Doc Hoff’s Blog Blog Project | “A Story About Time” by Kelly Donahue
The spring semester at UD has wrapped up, and the campus is quiet. But I wanted to post one last #BlogBlogProject from my Public Opinion Research class. I chose this blog by Kelly Donahue, who just graduated with a B.A. in Communication and four (!) minors: Political Communication, Environmental Humanities, English, and Global Studies.
What I like about this blog is that Kelly proposes a new sub-dimension to a concept we discussed in class — very academic! — and at the same time teases his professor, who has said more times than once, “Never end your blog with ‘Only time will tell!’” Thank you for the lol, Kelly!
~ Dr. Hoffman
The 2020 Democratic Primary race is officially underway, as the candidate who it seems many Democratic voters were waiting for has finally arrived. Vice President Joe Biden has saddled up his horse, granted a little later than 19(?) other candidates, and is charging out of the gate. Before even entering the race he was typically polling similarly to other early front runners Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but now, according to a poll by Hill-HarrisX, Biden is clearly out ahead of everyone else with 46% of voters saying they would vote for him. But, as Maximum Security learned in the Kentucky Derby, coming in first and winning are two separate things.
Setting the extended politics-as-horse-race metaphor aside, there are serious questions about what it actually means to be ahead by 32 points when the Democratic convention is still 15 months out. At the beginning of class we talked about what public opinion actually is, and who gets to claim responsibility for what the public’s opinion is. Of the five definitions we discussed, there are arguments for each, but I’m going to take the opinion that right now, public opinion can best be described as a fiction. When you look at the dimensions of public opinion, it’s clear that the direction of Biden’s support has been upwards since he announced, and the intensity of his support is increasing. But where I take issue is with the third dimension, stability.
Biden announced on April 25. We can look at polls from before he announced, and even polls over the past 2 years, and see that he has been thought of as a candidate since leaving the office of Vice President. However, with 15 months before the Democratic candidate is announced it would be downright foolish to assume that Biden will be on the stage with red, white, and blue balloons raining down on him. The campaign trail is fickle and Biden will certainly face stumbling blocks, as he already has claiming he has “no empathy” for Millennials. That doesn’t exactly sound like something a burgeoning voting bloc is going to want in a President.
I would like to add a dimension to public opinion, more of a sub-dimension to stability, and that is proximity to action being taken. The implication here is that the further away from action — in this case, voting — the less likely there is to be a true public opinion. While many people or groups have interests at this time involving who becomes the Democratic nominee, and who will eventually be the President, those interests are far away from being served. Essentially the further away in time from action you are, the less public opinion matters. At this point in the primary race we are so far in proximity from the actual voting that the early narratives of the race are just that, narratives, fictions. When those narratives are carried, month over month, they begin to manifest themselves gradually out of fiction and into reality.
This is all to tie stability together with our definitions of public opinion. Stability is the only thing that proves public opinion is real, and the only thing that can support that public opinion actually exists is prolonged evidence that it exists. It also is a claim that presidential hopeful Joe Biden is actually leading a primary race that isn’t fully real yet. The only thing that can prove that Joe Biden will be the Democratic candidate for president is a vote that makes him the candidate, and that is so far off that most people haven’t even begun to seriously consider who deserves to do that.
The strange thing is that fiction seems to be creeping its way deeper and deeper into American politics. The idea that a dishonest businessman who failed his way upwards would one day be the president of this country seems like a fiction. The 2008 run of Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, was itself a fairytale story. People have been reading George Orwell outside of required reading because suddenly, it feels like fiction might have some insight into our current situation that prior scholarly work may have missed. So even if Joe Biden’s run for president is currently a fiction, it may just manifest itself into a reality.
Only time will tell.
This blog was written for a class in Public Opinion Research by Kelly Donahue, a graduate of the University of Delaware with a B.A. in Communication, with minors in Political Communication, Environmental Humanities, English, and Global Studies. Dr. Hoffman received his permission to publish it here.
