In October, Newsweek ran this piece of mine which looked at why some Democrats like Congressman Ted Lieu and consultants Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier thought the Democrats could hold the House of Representatives in the midterms.
After looking at their arguments, and data, I came to this conclusion:
Despite the title of this piece, Republicans may yet win the House. That said, this race is close. It's unlikely we'll see a "Red Wave" that gives Republicans an overwhelming majority. There's almost no chance that Democrats will expand their majority. But if Democrats turn out more than pollsters think, they might just defy history and hold the House.
Meanwhile, here was the conclusion of the The New York Times' lead political analyst:
"Here's the thing about elections: When they break, they usually break in one direction. And right now, all the indicators on my political dashboard are blinking red — as in, toward Republicans."
He wasn't the only one. Every leading publication settled on a narrative and could not break out of it – Republicans were going to demolish Democrats. Even when Politico's own poll showed that Democrats could win, despite the narrative they had been pushing, they decided to trash their own poll as an outlier.
Everyone makes mistakes. When any of us make a bad call at work, we're expected to own up to it, learn from it, and let our bosses know how we'll correct course so we don't make the same mistakes again.
Yet, there seems to be very little of that from the political media. This, despite the fact that trust in the media is at an all-time low. Kari Lake, who may be Arizona's governor, said she'll use her gubernatorial power to "reform" media, and Donald Trump is threatening reporters with being arrested and sent to prison to be raped.
The one thing media audiences need to hear from them—accountability and reflection—is utterly missing. They are giving American very little reason to trust them, moving forward.
It isn't as if this is the first time that political media was radically off, when reporting in the lead up to the election. In 2016, it was a foregone conclusion that Hillary Clinton would win, that there was a "blue wall" that would stop Trump, and Republicans would go back to nominating normal people.
As media tried to assess what happened and why they got it wrong, in 2016, the Times' Maggie Haberman made an astute observation: "We don't know what happened, because the tools that we would normally use to help us assess what happened failed," Haberman said. "The polling on both sides was wrong."
Reporters have no such excuse, this time. There was a lot of polling leading up to the midterms that showed no imminent red wave. Polling site Split Ticket simply removed a lot of partisan junk polls from their aggregate and found a very close race, with Democrats poised to surprise. Political media, at large, just chose to ignore data and go with the narrative that was bouncing around the echo chamber.
For the sake of trust in the media, and for the sake of delivering news and not guesses, it is essential reporters stop trying to prove that they can guess what is about to happen, and stop echoing narratives they hear in Washington. Our political media must stop believing polling coming from partisan sources, aimed at reinforcing the narratives they want to believe.
Most of all, it is time for political media to admit they are getting it too wrong, too often, and step away from horse-race coverage based on guesses, narratives, feelings, and a lot of questionable data that gets tossed out there.
If political media want to get into the business of selling spin, and advising people on what they think is going to happen, there's always room in my industry as a political consultant.
But if the media want to rebuild trust in them, and be more accurate than they have been, now is the time to take stock of yet another election they blew.
Eric Schmeltzer is a Los Angeles-based political consultant who served as press secretary to Rep. Jerry Nadler and former-Gov. Howard Dean.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
