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FOCUS | Jon Stewart Is Right: How Long Will the Media Play Trump's Game? |
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Sunday, 04 November 2018 12:58 |
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McFarland writes: "Since Trump has been elected, two popular opinions have arisen, both containing some questionable version of the truth. One is that he's been terrible for journalism. The other is that he’s been a boon for comedy. Reporters and comics take issue with each of these assessments."
Jon Stewart. (photo: Getty Images)
Jon Stewart Is Right: How Long Will the Media Play Trump's Game?
By Melanie McFarland, Salon
04 November 18
Comics undertake journalism. The news becomes a joke. Trump is making rubes of the media, and it’s playing along
 fleeting moment within the teaser for Axios’s interview with Donald Trump, the centerpiece of Sunday's “Axios on HBO,” tells all you need to know about how the president truly feels about his relationship to the media.
Moments after Jim VandeHei admits to Trump that his “enemy of the people” rhetoric scares the hell out of him, the reporter (and co-founder of the media site) tells the president, “You are, like, the most powerful man in the world.”
Reflexively Trump looks off-camera and grins, briefly, his face flush with what appears to be self-satisfaction. There was concentrated smugness in that expression, tinged with a pugilist’s cruelty.
In that scene, VandeHei points out the extreme irresponsibility of any leader of the free world using his position and platform to vilify an entire class of people, and using that rhetoric to stoke the emotions of the people who constitute his base.
Ever the attention-hungry reality show star, Trump softly replies, “They like me more because of it,” calling his dangerous hyperbolic term the only way he can fight back. That satisfied grin says he knows he’s winning.
“Axios on HBO,” premiering Sunday at 6:30 p.m., is one of many specials the news site will run on the premium cable channel as part of a partnership. HBO has been steadily expanding its news and information footprint. And that in itself indicates how malleable our concept of news has become under Trump’s administration.
Mind you, HBO has long been a ferocious contender in the documentary space, and has been the home of “Real Time with Bill Maher” for 16 seasons, and “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” for five.
Joining this mix were its pre-midterm “Pod Save America” specials, live broadcasts of the Crooked Media podcast, which wrapped up on Friday. And four nights of the week it airs "Vice News Tonight," although HBO plans to cut that brand’s weekly news show following the run of its current season, according to an NBC News report.
However, out of all of these titles, it's the comedians, Bill Maher and John Oliver, who earn the most attention. Oliver in particular frequently receives positive acclaim for presenting deeply researched segments every week, diving into such public interest segments as corrupt government and corporate practices and alarming political trends. You know, just like a journalist.
As such, Twitter was over the moon this week at the sight of a veritable current affairs supergroup sitting down for a conversation, when Christiane Amanpour interviewed Dave Chappelle and Oliver’s former boss Jon Stewart at London's Royal Albert Hall for CNN's "Amanpour." The interview is worth enjoying in its fullness for many reasons but, as was true of that Axios clip, certain moments are worth parsing.
Since Trump has been elected, two popular opinions have arisen, both containing some questionable version of the truth. One is that he’s been terrible for journalism. The other is that he’s been a boon for comedy. Reporters and comics take issue with each of these assessments.
But one strange truth is that his tactics have resulted in a further conflation of journalism and entertainment in a way that has defanged the way the press covers him as well as Congress. Over the past week especially, many members of the press had to finally wake up to the fact that what journalists of color have been saying all along — Trump is a white supremacist — is indeed true. But most still have problems saying that, even after Trump crowed about being a nationalist at a rally in Houston. They’re too afraid of losing the crowd, of walking the room.
Near the beginning of her CNN interview, Amanpour poses a version of that thesis to Stewart. Pointing out Trump’s praising of a political candidate who assaulted a reporter — this in the midst of the still-unfolding reporting on the gruesome murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate in Turkey — Amanpour asks Stewart what he makes of Trump’s behavior.
She refers to Stewart as “sort of the gray beard of journalism, almost. I know you hate that. But when anchors started to be less authoritative than they used to may be, you know, 20 years ago, you were, for better or for worse, considered somebody with authority every night.”
Stewart dismisses this idea out of hand, explaining that in reality, he was the “no confidence” vote.
“We were none of the above,” he said. “So, people would say, you know, ‘Who's the most trusted news anchor?’ And they would list the four network anchors and then they would throw in, you know, my name — none of the above — and everybody's like, ‘none of the above’ and then circle it.”
If that’s true, that means we have many more “none of the above” selections these days. That’s not necessarily a negative: Oliver, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, and even Jim Jefferies in his own relaxed fashion have used their platforms, and the latitude comedy grants them, to tell hard truths.
This has expanded into the news realm, too. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Don Lemon are journalists who ask hard hitting questions but they’re also, in a very real way, personalities in the vein of Rachel Maddow and her dark matter equivalents Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham.
Megyn Kelly was part of that right-wing media axis until she made it her goal to be a Real Journalist. NBC thought it could style her thusly in primetime and failed. And when the corporate entity attempted to fall back on Kelly’s personality to carry a morning show, “Megyn Kelly Today,” critics and comedians did not allow NBC or the host to escape the ghosts of her racist past which, as her comments on blackface proved, were never in the past in the first place.
The migration of consumer trustworthiness from the hard journalism sphere into the entertainment realm, and comedic specifically, began long before Stewart revitalized “The Daily Show” in 1999. Fox News Channel made a point of blurring those lines since its earliest days before erasing them altogether in the Obama era.
But for mainstream media, what is coming home to roost now is how stubborn traditional news outlets have been in their refusal to acknowledge that the entertainer-in-chief has changed the game on them entirely. He did so from day one of his term by painting the entire industry as one nebulous cabal of ineffectual antagonists.
Earlier this week Vox’s Ezra Klein pointed this out, recalling former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s early declaration that the press was the opposition party.
“The problem was the media didn’t want to be Trump’s opposition party. The media wanted to cover his presidency,” Klein explained, pointing out the numerous post-inauguration instances in which journalists desperately sought out signs that Trump was finally becoming president. When those never truly arrived, journalists became the definitive enemy instead, seeking to delegitimize him at every turn.
And as his media partners at Fox News Channel picked up that catchy refrain, a concurrent timidity and habit of meeting outrage with outrage resulted. The outrage manifests in obsessive fact checking, which is both necessary and, this deep into the quagmire of lies, pointless. The timidity takes the form of refusing to accurately call the administration's horrific behaviors by their proper definition.
Namely this would be the refusal to call Trump’s reference to a migrant caravan primarily composed of women and children fleeing their violent homelands for the chance at having a better life as “invaders,” or the bigoted, Willie Horton-esque campaign ads attempting to frighten voters with visions of violent criminals illegally crossing the border, what they are. These are unequivocally racist actions. Not “racially divisive,” racist. And yet.
This is not to say that those who are demonstrating an understanding of that right now, such as Axios, are doing remarkably better. The news site launched in the Trump era with a very Trumpian manifesto:
“Media is broken — and too often a scam.
Stories are too long. Or too boring. Web sites are a maddening mess. Readers and advertisers alike are too often afterthoughts. They get duped by headlines that don't deliver and distracted by pop-up nonsense or unworthy clicks. Many now make money selling fake headlines, fake controversies and even fake news.”
An analysis in The New Republic that published not long after Axios launched that cited several phrases that could be interpreted as alarming within that paragraph. One that should stick out to the consumer, as the article cites, is the sentence that makes readers and advertisers equivalent.
Axios has stated its commitment to brevity, reflecting the trend toward shortened attention spans. Since that was written, it has more or less lived up to that, including links to slightly longer stories on its own site or much longer dives on other outlets. Why waste time pleading with the reader to patiently consider the bite in the larger context of the meal? That’s a sucker’s game.
Which brings us back to that clip, and VandeHei finding a way in with Trump by doing what Fox News excels at doing, and CNN, NBC News, CBS and ABC do not — and to be a traditionalist about it, should not be doing. He plays to Trump’s vanity.
“I don’t think you think we’re the enemy of the people, do you?” the reporter asks, and gets the answer both he and Trump want.
“I don’t. I don’t,” Trump says in a soothing voice, characterizing his race-baiting and casual endorsement of violence as “my only form of fighting back” to one of the guys he’s committed to fighting, only not in front of such a small audience. And on HBO! Which is better than TV!
This reminded me of something Tom Arnold observed about Trump in a recent Salon interview. “With so many people, what he's doing is, he makes them feel good about themselves. He makes them feel powerful.”
Hmm.
(Arnold, by the way, refers to himself in his Viceland unscripted comedy as a citizen journalist. Having seen his show, I can confidently say that he is as much a journalist as I am a Ugandan submarine commander.)
There are more news reports and documentaries on this administration than one person can track. There’s also an ocean’s worth of stand-up comedy specials and episodes of “The Daily Show,” “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” “Last Week Tonight,” and any number of half-hours devoted to the merger of comedy and current events.
That Axios clip and the racist outpouring on the election trail over the past week bring to mind a number of reporters’ insights and frustrations with the current state of journalism as it's presented, wriggling in a no-win situation. Time and again, the media leaps to cover the rambling disinformation sessions that are Trump's rallies and stream-of-consciousness rants passing for press conferences. Afterward analysts waste time attempting to dissect the nonsense to obtain some meaning or, more often, to demonstrate their offense.
They spend more time collectively cocking their eyebrows at a visit by a loopy, attention-starved pop star to the Oval Office than paying attention to very important legislative efforts making the rounds whose effects stand to impact millions of Americans and, in many cases, push us deeper into the plutocracy into which we seem to be morphing. By the time that interview with Trump airs, I'm guessing its content will seem late and probably won't grant any heretofore unearthed insights into the man.
Whereas I suspect the majority of sane news consumers feel a lot more like Stewart: “I’m less interested in [Trump’s] insults than I am interested in his injuries, about the people being hurt,” he tells Amanpour.
But Amanpour isn’t quite ready to give up the fight for her profession as it was understood to be in the past, in that era before we abandoned fact and reason. “We the journalists — we, I think, believe that our job is to navigate the truth and to do the fact checking and all the rest of it.”
Stewart sagely replies, “But I think the journalists have taken it personally . . . They are personally wounded and offended by this man. He baits them. And they dive in. . . . Journalists stand up and say, ‘We are noble. We are honorable. How dare you, sir?’ And they take it personally.”
“And now he has changed the conversation to, not that his policies are silly or not working or any of those other things, it's all about the fight,” Stewart continues. “He is able to tune out everything else and get people just focused on the fight. And he's going to win that fight.”
For a couple of years now Trump has certainly proven that to be fact. But are journalists willing to heed the sage warning of a comic?
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Mayday ... Mayday ... Mayday |
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Sunday, 04 November 2018 09:37 |
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Sullenberger writes: "Today, tragically, too many people in power are projecting the worst. Many are cowardly, complicit enablers, acting against the interests of the United States."
Chesley B. Sullenberger III and the crew of US Airways Flight 1549 at the Super Bowl in Florida in 2009. (photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
Mayday ... Mayday ... Mayday
By Chesley B. 'Sully' Sullenberger III, The Washington Post
30 October 18
 early 10 years ago, I led 154 people to safety as the captain of US Airways Flight 1549, which suffered bird strikes, lost thrust in the engines and was forced to make an emergency landing on the Hudson River. Some called it “the Miracle on the Hudson.” But it was not a miracle. It was, in microcosm, an example of what is needed in emergencies — including the current national crisis — and what is possible when we serve a cause greater than ourselves.
On our famous flight, I witnessed the best in people who rose to the occasion. Passengers and crew worked together to help evacuate an elderly passenger and a mother with a 9-month-old child. New York Waterway took the initiative to radio their vessels to head toward us when they saw us approaching. This successful landing, in short, was the result of good judgment, experience, skill — and the efforts of many.
But as captain, I ultimately was responsible for everything that happened. Had even one person not survived, I would have considered it a tragic failure that I would have felt deeply for the rest of my life. To navigate complex challenges, all leaders must take responsibility and have a moral compass grounded in competence, integrity and concern for the greater good.
I am often told how calm I sounded speaking to passengers, crew and air traffic control during the emergency. In every situation, but especially challenging ones, a leader sets the tone and must create an environment in which all can do their best. You get what you project. Whether it is calm and confidence — or fear, anger and hatred — people will respond in kind. Courage can be contagious.
Today, tragically, too many people in power are projecting the worst. Many are cowardly, complicit enablers, acting against the interests of the United States, our allies and democracy; encouraging extremists at home and emboldening our adversaries abroad; and threatening the livability of our planet. Many do not respect the offices they hold; they lack — or disregard — a basic knowledge of history, science and leadership; and they act impulsively, worsening a toxic political environment.
As a result, we are in a struggle for who and what we are as a people. We have lost what in the military we call unit cohesion. The fabric of our nation is under attack, while shame — a timeless beacon of right and wrong — seems dead.
This is not the America I know and love. We’re better than this. Our ideals, shared facts and common humanity are what bind us together as a nation and a people. Not one of these values is a political issue, but the lack of them is.
This current absence of civic virtues is not normal, and we must not allow it to become normal. We must rededicate ourselves to the ideals, values and norms that unite us and upon which our democracy depends. We must be engaged and informed voters, and we must get our information from credible, reputable sources.
For the first 85 percent of my adult life, I was a registered Republican. But I have always voted as an American. And this critical Election Day, I will do so by voting for leaders committed to rebuilding our common values and not pandering to our basest impulses.
When I volunteered for military service during wartime, I took an oath that is similar to the one our elected officials take: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” I vowed to uphold this oath at the cost of my life, if necessary. We must expect no less from our elected officials. And we must hold accountable those who fail to defend our nation and all our people.
After Flight 1549, I realized that because of the sudden worldwide fame, I had been given a greater voice. I knew I could not walk away but had an obligation to use this bully pulpit for good and as an advocate for the safety of the traveling public. I feel that I now have yet another mission, as a defender of our democracy.
We cannot wait for someone to save us. We must do it ourselves. This Election Day is a crucial opportunity to again demonstrate the best in each of us by doing our duty and voting for leaders who are committed to the values that will unite and protect us. Years from now, when our grandchildren learn about this critical time in our nation’s history, they may ask if we got involved, if we made our voices heard. I know what my answer will be. I hope yours will be “yes.”
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Blowing Smoke: Sorry, Pundits, but You Have No Clue What Will Happen on Tuesday |
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Sunday, 04 November 2018 09:34 |
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Hamby writes: "Polls remain our best tool for reading the electorate and discerning important trends, which is why journalists, handicappers, and campaign managers depend on them so much. Entire media companies are devoted to explaining them. But polls are not predictive. They are wobbly around the margins."
Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke is running against Ted Cruz. (photo: Getty Images)
Blowing Smoke: Sorry, Pundits, but You Have No Clue What Will Happen on Tuesday
By Peter Hamby, Vanity Fair
04 November 18
Electorates mutate every two years. Using past turnout patterns can be useful when modeling a universe of voters, but the polls cannot tell us with certainty what will happen on Election Day anymore. In a volatile environment where Trump has saturated every inch of our cultural fabric with politics, who the hell knows what’s going to happen?
 n the final week before Election Day last November in Virginia, where the commonwealth was electing a new governor, the polls were tightening. Republican Ed Gillespie, was, like Donald Trump before him, tapping into immigration fears by running campaign ads about the threat of the violent MS-13 gang and sanctuary cities. Polls showed Gillespie was suddenly within 3 points of the Democratic front-runner, Ralph Northam, who had held a sturdier lead for much of the year. Were Democrats about to blow another big race in a battleground state? Were last minute Republican efforts to exploit racial fears actually working? Could Northam lose even with an unpopular president in the White House? That scenario would defy the logic of every previous off-year election in modern times, but never mind. The punditry machine, huffing Twitter fumes, gassed itself up. The day before the election, three out of four panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe solemnly predicted a Northam loss.
The fourth, Harold Ford Jr., predicted a toss-up, but not without pre-writing an obituary. “Democrats are going to look back and wonder, if he does not win, did we lose on the crime issue, did we lose on the public-safety issue?,” Ford offered. Meanwhile, Mika Brzezinski wondered whether the governor’s race in a state populated by 8.5 million people might hinge on “the Donna Brazile stuff,” a niche beltway Twitter scandal so forgettable that I had to Google it to recall what it was about, despite the fact that I cover politics for a living and grew up in central Virginia. Turns out Brazile wrote a book trashing Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which surely weighed heavily on the minds of voters in Roanoke.
Not only did Northam win the Virginia race, he won by 9 points, a polling error more substantial than anything we saw in 2016. Gillespie, it turns out, actually won more votes than any previous statewide Republican candidate; he had enthusiasm at his back. It’s just that Democrats had more—and they blew the doors off on Election Day. The whole spectacle was yet another blow to polling and to punditry, two industries sullied by Trump’s victory in 2016.
The Virginia result went mostly unexamined after the results came in, as everyone in politics quickly moved on to the latest Trump thing. But the question of why Northam outperformed the polls, and why polls continue to wield such mystical power over the political press, is worth keeping in mind as America prepares to head to the polls next Tuesday. Every piece of evidence we have about voting behavior during the Trump presidency—special elections in various corners of the country, public and internal polls, early voting data in key states—indicates that we are heading for a midterm election with explosively high turnout. University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, who studies voting patterns, estimated recently that almost 50 percent of eligible voters could cast ballots this year, a turnout level not seen in a midterm election in 50 years. Trump, in his way, is loudly trying to juice Republican turnout in red-leaning Senate races by demagoguing the threat of illegal border crossings, which happen to be at their lowest point in decades.
Enthusiasm in this election, though, is mostly fueled by Democrats. Aside from college-educated white women, much of the Democratic coalition in 2018 is comprised of voters—young people, African-Americans, and Hispanics—who don’t typically show up in midterm elections. And the main thing to remember about high-turnout elections, especially ones that bring non-traditional voters into the mix, is that strange things can happen. House seats once thought to be safe are suddenly in jeopardy, like Republican Steve King’s solidly red seat in Iowa now appears to be.
Still, in the press, it seems written in stone that Democrats will take back the House but fail to take the Senate, thanks to an unfavorable map that has too many Democratic incumbents running in Trump-friendly states like Missouri, North Dakota, West Virginia, Indiana, and Montana. The prospect of a House-Senate split is the most likely outcome according to the polls and veteran handicappers, and that probability has already started congealing into conventional wisdom. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, writing last weekend, said this scenario is “the sensible thing to root for,” the best way to constrain Trump’s impulses but also an unchecked liberalism.
Polls remain our best tool for reading the electorate and discerning important trends, which is why journalists, handicappers, and campaign managers depend on them so much. Entire media companies are devoted to explaining them. But polls are not predictive. They are wobbly around the margins. Pollsters, the honest ones at least, know this and repeat the warning over and over again. Yet even the shock of 2016 hasn’t stopped people in the media from making predictions about next Tuesday. Journalists, at least on their Twitter accounts, have started to write off certain Senate races. Tennessee is one, North Dakota another. Joe Donnelly was left for dead last week, until a new NBC/Marist poll came out this week, showing him ahead by 2 points. In Nevada, a recent Emerson poll showed incumbent Republican Dean Heller ahead of challenger Jacky Rosen by 7 points, prompting a chorus of worried groans from Democrats. People who know better urged caution.
“Consistently, the public polling here is garbage,” Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston told me. He pointed out that public polling in Nevada underestimated Democratic performance in every one of the last six competitive statewide elections. In 2010, Harry Reid was losing to Republican Sharron Angle by 3 points heading into election day. He won by 5.7. “Polls here under-represent Democratic turnout in general. They under-represent Hispanics,” Ralston said. “I don’t know why no one has learned.” Funny stuff happens when people who don’t mainline CNN for a living actually vote.
Then there’s Texas, where Democrat Beto O’Rourke appears to have reclaimed some late momentum against Republican Ted Cruz, who expanded his lead in the race after the Brett Kavanaugh hearings energized G.O.P. voters. Right-leaning analysts have fallen all over themselves to mock the endless stream of Texas polling and the glowing coverage O’Rourke has received from the national press. Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini tweeted that “Beto is and has always been fanfic.” The Weekly Standard published an otherwise sensible piece about the race on Wednesday under the headline “Beto-Mania Is a Joke (Probably).” Yeah, O’Rourke might lose. That’s the most likely outcome and the best bet. But here’s a wild concept: he also might win.
***
The polling industry is cloaked in a kind of scientific mysticism that sometimes feels deliberately opaque. But pollsters are actually just making educated guesses—“assumptions” is their term of art—as to what electorates will look like. Those guesses can be wrong. They sometimes are. In 2012, Mitt Romney was famously befuddled when he lost on Election Night, because his final track of internal polls showed him winning Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Colorado. His campaign simply made a bet that the electorate would be slightly older and whiter than it actually was—and they were wrong. Other times, campaigns make good bets. In the 2008 Iowa caucuses, the Obama campaign gambled that they could only win by expanding the electorate and targeting non-traditional voters. That became the universe of voters that they polled. Other pollsters surveyed a traditional caucus electorate, scoffing at the Obama folks all the while. We know how that turned out.
Ten years on, since Trump took office, polls have consistently underestimated Democratic performance. “The polls in governor’s races, those special congressional elections, in the Alabama Senate race—on average they underestimated Democrats,” said Harry Enten, the CNN analyst, formerly of Nate Silver’s poll-and-data-driven site, FiveThirtyEight. “The error statewide in Virginia in 2017 was greater than the average error in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016.” But why? Northam’s pollster, Geoff Garin, said his biggest lesson from the Virginia election last year is that new voters are storming the gates in the Trump era and throwing turnout models out the window. Pollsters who aren’t accounting for the shifting electorate—a wave of new voters who haven’t been previously reached—could be making a risky mistake. “I think some polls are not reflecting the ways in which electorates are likely to expand,” Garin said. “Turnout in Virginia grew by nearly 17 percent from 2013 and 2017, with roughly 374,000 more voters. In our voter-file analysis, 30 percent of the people who voted in 2017 had not voted in either the 2009 or 2013 governor’s races, which indicates people were dropping out and moving away as well as dropping into the electorate.”
In the statewide races he’s working on this year, Garin said he has stopped tying his polling samples so rigidly to past midterm-vote history, as many pollsters do, by working off existing voter files to contact those most likely to turn out. It is true that the best indicator of whether someone will vote in an election is whether they have voted before. It is also true to anyone with a heartbeat and working eyeballs that Trump has motivated legions of new voters, particularly younger voters and women. Early voting numbers in many key states reflect this trend. “I am more concerned that I am under-representing them than over-representing them,” Garin said of new voters jumping into the voting pool post-Trump. In some states, he said, 24 percent of his polling samples are people who didn’t vote in two previous midterm elections.
Garin’s concern is troubling for all sorts of pollsters, particularly because young voters, a lynchpin of Democratic hopes this year, are immensely difficult to reach. “I think the single hardest thing right now is to predict the millennial turnout,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster. “Any pollster who tells you what that exit-poll number is going to be is lying.” Robert Cahaly, an Atlanta-based Republican pollster who devoted much of 2015 and 2016 to sniffing out those so-called “hidden” Trump voters, outlined the dilemma. “How many young people do you know who would get a cell phone call at five in the afternoon, answer it, and take the time to sit there and talk to someone?,” Cahaly asked. “That is not a normal young person. It’s hard to imagine a voter like that unless you are doing some kind of sophisticated digital polling, too. So you end up with too small of a pool of young people, and when you weight on that small pool, you aren’t actually representing the average youth voter.”
Enten put it another way. “Response rates are trash and they are trash among young people,” he said. Pollsters are more transparent about these shortcomings than pundits, who have a nasty habit of taking individual polls, even crappy ones, and using them to make sweeping claims about the election. “Polls, at least in this day in age, are about as accurate as they had been in the last 30-40 years,” Enten said. “But as long as we recognize the potential pitfalls of polling and recognize they are just tools, then we will be better off.”
Some surveys, like those attention-grabbing live polls from The New York Times and Siena College, are working overtime to compensate for their pitfalls—and still coming up short. Nate Cohn, who runs the poll, has written admirably about the difficulty of reaching low propensity voters in competitive House and Senate races. For instance, his team employs bilingual interviewers who do callbacks to make sure they have enough Hispanic voters in their data. Cell-phone calls, he notes, are “notably less likely to yield a response”—impeding their ability to collect responses from young people. That’s led to a risky compromise: in some states, the N.Y.T./Siena poll is defining “young people” as 18-39. Ask any 39-year-old “young person” if they know anything about XXXTentacion or Snapchat lenses, and you’ll figure out pretty quickly that the perspective of someone approaching middle age differs wildly from someone in college.
In their poll of the Texas Senate race, N.Y.T./Siena called 51,983 people around the state, and just 800 people responded. Among 18-29 year olds, they contacted 7,219 voters, and just 66 responded. That’s a grim 0.9 percent response rate among young voters, a critical voting bloc in this election, especially for Democratic candidates like O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams, who are depending on even just a marginal boost in youth turnout. Pollsters like Cohn adjust for these low response rates by “weighting,” adjusting the results to give more weight to respondents from under-representing groups. “But,” Cohn writes, “weighting works only if you weight by the right categories and you know what the composition of the electorate will be.”
You know who knows the precise composition of this year’s electorate? No one. Electorates mutate every two years. They get older, they get younger, they get browner, they get whiter, they get smaller, they get bigger. They respond to new candidates and shifting issue sets. Using past turnout patterns can be useful when modeling a universe of voters, but the polls cannot tell us with certainty what will happen on Election Day anymore. In a volatile environment where Trump has saturated every inch of our cultural fabric with politics, who the hell knows what’s going to happen? Maybe Democrats might actually win the Senate. Maybe Republicans will keep the House. Maybe Trump’s nativist final push will actually yield big returns just where he needs them. Or maybe not! Just let people vote. The only currency to cling to in the post-Trump era is that all bets are off.
“We are definitely in a dynamic situation here,” Garin said. “And people who tell you confidently they know exactly how things will turn out are blowing smoke.”
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Trump Is Lying About Medicare For All to Protect His Friends in the Insurance Industry |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44519"><span class="small">Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders' Facebook Page</span></a>
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Saturday, 03 November 2018 13:27 |
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Sanders writes: "Given the president’s propensity to lie about almost everything, it is not surprising that Trump is lying about Medicare for All—a proposal which 70 percent of the American people now support."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Antonella Crescimbeni)
Trump Is Lying About Medicare For All to Protect His Friends in the Insurance Industry
By Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders' Facebook Page
03 November 18
 iven the president’s propensity to lie about almost everything, it is not surprising that Trump is lying about Medicare for All—a proposal which 70 percent of the American people now support.
Our proposal would not cut benefits for seniors on Medicare, as the president and his Republican allies claim. In fact, we expand benefits to include dental care, vision care and hearing aids. In addition, Medicare for All would eliminate deductibles and copays for seniors, and significantly lower the cost of prescription drugs. And Medicare for All allows all Americans to see the doctors they want, not the doctors their insurance companies have a contract with.
The president is lying to protect the profits of his friends in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, but the American people are clear about what they want: to end the international disgrace of being the only major country not to guarantee health care as a right.
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amal Khashoggi’s horrific murder was a message to journalists, dissidents and regime critics everywhere. You are never safe. Anywhere, anytime.
