Don’t you want to know what’s going to happen this election cycle a little early? After all the speculation, science and advertising covering the airwaves, wouldn’t it be nice to have a crystal ball now?
That’s the promise of a group of dedicated political hobbyists, largely on
Take it from a political reporter: we all want to know everything as quickly as possible. And social media can be a useful tool for identifying trends before they appear on network television. But there is also a steady stream of nonsense, much of it from political hobbyists – and from some trolls who just want to stir things up.
The desperate quest to be first can lead to the rapid spread of misinformation. So here are a few warning signs to avoid on social media.
‘BREAKING: It’s already over’
If you’ve been on Twitter during an election cycle, you’ve seen it: someone going viral for predicting a key race with about 2 percent of the vote. Sometimes they are completely crazy – they see an advantage for a Republican. in New York as a rural county gets the first turn and we assume this will continue across the state, conveniently forgetting a blue stronghold called New York City. Sometimes it’s a little more data-driven: a political hobbyist sees an important province moving in a surprising direction and rushes to be the first to name a swing state.
Either way, and even if these people are sometimes proven right, it’s a horrible process that leads to widespread panic attacks. (Here at POLITICO, we call a state as soon as the AP calls it or three networks do so.)
The same dynamic also exists with exit polls. The notoriously unreliable exit polls start trickling out in the afternoon, before the polls close. This may lead some enterprising political nerds to extrapolate wildly and insist that, for example, exit polls on American views on the economy are rock-solid evidence of an outcome.
‘The atmosphere is strong’
You’ll hear this from both camps. Most people already know to ignore it, but vibe-based messages are still a huge universe online. It includes everything from information about how many yard signs there are in a neighborhood to how many doors each side insists they have knocked to discussions about interactions with swing voters – real and imagined – and how the only thing everyone sees is information that magically predicts victory for one candidate.
Real-life echo chambers and social media algorithms make it increasingly likely that most people will be presented with information that supports their previous assumptions about the state of the race. Ignore the yard signs, and especially ignore the posts over the yard signs.
‘According to my sources’
Someone knows someone who knows someone who has seen voter fraud in Dane County, or heard Trump throw fast food across the room at his aides in anger, or insist that the Harris campaign has canceled their order of victory balloons.
Here’s a hint: these are almost always lies. When a social media post starts with something like “I hear it” or “The campaign feels good,” that’s usually a good sign to close that browser tab unless it’s from a knowledgeable reporter embedded directly in a campaign. This is a classic example of people flourishing and insisting they know an outcome based on prior knowledge, when in fact they are just predicting, just like the rest of us. No matter who wins, someone with some of this “insider knowledge” will surely take a victory lap, basking in the glow of being right about the outcome. But their so-called “sources” will remain fabricated.
‘We have already won’
Consider these two posts, a week apart: On October 26, Victor Joecks, a conservative columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, posted on X that “Republicans could win Nevada’s Senate seat and every Congressional race. That’s how catastrophic NV’s early voting numbers are for Democrats. Is there time for Ds to close the gap? Certainly. But not much.” A week later, a liberal commentator named Swann Marcus on early voting numbers.
Between these two posts, Democrats closed some of the early voting gap. But the confidence with which both sides project that the early vote has sealed victory for them is clearly misplaced. This same dynamic exists in every swing state with early vote totals and will also exist if we get small chunks of the vote on Election Day as mentioned above.
‘We learned this last time’
By the start of election night in 2020, Democratic partisans began to panic. Florida, which they thought might play a role, was in the red, with large parts of the state looking even redder than in 2016. Election betting markets began to spike for Trump, reflecting the idea that the election miss was happening again was huge. and that Trump could make it happen. The election miss was indeed big in Florida, but that did not mean it was enough to sink Biden elsewhere. Each state has a different dynamic; the shift to the right in Florida occurred largely because Latinos in the state were moving toward Trump.
That wasn’t reflected elsewhere in the country — it wasn’t even the case just north of the Sunshine State, where Biden pulled off his biggest upset of the cycle by taking Georgia. But because of the speed at which states count their votes and how they report, there are always overreactions based on what comes first.
‘STOP THE COUNT’
Finally, there is the potentially most dangerous form of online nonsense: disinformation or misleading information that spreads through the campaigns or through the candidates themselves. The most insidious version of this is to insist, on the basis of no credible evidence, that there is vote rigging or that the other side is somehow cheating. Trump’s rhetoric on this front led directly to January 6, and his continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen has convinced a growing number of Republicans that election crimes will occur in 2024.
Campaigns can also be misleading in many other ways, such as selecting information that fits their narrative about where the race is going. The last few election cycles have taught most people in the country an important lesson: Don’t count your chickens. But the people who have failed to internalize that are still lurking on X, creating false or misleading information and trying to drag the rest of us down again.
