My Contrary Take on Misinformation and the 2024 Election

How much will misinformation and disinformation affect the 2024 election? Perhaps not as much as some think.

Photo by Elimende Inagella on Unsplash

It’s just a few hours until Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will be too busy praying, fasting, and asking for forgiveness to write anything of note for the rest of the weekend.

Before the sun goes down on the East Coast, however, I did want to make a slightly contrarian observation about Charlie Warzel’s latest Atlantic essay, which has been rocketing around my social media feeds this AM.

Warzel looks at the cesspool of disinformation about the Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Milton, and FEMA and reaches critical levels of despair:

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality….

Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants….

It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene. Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”

Kremer wasn’t alone. The journalist Parker Molloy compiled screenshots of people “acknowledging that this image is AI but still insisting that it’s real on some deeper level”—proof, Molloy noted, that we’re “living in the post-reality.” The technology writer Jason Koebler argued that we’ve entered the “‘Fuck It’ Era” of AI slop and political messaging, with AI-generated images being used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth….

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information. What is clear from comments such as Kremer’s is that she is not a dupe; although she may come off as deeply incurious and shameless, she is publicly admitting to being an active participant in the far right’s world-building project, where feel is always greater than real….

What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.

Now I have paid far less attention to these myth-infested waters than Warzel, and I am not so bold as to suggest that Warzel is wrong. But I do wonder whether there is a slightly different dynamic at play, one that would also explain the current polling vibes in the run-up to the 2024 election:

To explain what’s going on in the United States, let’s take a slight detour into Russia, where a recent survey conducted jointly by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Levada Analytical Center in Moscow reveals some very interesting findings about how ordinary Russians feel about the war in Ukraine 32 months on. Bear in mind that Russia is a country with far fewer press freedoms, far more government-controlled misinformation and disinformation, and far greater risks for those Russians willing to speak out in opposition to the war.

That is why these results are so surprising:

• Six in 10 Russians (60%) believe that the lack of a peace agreement with Ukraine is a critical threat to Russia, and a slight majority (54%) say it is time to start peace negotiations rather than continue military action (38%).

• By a five to three ratio, Russians say that the special military operation in Ukraine has caused more harm (47%) than good (28%).

• Eight in 10 Russians (78%) say the possibility of the special military operation in Ukraine escalating into a conflict between Russia and NATO poses a critical threat to Russia, and 53 percent say a military confrontation between Moscow and NATO is likely if Russia prevails in the conflict with Ukraine.

Compared with their May 2023 polling results, it is clear that the costs of the war are souring Russian public opinion on the war itself.

Here’s the thing, however: when those same Russians are asked what their preferences are for ending the conflict, the polling results indicate that there is no real preference for any meaningful compromise:

• Despite these risks, three in four Russians continue to support their government’s military action in Ukraine (46% strongly support, 30% somewhat support).

• When asked directly whether Russia should make certain concessions to Ukraine to end the conflict, only two in 10 think it should (71% oppose). As in previous surveys, Russians remain unwilling to cede any of the occupied Ukrainian territories back to Kyiv.

Despite more than two years of Russian propaganda, Russians seem keenly aware of the costs of the conflict. They know that the war represents a net loss for Russia. And yet these same Russians are unwilling to change course. When faced between two very unappetizing policy options, ordinary Russians express a preference for continuing the war.

What does this have to do with the United States? Let’s pivot to the Washington Post’s recent polling in Ohio. This is a state that last month was the target of a tsunami of lies and horseshit perpetrated by JD Vance and Donald Trump. Vance used the exact same “truthiness” reasoning as Amy Kremer to promote the lies about immigrants eating pets as a means of calling attention to the question of illegal immigration. Trump and Vance’s lies terrorized the town of Springfield, Ohio and led to rebukes by its Republican mayor and Ohio’s Republican governor.

So what did WaPo’s polling find? According to Scott Clement, Amy B. Wang, and Emily Guskin, Ohioans understand that Vance and Trump were lying:

Most Ohio voters don’t believe former president Donald Trump’s debunked claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield are “eating people’s pets,” and agree with Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s defense of Haitians as hard workers who are in the United States legally, a Washington Post poll finds….

For the past several weeks, Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, have pushed false and dehumanizing claims about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating cats and dogs in Springfield, in the state’s southwest — doubling and tripling down even as local police and officials have said there is no evidence for such claims….

The furor over Springfield has reverberated in the state, with nearly half of Ohio voters saying they have read or heard “a lot” about the city’s Haitian immigrants, about one month after Vance and Trump began spreading the falsehoods and blaming the group for the city’s struggles.

The Post poll found that 24 percent think Trump’s comment that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets is “probably” or “definitely” true, while 57 percent say it is probably or definitely false. Sixteen percent say they aren’t sure.

No doubt, one would prefer to see zero percent believe Trump and Vance’s lies on this question. In the partisan world we live in, however, it’s clear that this particular falsehood did not take except among those who have already chugged the MAGA Kool-Aid.

In rejecting Trump and Vance’s lies, however, the voters of Ohio are not prepared to reject Trump and Vance. Because the Post’s polling also reveals that, “Trump holds an edge of six percentage points over Vice President Kamala Harris among likely voters in the Buckeye State — 51 percent to 45 percent — similar to his eight-point winning margin four years ago.” Furthermore, “at least some Ohio voters appear to agree with Trump and Vance that Haitian immigrants are having a negative impact on the state. About 4 in 10 Ohio voters (42 percent) say Haitian immigrants in Ohio make the communities they live in worse, while 32 percent say they make them better, with 16 percent saying they make no difference.”

In other words, the residents of Ohio are fully aware that Trump and Vance are lying to them about Haitian immigrants. Enough of them, however, are willing to look past these lies and vote for Trump anyway, because they agree with Trump on immigration, or larger issues.¹

This matches other polling results showing Harris is now in positive territory on the favorable/unfavorable while Trump remains, as ever, underwater. Outside of immigration, Harris also polls even or better than Trump on how she would handle most issues. By these metric Harris should be ahead of Trump by a larger margin. There clearly remains a sliver of the vote that does not like Trump but thinks, for some reason, that his nastiness and bullying are presidential assets. This might be nuts — but it does represent a clear preference ordering.

The ridiculous misinformation generated over the past two months has been embraced by some Americans, but not many of them. Nor is this is a new phenomenon. Nor is there evidence that recent AI nonsense makes any of it more persuasive to most Americans. No, the truth is that Donald Trump remains competitive in this race because some Americans believe that despite his myriad flaws, he would be an effective president.

That is a crazy notion, but it is not due to disinformation. It’s due to some weird alchemy of traditional campaign bullshit and the gut instincts of rationally ignorant voters. Misinformation is a sideshow.

1. If there is misinformation or disinformation that warrants pushback, it is the bipartisan, post-neoliberal consensus that globalization was a mistake. And yes, I will die on this hill.