Polls show Trump winning key swing states. That’s partly a failure of the press

I learned the hard way to be skeptical about the predictive power of public opinion polls.

I remember election night 2016 all too well, as I hit delete on my partially pre-written Washington Post column and instead tried to look into the future of a Trump presidency. It was a future that wasn’t supposed to happen.

An entire nation of journalists was doing much the same. Not everyone, but a whole lot of us.

Given that searing memory, I reacted to the recent much-trumpeted Wall Street Journal poll about the 2024 presidential race with, well, not exactly a shrug, but not a primal scream either.

That was the poll that said Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden in six of seven crucial battleground states, the very ones most likely to determine who gets elected in November. The former president is ahead, according to the Journal’s poll, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina; the two candidates are tied in Wisconsin.

That doesn’t mean anything definitive seven months away from the election. Yet – as someone who thinks another four years of Trump would be a disaster – I believe there’s something to be learned here.

Rather than dismiss these findings, think about what they tell us, even if they do so imperfectly and even if they lack any real predictive power.

One of the things these numbers suggest is that the journalists are not getting the truth across to citizens on some key points (or if they are, that truth is being ignored).

The poll respondents claim that one of their big concerns is the economy. If that’s the case, they should be happy with Biden. Among the factors: low inflation, significant growth and low unemployment. Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate economist, wrote recently: “The economic news