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[TwilightZone]

12. It's not just a polling issue. That's just an easy way to avoid the real issues.

I disagree that we can just wave away President Biden's stubbornly low ratings (or Trump's relatively-high approval, for that matter) as a polling issue. Some polls undoubtedly have issues, but it's exceedingly unlikely that every poll has been substantially off every time over several years.

A significant part of the problem is that some people simply don't pay attention, they're apolitical, they're apathetic, they're highly influenced by propaganda and misinformation and/or they're under- or misinformed. As both 2016 and 2020 proved, there are at least tens of millions of people who fall into one or all of these categories. This is nothing new. We've been fighting active misinformation and propaganda from the right since at least the Reagan years

As for the economy, for many people, that means nothing beyond their own households. It doesn't matter how well the economy is doing as a whole if they perceive - right or wrong - that it isn't helping them. It could be as simple as the price of groceries, which is without question much higher than pre-pandemic, as is the cost of most other goods and many services. If that's what people living paycheck-to-paycheck view as "the economy", they're not going to see the macro level.