Americans feel angry and poor. The French feel ripped off by a stingy government and are stark raving mad. Across the European continent, electorates in countries heading shortly to the polls feel that the center has collapsed, while here at home, Republicans feel the approach of the bluest of waves, not just in swing states but potentially in historically safe GOP strongholds like South Carolina and Kansas.
But what if the vibes are all wrong? What if the riots and the radicalism currently threatening to consume the West are fueled not just by misunderstandings of the data but by willful obfuscations and manipulations of it?
The clearest evidence of a manufactured blue wave comes from polling outlet Wedgewood Polls, which confessed that it wasn’t actually a pollster but rather “an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.”
More accurately, Wedgewood was a social engineering weapon for progressives. In Michigan, Wedgewood’s blockbuster June primary poll showed Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) trailing a virtual unknown by 20 points, killing McMorrow’s momentum and eventually leading to the nomination of Abdul el Sayed, the socialist who can’t decide whether Iran is a greater threat to the United States than Israel.
In its last few weeks of general election Senate “polling,” Wedgewood claimed that el Sayed led Republican nominee Mike Rogers by 6 points, that Mississippi’s Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith was only 4 points ahead of Democrat Scott Colom, and that Democrat Adam Hamilton led incumbent Republican Roger Marshall by 2 points.
Obviously, Wedgewood doesn’t discredit every other reputable outfit. But in a polling environment that positions Iowa as closer for Republicans than Texas is for Democrats, doesn’t the polling evoke shades of Ann Selzer’s “Kamala Harris will win Iowa by three”?
The vibes, both here and across NATO, are similarly unmoored from the real economic data. In France, rioters have threatened the very existence of the Fifth Republic over a proposed 54 billion euro spending cut — a rounding error in the government’s budget — on the grounds that France has already starved social services. This is a laughable lie from a population whose government spends the equivalent of a majority of the country’s annual economic output and nearly a third of its gross domestic product on social spending alone, while its economic growth is a big fat zero.
Economic growth stateside has no such problem, thanks to the current regulatory regime, which has unleashed the AI boom. Far from showing a tanking labor market, the national unemployment rate has remained a full point below the postwar average, with data centers themselves resulting in a 3.5% increase in local employment and a 5% increase in local wages. And despite the fact that data centers consume less water than golf courses and Elon Musk is contemplating how to put them in space, data centers haven’t stopped attracting the dumbest sort of populist backlash.
This fact-free fracas epitomizes the weird malaise over the American economy more broadly. Yes, the Iran war has caused a sharp increase in gas prices that disproportionately harms lower-income earners, for whom transportation costs comprise a greater share of household budgets. And as evidenced by the New York Fed study that found that goods prices would have fallen last year absent President Donald Trump’s tariffs, inflation is unnecessarily high — about half a percentage point to 1 percentage point above the central bank’s maximum 2% target for core inflation.
But over the past two years, real average weekly after-tax earnings have risen almost 2%, and gas remains cheaper in real terms than during the worst of Bidenflation or the Great Recession. The economy is also revolutionizing convenience in very real but hard-to-quantify ways. These include Waymo and Cybercab, where governments are benevolent enough to allow self-driving cars that kill humans less frequently than human drivers do. Muse and AI agents are also allowing the busiest of us to issue verbal commands to schedule appointments, aggregate data, complete transactions, and handle emails without lifting a finger.
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None of this is to say that Republicans are in a great position come November or that the American consumer doesn’t have real complaints. (The French, however, have no leg to stand on.)
But perhaps the doom and gloom among America Firsters and defenders of the Trump status quo is, to a considerable degree, manufactured through vibes and lies rather than grounded in sound data.