Why this is different from 2016

As I touched on yesterday, the 2024 presidential election is starting to have echoes of 2016. We’ve got the entire media (on both sides) dishonestly whacking away at the Democratic candidate in the name of trying to manufacture ratings, even while going soft on a scandal-plagued Republican candidate because everyone already knows he’s scandalous. But I think it’s really important to focus on what’s different this time.

The media spent every single day of the 2016 election cycle pushing false and misleading headlines about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Yet none of that had any deciding impact. How can I say that? According to every expert statistical analysis that’s been performed in the years since, Hillary would have won if not for the last minute Comey letter. The media’s year and a half of lies about Hillary didn’t hand Trump the win. That all happened solely in that final fateful week. Everything that happened prior to that week ended up being meaningless.

So here we are in 2024, and the entire media is once again intent on pushing false and misleading narratives about President Biden’s fitness. Nevermind that Biden, jetlagged, short on sleep, ill, and on cold medicine, was roughly as coherent as Trump on an unusually good night. Biden is fine, Trump is the one who’s deep into dementia, and so of course the media is pushing the opposite narrative for effect.

But none of this is going to matter. Why? Look at the polling averages. The 2024 election was tied within the margin of error before the debate, and it’s still tied within the margin of error. Nothing changed. This means that no one out in the real world thinks that this debate mattered or that there’s anything wrong with Biden. All this wall to wall fictional media hype about Biden’s fitness isn’t impacting the people out there who are going to do the actual voting.

This is simply going to be yet another one of those elections where the entire media lies about the Democratic candidate the entire time, and we simply have to overcome it. Remember, we did overcome it in 2016, if not for a last minute fluke. And while another fluke can happen, there’s no reason to expect that it’ll happen in the way it did in 2016, or that the shift will even go in the same direction this time. That’s the thing about flukes: they’re not predictable, and anyone who claims to be able to predict flukes is full of it.

Aside from the fact that there isn’t going to be a Comey letter this time around, I believe there’s a much more important difference in 2024: us. No really. You have to understand what it was like back in 2015 and 2016, when the entire media (including the beloved MSNBC) was spending every single day pushing false narratives about Hillary’s emails. I was pretty much the only person trying to push back against it. I was new to this line of work and I didn’t have much influence. I did what I could, but it was just me and the handful of people following me back then.

This time it’s an entirely different game. There are a night and day number more people reading Palmer Report now than there were back in 2016. And that’s because so many more of you are now in a place where you recognize the media’s false narratives and you want to be able to push back against them effectively.

It’s also not just Palmer Report this time around. In 2024 there are a number of other political analysts and activist groups who are willing to call out the media on its bullshit each day (Meidas Touch, Mueller She Wrote, Aaron Rupar, just to name a few). I don’t see any of these folks as competitors. I see them as a welcome relief. This is more of what we need.

As for the Palmer Report audience and community, you’re a large army at this point, and you’re eager to go out and set the record straight. You’re also willing to go out and do the kind of work that needs to be done in order to win any competitive election: small dollar donations, volunteer shifts, knocking on doors, phone banking, sending voter registration postcards, you name it.

So yes it’s going to be different this time around, because we’re different. We’re better at this than we used to be, and we’re more powerful than we used to be. We’re not going to let the media screw up this election. We’re going to fight back, work hard, and be smart, and we’re going to win: Donate to Palmer Report