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Brian Beutler: “If you’ve followed elections closely in recent years you’ll recognize this as part of a pattern: Polls say Democrats are doing pretty well, elites question the polls, reporters echo elites—but then voters cast ballots and reality converges with data rather than headlines. Many liberals I know find this frustrating, even inexplicable. Will the strategists and commentators who set expectations based on whatever vibe they’re picking up at the moment never learn? Never face professional consequences?”
“I confess to finding this frustrating as well. But the phenomenon doesn’t spawn from bad journalism so much as from the clash between insecure liberalism and kayfabe conservatism. These sorts of headlines are inevitable, and aren’t even really falsifiable, because they reflect Democratic neurosis and artificial Republican aggression back out into the world, and the affects persist despite the more reliable barometer of public polling.”
“Two things would make this sort of thing less prevalent: First, a liberalism that was more confident in its appeal to a majority of the country; second, a press corps that was better at detecting false Republican bravado, and more willing to identify it as such.”
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