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Concealing Key Data at 538
Harry Enten of the data journalism website 538 had a piece headlined “Sanders Isn’t Doing Well With True Independents” (5/25/16) that argued that “there is no sign that true independents disproportionately like Sanders.” A “true independent,” in this usage, is one who doesn’t lean toward the Democrats or Republicans; the idea that Sanders does relatively well with such voters was part of the argument that Sanders would be more electable than Clinton in a general election.
Citing a recent Gallup poll (but using numbers beyond those available at the link provided), Enten reported that while Sanders does better than Clinton among Democratic-leaning independents, the same is not true with the true neutrals: “In the Gallup poll, Sanders had a 35 percent favorable rating among independents who don’t lean toward either party. Clinton’s favorable rating with that group was 34 percent.”
It sounds like “true independents” have very similar feelings toward Sanders and Clinton—until you think about the addendum Enten adds:
One could argue that Sanders has greater potential with these true independents than Clinton: Just 63 percent of them had formed an opinion of him, according to the Gallup poll, while 83 percent had done so for Clinton. But it’s also possible that these true independents will turn against him in greater numbers as they learn more about him.
Though Enten presents this as information that could cut either way, you can deduce from it the key data that 538 conceals: The percentage of non-partisan independents who have an unfavorable opinion of Sanders is 28 percent—for every five who like him, four dislike him—whereas for Clinton, 49 percent have an unfavorable opinion, a 5-to-7 positive/negative split. In other word—contrary to Enten’s whole argument—“true independents disproportionately like Sanders.”
What to Do About Poverty? Don’t Ask
In nine debates between Democratic presidential contenders, corporate media moderators failed to ask the candidates a single question about poverty. (Sometimes candidates brought up the issue unprompted—Bernie Sanders raised it 12 times, and Hillary Clinton five times.) By contrast, moderators asked 30 questions about ISIS and terrorism. With 45 million below the poverty line, Americans were literally a million times more likely to live in poverty than to have been killed by Islamist violence since 9/11.
Doubting Bill Clinton’s ‘New Life’ for Democrats
In a New York Times op-ed (5/21/16), Pittsburgh Post-Gazette executive editor David Shribman wrote that Bill’s Clinton’s “effort to pull the Democratic Party—which had lost five of the six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988— back into political relevance,” left many liberals feeling “bruised, even betrayed,” by his pro-corporate policies—“but no one doubted that he had given new life to the party when he left office in 2001.”
Actually, plenty of people have doubted this (e.g., Jeff Cohen, LA Times, 4/9/00)—and for good reason, since Clinton left Democrats in a much worse political state than when he was elected. To take just one measure: Bill Clinton came into office with 258 Democratic House members, which was at the time a fairly typical number. The Democrats had controlled the House every Congress but two since 1931; even when the Republican presidential candidate won in landslides in 1972 and 1984, the GOP didn’t manage to win more than 192 House seats.
Then came Clinton’s “triangulation”—shifting toward Republican positions—which, as Shribman writes, allowed Clinton to pass “major parts of his agenda, from a trade deal with Mexico and Canada to welfare reform to a crime bill.” The NAFTA trade pact in particular alienated labor unions, a key part of the Democratic coalition. This led directly to the 1994 midterm massacre, in which the Democrats lost 52 seats and control of the House; since then, the Democrats have only led the House twice, with Republicans mostly having 220 seats or more.
The Glass Is Full of Half-Truths
“When Did Optimism Become Uncool?” wonders a New York Times Sunday Review piece (5/12/16) by Gregg Easterbrook. “The country is, on the whole, in the best shape it’s ever been in,” Easterbrook writes. “So what explains all the bad vibes?”
It would be easier to be optimistic if the case for optimism didn’t involve so much manipulation and misrepresentation (FAIR.org, 5/13/16). For example, Easterbrook writes that “unemployment [is] now below where it was for most of the 1990s, a period some extol as the ‘good old days.’” Actually, in the ‘90s, labor force participation—the broadest measure of employment—was 3 to 4 percentage points higher than it is today.
“The American economy is No. 1 by a huge margin,” Easterbrook boasts. But if you adjust for purchasing power—which you should when comparing living standards—the largest economy in the world is China’s, by more than a trillion dollars.
Cable’s Guests on Abortion Mostly Anti-Choice—and Male
Rachel Larris and Sharon Kann (Media Matters, 6/1/16) surveyed 14 months of evening cable news on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. They found a discussion that’s, first of all, dominated by the part of the population that doesn’t have abortions—62 percent of those talking in segments on the topic were men. Out of 370 guests in the study period, only one was an advocate for reproductive rights for women of color, who face disproportionate restrictions.
On the three networks overall, guests opposing abortion rights outnumbered pro-choice guests about 2-to-1. This was due not only to a preponderance of anti-choice guests on Fox News, where they outnumbered pro-choice guests more than 5-to-1, but on CNN as well, where the ratio was more like 2 1⁄2-to-1. Only on MSNBC did pro-choice guests outnumber anti-choice guests, by about 4-to-1.
