Before moving on from election week, I would note a new-to-me genre of story, one that perpetrators may hope will quickly be forgotten. It’s a subset of the numerous advance predictions this fall of a disaster for Democrats in the midterms.
Steve Clemons, Semafor’s political columnist, headlined his Monday newsletter, “Precriminations.” I also encountered the term “pre mortem,” or as Politico founding editor John Harris put it in a late October column, “the (Democrats) readiness to perform an autopsy on a living patient.”
Oh where, oh where did we go so wrong, was the Democrats’ lament.
Clemons and Harris were observers of the trend, but the nation’s largest newspapers were practitioners with a vengeance. As it happened, the New York Times and Washington Post provided nearly identical examples late last week.
“Top Democrats Question Their Party’s Strategy as Midterm Worries Grow.” headlined the Times. The lead paragraph said that Dems are “openly second-guessing their party’s campaign pitch and tactics, reflecting a growing sense that Democrats have failed to coalesce around one effective message.”
Over at the Post, the headline was “Democrats fear midterm drubbing.” The text explained, “there’s a growing sense among Democrats that there’s little they can do at this point to combat the combined forces of history and economics.”
I am not as much a deplorer of horse race political coverage as some. Who is likely to win the big contests seems a legit story. But it surely is excessive to explain why Silver Slipper lost by a humiliating 20 lengths before the race has even been run.
News cycles being news cycles, the inside dopesters at the Times and Post have quickly moved on, with scant reflection that I can see in their hot takes on why their previews of just a week ago were so far off.
By Thursday morning, the Post had executed a 180-degree turnaround and was reporting “The Republican finger-pointing has begun.”
The new consensus seems to be that James Carville’s truism, “It’s the economy, stupid,” did not hold. Abortion rights and threats to democracy were far from secondary in getting some voters out and voting for Democrats.
I did see honorable exceptions to the forget-what-I-just-said norm.
One of the Post’s few right-leaning columnists, Henry Olsen, weighed in Wednesday morning with a straightforward analysis of why his big red wave prediction had been ill-founded. Missing Republican weakness in the suburbs and voters who mildly disapproved of President Biden’s performance but still voted for Democrats were among the mistakes he cited.
Channel-surfing Friday afternoon I caught enough of Fox News’ The Five to see smirking host Jesse Watters concede he had been way over the top in touting the red wave and was in process of paying off a $1,000 bet. He and his fellow panelists speculated (and Fox should know) that maybe Republican voters don’t hate Biden as much as they do Hillary Clinton, thus suppressing turnout.
An even better performance was 538’s Nate Silver with a wonkish essay on election eve predicting Republican gains but casting doubt that the anticipated red wave would materialize. Focusing on polling, Silver raised the possibility that the profession had taken so much heat for wide misses in underestimating Republican margins in 2020’s races that the pollsters were over-correcting this time.
The Wall Street Journal is a special case. Its political reporting is straight down the middle, but its opinion columns and editorials overflow with pieces test-driving Republican talking points or touting Republican chances.
By Thursday, the Journal opinion section had pivoted too, with a long editorial on “The GOP’s midterm failure,” claiming a silver lining: “The party wasted a great opportunity, but at least we may get gridlock in Washington.” That’s preferable, in the Journal’s eyes, to two more years of a progressive agenda.
I learned in reporting on the 2020 forecasting and projection cycle that pollsters get together for extended retrospectives after each election to compare notes on what they did right and wrong, recalibrating for the next.
Journalists reflect some too, though as has often been observed, resolutions to pull back from endless coverage of polling ups and downs are not to be trusted. Maybe a more modest improvement could be in the cards: Hold off on the inevitable who’s-to-blame takeouts at least until the literal morning after.
