From polls to Gaza – what the media got wrong with the US election

Rory Stewart, for weeks, had told his followers that the Vice President would beat Donald Trump “comfortably”.

“Journalists would like the US race to seem as close as possible - it suits their appetite for suspense,” he said.

“But this won’t be a close race decided by a “couple of thousand votes” … and Kamala Harris will win.”

READ MORE: Kelly Given: Kamala Harris’s failure in US election could have been avoided

After all, he argued, Harris had raised the most money by far. The Democrats had knocked more doors. The issue of abortion meant women would flock to her instead of Trump. Joe Biden’s government, he added, had been “solid” and Trump had “lost ground” since his 2016 win.

Even in the aftermath, a thunderstruck Stewart dug in: “If she (Kamala Harris) was currently winning, you’d have a very good answer for why she was winning.”

Except, of course, she didn’t. Trump will be the next US president, and comfortably so, sweeping all seven swing states as well as the popular vote.

Stewart (below) was far from the only media pundit to make such a painfully wrong prediction while other mainstream and legacy media – from the BBC and Sky News to The Guardian – were largely more cautious.

Polls, polls, polls were the name of the game for most outlets, ourselves included. These supposedly sophisticated models were mostly indicating a razor-thin margin between the Republican and Democrat candidates – if not a slight lean towards the latter.

The Economist model, for example, predicted a thin margin for Harris. Polling expert and founder of Five ThirtyEight, Nate Silver, said he had run 80,000 models and the election was “literally closer than a coin flip” but still put Trump at a slight disadvantage. Hell, Focaldata – a UK polling company – even brought innovative MRP polling into the mix and called it for Harris.

But, however sophisticated or innovative the survey model, the polls – by and large – were wrong again. Three elections in a row now, they have dramatically underestimated support for Trump. And, since they were wrong, so too was the framing of a lot of the media coverage going into election day.

But was it just an overreliance on polls and, particularly on the part of some media pundits, a bit of wishful thinking that went wrong for mainstream and legacy media?

No, says Shakuntala Banaji – a professor in the department of media and communications at the London School of Economics (LSE) – who highlighted that Gaza played a larger role than many have suggested.

In Michigan for example, one of the seven key battleground states, Harris lost heavily in all the more Muslim districts.

READ MORE: Rory Stewart says he has 'often' considered standing to be an MSP

Meanwhile, both Palestinian congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and left-wing Ilhan Omar, who ran on a far more pro-Gaza stance, won their re-elections comfortably.

“The legacy media are so aligned with their own story and their own narrative about why people vote that they were unable to see three things,” Banaji said.

The first, she explained, was that Harris had taken the wrong strategy with her own Democratic voters.

“Instead of being really strongly behind social justice and economic justice, she was trying to be conservative-lite,” Banaji said.

“And a lot of legacy media were just so relieved to have Harris there and to have an alternative option to the far-right that they didn't see how far right the Democrats actually are and how that does not please large segments of voters, who then either voted in protest or didn't vote.”

While votes in some states are still being counted, turnout for Democrats has certainly been impacted – with Harris currently possessing more than 12 million less votes than Joe Biden had in 2020. In the popular vote, she is currently four million votes behind Trump – whose vote count in 2024 is almost identical to 2020.

“This would have been over issues to do with the economy, over issues to do with Palestine and the funding of the ongoing genocide,” she said.

(Image: PA)

With media pundits like Stewart and Alastair Campbell – but also the wider mainstream media – Banaji added they were “unable to see their own biases” on these issues and imagined the US election to be a straightforward competition between a left and right-wing candidate when it was actually right and far-right.

She added: “We are not just guilty of not wanting to do soul-searching, we are part of the problem. Mainstream academia and the media are getting it wrong in such big ways.”

Banaji said that the second key issue legacy media got wrong was the Elon Musk effect.

“The legacy media simply had no understanding of the massive damage that the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter/X has had across the board in terms of the legacy media's own understanding of politics,” she said.

“The fact that liberal and anti-genocide voices and social justice voices – both within and outside the Democratic Party – were being censored massively by Meta, by Alphabet, by X, meant that what the media were drawing from in terms of their pool of available resources were largely centre-right and extreme conservative voices.”

She added: “And bizarrely, even that misled them into underestimating how much support there would be for Trump amongst middle-aged, middle-class white Americans.”

“They are the ones that have elected Trump because in both categories – male and female – they voted in swathes for Trump.”

Banaji went on: “His validation of a particular form of white masculinity in the US was a huge factor which, of course, was picked up on by anybody who had any sense in the legacy media, including people in the UK who could see that this was having an effect.

“But, I guess, that's not the story that people want to tell.”

Finally, the third aspect the media didn't really pay attention to according to Banaji – except for the likes of Fox News – was religion.

“Christianity absolutely dominates the electorate in the US, whether it's evangelical churches, Catholicism or other very far-right Christian denominations,” she said.

“And the anti-abortion and anti-trans rhetoric that Trump spewed and Elon Musk amplified on Twitter/X has had a massively devastating effect on the electorate. It has really radicalised some Christians against Harris.

“They will never vote for a candidate who has not come out as anti-abortion. [And] there was also a lot of disinformation about trans people within legacy media. So how would legacy media diagnose something that they're a part of? They are part of that, and that's exactly what is being attempted in the UK.”

Trust in legacy media is at an all-time low

IT'S not just the predicting of results that went wrong, says media expert Dr Russell Jackson. 

The fact of the matter, he said, is that trust in legacy media is at an all-time low and our influence simply isn’t what it once was.

Where an endorsement for a political candidate from most mainstream newspapers and news channels – which was the case this time around with Kamala Harris – would help boost the vote, if anything, it could be a disadvantage now.

After all, while in 2000, 47% of Republicans had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the news media to report fairly and accurately, by 2024, that share fell to 12%, according to Gallup.

Meanwhile, in a Pew Research survey taken in September, young adults aged between 18 to 29 – where Trump did much better than expected – are as likely to trust information from social media (52%) as they are from legacy media (56%).

This is perhaps part of why Trump’s move – apparently at the suggestion of his 18-year-old son Barron – to give huge interviews to comedians, influencers and internet personalities like Joe Rogan was so successful. Exit polls by NBC News found that men under 30 voted for Trump by two points – a reverse of 2020 when Biden carried that demographic by eleven points.

Jackson agrees that it had an effect, but also that the wider far-right media ecosystem is “way ahead of the curve” compared with more mainstream or left-wing media.

“They stole a lot of ground in creating these podcasts, funding these podcasts, ensuring their wider distribution,” he said.

“People like exciting things to talk about and outspoken people. And when it's the likes of Joe Rogan - who's got his own political agenda and has a certain kind of guest - those people's voices become amplified.”

Dr Jackson added that it’s also an issue of politicians like Kamala Harris – who rejected an invite to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast – not understanding the current media ecosystem.

“What Keir Starmer has been criticised for by a lot of people on the left is going and talking to The Sun, having a column in The Telegraph," he said.

“I think any politician worth their salt should be able to go on to all of these platforms and calmly and rationally argue their case. You are not going to reach these people in any other way.”