The day after

On Facebook Live last night, I said that the media narrative, once a victor was declared, would be telling in how the public interprets the election. Today's overarching media narrative is best summed up in this one tweet:

The truth is none of us know as much as we publicly purport to.

— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) November 9, 2016

The search for "what happened" has taken on a couple of dimensions. The first is the media's own recognition that it grossly underestimated large portions of the population and thus failed to predict the outcome. In a WaPo piece, Margaret Sullivan wrote:

To put it bluntly, the media missed the story. In the end, a huge number of American voters wanted something different. And although these voters shouted and screamed it, most journalists just weren’t listening. They didn’t get it.

A GOP insider quoted in Politico also blamed the establishment, "Even in the face of polls that showed it very close, [the press and DC insiders] said that Trump had almost no chance. It was because they couldn’t imagine it happening."

This article in Politico refutes Sullivan's claim by pointing the finger of blame on American voters:

He slung praise upon a constituency that was starved for the respect of a plain-speaking candidate, and they rolled over on their backs and grinned, tongues akimbo, as he scratched their bellies.

The media is also looking at the pollsters. In the Guardian, Mona Chalabi, points out that social science polling is not hard science and interpretation introduces bias. Americans are partly to blame for our faith in surveys. Instead of recognizing unpredictability, "you’d rather hit refresh on a little web page that tells you how America will vote. Too bad the numbers were wrong."


The final dimension goes deeper than the topical "missing the story" and speaks to the established paradigm that underlies assumptions about politics. These suppositions, faith in numbers and data, dependence on the wisdom of the political establishment, failure to recognize the entrenched anger of rural America, the discounting of Trump supporters as an angry uneducated minority, an unfailing faith in minority turnout for Clinton, and an underestimation of the GOP turnout machine produced a general consensus that Clinton would win. For the media, insiders, and many of us, this paradigm was shifted early this morning. Donald Trump harnessed an energy that many chose to ignore and  was successful.

This leaves me questioning my own assumptions about Americans. In the Nation, Joan Walsh writes, "At this moment, it feels like everything we know about politics is wrong." That's how I feel and it's a little disorienting.