Our useless media blew it again
No lessons learned.
In 2016, after President Trump shocked the press by defeating Hillary Clinton, there was a protracted episode of self-flagellation in media. Establishment newsrooms everywhere promised to do better to understand an electorate it clearly knew nothing about.
On Wednesday, as the fate of the 2020 presidential election still hangs in the balance, it became achingly clear that those promises had been empty. Over the last four years, the news industry had only retreated further into its partisan trenches.
As of this writing, Democratic nominee Joe Biden has a slim 23 electoral vote advantage over Trump. His odds of reaching the White House in a 270-to-268 electoral college squeaker are better than even.
Yet, the press assured audiences going into Election Day that it would not be this close of an election, that the Republican Party would suffer, and that the Democratic Party would seize the moment to re-establish itself as the dominant political power in the country. This simply has not happened. The GOP is on track to maintain control of the Senate. It is poised to gain more than ten seats in the House, and Trump himself has made impressive inroads with nonwhite voters.
In fact, according to exit polling data, the president made gains with nearly every demographic except for white men. Trump, whom the press called an irredeemable racist nearly every day for the past four years, is on track to pick up the highest share of the nonwhite vote for a Republican presidential candidate since 1960, more than twice what Sen. Mitt Romney earned in 2012, and nearly three times what George W. Bush picked up in 2000. Clearly, there is a disconnect between what members of the press believe and what voters believe.
In Florida and Texas, where Trump was announced the projected winner Tuesday evening, he was buoyed by strong support from Hispanic and Latino voters. Trump’s success with this voting bloc has left certain members of the press apoplectic, which is a curious reaction for people who said they were going to do a better job of understanding voters.
It seems clear now that the promise to get a better read on the electorate was apparently never a serious one.
Indeed, instead of placing a finger on the pulse of, say, Latino and Hispanic voters in Florida, establishment media decided somewhere in 2017 that its time would be best spent chasing after porn star allegations, dead-end Russian collusion conspiracy theories, and whatever shiny anti-Trump scandals crossed its path.
Instead of leaving the comfort of their familiar circles to figure out why a Latino or suburban women would support Trump, news organizations such as the New York Times have indulged themselves with a seemingly endless stream of frantic, self-important partisan content, including a ludicrous collaboration last week detailing all the good things that have been “lost” in the U.S. because of Trump.
This obsessive, myopic focus on “getting” Trump obviously left the nation’s media ill-prepared for the realities of the 2020 election.
Look, Democrats did not even pick up a single House seat in Texas, despite everything the press predicted about the Lone Star State trending blue. And that is on top of the news media’s bullish predictions about Biden’s chances in the election.
The New York Times, for example, featured a poll ahead of the election showing Biden winning Wisconsin by 11 points. That is only 10 points off, but it could be worse — the Washington Post, for its part, sponsored a separate survey showing Biden taking the Badger State by a whopping 17 points!
“Trump Defectors Help Biden Build Leads in Wisconsin and Michigan,” the New York Times bragged in early October.
The Washington Post’s Charles Lane predicted 391 electoral votes for Biden. His colleagues were similarly confident. Molly Roberts predicted 330 for Biden, Karen Tumulty predicted 305, David Byler predicted 348, Jennifer Rubin predicted 342, and so on.
The New York Times’sUpshot predicted Biden would win 357 electoral votes. That is some brilliant prognostication. CNN, meanwhile, reported that “Joe Biden may win more than 400 electoral votes,” adding the caveat that “there's a long way to go.” FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver's vaunted “model” showed the likeliest Election Day scenario involved Biden taking more than 400 electoral votes.
There is clearly a gap between the voters and the people who are paid large sums of money to understand, explain, and predict the world in which we all operate.
Here is a funny flashback: Consider how Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Amy McGrath’s candidacy was greeted last year by members of the press. MSNBC Capitol Hill correspondent Kasie Hunt even declared that the Democratic candidate’s ultimately hopeless crusade to unseat Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would prove to be a “blockbuster” race. McGrath lost her race by 21 points.
There was never any basis to believe that the election would be a “blockbuster.” But Hunt, like so many in the press, has her own ideas about what voters want, and it just so happens to line up perfectly with her preferences. The obvious problem here is that there are often major discrepancies between the two.
Worse still, the press’s failure in the 2020 election suggests there is not even the pretense of trying to understand why anyone would vote for Trump. It is as if members of the multibillion-dollar news industry are actively fighting the people they are supposed to be informing.