Democrats are reeling this week from having been bounced around like pinballs with bad polling results for 2024 followed by excellent returns in the off-year elections. It's hard to know what to make of it all. But now that the smoke has cleared a little bit we can come to some solid conclusions.
First, the elections this week showed conclusively that Democratic voters are still motivated to vote to keep Republicans from further eroding abortion rights than they already have. They cemented the right to choose in the Ohio constitution, re-elected a pro-choice governor in conservative Kentucky and repudiated a rising Republican star who campaigned on a plan to enact a 15-week ban in Virginia which the GOP absurdly seemed to believe was a consensus position.
Just as interesting was the complete failure of the right's other culture war obsessions of the past few years. We saw it coming with the flop of a DeSantis campaign which was predicated on anti-vax hysteria, book bans, demonization of transgender kids and the boogeyman of critical race theory. The election on Tuesday featured a repudiation of Moms for Liberty school board candidates all over the country including Loudoun county in Virginia, the epicenter of the so-called "parent rights" movement that sprang up during the pandemic. Apparently, other parents decided they didn't want these busybodies telling them how to educate or raise their kids so they ran against them and won.
The reasoning behind this is obvious: Voters see that the MAGA assault on democracy is manifesting itself personally in their daily lives. The right has shown that they are serious about using the power of the state to take away people's rights and intrude on people's personal lives. It's no longer an abstraction, it's become an immediate threat.
There has been very little discussion of this in the mainstream news media. In fact, on election night, some of the pundits and anchors seemed to be confused by what was going on. For instance, CNN had announced their latest 2024 poll showing that Joe Biden is narrowly losing to Donald Trump a year from now and they were breathlessly "analyzing" what that meant for the Democrats, pounding and pounding away at Biden's so-called age problem when the returns started to show that Republicans were suffering yet another rout at the ballot box. One panelist, Kate Bedingfield, President Biden's former communications director, politely suggested that if they were going to spend the night discussing polls about an election a year from now, they might want to take a closer look at the actual election that was happening that night. But it didn't take long to get back to what they clearly think is the sexier subject — a horse race that hasn't even started.
I've written before about the propensity of Democrats to panic and I won't belabor it. It's just what they do. But the problem of the media narratives is a real one, as we all learned to our dismay in 2016. The constant drumbeat about Hillary Clinton's health, driven by the right-wing media and pushed hard by Trump with his "she doesn't have the strength and stamina" to be president was taken up by the press without even considering that they were disseminating GOP talking points. And we all know about the "but her emails" debacle that very likely resulted in Clinton's narrow electoral college loss that year. As far as I know, there has not been a real reckoning with the dynamics that drove the press in that cycle and it seems to be reasserting itself again this time with the obsession with Biden's age.
The right has been flogging that story relentlessly since Biden took office and it's taken hold. Of course, Biden is an elderly man but he's mentally and physically fit, certainly just as much as Donald Trump who is a mere three years younger and who makes gaffes daily that would have the press calling for Biden to immediately step down if he said such things.
Trump gets confused and says North Korea has 1.4 billion people which is off by about 1.375 billion. pic.twitter.com/7sRFbApCkL
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 9, 2023
The press waves away this discrepancy by saying that the "perception" is that Trump is much younger and more vital and perceptions are what matters in politics. But when the perception is wrong, it's the media's job to correct it, not accept it as a fact of life and run with it, particularly when it obscures the reality that the Republicans, led by Trump, are proposing the most dangerous usurpation of our democratic system in American history.
Margaret Sullivan, the former media critic for the Washington Post and now a columnist for the Guardian, explained the consequences of this abdication of responsibility, pointing out that Biden’s low approval ratings, despite his accomplishments, demonstrate that the media is simply not doing its job. She writes that their narrative of Biden's "age" and the horse race obsession means they are simply not doing an adequate job of informing the public of the danger a Trump second term presents. Her advice:
Report more – much more – about what Trump would do, post-election. Ask voters directly whether they are comfortable with those plans, and report on that. Display these stories prominently, and then do it again soon.
Use direct language, not couched in scaredy-cat false equivalence, about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.
Pin down Republicans about whether they support Trump’s lies and autocratic plans, as ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos did in grilling the House majority leader Steve Scalise about whether the 2020 election was stolen. He pushed relentlessly, finally saying: “I just want an answer to the question, yes or no?” When Scalise kept sidestepping, Stephanopoulos soon cut off the interview.
Those ideas are just a start. Newsroom leaders should be getting their staffs together to brainstorm how to do it. Right now.
I also think they should stop worrying about exposing the public to Donald Trump and force the people to take a closer look. There's a sense that his absurdness has faded in the memories of people who don't see him anymore. If they did, they would realize that he's actually gotten much worse. His obsession with revenge and retribution is more than disturbing and his meandering rally speeches are even more incoherent than before.
The press needs to keep in mind that this relentless recitation of poll numbers showing Trump slightly ahead a year out is setting in stone a narrative that will serve Trump's purposes very well if he loses. He won't say the polls were wrong, he'll say they prove that the election was rigged. The constant media criticism of Biden's age, the lack of attention paid to his very real accomplishments and lackluster response to Trump's promises to destroy democracy are priming plenty of people to believe that Biden can't win and that Trump isn't really that bad. And that plays right into Trump's plans to once again call on his people to "fight like hell" if he loses.
The media must be extra-vigilant about ensuring that the public knows the facts this time and isn't relying on "perceptions" partly created by the media itself. As Sullivan says, "With the election less than a year away, there’s no time to waste in getting the truth across."
