“Voters Are Smarter Than the Media”: The Pundit Class Misjudged the American People

For weeks, the political-industrial complex was sure that these 2022 midterm elections would be a bloodbath for democracy, a “red wave”—or better yet, a “red tsunami”—crashing over America. …

But that’s not what happened. Voters rejected antidemocratic secretary of state candidates, as well as the prognostications about what they cared about most heading into the polls. Perhaps Representative Ruben Gallego summed it up best when he texted me, “Voters are smarter than the media.” Indeed, just about everything the media suggested voters didn’t care about, they cared about passionately. …

The political-industrial media complex was wrong. You can blame polls for some of the faulty predictions; Trafalgar, for one, flooded the zone with junky partisan polls. But much of what happened looks more like groupthink that happens when you’re trying to make a supposition on too little information. CONTINUED

Molly Jong-Fast, Vanity Fair


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