November 9, 2023
Yesterday, Democrats nearly swept the table in an off-year election, easily passing a referendum in red-state Ohio enshrining the right to abortion, easily re-electing a Democratic governor in Kentucky, and sweeping into the majority in both houses of the Virginia legislature.
None of these things were predictable; all were quite plausible outcomes.
Let’s go to the reportage prior to these votes, shall we?
The Guardian, Monday, 6 November, 2023: “Abortion providers brace themselves ahead of Ohio vote: ‘It’s just terrifying’”
Politico, Friday 3 November 2023: “Kentucky is about to give us a major test of Biden’s unpopularity.…Biden won just 36 percent of the vote in Kentucky in 2020 — and he’s gotten a lot less popular since then. That provided an opening for Republicans.”
AP News, Sunday 5 November 2023: “An analysis by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project found that six days out from the election, the share of early votes cast by likely Republican voters…has increased more than 2 percentage points from last year, while the GOP’s share of mail votes is up by almost 4 percentage points….’We’re going to beat them at their own game,’ Kay James, a former Youngkin Cabinet official who now works with his PAC, said at a rally Thursday.”
The Democratic party was alleged to be falling apart due to a rebellion of more liberal voters angrily rejecting Biden policies on the Israel-Hamas war:
Prism Reports, Monday 6 November 2023: “Voters say they have lost faith in the Biden administration for not calling for a ceasefire in Gaza…. ‘I have not made up my mind as to which way I will vote,’ [a voter] said. ‘But I can definitely say that [with] this situation and how the past couple weeks have unfolded, I am much less likely to support the Democratic Party….’”
More generally, the alleged unpopularity of Joe Biden was supposed to drag his entire party down to defeat:
The New York Times, Sunday 5 November 2023: “Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds… Discontent pulsates throughout the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them. The survey also reveals the extent to which the multiracial and multigenerational coalition that elected Mr. Biden is fraying.”
Now let’s look at the post-election analysis.
The New York Times has a single take, and to give them credit, they are not abandoning it. They have been saying Biden is electoral poison for some time, and they seem to be too invested in this single-point scenario to examine other possibilities (Biden might be better liked than they think? Polling a year before a presidential election is historically unreliable? The alternative to Biden might be even less popular? Personal popularity of candidates might be overwhelmed by other outside factors such as the abortion issue?)
New York Times, Wednesday, 8 November 2023: “Elections Are a Respite for Biden, but Show the Disparity Between Him and Party…. Tuesday’s results were a win for the president after demoralizing poll numbers. But some strategists argue the outcomes only show that Democrats are doing well, not necessarily the president.”
The Guardian, Wednesday, 8 November 2023: “Abortion is a winning issue’: rights victories in 2023 US elections raise hopes for 2024…. The issue turns voters out in high numbers, which could also prove a boon for Biden at a time of low enthusiasm….”
Politico, Wednesday, 8 November 2023, like the Times, stuck to their pre-election take on Biden being in deep trouble: “’Voters vote, polls don’t,’ read a Biden-Harris fundraising email issued after a good chunk of the results were in…. Those pleas are probably downplaying the political trouble Biden faces at this point. But the president undeniably got a nice boost from the night…. [Democrats] believe they bought themselves a reprieve from naysayers who fear that they’re facing doom when Biden squares off against Trump.”
AP News, Wednesday, 8 November 2023: “Democrats have made clear they plan to make the issue central in races for the presidency and down the ballot next year. …Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said in a statement that ‘Americans overwhelmingly side with President Biden and Democrats’ vision for this country’ and ‘that same choice will be before voters again next November.’”
I could go on. But the point is not to do “gotchas” on the inconsistency or pig-headedness of these journalistic enterprises. It’s to show that “takes,” whether consistent or not, are essentially a denial of the fundamental unpredictability of political events. The New York Times seems to believe that Biden’s age and “unpopularity” are the one single key to the 2024 presidential election. They are sticking to that take come hell or high water.
And this is stupid. It is exactly the sort of “Fatal Certainty” that I just wrote a book about. The Times (like Politico, and many other journalistic outlets) has one scenario of the future, even though we do not even know whether EITHER of the leading candidates (who would BOTH be older than any previous major party candidates) will actually still be around and on the ballot in November 2024.
In 2016, the Times seemed to decide that their single point scenario was that Hillary Clinton would be elected, and therefore decided to focus on her emails, despite Donald Trump emitting scores of arguably equally or more concerning scandals on a regular basis.
Partly as a result of this fixation on one single Clinton scandal involving a handful of ex-post-facto classified emails on a server that (unlike, e.g., her department’s government server) was never penetrated by the Russians or others, which they decided was THE story of the 2016 election, we now see the ex-president they essentially helped to get elected quite literally in the dock for mishandling hundreds of top secret documents. There is not nearly enough attention paid to the titanic level of irony encapsulated in this comparison, nor on the role played by leading “journalists” in making it possible.
We deserve better journalism. We deserve journalists who admit that they do not know what THE story of any election actually is. Which means they should abandon “takes,” and start using rigorous imagination to generate multiple scenarios of every election – indeed, of every important issue that is subject to fundamental uncertainty.
If they could, as they say down here in New Zealand, “arse themselves” to even try to imagine the sort of things (like the abortion issue in this particular election, or a terror attack next year, or a bad (or good) outcome in the Ukraine or Gaza conflicts, or… FILL IN THIS BLANK, “journalists” – it’s your JOB…) that could render their single hot take utterly irrelevant, we would all be far better off.
Macho posturing and fixation on “takes” that grab eyeballs – like “Biden is too old” or “Biden is unpopular” or “Trump’s trials help him with his base” or “Trump is leading the polls in every swing state twelve months before anyone votes, so Biden is doomed” – do not serve the public, and actually betray the trust that any serious professional journalistic enterprise should seek to deserve.
Give us multiple scenarios of any fundamentally uncertain issue, or admit that you are charlatans.
IMAGINE. RIGOROUSLY.
