To rally support for his effort to impose an email questionnaire on federal employees, Elon Musk resorted to one of his favorite tactics: posting a poll on X. “Should all federal employees be required to send a short email with some basic bullet points about what they accomplished last week?” Musk asked Sunday morning, inviting his 200 million-plus followers to voice their approval or disapproval. More than 1,200,000 people responded by the time the poll closed on Monday, with 70.6 percent of respondents answering “yes.” “The public votes overwhelmingly in favor,” Musk wrote. Governing by poll has become a regular gambit for Musk. It promotes his vision of X as a public town square where important decisions are made, and — at least in theory — gives him actual information about what people think. He asked X users whether judges who rule against “the will of the people” should be impeached, and whether DOGE should audit the IRS. (More than two years ago Americans got a preview of this tactic when Musk used a poll to justify his decision to bring then-former President Donald Trump back to the platform.) For all the debate about whether Musk is or is not some kind of “shadow president,” secretly wielding unchecked power — and all the gossip about where he stands in the never-ending court drama of the Trump White House — his use of X as a would-be legitimizing force points to how he really uses that power. He creates a feedback loop with the platform he owns, to justify any governing decision he wants to make. On one level, this is a tech-enabled twist on an old form of governance, where the public votes directly on major policy decisions. Polling gives Americans more direct input than the traditional republican system usually affords — something that could be a boon in an era where only eight percent of citizens see government as “responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans”. “When done properly,” says Jeffrey Green, a professor of political theory at the University of Pennsylvania, poll-based governance “has some potential beneficial role to play.” Green said this form of governance can make democracies more responsive, when a healthy dose of public accountability for the leader, and scrutiny of the electoral process, is applied. But only on a very superficial level is that what Musk is doing. Anyone familiar with politics can recite (or debate) all kinds of ways that serious polls correct for errors or create accurate samples. And in actual democratic voting, every registered citizen gets a ballot and is invited to vote, with exhaustive guardrails around when, where and how said votes are counted. None of these things are true of Musk’s polls on X, which are seen only by X users (and primarily his own 200 million followers). Anyone can respond, including non-Americans and bots. The polls are conducted on a platform that he alone controls, making decisions about who sees the poll, when and where they see it, and how it’s worded. And he ignores the answer if he feels like it: In December 2022 a clear majority of X users told him that he shouldn’t govern the platform, to which he responded by saying that he would limit who could vote in polls going forward to paid subscribers (a promise on which he seemingly did not follow through). Looking at this version of governance-by-poll, Green and other political scientists see something less like direct democracy, and more like a banana republic where voting is used mainly to endorse what the leader already wanted to do. Maria Victoria Murillo, a professor of political science at Columbia University, has written about Latin American countries where leaders use direct polling on policy changes to demonstrate their responsiveness to voters’ immediate concerns, with the goal of strengthening their populist bonafides and increasing their chances of reelection. On X the fundamentally skewed nature of who responds to the polls — and who controls their presentation — makes them more a rubber stamp from Musk’s diehard fanbase than any kind of meaningful political information. “X is not representative of the population. It has an overrepresentation of those most interested in politics and now those supporting Musk given his use of X,” Murillo told DFD. “Nobody voted [for] Musk, and he doesn't have the type of popular support that plebiscitarian leaders have.” That means that no matter how hard Musk insists that “the people have spoken,” it’d be more accurate to say “a people have spoken” — and at that, one heavily swayed by Musk’s own decisions about how X is run. “Mussolini used the crowded square, the equivalent of plebiscite by X, as a sign of consent,” Nadia Urbanati, another Columbia University political theorist, told DFD. “Still, no intellectually and morally honest person could say that was a democratic way of testing popular opinion.” Musk’s insistence that his polls represent the “vox populi” cements the feeling among his followers that they really are the majority. It also implies that any resistance to his will is by definition undemocratic, and creates a cognitive reinforcement loop for Musk himself, through which he might genuinely come to believe he’s doing the “will of the people.” It’s also a possible Achilles’ heel. What X users want is increasingly not the same as what Americans want: A recent Emerson College poll found 45 percent of respondents disapproving of Musk's work with DOGE, and only 41 percent approving, while an Economist-YouGov poll found DOGE topping the list of agencies Americans want eliminated. That’s a far cry from the Kim Jong Un levels of approval Musk frequently receives in X polling. At some point, actual democratic institutions will almost certainly thwart what Musk and his followers have convinced themselves is the authentic “will of the people” — with an outcome that no one, at this point, can predict.
| 
