Reports of the Democrats’ demise in the midterms have been greatly exaggerated
Last week Palmer Report warned you to ignore the sudden doomsday hyperbole spilling out across the airwaves, insisting that the Republicans were suddenly a lock to retain control of the Senate in the midterms. One TV pundit after another trotted out one outlier poll after another, to make the dramatic case that one Democratic Senate candidate after another was toast. Here’s the thing: it wasn’t accurate. Now we’re seeing just how inaccurate it was.
Remember that infamous poll that had Democratic candidate Phil Bredesen down by fourteen points in the Tennessee race for U.S. Senate? Two new polls have been released in that race, one which has Bredesen down by just three points (Reuters), and one which has Bredesen up by one point (Vanderbilt). Has this race suddenly changed that much overnight? No. It’s just that, back when cable news was yelling around about the fourteen point poll, the average of polls in this race said that Bredesen was only down by around five points. It was a competitive race then, and it’s a competitive race now.
Palmer Report also warned you not to buy into the doomsday headlines insisting that Brian Kemp had succeeded in rigging the Georgia Governor’s race in his favor. Those articles conveniently left out the part about the legal action that always follows in these situations, and the frequency with which these things are overturned. Sure enough, everyone from the ACLU to the NAACP is now suing, and the backlash has prompted Stacey Abrams supporters to line up for early voting in droves. In fact, Republican voter suppression schemes usually only tend to work well when they’re not exposed in advance. The day Kemp got caught, it was a victory for the Resistance, not a time for surrender.
These are troubling times. Most of the news is not good in general. It shouldn’t be sugarcoated. But the media also shouldn’t try to paralyze you into staring at your television by telling you that twenty things are on fire when only ten things are on fire. We don’t know how a lot of these midterm elections will turn out. But we do know that Bredesen was never down by five points, and that Kemp was never in position to simply get away with his voter suppression. Tune out the ratings-driven doomsday hype, and get out and fight!
