After watching any debate, there's a brief minute where you conclude about who 'won' the debate or who performed the best. Then a few seconds later, political pundits tell you who they think won. Their opinions then turn into 'what most people thought' when you're talking about the debate with others.
I bring this up because after every single Democratic debate this year, the overall media consensus is that Hillary Clinton won every debate. But if you checked online, you'd see almost every single (unscientific) poll had Bernie Sanders winning by 70 percent, 80 percent, or 90 percent. This phenomenon happened every single Democratic debate without exception.
Now why is this? Why are pundits' opinions about who won debates so starkly different than the polls we see online? Depending on which candidate you're pulling for, your first and obvious thoughts might be the media is unquestionably biased for Clinton or that young Sanders' supporters are brigading the online polls. And after the first few debates, I admittedly began to think these thoughts, but it turns out neither is the case.
A few months ago, two major liberal groups, Democracy for America and MoveOn.org ran online polls for their members to decide who they should endorse. The following are the outcomes:
- Democracy for America -- 270,000 votes cast -- 88 percent Sanders
- MoveOn.org-- 340,665 votes cast -- 78.6 percent Sanders
Somehow, Sanders received an enormous amount of online votes from members who had to be registered with these organizations before the polls took place. This debunked the young supporters brigading myth and maybe there actually was huge amounts of people that supported Sanders' ideas. And after the most recent debate, there was a very small percentage of media that stated Sanders actually did win by a slight margin. This began to poke holes in my Clinton bias theory.
You see, the huge difference we've seen between the political pundits and what seems to me as a very large percentage of people, is our respective definitions of what a president should be. Political pundits admire 'political' characteristics and most Americans are looking for something completely different.
Remember, not a single vote has been cast for any of the presidential candidates. If the media was always right, Trump would've dropped out of the race by now and Sanders would still be polling around 3 percent. So don't refer to pundits as 'most people' and don't take for granted the precious minute after debates where you've formed an opinion without an outside bias. Every single political pundit is only worth one vote, just the same as yourself.
This post originally appeared on Medium.