I am not surprised that Fox News watchers were not much in the mood to watch the inaugural festivities but I am shocked that only 22% of their audience was in the 25-54 age range. I think it is safe to say that they didn’t do very well with views 24 and younger, so it appears that nearly 80% of their audience was 55 and older. Since advertising rates are tied to the prime 25-54 demographic, this is not good news for Fox’s revenues. It is also an ominous sign for the future. Every day that someone dies of old age is a day that Fox will lose audience share.
I still remember the 2010 midterms, so I don’t want to predict that the conservative movement is dead, but I think that 2010 was their high water mark. The future will be about managing their decline.
Why are you shocked? MSNBC has been beating Faux Noise in the 25-54 demo with some regularity. The problem is getting younger people to vote in non-Presidential year elections. That’s why it was stupid to let OFA go dormant. Maybe dormant isn’t exactly correct but it certainly wasn’t the force in ’10 that it was in ’08.
Virginia Republicans Ram Through Redistricting Plan While Black Civil Rights Veteran Senator is Out of Town
In Virginia they managed to steal about 7 seats through this extreme gerrymander effort.
Clearly after the last election Republicans know they can’t compete at the national level anymore, so they’re going to CHEAT like Hell and defy anybody to do anything about it! We’re going to wind up with Gerrymandered Districts in every state the likes of which haven’t been seen since the rotten burroughs of 18th century England.
And the reactionaries on the Supreme Court have already approved this. If you’re going to lose: change the rules. And then laugh at all the loser blacks and Latinos whose votes don’t count anymore.
They tried ignoring them. Then they tried to suppress their votes, but that didn’t work very well either. Surprisingly, black and Latino voters resented the blatantly racist efforts to prevent them from voting and were willing to stand in line all day if necessary to vote.
(Those efforts are still ongoing, and many of the voter suppression efforts are simply going to be expanded for 2014).
But, the Republican Party is going to try and ram through gerrymander legislation to make sure that they win and hold onto the House, NO MATTER HOW MANY DEMOCRATS VOTE AGAINST THEM!
And unless the Federal Courts are willing to intervene like they did in the 1960’s there’s nothing to stop them. How can Democrats win back blatantly stacked legislative districts? They would need to win the Governorship and both houses of the state legislatures to even have a chance to ram through legislation to undo the damage.
In some states the people might be able to prevent or undo the problem through referendums, as they have in Ohio. But, As the Wisconsin legislature showed, the GOP is desperate to rig the election and will stop at NOTHING to accomplish their goals. They attached their bill to a spending bill, so that the people couldn’t put it on the ballot and vote it down. And in 1/2 the states there’s NO citizen referenda.
And it’s not at all clear that voters will punish them for it either (see Governor Scott’s victory as prime example).
Oh, I don’t know. The R’s will TRY to steal, but these guys wouldn’t know a strategy if it bit them in the ass. These things have a way of backfiring on the perpetrators. EX: MA screwing around with the way to appoint interim senators so ROmney wouldn’t be able to appoint a replacement for Kennedy.
I don’t know exactly HOW this will bite them, but it will. Count on it.
And no .. Democrats never do blatant crap like this .. many reasons for it .. but they never do … and anyone that tells you that both sides do it .. in this case .. are lying
Umm, they do it all the time in Illinois, Calvin. Corruption doesn’t belong to just one Party.
Not really. Their redistricting plans are nothing like that of the remainder of the country. What most Democrats push is non-partisan redistricting, which gets the votes about proportional to the seats. Illinois is probably the only example we have, and even then…it’s not tilted in favor of the Dems that much. Maybe like +2-3; not going from 20-20 to 27-13.
Mmmm, Joe Walsh was actually winning until he hit the brick wall of Elgin which was grafted onto his district, then he spectacularly lost. I’m hapy, but it was gerrymandering to tack a largely non-white city onto a district historically suburban and rural and predominately white. I’m happy with the results, but I do see that it was just like what the Republicans did. “Graft” was too strong a word, but there is plenty of that here too and, yes, it is bi-partisan.
You can see a similar trend in the demographics of the Tea Party itself. (It’s hard to make a direct comparison, because the percentage breakdowns are structured differently.) I quote from a 2011 Harris poll:
“A much higher proportion (49%) of people over 65 than of Baby Boomers (36%) and younger generations (37% of Gen X, aged 35-46 and 34% of Echo Boomers, aged 18-34) are Tea Party supporters”.
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/mid/1508/Ar
ticleId/718/Default.aspx
The American “conservative” movement is certainly not dead—it is only braindead. But still ambulatory…
I’ve often wondered why Fox lights their sets so bright it seems the makeup is slowly melting. It appears they do this because their audience is half-blind.
That’s why the 2012 elections were such a big deal. It was their last plausible shot at a dominant governing majority.
They make new old people every day.
yeah, but we weren’t voting for Nixon the FIRST time.
I’m 60, and Nixon seared me for life. No fucking way in HELL I will ever vote repukeliscum. We need to remind aged 60YO folks like me just exactly what it is about G Gordon Liddy that we found so remarkably nauseating in 1972. LIddy and his clones are still there.
True, but old people are dying off almost as fasting as they’re becoming old. (Not as fast because of the size of the baby boom generation.)
The big demographic change in the electorate is the 4 million 18-year olds who are becoming eligible to vote every year in this decade.
here is what is needed, from a former candidate (c’est moi!):
Someone, either here or at DK, made a brilliant observation. They explained that FOX didn’t start off really insane. They started by being just a tiny bit to the right of average. Once people were comfortable there, they moved just a bit farther, and then farther. Those who were along for the ride never realized that they were being slowly brainwashed. It’s a brilliant way to create an army. BUT, it’s self-limiting, because anyone who wasn’t there at the beginning can’t catch up. From the middle, where most people are, FOX just continues to seem more and more crazy. Eventually, there will be no one left who was there at the start, and the whole movement will collapse.
I’m guessing that all echo chambers tend to become more extreme via the self-reinforcing feedback loop you describe.
You may be right, but if republicans in states they control so rig the electoral game so that Dems can’t win national races or state majorities, as they are working at right now in PA, WI, MI, VA, then it hardly matters what the demographics are.
You may be right.
On the other hand, I work with Senior Citizens (Companion Care) and I have seen several life long Democrats who – as they undergo a cognitive decline – start watching Fox news, start believing it, and start spouting right wing talking points.
So – just because a 50 year old votes Democratic does not mean they will do so at age 75.
But they won’t be able to do so for long, will they?
My brother-in-law retired and now sits in front of FoxNews all day. In the course of a few years, he’s gone from Normal to Birther-adjacent.
Was he Conservative to begin with? It’s much faster to brainwash somebody who actually wants to believe you.
OT: Panetta lifts the ban on women in combat roles. That’s a big deal
2004 was their high-water mark.
2010 was a fluke.
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So, clownshow Charlie Rose thinks anyone cares what the Three Stooges think? I know it’s like 5 .. but still .. Goodwin and Meacham are the worst of that lot .. ugh!!
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I was surprised at the universal acclaim President Obama will be one of the great presidents in US history. Great achievement on economic recovery, preventing a slide into a depression. The passing of Affordable Health Care in first term could have been undone if he had lost the reelection.
It was quite a long time ago that Keith Olbermann (then still on MSNBC) pointed out that the average age of a Bill O’Lying viewer was 71.
Fox has always had a limited, albeit devoted, demographic. But their success is not in their main audience – it is that they are a means to get crazy right wing memes into the general discussion.
Decision-makers, the other news organizations, and the high-information public are all forced to monitor what Fox is saying and pass it on or address it in some way. A recent example was the Unskewed Polls nonsense. There are many other examples dating back to the Swift Boat Liars.
There is no equivalent on the left. There is no single media source that can, simply by covering a topic 24 x 7, force the major media to deal with it.
If there were then right now we’d be having a major national debate on the rash of vote manipulation schemes the GOP has employed and plans to employ from Gerrymandering to Electoral Vote allocations. Everyone would be aware that the House GOP has a majority despite getting only 47% of the House vote nationally. It would be a scandal that wouldn’t go away because the leftwing news channel wouldn’t drop it.