Polls have turned the US election into a game. We need to do a reality check | Peter Pomerantsev

IIn Washington DC, I measure my life in surveys and heartbeats. The polls are relentless, nerve-wracking and shockingly contradictory. There are statewide polls, swing state polls, small county polls that predict an entire election, and partisan polls designed to demoralize the other side.

There are surveys about whether a candidate inspires confidence, compassion and leadership skills. I've noticed that after one bad poll, I start looking for another one that tells me numbers I like. I've also noticed that after a good survey, I look for a bad survey to bring me down, as if I'm trying to pop the balloon of confidence and remind myself of “reality.”

But the polls never quite bring you to reality. Instead, they shape it. The big problem here is not just what the polls say or how they were compiled, but also that the obsessive focus on polls is symptomatic of how we view politics.

Polls make politics feel like a race, a game, a sport in which personalities compete against each other. Who's on top? Who's downstairs? What tactics did they use to outwit each other? What does it say about her personality? Words are seen as weapons politicians use to demonstrate their ability to undermine or intimidate the opposition – rather than substantive statements about what they plan to do.

And what kind of politician will be successful in this world where political speeches are just a game? A candidate like Donald Trump.

It was communications professors Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella who first noticed the connection between describing politics as a series of strategies and growing cynicism among voters.

This was the mid-1990s, when the media was constantly analyzing the rivalry between President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the early variant of today's identity-based partisanship. Jamieson and Cappella noted that the media focused less on the issues the two debated – often related to health care reform – and more on how they competed with each other.

The coverage focused on who was winning, used the language of games and war, emphasized the performance and perceptions of politicians, and gave new weight to the polls.

This kind of reporting has made people more cynical about politics – the feeling that it is just a game between self-serving schemers – and then made them even more cynical about the media.

Decades later, this “spiral of cynicism” is all around us: from the exploding popcorn of the polls to the headlines. After Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly compared him to a fascist last week, the Wall Street Journal wrote: “Harris is using the former Trump chief of staff’s comments to paint him as unfit for office.”

The question of whether Trump is a fascist or not has been reduced to highlighting a rhetorical tactic. The idea that all politics is a cynical game and that the “mainstream media” doesn’t really care about voters’ concerns has become so pervasive that it has paved the way for politicians to advocate for tearing down the whole edifice democracy as we know it.

It is no coincidence that this shift began in the 1990s, when the Cold War was over and the great philosophical debates about politics seemed to be over. Instead, politics was about entertaining performances – the era of Blair, Clinton, Zhirinovsky, Yeltsin. And the media began over-reporting, replacing ideological debate with personality and tactics.

In the 1990s, the reality show also became the dominant entertainment format. It originally grew out of observational documentaries that sought to better understand society by continuously filming ordinary people in their homes so that they would forget about the cameras and be more themselves.

It quickly became the opposite: a circus where all behavior was reserved for the cameras. Participants learned to say and do the most disgusting things just to provoke a scandal and attract attention for themselves.

American television political debates began to mimic the same logic. In a busy primary debate, candidates receive only a small fraction of the airtime. The way to get more done is to attack another candidate in the nastiest, most personal way possible, provoking them to counterattack. If you are attacked, you have more time to react.

This quickly led to debates in which extremely clever candidates personally insulted each other in order to attract more attention. The debate stage was set for reality show host Trump.

The design of most social media follows the same incentives: it rewards making the most extreme and often nasty statements to get attention. And Trump has been successful in this too.

In the 1990s, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) boomed with its cabaret wrestlers who performed obviously fake fighting moves in which violence was theater. Trump has always been a fan of WWE, even participating in mock matches and being a member of the Hall of Fame.

This year, 1990s wrestling star Hulk Hogan spoke at the Republican National Convention; Trump attends his own rallies to the theme song of The Undertaker, who was the “evil” counterpart to Hogan's all-American “goodie” at the height of WWE. Many of Trump's supporters apply WWE cultural logic to his statements. Sure, the argument goes, Trump could say some very authoritarian-sounding things – but it's just a game.

So can we ever find a way back to reality? On topics instead of strategies? We can do that, and we can even use surveys to do that. When pollsters recently gave voters a choice of policies rather than personalities in this election, the majority, including Trump supporters, preferred Kamala Harris's.

Partisan polarization dissolves when we change the way we report politics. We can also develop diverse political debates on television that retain the excitement of competition but repurpose it to reward cooperation rather than abuse.

Imagine a debate format in which candidates must solve a real policy problem and demonstrate how they would work with each other and the opposition party to solve that problem. We could also scale social media platforms that algorithmically identify the commonalities of political disagreements to generate shared policy solutions. Such platforms are already in use in Taiwan.

Of course it is appealing to escape from reality into the grotesque circus of politics. But if we can't face the facts, others will force us to. This month, Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute and Sam Cranny-Evans of the Open Source Center presented a chilling analysis of Russian weapons manufacturing and supply chains at the Wilson Center in DC.

The slideshow showed satellite photos of munitions factories where newly cleared areas of land are being prepared for the production of more weapons. Vladimir Putin is preparing for a major war. China's weapons production is on a war footing. They don't play.