oh c’mon this was a great opportunity to say “stop the presses!”
nobody said it? https://t.co/VQo8H54r3g
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) November 9, 2022
Still a few holdouts being like "Well just wait till 2024 because THEN you'll be fucked we promise!"
— Drew Magary (@drewmagary) November 9, 2022
What about our narrative? Have you voters even thought about the prewritten articles we have to delete?
— Matt (@mcmikels) November 9, 2022
striking how disconnected the dominant political media narrative of this election cycle – a red wave driven by inflation, “defend democracy” not being a mobilizing message, and voter fear of rising crime and defund the police demogauging – seems to have been from reality
— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) November 9, 2022
Once again, the real loser tonight is pollsters and the way that politics is covered in the media/social media in America, inflating the views of the crazies and giving them all the oxygen.
Thank you to all the Americans who quietly don’t want to burn the country to ashes. ?? https://t.co/yBVbFWRjiS
— Molly McKew (@MollyMcKew) November 9, 2022
Just wanted to say that political punditry is more broken than polling, because people who write opinion pieces literally are never held accountable for being consistently wrong, over decades.
— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) November 9, 2022
Political press largely blew it on their coverage of the campaign. But I agree that they’ve done a better job explaining voting & tabulating, what’s a normal process & a normal delay, etc. https://t.co/64ems8Yhta
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) November 9, 2022
Someone’s grouchy https://t.co/qeWC4McXBb
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 9, 2022
Just going to leave this one here, for all those who said it was a losing issue for Dems to talk about defending democracy. https://t.co/iCS2y2UXMb
— Andrew Lebovich (@tweetsintheME) November 9, 2022
HumboldtBlue
Biden is putting on a masterful performance at this press conference.
mrmoshpotato
Ain’t that the truth.
Also, haven’t checked in on Driftglass lately, but I’m sure I can rest assured that David Brooks is still an idiot.
Baud
Along with the predictions of doom, the media, even friendly media, treated us with all sorts of advice about how Dems were running their campaigns badly. Apparently, not badly enough.
Old School
All those lessons will be forgotten in two years. Sigh.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Baud: It’s like these campaigns were trying to reach actual voters, and not just media hacks! How dare they!
Peale
I think the thing that made me happiest last night was Gretchen winning term 2 in Michigan. I think we sometimes forget about the pols who win when they are expected to win.
RaflW
James Fallows has a great piece on his substack on this theme. I wish more journos would read and at least consider him. He’s not a flamig lib, and he’s been a journalist and writer on these topics for a long time. IOW a person who ought to have some gravitas. We’ll see.
A small taste
HumboldtBlue
@Old School:
Yup.
Old School
If Republicans campaign ads emphasized inflation and crime and Democratic ads emphasized democracy and Roe, I’m not sure it says anything too shocking that voters identified them as the top issues.
cain
These people should definitely shut the fuck up about their predictions – they don’t know anything about what this country is feeling – maybe they should stop going to GOP parties?
Turgidson
@Peale: Whitmer didn’t just win, she blew the doors off that empty-headed crackpot. If Biden decides not to run, I hope she considers getting in. She’s really good at this.
kindness
Did that NY Times cover really go out? I mean, I know the publisher thinks his memes will create the future, which far too many of their editors & writers then pander to but that cover? Really??
@Turgidson: If Biden decides not to run. Oh please, not another one of these….
Turgidson
@Old School:
You give them too much credit by assuming they will even *realize* there are lessons they could learn. They still defend their Butter Emails coverage like the groupthinking shallow twits they are, without even considering that they *might* have fucked up.
Betty
@HumboldtBlue: And yet the questions continue to be infuriating.
bcw
Agree it was the pundits more than the pollsters. An example is the NY Times headline “poll shows public indifferent about democracy” when the poll actually showed >60% felt defending democracy was an important question.
MisterDancer
You know what else is notable?
A lack of “it was stolen!” narratives from the Right. I had serious fears I’d wake to overnight election violence, some Brooks Brothers Riot shit at a minimum.
We didn’t see that. Aside from the “dropbox protectors” who got pushback from the courts, the people with the guns seemed to have kept them from the polls. Then the asshole deniers got shellacked in this voting cycle. Trump found other axes to grind (and has Other Issues to deal with at “home”). Everyone else on that side seems to be nursing a hangover.
That’s a Win for American Democracy, given all the fears and Jan6 terrorism. And we really haven’t talked much about that yet, from what I’ve seen online.
HumboldtBlue
@Turgidson:
And flipped the state legislature and generally put on a damn fine performance, but of course the media focuses on the charmless ogre, DeSantis.
@Betty:
And he handled them all with the deft touch that 45 years in public office allows one to develop. I mean, he humble-bragged his way through that presser and laughed at the questions when they were laughable and gave straight answers when they weren’t silly.
SpaceUnit
Browbeating the media over their narratives and predictions only makes sense if one assumes they are interested in accuracy and not deliberately carrying out psy-ops for the GOP.
dmsilev
I shouldn’t laugh, but I laughed
UncleEbeneezer
@MisterDancer: That’s a very good point.
Qrop Non Sequitur
Right, but the portion of the public that matters to the NYT is indifferent.
dexwood
@Old School: You can’t forget lessons you never learned.
Martin
Here’s the value of exit polls in one NYT post:
Every breakdown is good news for Republicans/bad news for Democrats. And yet, that’s not what happened in the actual vote. And they published this today. So they know the exit poll doesn’t match reality.
The explanatory value of the exit poll only works if the polling sample is accurate, and since I trust the NYT to know how to implement a poll, they must know they sampled wrong and yet they’re pushing this article out as if it tells us anything, and it pretty much can’t because it can’t even explain the event that it was sampled from. It’s just garbage. But NYT is invested in it, so we’re supposed to swallow their garbage. That article should have been a critique of why the exit poll didn’t match the results. That would be useful and instructive.
My best guess: it tells us a bit more accurately the trend of in person polling, with the variance being by mail.
dmsilev
@SpaceUnit: One good thing about Twitter is that it has shown to the world that Our Media Betters have, by and large, skins thinner than that of the average onion. Mocking them incessantly, personally, might eventually do some good. Won’t do much about their bosses though; that’s the real problem.
Ohio Mom
@HumboldtBlue: Yes, Biden aced that press conference.
He was full of affectionate good humor for the reporters, had a nice balance of answering questions and veering off to tout his accomplishments. Once or twice, he was gently honest, turning down sharing sensitive information.
Just all around, proving he is a calm, steady hand at the helm. We are so lucky to have him.
Miss Bianca
@MisterDancer: You’re absolutely right – I hadn’t realized how much I was dreading a repeat of that “STOLEN ELECTIONS!!11!!” crap until…I didn’t hear anything about it.
Matt McIrvin
@MisterDancer: I think it’s still early for “it was stolen” agitation because the closest races haven’t been called yet. But Kari Lake in Arizona seems to be preparing to sow FUD about the election and challenge the result, since she’s still behind by just a few thousand votes out of 1.8 million. Of course, she could also still win outright.
HumboldtBlue
@Ohio Mom:
“What do you think you will change going forward?”
Biden: “nothing”
Baud
@HumboldtBlue:
🤣
SpaceUnit
@dmsilev:
Yeah, working the refs is only useful when those refs actually care about being even-handed.
UncleEbeneezer
Anyone got a free/share link for J. Bouie’s piece “No One Forced Republicans To Do Any Of These Things?“
Dangerman
I kinda feel for them. They were promised a pony and woke up with a horse’s head in their bed instead.
Cheryl from Maryland
It’s not just Roe; it’s how pig-ignorant Republican policymakers are about the health of women and children and how tragic and dangerous pregnancy can be. I know much of this is misogyny, that female naughty bits are “icky with all that blood,” that their wives, sisters, and daughters were fortunate so everyone else must be as well, but dammit, either get informed about these issues because at least 50% of the population has to deal with them, or get out of the way. Preferably getting out of the way as for other health issues.
Read an article that female puberty is starting as early as six. Pity the girl who is that age in Florida.
MattF
We all now get to say: “I told you so.” Seriously. Yeah, Biden is old and not as popular as he should be— but conventional media wisdom extrapolated these facts into the right-wing narrative of senile and ineffective. There’s an obvious need for the media hacks to pause and consider where they ran off the tracks. Unlikely to happen, though.
Immanentize
@RaflW: I love this last footnote from Fallows’ article:
[Ok, he miss uses semicolons in the third sentence which really isn’t a sentence is it?]
UncleEbeneezer
SpaceUnit
As far as the suits at the NYT are concerned, their political coverage is just right and no self-reflection is required.
Baud
@Immanentize:
Garbage.
danielx
Being a ‘highly regarded’ political pundit is sort of like being very, very rich: there are no consequences for being a fuckup.
Obligatory – this is good news for John McCain.
Barbara
@MisterDancer: I was dreading the so-called “red mirage,” and the escalating shrieks of fraud. Of course, in Arizona, if they just stopped counting at midnight on Election Day — oops, Kari Lake would lose — so, naturally, we have to COUNT EVERY VOTE, which of course we do, but, basically, they stop spinning when spinning doesn’t give them an advantage. And I am truly relieved that there was no red mirage in the contest between Oz and Fetterman, because Pennsylvania has some of the most odious Republican state legislators in existence. I lost three pounds over the course of election week in 2020, obsessively following the data from Pennsylvania and Georgia and reading about the efforts of state legislators to just throw all the votes away and decide the outcome on their own.
Immanentize
@Baud: That is the terse version of what Fallows was trying to get across.
Cacti
The “liberal” media tried so hard to tell voters what issues should and shouldn’t matter to them. Good thing they didn’t listen to the smarmy fucks.
Immanentize
@Barbara: i have long been interested in trying to leverage the voting laws for those in the military into some kind of understanding that no final results are even possible until all the military ballots are received and counted. And they, by law, have a week after election day to get them in. Seems damn unpatriotic to me.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Friendly media? To the Dems, surely you jest.
Even late night TV hosts think that Biden is old is a ha ha funny joke. I am looking at you Stephen Colbert. And they all worship at the altar of the Vt senator.
MisterDancer
@Matt McIrvin: To be clear, I was expecting Day-Of issues/agitation. Lake may pull that crap in the back 40 of the count, as you say — yet that’s not the waves of “vote for us or we’ll call it stolen!” that we were hearing from a lot of corners of The Right, prior.
In other words, I was expecting a Trend.
Annie
What really worries me is Georgia. How can anyone sane think an ex-football player with no knowledge of any other field, who paid for abortions which Republicans should find repellent, is a better choice for Senator (or dog catcher) than a pastor who occupies Martin Luther King’s former pulpit?
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I find their approach to covering India smug, condescending and oftentimes completely wrong.
MattF
And oh, btw, Bitcoin has lost about a third if its value in the last day or two. Try googling ‘btc’— it was around 21000 a couple of days ago.
Martin
@Cheryl from Maryland: The Handmaids Tale is on season 5. Anyone who doesn’t think that women aren’t invested in their own freedom in a potentially oppressive society simply isn’t paying attention. The proof is sitting right fucking there.
Martin
@Cheryl from Maryland: The Handmaids Tale is on season 5. Anyone who doesn’t think that women aren’t invested in their own freedom in a potentially oppressive society simply isn’t paying attention. The proof is sitting right fucking there.
Martin
@Annie: It’s about power and nothing else. Feel free to substitute that explanation for any other questions about the Republican Party you might have. The GOP should adopt “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” as their party motto because that’s 100% where their voters are.
mdblanche
No doubt a period of reflection is called for on the part of the voters. By their failure to uphold the narrative they have severely let the pundits down.
dm
@Martin: I don’t know.
Their exit polls showed that every demographic was less enthusiastic about Democrats in 2022 than in 2018 (I’m a bit surprised about women, and the young, however). That pretty much agrees with yesterday’s results — the Democrats have come out with fewer seats in Congress than they did in 2018 (Democrats picked up 40 seats in the House in 2018, there was no such wave this time, merely stability).
Apparently these “exit polls” include interviews with people who voted early as well as Election Day voters.
Barbara
@Annie: If I were a voter in Georgia I would consider Walker’s entire candidacy to be a slap in the face, a giant fuck you.
Ken
@MattF: That’s not really bitcoin’s fault.
The second-largest cryptocurrency exchange (the one set up by a guy who said that all crypto is a Ponzi scheme) turned out to be cooking their books ever so slightly.
The largest cryptocurrency exchange (the one set up by a guy who’s being investigated for using the exchange to circumvent sanctions on Iran) offered to bail them out, but after looking at the books withdrew the offer today.
So now people are worried that all crypto is secretly a criminal scam, which is ridiculous. There’s no “secretly” about it.
Matt McIrvin
@MisterDancer: It is interesting given that so many of the losers were, themselves, 2020 election deniers.
MisterDancer
@Annie: For those who remember the Illinois Obama/Keyes election (the source of the Crazification Factor concept) — well, the Conservatives have built a firewall that makes even an Alan Keyes-type look good.
And as much as they’ve built it by stoking Fear of a Black Planet, we gotta acknowledge it’s more than that. People like Candace Owens, Tim Scott, Hershel Walker, and especially Justice Thomas represent a kind of New Jim Crow, if you will. They serve to propagandize that ANYONE can “get over” in conservatism, if they believe hard enough.
This isn’t about Walker. It’s about the Pyramid scheme of power and wealth that the modern GOP has turned into. It could be anybody — literally, any body still moving — and these voters, who are hooked hard into this, will vote for ’em because it’s not about the candidate, it’s about the hate I can express, and the “conservative lottery ticket” of possible wealth when they “cut my taxes!”
It’s all symbols and code words and promises you’re trained to hold to, no matter what, re-enforced by your closest friends and family who mostly feel the same, except for that weird cousin who always did look down on us.
Racial animosity still animates this — but now that’s changed, and there’s so many more targets to hate. Enough hate to push you to the polls for a lifetime, one might say, with careful prodding…
MattF
@Ken: Agree. I just like to watch things fall. Universal law of Gravitation, and all that.
Magrat Garlick
Someone requested a gift link to this Bouie article: “No One Forced Republicans to do any of these things”
MisterDancer
@Magrat Garlick: Thank you! That is a really great article!
Dadadadadadada
@Annie: Well, see, that’s the thing, no one sane does support Walker over Warnock.
Montanareddog
@Turgidson:
Obligatory
prostratedragon
@RaflW: Re Fallows, ain’t that the truth! Maybe one reason election punditerizing is so arid is that there isn’t enough substance there, most of the time, actually to engage a mind –unlike actual issues.
Fair Economist
@MattF:
I’m lovin’ it. More good news!
Fair Economist
@Ken:
I’m stealing this.
mrmoshpotato
Surprising?
No. Because Twitter was bought by a bratty child.
mrmoshpotato
@Ken: Dude, it’s crypto.
It’s sooper seekure, and sooper dooper seeeekrit!
You lame-os are too stoopid to know this.
Bill Arnold
@mrmoshpotato:
“Crypto” is shorthand for “cryptography” or “cryptology”. Even has an annual conference: https://crypto.iacr.org/2022/program.php
:-) Yeah, a newish (only like 15 years old!) joke among cryptographers, after the name appropriation by cryptocurrency greedheads.
Mai Naem mobile
@dm: wouldn’t you expect less enthusiasm about Dems in 2022 since they’re the party in charge and everything is their fault? 2018 would have been shown even more enthusiasm for Dems than normal since TFG was completely off the charts cray cray.
Geminid
@dm: Exit pollers may interview early voters in addition to election day voters, but there are now a lot people voting absentee/mail-in. So exit polls can still have relative value but not like they did 10 years ago.
different-church-lady
I really wanna know if my gut feelings about the media being complicit in the psyops are legit, or if they’ve just gotten even worse at being played for dupes by the GOP.
different-church-lady
@Mai Naem mobile: We keep talking about enthusiasm like it’s a synonym for determination.
Ladyraxterinok
@mdblanche:
See Brecht poem Die Loesung/The Solution written after the 1953 uprising in the DDR. The German poem, it’s English translation, and the background is found under the poem title in Wikipedia.
Brecht says rather than the people working to regain the trust of the government would it not be easier for the government to simply choose a new people
dm
@Mai Naem mobile: Sure. I just thought that what I understood Martin’s objection to be — “see the perfidy of the NYT! they frame this exit poll in a way that contradicts what happened yesterday” was basically wrong. The NYT reported on the poll, and what they found was pretty consistent with what happened yesterday.
frosty
@different-church-lady: Good point. I was trying to describe the Dems I canvassed the last couple of weeks – the ones who virtually all told me they were voting D straight down the ballot. Enthusiastic and grimly determined was what I came up with, but neither seems exactly right. Grimly enthusiastic?
Another Scott
@dm: I think that, in general, exit polls are constructed and used to support narratives, not to actually explain what voters were thinking.
The Coppins tweet above points to Axios which points to a CNN exit poll of Pennsylvania Senate voters. One of the questions:
Maybe 91% of surveyed voters looked at the parties and their differences and based their votes on that??? I mean isn’t that what they’re saying there??!!ONE
Oh, no, I guess we need the pundits to explain to us that Biden was too mean and Harris didn’t go to the border early enough, amirite??!!
(groucho-roll-eyes.gif)
Grr…,
Scott.
RaflW
oops