized, Bond villain-style role as a telecoms operator-slash-heavy industrialist-slash-strong GOP partisan is unlikely to diminish; a Trump win could give Silicon Valley free rein on key issues. Even a win by the “establishment” candidate, Harris, carries its own significant question marks given how young her candidacy is (the mid-summer ticket switch an historical anomaly), and the protean nature of her plans and policy views.
Many of these trends have been visible for a while, to those who have been watching. But not until the climax of this presidential election have they come together in ways that feel so glaringly odd and destabilizing. The future, as always, remains uncertain. But the gradual-and-then-all-at-once slide into our strange digital present suggests that as we arrive there, signs will be present for those who know where to look.
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