Democrats are getting nervous as they realize their base is tuning them out By Andrea Widburg
It’s fascinating to watch some of the smarter Democrats drag themselves out of their own Trump hatred long enough to realize that their party is in trouble at a very fundamental level. Such is the case with Peter Hamby, who wrote an article for Vanity Fair entitled, “‘Like, I’ll tune in when there’s two weeks left’: Why Trump has a huge advantage over dems with low-information voters.”
What Hamby is concerned about is the fact that the media are so excessively self-involved that they no longer know how to communicate information and ideas to the voters media types want to reach most: people who are not politically engaged on a day-to-day basis but must turn out to vote on November 3 if the Democrat candidate is to win.
Hamby notes that traveling reporters have nothing but disdain for those who spend their days sitting at their desks reading and reporting on Twitter:
[T]he stories and micro-scandals that obsess political and media insiders—often played out in episodic fashion on Twitter—matter little to voters who are too busy and too well-adjusted to follow every nanosecond of the political news cycle. It’s hard to overstate how salient this discontinuity will be in the current election year.
After slinging several pointless personal attacks at Trump and his supporters, Hamby grudgingly notes that Trump is a master communicator who speaks directly to Americans about things that matter to them. Meanwhile, the media are obsessing about “wine caves, pay-fors, court packing, white privilege, and Iowa’s role in the nomination process.”
This disconnect doesn’t just affect media profitability. Hamby understands the real problem, which is that, outside of the hard-Left Democrat base, voters neither know nor care about the candidates. The only thing that jazzes black voters (still) is Obama. Everything else is “meh.” Worse, when these low-interest voters weren’t thinking “meh,” their thoughts weren’t very nice:
In Milwaukee words that came to mind for Biden included “hugger,” “oil tycoon,” “cops,” and “old white money.” Six of the voters—all of whom had voted in the past two election cycles—responded with some variation of “nothing” or “I have nothing” when Biden was named. In Philadelphia the voters associated Biden with “crime bill,” “too old,” and “not fired up.” A grandmother and self-described “cat lady” named Jean said, “I heard he said a bad thing, I didn’t like it.” Biden elicited better reactions in Miami, where attendees said “Obama,” “experience,” and “well dressed” when the former vice president’s name was mentioned.
Sanders didn’t fare much better:
Sanders, too, was described as “too old” in all three cities, though many of the responses were, if not on message, at least message-adjacent. The Miami group associated Sanders with “crazy hair,” “grinny,” “free college,” and “wants to give away too many things for free.” The Philadelphia group said “your crazy uncle,” “health care,” “questionable health,” and “passionate hand talker.” In Milwaukee the Obama–Trump voters described Sanders as “for the people,” “crazy but in a good way,” “boisterous,” and “bold”—while three of the voters had no response to his name.
The other top Democrat candidates hadn’t even registered with those voters queried. And still, the media relentlessly press on, recycling hoaxes and conspiracies, and endlessly trying to one-up each other with information that is the political equivalent of inside baseball.
When Democrat voters do bother to tune into the news, they don’t trust what the outlets are saying, whether their watching left-leaning sites or Fox News:
Most cautioned that they tune out political news, before naming Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google News, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, and “local news.” But even as the participants identified their own news sources, every focus group participant said they didn’t trust them for information about politics. All of the cable networks were viewed as agenda-driven and produced to stoke outrage and ratings rather than inform viewers.
Trump knew in 2015 that the media outlets were not only the enemy, but also dinosaurs, partisan, ill-informed, and mindless. (Or as Ben Rhodes said, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.… They literally know nothing.”) Americans have figured this out too, and the smart ones are listening to Trump as he tweets right past the media.
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