Polls Vanish! Real Debate Ensues!

The first sign of trouble came just after Labor Day, 2016, when an editor at Politico was preparing the first of 350 semihourly polls for the general election campaign.

“I can’t figure it out,” he said to the tech support people who had rushed to his computer. “Every time I hit 'send,’ my desk top crashes.”

“It’s worse than you think,” came the reply. “It’s crashing everyone you’re sending, too. Better hold off on that poll story until we can figure out a workaround.”

“Hold off?” the horrified editor gasped. “Why don’t you cut off the air supply in here while you’re at it?”

But it wasn’t just happening at Politico. At ABC News, the poll graphics, along with the field report, disappeared minutes before its newscast was to lead with the epochal news of a 1.5 percent shift among Hispanic professionals in Pennsylvania. At NBC, the network feed of its poll report was interrupted by a test pattern. At The Washington Post and The New York Times and The Huffington Post every story, every analysis of polling information was systematically erased.

No one knew how it had happened — how what came to be known as the Voxnix Worm had burrowed its way into the Web. But what was clear was that the media — old, new, social, anti-social — had to find something to fill the hours of air time, the millions of column inches, the zillions of megabytes, that would ordinarily have gone into the Niagara of polling data.

So, out of desperation, stories began to blossom about where the candidates stood on key policy issues; and because these stories were now featured, rather than buried, editors and producers began to insist that these reports feature clarity and flair, rather than the level of zip reserved for the disclaimers about the latest gout medication.

Other features actually focused on the platforms of the two parties — those once-significant declarations of principles that had been thrust into obscurity. (By the time the campaign ended, 26.7 million Americans had switched their registration to “Independent”)

The impact of the Voxnix worm? Well, there were costs. For instance, without the chance to argue about sampling errors and party I.D. weighing, Twitter traffic declined some 40 percent.

But when Election Day was over, and voter turnout had jumped to the highest levels in U.S. history, most Americans — by a 79-15 margin -- agreed that the Voxnix Worm had been an unalloyed blessing.

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