Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today answers one big question:
The biggest divide in politics is not between Left and Right; it’s between political junkies and everyone else. There is a massive chasm between those who actively seek out political news and the vast majority of the country. The gap has been exacerbated by tectonic shifts in the media environment. I summarized the changes that led to this “News Gap” in a recent post:
It has never been more difficult for voters to follow the news or for politicians to get attention. The traditional political media is at its nadir in influence, reach, and credibility. Audiences are declining and becoming more ideologically homogeneous. All but the most engaged voters have tuned out political news altogether.
Social media used to be a major conduit for news — no more. Elon Musk rendered Twitter utterly unusable. Facebook, once the most dominant media platform in the world, moved away from news and politics. TikTok emerged as a major news source for younger voters, but the information on that platform is often present without context; and credibility can be impossible to divine.
Readers (and the writer) of this newsletter have barely noticed the changesy. We watch cable news, we download podcasts, subscribe to newsletters, and (some of us) still use Twitter to track current events. We are junkies. We seek out political news at every opportunity. But for the vast majority of Americans, who do not actively engage with politics and the news, these changes significantly altered their media diets and what they know about politics and politicians.
Pfeiffer says that 3 polls this week address that phenomenon and somewhat answer the question about why this race is so close. Navigator Research showed that people aren’t hearing about the Inflation Reduction Act — and if they do they support it:
A CBS poll found that people have no idea about all Biden has done on climate change:
As Pfeiffer makes clear, this isn’t just a matter of Democratic messaging, it’s a structural problem. People who pay attention back Biden:
The massive differences in news consumption may also be driving political support for the two candidates according to a fascinating NBC News poll:
Biden holds an 11-point lead among traditional news consumers in a head-to-head presidential ballot test, with 52% support among that group to Trump’s 41%. But it’s basically a jump ball among digital media consumers, with Trump at 47% and Biden at 44%.
And Trump has a major lead among those who don’t follow political news — 53% back him, and 27% back Biden.
The more news you consume, the more likely you are to back Joe Biden. I don’t want to make the classic causation/correlation mistake. Biden does better with older and college-educated voters and those cohorts tend to be more avid news consumers. Do people approve of Biden because they are more informed about politics or do people with similar value systems to Biden just pay more attention to the news? This is a “chicken or the egg” situation, so there is no simple answer but there are reasons to believe that the “News Gap” is shaping political opinions.
And this is relevant too:
This would explain why the Biden campaign remains on TikTok despit agreeing to ban the platform if they refuse to divest. They cannot afford not to.
Pfeiffer doesn’t seem to have any bright ideas about how to deal with this but is instead just making the point that the old style of communicating through ads, direct mail and earned media isn’t going to get it done. I have no idea either. Nobody wants to get thousands of emails or texts and I would guess that most people don’t read them anyway. Door knocking? Sky writing? I just don’t know.
Maybe people will tune in as the election looms but I wonder. People are so turned off that they just don’t want to think about politics anymore. Score one for Trump. He’s made it all so toxic that he’s made half the country recoil in horror.