… Biden’s apparent resurrection from relic to runaway front-runner has illustrated a chasm between perception and reality. …
So why did the media spend the past few years getting the state of the Democratic Party so wrong? …
The most important ingredient in the delusion was Twitter. It is hard to exaggerate the degree to which the platform shapes the minds of professional political observers. Part of Twitter’s allure to insiders is that it creates a simulacrum of the real world, complete with candidates, activists, and pundits all responding to events in real time. Because Twitter superficially resembles the outside world’s political debate — it does, after all, contain the full left-to-right spectrum — it is easy to mistake it for the real thing. But the ersatz polity of Twitter doesn’t represent the real world. CONT.
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine