I wrote this on October 28th:
Let’s start with the media environment. I’ve actually been watching almost no politically related television for the simple reason that almost none of it has anything to do with the upcoming elections, let alone actual issues that might be taken up by the next Congress. The media has been keeping the country almost in an election blackout, with coverage mostly related to conflict in the Middle East and the Ebola virus (see, for example, current front-page of CNN.com). I don’t know how to account for this fear-heavy media coverage, but I do know that it cannot help the Democrats that they have not been able to get any kind of aspirational message in front of the electorate. I’m tempted to blast the party for incompetence, but the media simply isn’t covering any political messages at the moment. If the Democrats had a compelling message, I can’t honestly say that things would be appreciably better because the electorate would never hear it on the news.
So, this election about nothing is a new thing, and while I can anticipate that this favors the Republicans, I can’t figure out how disastrous this media environment is on, say, a scale of one to ten.
We have our answer now. On a scale of one to ten, the media coverage leading up to this midterm election was a TEN on the scale of hurting Democrats.
This is not to absolve Democratic Party strategists of any responsibility for this defeat, but the simple fact is that the polls were way off, basically eight or nine points too favorable for the Democrats. We cannot explain this polling error by reference to bad messaging. Something deeply emotional was going on with the electorate that caused them to break sharply against the Democratic Party beginning around the time of the first beheading by ISIS and then turning again sharply against us in the last days of the election, possibly related to anxiety over the Ebola virus.
The media are how these images and fears were primarily transmitted to the voting public, although the Republicans also made it part of their campaigns. The pollsters may find other factors that led to their epic failure, such as misreading the demographic makeup of the electorate, but the simple truth is that a lot of people either lied to pollsters about who they intended to vote for or changed their minds over the last two months and last few days.
We used to have a term for something similar called the Wilder Effect. This referred to the Virginia gubernatorial election of 1989 in which black Democrat David Wilder did significantly worse than the polls had indicated that he would do. It was surmised that a lot of voters refused to admit that they weren’t going to vote for a black candidate and that supposedly undecided voters broke against him by an anomalous percentage. This phenomenon is also known as the Bradley Effect because something similar happened to black Democrat Tom Bradley in the 1982 California governor’s race.
In yesterday’s case, it may be that a lot of people simply were influenced by a pervasive environment of (essentially) media-induced terror and it caused their brains to go reptilian. There is plenty of research to support the fact that people gravitate to the right when they feel physically threatened. This process goes on on a subconscious level which is not conducive to verbal articulation. People may not want to admit that they’re voting for the “wrong” party, but they go ahead and do it.
Unless someone has a better explanation for the results out of Vermont, I have to assume that some kind of Terror Effect is the primary culprit in the late break against the Democrats. Yes, they were in a challenging environment anyway, but that doesn’t explain why the environment suddenly grew disastrously worse.
Someone can analyze how the late money was spent as another potential explanation, but I believe that last night was caused by a media environment that made Democratic priorities impossible to communicate to the electorate. Better strategists couldn’t have changed that.