It’s the Media, Stupid
One thread that runs through most explanations for Tuesday's result.
In the wake of the red wave that saw Donald Trump win back the White House, Republicans to regain control of the Senate, and Republicans generally outperforming their 2020 returns everywhere, there have naturally been all manner of explanations given for how it could be so. While they range from everything to Fear of a Black Woman to Joe Biden Intentionally Sabotaged the Democrats to Get Revenge, one that I’ve seen most often is The Changed Media Landscape.
Regular commenter Jim Brown 32 raises it in this morning’s Forum:
Democrats have no viable messaging apparatus in this Country that can challenge RW messaging. Period. The messaging they do have is in a completely different language than what most of the country speaks–and is easy to counter-message.
Most of the people in this country are Simpletons (I say this not as as insult) they live their lives at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. Having more stuff and money available to us does not change ones Psychology. Perceived threats to one’s safety, lifestyle (however shitty) and freedom of movement to access: food /housing /sex are the predominant motivation of most Americans and indeed Earthlings. SYSTEMS–the methods and means by which the aforementioned things are delivered are a level higher–and although systems are the key to modern society– only a minority of people can understand them enough to develop an emotional attachment to them and their proper creation and understanding.
A great irony is that although RW messaging hits exclusively at the bottom of Maslow–they built a SYSTEM to deliver that message at multiple layers of society. Conversely, the LW and centrist speak Latin to Italians in the town square — so that even a villager that happens to be passing by with their mules has no idea what the hell is being blabbed about.
If Democrats want to get the power to execute their agenda–the message cannot only be for the true believers, the inner circle. If fact, MR should hate the message–but like the outcome of more rural Americans voting Blue. Republicans have accepted this. Don’t you think JD Vance would prefer a different message? I’m sure he would — but he knows Italians only understand Italian.
This is not trolling people—it’s meeting them where THEY are. The majority of the Country cannot meet intellectuals on equal ground. You cannot educate psychology. Maslow’s rungs are only climbed by experience–experience that is not possible for the majority of a large population to receive.
The good news is that Democrats can play the same game if they hold leaders accountable to results. Results start with counter-messaging in Churches and local News. Results start with understanding that primary objectives (i.e., DEI) can only occur indirectly. The primary objectives are to force Republicans to defend their Maslow bottom-rung failures on their home turf–with their own constituents.
Why are Rural people afraid of the city but not fired up about their own squalor? Could it be because of Sinclair and the Local Preachers? These places could do better but don’t because they don’t have to as long as there is an unchallenged message of an outside enemy at the gate. If you live on the bottom rungs of Maslow, this is a real and pervasive threat—however imaginary to people at higher rungs.
While I’ve thought and written about the Republican Infotainment Complex a lot over the years, that they’re better than the mainstream press at communicating to blue-collar folks in their own language is a really strong point that I’ve not really considered. Still, the ecosystem hasn’t changed that much since 2020 and Trump lost that one by 8 million votes.
New Republic editor Michael Tomasky (“Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?“) adds his perspective:
Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
I’m honestly quite skeptical that the right-wing media is now larger than the mainstream press in terms of audience reach, much less that the set the latter’s agenda. But it’s certainly the case that huge swaths of the country get their news from these sources and are largely oblivious to the framing of the New York Times and Washington Post.
And this point is crucial:
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.
Once upon a time, I ridiculed John Edwards for his “Two Americas” schtick. But there’s now very little overlap between the folks who think Trump is a fascist set out to destroy American democracy and those who think he’s our one last hope to save it. And the thing is, both groups are equally sincere in that belief. They live in separate realities.
I asked [Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America] what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”
Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”
To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.
A related point I’ve seen is the Democrats’ failure to engage with this ecosystem was a huge mistake. Ezra Klein (“Where Does This Leave Democrats?”):
The Democratic Party had spent years kicking people out of its tent. I went and listened to the appearance Elon Musk made on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Monday. It was strikingly right wing and conspiratorial. It wasn’t that many years ago that Rogan had Bernie Sanders on for a friendly interview. And then Rogan kinda sorta endorsed him. Rather than celebrate, online liberals were furious at Sanders for going on “Rogan” in the first place. I was still on Twitter then, and I wrote about how of course Sanders was right to be there and this was one of the best arguments for Sanders’s campaign. If you wanted to beat Trump, you wanted to win over people like Rogan.
Liberals got so angry at me for that, I was briefly a trending topic. Rogan was a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist, a racist, the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not chat with. But if these last years have proved anything, it’s that liberals don’t get to choose who is marginalized. Democrats should have been going on “Rogan” regularly. They should have been prioritizing it — and other podcasts like it — this year. Yes, Harris should have been there. Same for Tim Walz. On YouTube alone, Rogan’s interview with Trump was viewed some 46 million times. Democrats are just going to abandon that? In an election where they think that if the other side wins, it means fascism?
The iconoclastic, suit-eschewing US Senator from Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, agrees:
I’ve always been a fan of the Rogan podcast, and of him personally. That doesn’t mean that I have to agree with him on everything, but it’s all about having conversations and having an exchange of ideas. I think he really pioneered that whole medium, and I think it’s important for all of us, especially for elected leaders, to challenge your own views and to expose yourself [to others]. He has created an incredibly impressive platform, and it would be pretty dumb to ignore that or to pretend it doesn’t exist.
So, I was happy to show up there. And it also addresses an important kind of an issue, in my opinion, with the Democratic Party. We have a challenge. We have our own kind of “childless cat ladies” situation: “Bros.” People refer to these young guys as bros, and clearly that’s not a positive term. They’re described as dopes, or gullible, or brutes. People were really shocked when the whole childless cat ladies thing dropped, and it is dumb. That violates the basic, basic rule of politics. Don’t subtract, do addition. I think that was part of the new coalition that really delivered a pretty crushing victory for Trump.
Some, like The Nation‘s Elie Mystal, take a different tack:
People saying Harris should have done Joe Rogan are missing the point. That wouldn’t have helped her. Liberals need to BUILD THEIR OWN JOE ROGAN. Somebody who can speak to the people he speaks to, without being a guy who wants to kiss ass to billionaires like Elon Musk.
Former WaPo columnist-turned-Substacker Taylor Lorenz rejoins with “Why Democrats won’t build their own Joe Rogan.”
Without a network of culturally relevant influential content creators boosting and translating their messaging, the Democratic Party is rapidly losing credibility among younger, predominantly male audiences who have become ardent supporters of influencers that promote a distinctly conservative worldview.
This imbalance when it comes to online influence is no accident. It is the result of massive structural disadvantages in funding, promotion, and institutional support. And understanding why Democrats can’t (or really won’t) cultivate an equivalent independent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built is crucial for anyone who hopes to ever see the Democrats back into power.
The conservative media landscape in the United States is exceptionally well-funded, meticulously constructed, and highly coordinated. Wealthy donors, PACs, and corporations with a vested interest in preserving or expanding conservative policies strategically invest in right-wing media channels and up and coming content creators.
This creates a well oiled pipeline for conservative influencers: young TikTokers, YouTubers, livestreamers, or podcasters are discovered, developed, and pushed to larger platforms, often with the financial backing of conservative billionaires or organizations on the right who have long recognized the content creator industry a valuable means of shaping public opinion and policy.
Organizations like Turning Point USA, PragerU, and The Daily Wire and others receive millions from backers who view them as advertising for a broader conservative agenda. These media entities act as content creator incubators and spend extensively on outreach, production quality, and audience growth. The resources and near unlimited funds they receive allow conservative content creators to grow rapidly and spread their message widely.
For instance, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire has been heavily funded by wealthy Republican donors, including the Wilks brothers, Texas-based billionaires known for their oil and fracking fortune. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, receives millions from conservative mega donors including the Koch network. Right wing content creators Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin were recently getting paid $400,00 a month, at least $100,000 per YouTube video, after accepting funding from a right wing Russian influence operation. Johnson even allegedly negotiated a $100,000 signing bonus.
Renee DiResta, a researcher and author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, recently posted that, if you want to amass power online, pouring money into the influencer industry is essentially cheaper than buying bots or banner ads online. “Buying authentic influencers is a far better use of funds than creating fake personas, because they bring their own trusting audiences and are actually, you know, real,” she posted on Threads.
[…]
There is simply zero equivalent to this massive infrastructure on the left.
Leftist channels do not receive widespread financial backing from billionaires or large institutional donors, primarily because leftist content creators support policies that are completely at odds with what billionaires want.
Left leaning influencers argue for things like higher taxes on the rich, regulations on corporations, and policies that curb the power of elites. Wealthy mega donors aren’t going to start pouring money into a media ecosystem that directly contradicts their own financial interests. And so, progressive creators are left to rely on meager crowdfunding efforts to make a living.
While there are plenty of Democratic-leaning billionaires who could fill the gap, the interests of the billionaire class and the Democratic Party don’t exactly align. Dan Drezner, who’s hardly a lefty, made similar argument years back in his bestseller The Ideas Industry: it’s simply a hell of a lot easier to make a living pushing agenda that flatters the wealthy than one that antagonizes them.
Regardless of the solution—or whether one even exists—the fact that half the country inhabits a completely different media ecosystem from the other half is a huge problem.
It is not, of course, a new one. As noted above, Fox News launched in 1996 and Rush Limbaugh was going strong for years before that. The late broadcast journalist Garrick Utley had an essay in Foreign Affairs back in March 1997 that coined a new term: narrowcasting.
While his focus was the decline in investment in coverage of foreign affairs, the essay was exceedingly prescient as to the future of the news industry writ large.
New technologies in cable and satellite TV have turned the stable, predictable, almost automatically profitable television marketplace into a competitive cauldron in which journalism must increasingly compete with entertainment programming. This has prompted a redefining, or at least a questioning, of the traditional news agenda in the post-Cold War world.
[…]
The image of the correspondent reporting from some troubled land has become firmly imprinted in viewers’ imaginations, particularly since 1963. Televised coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy bonded viewers to what was beginning to be called a “medium,” which could convey human experience and emotions as they could never rise off the printed page. A Roper poll that year found for the first time that television was the main source of news for more Americans than newspapers. Moreover, in 1963 NBC and CBS expanded their nightly news programs from 15 minutes to 30. Some at the networks wondered whether there was an audience — and, therefore, sponsors — for the longer newscasts.
[…]
With the 1996 merger of Time-Warner and Turner Broadcasting, the parent of CNN, all the major American news divisions are owned by transnational corporations. The financial benefits are clear: Jack Welch, chairman and chief executive officer of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, and Rupert Murdoch, who controls Fox, could provide heavy backing for their start-up news channels. Deep pockets count for a lot in the race to create global television empires. But the drive to penetrate new markets and build media imperia raises serious concerns for international reporting and broadcasting. Authorities in the countries on the receiving end often see the news beamed in as politically or culturally undesirable, even subversive. When interests clash, as they inevitably do, good journalism is likely to be sacrificed. The trend is already established.
[…]
The growing tension between journalistic and commercial priorities may never be fully resolved. But whatever direction events may lead journalists, the role of traditional news organizations is likely to shrink further. The flow of information from fax machines to the Internet and through other technologies already developed or still undreamed of will overwhelm efforts to control it. Today and in the future, anyone sending information from one country to another is a de facto foreign corespondent. The number of correspondents, accredited or not, will rapidly increase. Equipped with camcorders and computers, they will send out and receive more and more foreign dispatches. Even in countries where governments try to control the availability of video on the Internet, ingenuity and ever smaller satellite dishes will enable some, perhaps much, news and information to get through.
I have frequently quoted the late, great Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s admonition, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” It has, alas, been years since that held true.
Joe Rogan is perfectly winnable if you don’t treat him with open contempt, and you meet him where he’s at. He’s not very bright, but he’s winnable. And his followers. Winnable, at least in part.
A lot of those people believe they are being treated unfairly, but they also believe in fairness.
It was a misstep by the Harris campaign to not make a chat with Rogan happen (is it an interview? Kinda…) I don’t know if it would have helped her campaign that much, but it would have helped future campaigns a lot.
It’s kind of baffling that the janitor from Newsradio is a major political force, but accepting that is part of meeting people where they are.
The one person I would love to see sit down with Rogan is Elizabeth Warren.
What interests me is that Trump and his most ardent fans have been denigrating Fox News for at least four years now.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2020/11/12/trump-is-now-trashing-fox-news-heres-what-may-be-his-ulterior-motive/
The MAGAs are convinced Fox is far too left-wing.
This has been a huge problem for decades, and I think the continued lack of a solution is exactly the one Drezner identified: the funders don’t match the messengers. You can imagine a Bernie/AOC-style media platform being pretty popular, but that’s not what Bill Gates is going to fund.
I also haven’t looked into it systematically, but my sense is that there are more RW billionaires in the space than left, and they are more patient and more likely to fund something long-term rather than expecting immediate results.
I am baffled by the people who call for a liberal equivalent/counter to the right-wing disinformation machine. What message would such a medium enable, and why would anyone who finds Fox and Friends informative ever watch it, or believe a word of it? Who is the Voice who would both have durable credibility with RWNJ audiences and speak truth to them? If Liz Cheney can’t do it while keeping her credibility, who could?
The plutocrats’ propaganda is psychological crack — it is comforting and empowering to know that you are the true Americans, and your problems are caused by brown people and gays and atheists, but We’re Going to Do Something About That. There is no appetite for being told it’s more complicated than that, and that you need to do the intellectual equivalent of eating better and exercising more.
@Gustopher: Can I upvote this a few more times? I heard a bunch of people saying that Harris shouldn’t go on Rogan, but to me this was the most consequential mistake of the campaign. She could have come across as an actual person to a bunch of people with only a vague notion of what she was all about. It probably wouldn’t have won the election for her, but I think it would have had the largest impact of any single action she could have taken. (It probably also would have prevented him from endorsing Trump at the last minute, because his half-assed endorsement seemed more out of spite than anything else.)
I don’t think Rogan is a “bad person”, I think he just swims in misinformation and isn’t able to evaluate veracity particularly well. But he also wants his interviewees to talk, and he represents his listeners extremely well. He isn’t overly confrontational, but he’ll ask questions that “average folks” would ask. It’s like talking to someone at a kegger. That’s exactly what you want in an interview when you’re trying to introduce yourself to a large audience.
Thinking about this more, it would have been a great if Joe Biden had started calling in to Fox & Friends once every couple weeks to talk directly to their audience. It’s like offering an ambush interview, but you call and control the direction of the conversation. You can avoid answering basically anything by appealing to limited time. “I only have a few minutes and just wanted to update your viewers about what my Administration is doing for them because I think every American should be able to hear from me.”
That show is never going to turn down an interview with the president. Just take it over like Trump used to, but instead of using it to rail against the evil commies trying to put you in jail for (gasp!) inciting a coup, use it like a quick-bites fireside chat.
@ptfe: I understand what you are saying here, but Pete Buttigieg was frequently on Fox, and this was sort of trotted out as evidence that Fox was getting lefty.
I sort of feel like we’re well past the point of working within this ecosystem, we have to instead wait for the collapse.
@Jen: What makes it collapse?
It’s very self-reinforcing. Like this table:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1458854563/tensegrity-coffee-table?gpla=1&gao=1&
It defies common sense, but it doesn’t collapse.
While an incomplete response, I think these conversations discount things like The Daily Show, John Oliver, Colbert, and other late-night shows. They skew clearly Democratic and fill some of the same infotainment space as Fox News.
Also: Yes, Harris should have gone on Rogan (although I don’t think it would have made enough difference).
Also: Rogan may not be a bad guy, but my attempted experiment in listening to him a few years did not leave me with the impression that he is persuadable on the partisanship issue. At best he will pretend to be a Libertarian.
The reality is the media landscape has become highly balkanized. There’s nothing that can be done about it, and whining solves nothing. The most tiresome is the now decades-old whining about Fox News from the left and the “MSM” from the right. Second to that are host of complaints about the national establishment media which boil down to partisans being angry that some story or headline doesn’t “accurately” reflect their reality.
I’ve got three kids, two of voting age (They both voted Harris). They don’t care about any of that. Hardly anyone from their generation is as obsessive about or interested in the kind of media criticism and tone policing that occurs regularly among political hobbyists, including here.
The balkanization of media means that if you want to get your message out, you can’t play it safe and stick with friendly or traditional outlets. The thing about Rogan, and some of the other influential people looked down on by most of the DC establishment, is that those are the kinds of people that the marginal voters who only come out for Presidential elections listen to. Compared to the roughly 157 million voters this last cycle, very few watch cable news (Cable news watchers are almost entirely old people and political hobbyists). Very few subscribe to or regularly read the premier outlets like the NYT and WAPO. The people reading this comment right now (and me writing it) are among the very few who spend a lot of time thinking about national politics. Most people don’t because they have more important things to worry about, and a lot of them listen to shows like Rogan. The people who watch cable news, regularly read establishment media, and participate on political blogs are generally already in the tank one way or the other and are not persuadable.
As Ezra Klein notes(gift link), the efforts by the ideological left to marginalize Rogan and others for wrongthink is both dumb and futile:
Having reflected more on the election result, I suggest most pundits are focusing on the wrong questions. Instead of “Why did Harris lose and how could she have won?”, they should be looking at 2020 and asking how Trump, widely denigrated as one of the worst presidents in history, persuaded 11 million new voters to turn out and vote for him.
Here are the relevant numbers:
Harris’s result was comparable to Obama’s in 2008. Talk of Democrats “losing the working class” and the like is nonsense. Trump has succeeded because a lot of Americans who previously hadn’t bothered to vote at all became loyal MAGA supporters during his first presidency, not during his first campaign. And unlike the millions who turned out for Biden in 2020 in a one-off protest about the way the pandemic had turned their lives upside down, Trump’s new voters have stuck with him. In many ways, this election was simply the result that would have occurred in 2020 absent the pandemic.
It remains to be seen whether all these new MAGA voters will be a permanent Republican base. If they are, Democrats have a major problem on their hands that will not be solved by tinkering with the messaging.
I’m mad about the media. They told me that Mexicans and women would vote overwhelmingly for Harris. They told me that Iowa would flip. They told me that the polls showed a fairly likely Dem victory. All false. I’m sick of these media pro Harris misleading stuff.
One thing that jumped out at me from this week’s results and that we’ve seen replicated over and over is Democrat-supported initiatives passing on ballots. Florida’s abortion provision “failed” but that means it got 57% in the face of an aggressive (and illegal) effort by Francisco Florida. We keep running into this problem:
1) Democrats’ ideas are popular
2) Democrats are not
I think going on Rogan, Fox News, etc. is critical. Republicans have gone on liberal channels for ages and, even when they sound dumb, they increase their support. They sound like they give a crap about non-Republicans. When Dems refuse to go on Fox News or Rogan or whatever, they come across at elitists, as not caring what half the country thinks. You have no idea how many Trump supporters I’ve talked to remember Hillary’s “deplorable” comment or Biden’s “garbage” comment. That stuff sticks. The only way to counter it is .. to counter it.
You don’t have to agree with people to get their support. A lot of the time, just saying, “I see where you’re coming from” can go a long way.
(And, yes, I know Republicans call liberals worse. It doesn’t matter if the game is unfair if it’s the only game in town.)
More than 360 papers have closed since just before the start of the pandemic. It would be difficult, in a mere comment, to digest the impact of broadcast staffing cuts, or mergers and acquisitions (which have been hugely impactful to editorial tone) and hedge fund owners in the last few years have impacted the popular media industry.
Since we’re talking about Rogan … Neither Trump nor Biden went on that show in the last cycle. Now there’s a reasonable-as-any-other rationale that Harris not joining that program was a tactical mistake. Maybe that’s important.
Viewership and circulations are down, as we know, and that has long tail impacts, most of which are baked into the above. A few days ago the owner of one of our papers of record dismissed the idea that the tone of his publication means anything.
Since Steven mentioned it, Last Week Tonight’s biggest rating in the last two years was .50. And paywalled. Jon Stewart’s return to TDS this February tallied 1.85 million viewers, across multiple networks and repeated airings. These are both good-to-brilliantly written shows with small audiences in a continually shrinking medium.
That says nothing about social media platform replays and clips. We need two or three more theses to get into the impact (or non-impact, which must be addressed as an aspect of media effects) of a handful of our contemporary online platforms
The media ecosystem continues to change underfoot. Much as anything, and perhaps more than some things, that’s a factor here.
@Slugger: Those errors were not lies. That’s the best information they had. It wasn’t very good, was it? I didn’t like it either? Really, it sucked.
I don’t know why that is, but my guess is that it happened because people who said they would vote for Harris didn’t. Mostly, they didn’t vote at all. This is likely due to something called the Bradley effect.
I’ll tell you what a good message (for Democrats) is: How Tim Wallz talks about stuff. “Mind your own business!” is relatable. It’s unequivocal. It doesn’t sound like a lawyer, or a consultant. Also, “it’s weird!”. It isn’t lies. It’s broad themes, simply stated, using words that people who don’t have Ph.D.’s use.
I have learned to do this, because I like talking to family members, and people I grew up with. Interestingly enough, for all his “professorial” label, Obama could do this. Bill Clinton did this.
The only Harris ads I saw were fundraising asks on YouTube. She seemed fine there. I can’t vouch for anything else. But it’s kinda not the point. I’m simply describing how messaging might go.
As far as apparatus is concerned, yes, Democrats need more. People advocating for trans rights needs more (I’m feeling quite cautious that “Democrats” in general are advocating for trans rights these days). We are looking for the big bomb, but we need a MIRV. A message with a thousand messengers.
But Harris did go on Fox News, and she didn’t really avoid Rogan. Trump went in Rogan for the first time in his life just 10 days before this election, and then we started hearing, “hey, why isn’t Harris going on Rogan too”, as if it was considered to be some rite of passage. Reports were that her team tried to negotiate a time, but it would’ve meant canceling other plans during the last week of the campaign—and remember that tens of millions of people had already voted by that time.
I expect that Democratic candidates in 2028 will appear on a variety of media outlets, including Fox News (as Buttigieg and Newsom and Harris have) and whatever podcasts and streaming video shows are relevant.
@Ken_L:
Our population is 41 million higher now.
@Slugger:
If the exit polls are right, women voted 53-45 for Harris. Otherwise, the polls were showing a Hispanic shift to Trump (although Mexican-Americans were seldom broken out). There was only one poll showing Harris winning Iowa. And the national-level polls were incredibly tight the entire time, except for a modest and temporary convention bounce.
@Hal_10000:
I think the same. Harris should have sat down with Rogan, even if it meant traveling to Austin (it’s not like she didn’t visit Texas at all, she did).
You know who goes on Fox regularly? Pete Buttigieg. And he kicks ass.
@Mikey: Pete gets it, and he’s great on Fox. But when I say I would love to see him at the top of the ticket, you know what I hear from my (albeit limited) Dem circles? “Ugh, another white male, and one who worked for a consulting firm.” It’s…frustrating.
@Kenny: I agree; shifting and fragmented.
My point being that being that these conversations almost always ignore the way in so much of late night comedy has shifted to a pro-Dem POV. This is absolutely the case with Colbert and Meyers and I think too, with Kimmel. Fallon tries to be more neutral.
I think as one tries to analyze podcast effects and infotainment in general, this should be taken into account.
Here are some recent ratings.
@Mikey: I will note that Pete is gifted in ways that most politicians are not in terms of those kinds of appearances.
Outside of gun control I’m to the left of a lot of people here. Yet youtube keeps pushing right winger channels and anti-woke shit on me all the time. I’m watching Bryan Taylor Cohen, Seth Meyers, and Stephen Colbert. Youtube is like here’s 10 channels of people hating on liberals, woke, Biden, Kamala!!
I don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I watch taofledermaus occasionally? Maybe it’s Forgotten Weapons? Steve1989MRE? The lock picking lawyer?? Cutting Edge Engineering???
90% of the time I watch informational or non political related videos (gameplay, tutorials, etc). So I have no idea why I keep getting right wing junk pushed on me.
@Steven L. Taylor: Pete was my pick for president in 2020. It was clear even then he was capable of going into the lion’s den and coming out looking good.
@James Joyner:
30 million in the voting-eligible population (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections), and Harris will get seven million more votes. Her estimated final vote equates to 31.1% of the total voting-eligible population, compared to 32.6% for Obama 2008. Trump won in 2016 with 27.3%. The Trump era has witnessed a substantial increase in turnout for presidential elections, which disproportionately favors Trump.