You Can Blame It On Fox— Or The Disinvestment In Public Education
People who haven’t made up their minds which candidate is the greater or lesser evil are still up for grabs according to the new Monmouth poll (one in six voters). Most of them don’t like RFK, Jr either. Imagine an election where you get to vote for someone you think is great— say Bernie for example— insteda of against the other guy!
Is that making you wonder about what the Republican voters who opted for Nikki Haley as a protest vote are going to do? Well, a trio of Wall Street Journal reporters tried figuring that out for us. Remember, Haley hasn’t been in the race for months, but in the closed GOP primary in Pennsylvania last week, 17% of teh voters shunned trump by picking her, especially in the suburban counties around Philly. “Those Haley voters, largely insignificant in the primary,” wrote Anthony DeBarros, Danny Dougherty and John McCormick, “could play an outsize role come November in swing-state contests in that could decide the election by razor-thin margins. To win, Trump will have to overcome the challenges the results in Pennsylvania— and other primaries— highlight: persuading voters in cities and their surrounding suburbs where the population is younger, has more college education and higher household incomes… Last week, the Biden campaign announced a six-figure ad buy in Pennsylvania targeting the nearly 158,000 voters who chose Haley in the Republican primary… In addition to Pennsylvania, Haley pulled in more votes than might be expected from a non-candidate in other April contests, notably 13% in swing state Wisconsin… AP data shows that even in states with closed primaries, where only registered Republicans could vote in the GOP contest, Haley’s share was 16%.”
They also reported that “a majority of Haley voters said they wouldn’t ultimately vote for the former president… Haley did best in urban areas and surrounding suburbs. She took 24% of the vote in counties the American Communities Project calls ‘big cities’: densely populated, diverse places with higher incomes where Biden did well in 2020. She similarly did well in surrounding counties that the ACP calls ‘urban suburbs’ and ‘exurbs,’ where she took 26% and 23% of the vote, respectively. Those areas include heavily blue Northern Virginia— where the primary was open— but also Montgomery County, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb where the primary was only open to registered Republicans and Haley took 25% of the vote.”
Haley’s returns were stronger in places with higher levels of income and education, which tend to rise together— and tend to be higher in metro areas. She received 26% of the vote in counties with the highest educational attainment— the top one-fifth of primary counties in terms of the percentage of people ages 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to 2018-22 census estimates. By comparison, she received 9% of votes across counties with the lowest educational attainment. In six swing states, Haley received 24% of votes in the highest-educated counties.
…When Haley exited the race on March 6, she declined to endorse Trump, and a person close to her says she is no closer to doing so than she was that day. “It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it, who did not support him, and I hope he does that,” Haley said at the time. “At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people.”
How often do you find yourself wondering, what kind of screwed up people vote for Trump? Remember, in 2020 there were 74,223,975 of them in 2020— and they didn’t all live in the Old Confederacy and Wyoming. In fact, more Californians (6,006,518) voted for Trump than did citizens of Texas (5,890,347), Florida (5,668,731) or any other state. 3,251,997 New Yorkers voted for him— more than the 3,154,834 Ohioans who did. More voters in Illinois picked Trump (2,446,891) than did voters in a red bastion like Missouri (1,718,736). So, the question remains— what kind of ignorant, screwed up morons (46.8% of the voters) voted for Trump? And that leads right to the age-old question about which came first, the chicken or the egg, first discussed by Aristotle (who concluded that it’s an infinite sequence, with no true origin) and 4 centuries later by Plutarch in Symposiacs who literally asked “Whether the Hen or the Egg Came first” and then linked the seemingly simple question to the larger philosophical debate about the origin of the universe.” He was a bit early to link it to how stupid or hateful someone has to be to vote for Trump. However, NBC went there.
Basically, do Fox News and Hate Talk Radio news consumers vote for Trump because they get their news from Fox and Hate Talk Radio or do Trump supporters turn to Fox and Hate Talk because of conformation bias? In other words, do individuals’ preexisting support for Trump influence their choice of news sources or do their choice of news sources reinforce their support for Trump? Lots of research in psychology and media studies suggests that both factors likely play a role. On one hand, individuals may be drawn to news sources that align with their preexisting beliefs and values, seeking out information that confirms their perspectives, while on the other hand, exposure to bigoted and dishonest news sources like Fox shape individuals’ beliefs and attitudes over time, reinforcing their support for fascist ideology.
The classic 1985 study by Vallone, Ross and Lepper, The Hostile Media Phenomenon: Biased Perception and Perceptions of Media Bias in Coverage of the Beirut Massacre examined how Americans (both pro-and anti-Israeli) perceive media coverage of politically charged events through the lens of their own biases. Want to read more? Try Stroud’s 2008 study Selective exposure to partisan information, which investigates how individuals selectively expose themselves to political information online, exploring the role of confirmation bias in shaping media consumption habits.
NBC didn’t actually get into any of that. Yesterday, Ben Kamisar reported that Trump and Biden supporters get their news from different sources. It confirms the DWT thesis that only ignorant morons support Trump. “Biden, wrote Kamisar, “is the clear choice of voters who consume newspapers and national network news, while Trump does best among voters who don’t follow political news at all… The poll looked at various forms of traditional media (newspapers, national network news and cable news), as well as digital media (social media, digital websites and YouTube/Google). Among registered voters, 54% described themselves as primarily traditional news consumers, while 40% described themselves as primarily digital media consumers. Biden holds an 11-point lead among traditional news consumers in a head-to-head presidential ballot test, with 52% support among that group to Trump’s 41%. But it’s basically a jump ball among digital media consumers, with Trump at 47% and Biden at 44%. And Trump has a major lead among those who don’t follow political news— 53% back him, and 27% back Biden. ‘It’s almost comic. If you’re one of the remaining Americans who say you read a newspaper to get news, you are voting for Biden by 49 points,’ said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the poll alongside Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt.”
