Biden losing with voters who get their news from nowhere | Will Bunch Newsletter

Last week, I told you about how Donald Trump and friends were obsessed with taking a decent turnout for their rally on the beach in Wildwood and inflating it into a political Woodstock. Then, the city functionary who claimed a throng of 80,000 to 100,000 admitted that she was really talking about the number of people in all of Wildwood that Saturday, not just at the rally. That didn’t stop North Dakota governor and VP wannabe Doug Burgum from claiming a crowd of 107,000. 107,000!! Trust me, by the Milwaukee convention in July, Trump will be bragging about the attendance of 250,000. Minimum.

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The constantly simmering fire on social media about how the mainstream news media covers — or doesn’t cover — President Joe Biden had a 55-gallon barrel of gasoline tossed onto it this weekend. It started on Friday when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 40,000 for the very first time — the latest in an apparent economic winning streak for the 46th president — and it barely garnered a peep in either the New York Times or Washington Post.

Biden’s most online fans were still seething about that slight two days later when some were shocked to see the Post put a U.S. economy story at the top of the Sunday paper, with the headline: “Buying slows as gloom spreads.” So with the lowest unemployment since the 1960s, the record stock market, real growth in wages and in sectors like manufacturing, that’s what the paper went with? Gloom?

Veteran journalist Kevin Drum instantly pulled up a slew of data that contradict the Post’s glum but mostly anecdotal analysis and asked “why does the Post publish a jumble of misleading or outright incorrect economic statistics instead of just looking them up first?” That kind of question — asking why these elite newsrooms or cable news outlets like MSNBC and CNN are quick to play up Biden’s age or stylistic stumbles while ignoring his accomplishments, as he remains in a dead heat with four-times-indicted Donald Trump — epitomizes the deeply held thought that Biden’s struggles are perhaps largely due to the myriad failings of the mainstream media.

Critics are absolutely right to be furious. But at the same time, I don’t think the New York Times is the reason Biden isn’t clobbering an opponent who’s stuck in a Manhattan courtroom facing 34 felony charges. I think his real problem is the millions of Americans who wouldn’t open the New York Times if you dropped it on their lap with a slice of pizza tucked inside.

There are basically three clumps of voters in America. There are — praise the Lord — millions of diligent, civic-minded Americans who watch debates or read news, somewhere, to better understand the candidates. But there is also a large pool of what I would call the disinformed, who also pursue information but get it from propaganda sites like Fox News that twist reality, or worse. Many of them liked Trump in 2016 and like him even more now.

The group where Biden used to do OK but is now struggling is a third bloc I’d call the uninformed. Either by choice or by the realities of working multiple jobs or going to school or raising kids, millions of Americans get no news other than the snippets that pop up on TikTok or somehow interrupt the football game. These folks don’t know the New York Times, but also no one at the New York Times knows these folks — until their odd views show up in the polls and everyone is shocked.

For all the deserved carping about negative portrayals of Biden and overly positive coverage of Trump in print, a recent NBC News poll found that among the dwindling number of Americans who identify newspapers as their primary news source, the incumbent Democrat is winning by landslide proportions, 70% to 21%. NBC also found Biden leading with the millions who still watch nightly news on the traditional networks. These viewers, like newspaper readers, tend to be older — and, yes, Biden leads among senior citizens. Maybe because they are better informed?

Conversely, I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that when ranked by news consumption, Trump’s biggest lead is with voters who say they don’t follow the news at all. In the NBC poll, one in seven reported they don’t follow politics — and they are supporting Trump by a solid 53-27% margin. This category is also the most likely to pick a third-party candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or Cornel West, or Jill Stein, and also most likely not to vote at all.

Too many of us live in denial about the potency of the all-American low-information voter. Many were shocked when a New York Times poll asked voters whom they faulted for shrinking abortion rights, and 17% blamed the pro-abortion-rights Biden instead of Trump, who appointed the three justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.

In a 2018 C-SPAN poll, 52% of Americans couldn’t name a single Supreme Court justice, so it makes a kind of warped sense that some unhappy voters would blame the president, who had nothing to do with the 2022 Dobbs decision. And wasn’t Biden also the president when you paid $24 for lunch at Five Guys? I know, I know … you’ve read all the stories that inflation is actually worse in other developed nations than in Biden’s America. You know who didn’t read those stories? Low-information voters.

I happen to think criticism of the elite mainstream media is vital, which is why I’ve done so much of it myself. Everyone should be reading media watchdogs like Mark Jacob, Margaret Sullivan, Dan Froomkin, Jay Rosen, and a bunch of other folks pleading with top newsroom leaders to take 2024′s threats to democracy more seriously. That’s because while only a small fraction of Americans read the New York Times, the decisions it makes about the news flow into a bigger political ecosystem and influence how millions of people perceive the candidates.

But those ripples don’t reach everybody.

If I were working for Team Biden, I’d spend less time suggesting clever tweets to the New York Times Pitchbot and hire the best mad men and women in advertising to figure out how to get the president’s message not only on TikTok — although that’s essential — but into places like hair salons or outside Wrestlemania or in a nightclub where these politics-avoiders will somehow see it. Stop obsessing over bad information, when the real problem is no information at all.

Question: Boiled Crustaceans: Why do media outlets — business journalists in particular — find it impossible to report on the causality of hedge fund predation & monstrous mismanagement in epic bankruptcies? Like Red Lobster...? — jimhaigh (@jmhaigh) via X/Twitter

Answer: The media definitely pounced on Monday’s bankruptcy filing by Red Lobster, the iconic chain that defined a big night out for the U.S. middle class in the latter 20th century. Reporters truly loved the idea that the last straw was those gluttonous Americans gorging themselves on an overdone all-you-can-eat shrimp deal. There’s a kernel of truth there, but it may be more that one of Red Lobster’s investors, a Thai seafood firm, was dumping its catch at inflated prices. In the end, the chain’s downfall had nothing to do with “Bidenomics” or inflation or rising labor costs, and everything to do with the vulture capitalism of its private equity owners who — through methods like dubious real-estate deals — squeezed every dollar from a once-profitable venture. We’re never going to solve the crisis of late-stage capitalism until we admit that it’s the root of so many of our problems.

Your thoughts on Trump’s VP pick were both interesting and all over the map, with names ranging from the ridiculous (wacky Hawaiian progressive turncoat Tulsi Gabbard) to the sublime, in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. I think Kristina Austlid was spot-on with this pick: “Tim Scott is amiable, smart but not a smarty-pants, loyal to Trump, Black, from South Carolina, and not an obvious threat to Trump’s ego.” But I think “cdudley32279″ (please provide real names if possible) captured the zeitgeist when he wrote: “My prediction is Trump will choose a white male, middle aged, far right Christian who has never made a negative comment about him and is neither too well known or good looking.” Did you hear that, Doug Burgum?

📮This week’s question: The downfall of the U.S. Supreme Court has accelerated with news that a pro-Trump upside-down American flag flew over the home of Justice Samuel Alito after the Jan. 6 insurrection. So how can we fix SCOTUS? Term limits? Expand the court? A couple of impeachments? What’s your solution? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Supreme Court” in the subject line.

Donald Trump’s Manhattan felony trial for covering up the hush money paid to an adult-film star to keep their affair quiet ahead of the 2016 election continues to be historic, endless, and boring — for the most part. Monday brought some rare exceptions, including the judge’s dressing down of Trump’s arrogant first defense witness, lawyer Robert Costello. But what I found more intriguing was yet another Trump mini-scandal that I’d never heard about before. The developer-turned-president who’s notorious for stiffing his vendors was willing — sort of — to pay good money to one contractor, a tech consultant who knew how to rig utterly meaningless online vanity polls.

This all started, according to a 2019 story by CNBC — ironically, the victim of much of this plot — back in 2014 when Trump and his Trump-Tower-sized ego were wounded by the business network’s online poll to name America’s Top 100 business leaders. Despite retaining a tech firm to game the results, the paper billionaire still didn’t make the cut, fuming on then-Twitter, “Stupid poll should be cancelled — no credibility.” (The tweet only got 30 likes.) But the future president did not give up. With help from the firm called Red Finch, he got himself boosted to 5th place in a 2015 Drudge Report poll of White House hopefuls, months before he came down that escalator.

Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen testified on Monday that he’d retained Red Finch to rig a CNBC poll, although it was unclear if that was the same 2014 one reported on by CNBC and the Wall Street Journal. Cohen said that in a online poll for the most famous business executive of the last century, Red Finch used purchased IP addresses to boost Trump from nowhere to 9th place — No. 1 would look too suspicious, they’d agreed — only to have CNBC not publish the result. The point of the testimony under cross-examination was to raise doubts about Cohen’s credibility; it seems that — while Trump had wanted to stiff the firm altogether — Cohen finally convinced his boss to turn over $50,000, but he only paid Red Finch no more than $20,000 and pocketed the rest.

But the real loser here is Trump. The man who later attacked democracy by claiming the 2020 presidential election was rigged was in reality so corrupt as to rig these trivial online polls. The narcissism of Trump’s determination to cheat and inflate his ego over something so meaningless is one of the clearest insights ever into the moral character of a man who shouldn’t be allowed within 100 miles of the Oval Office — yet leads in many 2024 polls.

The Inquirer and the Daily News went through about (give or take) 10 different owners in the first two decades of the 21st century; one of these, a Republican, thought it would be a great idea to hire landslide-trounced ex-GOP U.S. senator Rick Santorum as an op-ed columnist. My idea was to rebut each column on my Attytood blog; I even gave these pieces a name, “The Elephant in the Room.” On this date 15 years ago, I was attacking Santorum for twisting statistics to argue that Americans were becoming increasingly antiabortion — because of Republicans. I wrote: “The statistic that he leaves out? The overall number of Republicans has shrunk from 35% of Americans not too long ago to 21%, the lowest point in more than a generation, and the prime reason is that moderates — including and perhaps especially those with a moderate stance on abortion and related social issues — have been leaving the GOP in droves.” Read the rest from May 21, 2009: “Santorum’s ‘Elephant’ tramples the numbers on abortion.”

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