How election "analysis" hurts democracy
When all of this becomes a game, bad people win
Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.
Tonight is a bit of a deep dive into national news, but before we get to that, I want to direct your attention to two new items:
My scoop on the latest twist in the cold war between Starbucks and the union that now represents nearly 10,000 workers
This quick segment of an interview with AOC that I did (via videographer in Vegas) this weekend. More to come on this.
OK, now let’s get to tonight’s big story.
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I spent four hours last night watching CNN’s coverage of the Iowa Caucuses. I know this because I was at a friend’s apartment and there are time-stamped subway fare charges on my credit card, assurance that the cable network’s vacuous broadcast hadn’t driven me into a fugue state for several days.
It was a night of anodyne conversation, meaningless maps, and punditry cliches. Instead of providing any broader political context, the broadcast focused on number-crunching and analytical pablum, to the point that the network’s anchors and analysts could have just as easily been calling a darts competition, American Idol finale, or an actual horse race on closed circuit TV at the tracks.
The three leading candidates were reduced to avatars, each with slightly different attributes and theoretical paths to victory, which were discussed in front of a map divided into 99 blank square counties. Working from old data, John King and Jake Tapper discussed how Nikki Haley’s team really needed to have targeted a series of indistinguishable squares that went for Marco Rubio in 2016 and why DeSantis’s ground game could help him in some other squares, according to campaign insiders.
It was impossible to tell where they were pointing on the map, which entranced with its mundanity.
Desperate for a storyline as Trump rolled through the frozen Hawkeye State, the hosts and analysts continued to come back to DeSantis and Haley’s tight race for a distance second place, reviewing their approaches to establishing themselves as the final speed bump in the former president’s path to the GOP nomination. It was all mechanics over ideology, with no examination of their long records as elected officials.
Don’t meet the candidates
Attentive viewers were regularly told that DeSantis invested millions in campaign infrastructure in Iowa, but would have had to do some research to learn about his accomplishments as governor. No mention of his four years spent torturing trans kids or getting tens of thousands of people killed with his reckless Covid policies; not a word about his efforts to make it harder for people to vote or callously allowing energy and insurance prices to skyrocket in exchange for some lobbyist donations.
Maybe they were just very conscious of the fact that the network had a televised town hall planned with DeSantis the very next night.
As entrance polls and then the results poured in, Republican voters’ slavish devotion to the disgraced ex-president became another hot topic of conversation. Trump as a developer and celebrity was a name brand that stood for empty opulence, and even after four chaotic years in the White House, he is treated like a force of nature rather than a person whose decisions were deeply consequential to the American people.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, who worked for Trump until she made the convenient pivot after Jan. 6, said that if he won on Monday, it’d constitute “the greatest comeback in American political history.” She later called him a threat to democracy, but that was an aside to further praise for his powerful victory.
Various hosts offered starry-eyed talk about the purity of the night’s display of democracy in action, which belied the fact that voters were largely lining up for politicians who have tried to overturn elections and signed policies that have restricted voting access. Without that context, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were out there choosing which charities should benefit from their town bake sales.
Setting expectations
It would be unrealistic to expect this version of CNN to go all-in on trashing the candidates, but even putting aside the network’s moral responsibility to not lionize or normalize them, there were plenty of opportunities for hosts and analysts to provide useful context. One entrance poll showed that the economy was the most important issue to caucus-goers, providing a perfect platform for a review of Trump’s enormous corporate tax cuts, Haley’s virulently anti-union record, and the billions of dollars that DeSantis has directed toward corporate donors.
None of this is unique to CNN; the New York Times and AP’s write-ups of the night’s events offered little-to-no discussion about who these people are or what they’ve done. My favorite line from The Times’s day two piece about Trump’s big victory was the assertion that “absent a trial, the Biden team’s ability to focus public attention on the events of Jan. 6 is far from assured.”
It’s hard to take seriously the biggest and most influential newspapers in the country when it suggests that public attention is a fickle and uncontrollable force of nature.
The Times did another follow-up piece looking at how voters dismissed Trump’s legal troubles, but it takes until the ninth paragraph it to mention Jan. 6. Even then, it came within the context of the “remarkable resurrection” of his political career.
There’s no need for deep biographies of the candidates, but covering them with zero context, as if they are investment funds or stock car teams, is dangerous. Doing so grants them a tacit approval and allows them to become household names without any real friction. When reporters and editors abide by this outdated formula so that they can claim objectivity, it instead makes them complicit. There’s no nobility in narrating our collective decline.
Four years of self-sabotage
Perhaps the most nauseating data point to emerge from the CNN poll was that nearly 70% of caucus-goers believed that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. That is in line with recent national polling results, which also show that a growing number of Republicans believe that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists are being too harshly punished, among other disturbing trends.
Right-wing media and a new class of psychotic Republican legislators can claim much of the credit for this shift, but they ought to send a thank you note to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who dragged his heels for two years before being pressured into authorizing an investigation into Trump’s clear involvement in the insurrection.
With the stage to themselves, conservatives were able to rehab Trump’s image among skeptical Republicans, and now they’re able to brush off the various criminal investigations and charges as mere politics.
The Democratic old guard has the awful tendency to avoid taking action, and whether it’s out of deference to institutions or just sheer elite indifference, it’s coming back to haunt them right now. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which is being used by conservatives as a vehicle to gut the national regulatory state.
Their goal is to end the deference that is given to experts in federal agencies to interpret and enforce laws passed by Congress. The court could essentially end all regulatory actions on everything from child labor inspections to environmental standards to making sure raw meat isn’t tainted before it hits the grocery store. Doing so would require ending what’s known as the Chevron Deference, a legal standard established in 1984 and defended in 2005 by Justice Clarence Thomas.
A lot has changed since then, including Thomas’s lifestyle. He has since become the beneficiary of countless luxury vacations, forgiven loans, advantageous real estate deals, and other acts of generosity from a litany of conservative donors. Thomas’s billionaire fans include Charles Koch, who today was revealed to be funding the legal team representing the plaintiffs.
Back in 2020, Thomas began suggesting that he’d be interested in reconsidering his decision, and when the Supreme Court said it would take up the case, it was immediately clear that he held serious conflicts of interest. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin issued his normal plea for Thomas to recuse himself from the case, which was obviously ignored. As a result of this outrageous and habitual meekness, it is virtually assured that Thomas will vote to overturn his own decision when the Court reconvenes this spring.
Whether that’ll be enough to blow a total hole in the federal government remains to be seen — John Roberts will surely hope to create a compromise, and maybe Amy Coney Barrett will decide to take him up on it — but even being in this position is a damning condemnation of leadership’s deeply outdated approach to governing and politics.
Trump’s growing lead over Biden is attributable in no small part to his domineering aggressiveness, which gives many voters confidence that he’s willing to fight for them. If the Biden campaign wants to turn this thing around, it will need to show the same sort of tenacity, and on very specific things. I’ll talk more about this in future editions of the newsletter, but Biden and Democrats need to come up with an economic platform that promises serious subsidies, programs, and a higher standard of living.
The failure of Build Back Better isn’t something to run from, it’s an opportunity to say that we came closer than ever to universal pre-k, free community college, and many other ultra-popular programs, and if you put us back in office, we will absolutely finish the job. Trump makes big promises, but they ‘re vague and offers voters nothing beyond a parasocial thrill.
This is the moment to turn the voter focus on the economy into a strength by challenging Trump to come up with anything nearly as generous and world-changing for working people. It’ll never happen, and if the news media would cover his record as president, everybody would know that.
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You are right on, Jordan. I was watching MSNBC and it was the same kind of pablum, with stories that have been well worn [and worn out, might I add].
I believe that one of the problems with regular media is that indeed, they are afraid to offend for fear of losing potential interviews. The result is that all "points" are made with a view to not offend.
My hubby watched Newsmax and as I looked over his shoulder, republicans have no difficulty getting offensive. That creates a very uneven playing field.
See, this is why we read the Progress Report, and not the NYT, WSJ, or WP. If they don't want to fully disclose their knowledge of the "candidates", then I don't want to fully disclose my wallet for subscription. Simple. Thanks, Jordan; keep up the great work.