You can see this attitude in the knee jerk reaction to not get complacent or the adage to run like you’re X points behind.
That may be useful advice for campaigns, but I’m not sure about voters. To me, being told to disregard the good news just leaves the bad news. I realize the potential motivating factor, but personally, it wears me down and makes me less enthusiastic about voting, especially when the other side has no such issues and thrives on good news, whether it’s the truth or not.
Like I said, I can see the reasoning, but again, for me personally, it’s just wearying.
Good news and a positive outlook are morale boosters which encourage participation. Statements like “Trump has no path to victory!” or “Kamala Harris is guaranteed to be elected President!” are bombast that encourages complacency, especially when coupled with polls showing a single digit lead but are known to underrepresent Trump voters.
There is plenty to be heartened about in recent developments, but also still a lot of reason for concerns, especially in Congressional and state-level elections, as well as the nearly inevitable waves of election denial and general shitfuckery which canny observers are anticipating. Just because you are eight lengths ahead in a race is not a reason to slack pace, especially when you are in a marathon and still kilometers from the finish line.
I think reacting to every piece of good news with over the top elation only sets yourself up to be crushed by every piece of bad news. The election is close and will have ups and downs, I think it makes sense to moderate enthusiasm until the election is over.
Yeah. The better alternative is to say “what we’re doing is working!” because it’s positive and uplifting, and it encourages people to keep pressing instead of taking their foot off the gas.
Edit to add: So to answer the OP, it’s not the good news, it’s the reaction to it.
“Good news from a single poll” or from a single poll-aggregator is a very specific response cycle where a clickbait headline oversells one poll (whether bad or good), and then more level-headed folks point out the margin of error, how much things could change, trauma from 2016, etc. Which are all correct, but one can still be plenty optimistic in tone if the general direction is good without implying slacking off in effort (“a long way to go still - but boy we’ve come a long way since last month”).
Can’t recall the title of a book I read w/in the past couple of years, saying that on a global level things like wealth, health, education are generally better than they were in the past. For example, worldwide, fewer people are living in the direst poverty. Life expectancy and literacy rates are increasing.
But references to such gradual trends do not provide good daily headlines.
And if you are the party not in power, you want to paint things as badly as possible, to suggest you could do better.
Also, folk tend to focus on particulars of their personal situation. Who cares if all the economic factors are improving - and if my overall lifestyle is just dandy - if I have to pay more for gas, food, and housing?
Good news is certainly just as important, if not even more important, than bad news. One of the biggest problems of Western media is allowing bad news to carry so much more weight than good.