The New York Times Fooled Again
The Grey Lady insists on mistaking partisan right-wingers for moderates
Political journalists love going on the hunt for the rarest of unicorns, the genuine political moderate. These human weathervanes, who shift direction to match the blowing wind of public opinion, make for great copy. They have the drama of the divided soul and handily personify (and therefore seem to explain) shifts in the electorate.
Unfortunately, true moderates are very difficult to locate. Most so-called independents in fact lean in one direction or another and simply prefer to avoid affirming a partisan identity. The voters who are genuinely up-for-grabs are not, typically speaking, moderate so much as they are conflicted. They are drawn to different ideas from competing parties and vary depending on what issue is salient at a particular time. But part of what makes them conflicted is a disengagement from normal politics, which they only pay intermittent attention to. As political strategist Ian Haney Lopez notes,
The conflicted voters in the middle who toggle between the two parties — and thus the voters who determine elections — are not “moderate.” They are low-information voters who are not paying attention.... More than that, they often quickly bounce between progressive and reactionary views of the world (but certainly do NOT hold nuanced, considered, centrist views). They are “conflicted,” in the sense that they can be pulled in very different and possibly extreme directions.
Finding such people and getting them to explain their political thinking is damnably hard since they are chameleons that, to the extent they have politics at all, tend to change depending on the environment they are in.
This difficulty in finding genuinely conflicted voters has particularly bedevilled the New York Times, which has fallen into the habit of misidentifying clear right-wing partisans as moderates. Perhaps owing to the fact that conflicted voters are difficult to accurately identify, but equally likely because Republican-leaning partisans often like to present themselves as middle-of-the-road types pushed into the GOP by liberal extremism. This is a popular narrative on the right and one to which the Times is all too susceptible.
On Sunday, the Times featured an article by Jeremy W. Peters and Matthew Cullens about Virginia’s gubernatorial race which emphasized that many conflicted voters embarrassed by Trump were now willing to give the GOP a second chance. Here is one voter profiled:
“I’m a Hillary-Biden voter,” said Glenn Miller, a lawyer from McLean, as he walked into a Youngkin rally in southern Fairfax County on Saturday night that drew more than 1,000 people. He explained his tipping point: Working from home and hearing his teenage daughter’s teacher make a comment during a virtual lesson about white men as modern-day slaveholders.
“There are a lot of people like me who are annoyed,” he said, adding that he was able to vote for Mr. Youngkin because he did not associate him as a Trump Republican. “My problem with Trump was I thought he was embarrassing. I just don’t think Youngkin is going to embarrass me or the state.”
As Laura Clawson noted in Daily Kos, the “details” of Miller’s life don’t match up with this account:
Details like his political contribution history, which leans very Republican. Details like the piece he published before the 2020 election railing against race-based admissions and critical race theory—before critical race theory became a Republican rallying cry!—at Quillette, a publication that attempts to launder alt-right thinking into intellectual respectability and has repeatedly promoted racist pseudoscience.
Responding to critics such as Clawson, the Times appended a note reading, “An earlier version of this article referred incompletely to Glenn Miller. A frequent donor to both parties, he has been active in Virginia in local efforts opposing the elimination of race-blind admissions tests in schools and has spoken out against critical race theory.” (Even this correction is misleading since, as the journalist Jonathan Katz pointed out, Miller has given almost exclusively to GOP candidates since 2016).
On Twitter, Jeremy W. Peters described Miller as “a political independent who works for a nonprofit that helps vulnerable women.” The novelist Jacob Bacharach fact checked this claim and noted on Twitter that Miller isn’t an employee but rather sits on the board of such a charity. Further, the charity itself seemed to do little or nothing to help vulnerable women. The charity Miller oversees is, Bacharach notes, “a phony nonprofit that has zero actual programmatic activity!” (I recommend reading Bacharach’s thread for the delicious details).
In her Daily Kos column, Clawson cited a parallel case of misidentification: “Last week, it was Sarah Maslin Nir’s report on a public school paraprofessional leaving her job and moving in with her parents over a vaccination mandate—a report that omitted the woman’s history as a Trump-supporting anti-vaccine activist who took part in an attack on a COVID-19 testing site.”
This exact same pattern of misidentifying voters occurred in an article the Times published on October 21, 2020 by Elaina Potts. The article dealt with Georgia voters who had mixed feelings about Trump but were going to vote for him anyways. The correction appended to the article tells the story:
An earlier version of this article contained several errors. It referred incompletely to two Atlanta-area voters, omitting their connections to Republican politics in Georgia. Natalie Pontius, an interior decorator near Atlanta, served as a consultant for a Republican candidate seeking a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives. Jake Evans, an attorney, chairs the state's branch of the Republican National Lawyers Association and has been appointed to Gov. Brian Kemp’s election-security task force.
Yet even the correction omits the piquant fact that Jake Evans’ father was Trump’s ambassador to Luxembourg. In other words, Evans wasn’t a conflicted voter at all but an entirely partisan one with predictable politics.
If the Times keeps making the same mistake over and over again, it is worth asking why. I’ve already indicated how challenging it is to locate the authentically conflicted voter. It’s also worth noting that political reporters are likely to have sources and social networks plugged into existing partisan communities, which makes them all the less likely to encounter the conflicted voter. (Although from a journalistic point of view, the very fact that the sources are sharply defined in partisan terms should have made it easier for the reporters to do some elementary fact checking. So these articles remain reporting failures).
But perhaps the deepest problem of all is that the Times refuses to recognize Republican partisanship as a non-story and prefers the drama of tormented voters who are tugged at in many directions but end up voting, with inner remorse, for Trump and the GOP. This makes a good story. But the truth is often less narratively satisfying: it’s hardly a surprise that well-to-do white voters, the type interviewed for these stories, would vote Republican.
As an institution committed to seeing itself as a disinterested, objective voice separate from both sides, the Times is loath to acknowledge asymmetric polarization: the fact that the Republicans are becoming more authoritarian makes both-sides journalism hard. So the newspaper puts a premium on seemingly moderate Republican voices, even if they turn out to be partisans putting a spin on GOP rhetoric designed to appeal to Times readers.
The Times would do us all a favor if they stopped pretending there are many conflicted Republicans around and instead tried to come to terms with what the Republican party actually is.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Are these the same "closet Trump voters" that threw off so many polls (here's looking at you, 538) in 2016 and to a lesser degree, in 2020?
If so, it wasn't just the NYTimes who was profiling them. Most large circulation news outlets were doing the same. They are obviously not moderates, but they are dissembling partisans with motivations that span the range of low-information to right wing realpolitik .