Every time I hear some talking TV head mouthing, “Republicans are favored to take the House and Senate this election cycle,” I have to resist the temptation to throw something at the TV. This season, that bland dry statistical talking point implies propaganda for a mob of racists, sexists and insurrectionists seizing control of a major branch of American government, and our mainstream media is failing to report the whole picture.
When the talking heads attempt to explain why they so blandly mouth this talking point, they trot out another talking point, about how the party in power typically loses seats during midterm elections. They often drag up 1994 and 2010, the last two times a Republican “red wave” swept over the United States Congress, as if the corporate media is eager to jest at the wounds Democrats suffered those years.
To blithely base predictions about what’s going to happen in 2022 on numbers from 1994 and 2010 appears to be perhaps a prime example of that old saying about lies and statistics. American politics in 2022 bear little resemblance to American politics in 1994 or 2010.
To base election-season reporting on a “Republicans favored” talking point in 2022 is about as “balanced” as taking some Republican Party press release and putting it into the mouths of whoever’s deemed worthy enough to mouth election-year analysis on TV.
A less biased framing would entail discussing how patterns from Democrats’ worst midterm performances in recent history cannot be used to predict that Republicans will be “favored” in 2022. Today’s tens of millions of Republican voters, by and large, are not voting for the party as it was in 1994 or 2010 when it was toxic enough. In today’s Republican Party, what was once the lunatic fringe is now the lunatic fabric, and media reports blithely predicting tens of millions of Democrats will just roll over for these “favored” Republicans, in district after district and state after state, shouldn’t be treated as normal.
What today’s Republican Party has adopted as a campaign strategy started long before Donald Trump. He simply poured an entire refinery’s worth of gasoline on a movement the Republicans have been building for decades. Today’s frankly racist and sexist make-excuses-for-insurrection party has been developing at least since Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” which pandered to crude segregationists and cruder racists outraged that Black people were getting voting rights. It became more apparent during the Ronald Reagan-era cultivation of a conservative blue-collar vote, what back in the 1970s was called the “Archie Bunker” vote, after a TV character.
Then came the Donald Trump cult, and a Big Lie to match anything Adolf Hitler and the Nazis disseminated is now a prime weapon of the Republicans’ toxic propaganda — that the 2020 election was somehow “stolen” from Trump, and just about every Republican candidate in America today is cynical and manipulative enough to campaign on it, promising to “restore” election “integrity” in ways that resemble every dictatorship the world has ever known.
Today’s media must acknowledge that tens of millions of American voters are racist enough to think Black lives don’t matter, sexist enough to think women should be kept pregnant and barefoot, and deep enough in some right-wing fever swamp to believe, or at least repeat, right-wing propaganda that the 2020 election was “stolen.” To blithely and blandly base election analysis on the hypothesis that such voters represent a majority of people who will dutifully vote to determine the course of the country come Election Day, Nov. 8, doesn’t automatically follow.