Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Menace to Society

[Brexiter]

We begin today with Brianne Pfannenstiel of the Des Moines Register and the all-too-predictable announcement of the Selzer poll showing that Number 45 has a nearly 30-point polling advantage over his nearest rival for tomorrow’s Iowa Caucuses.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is in a distant second place, having overtaken Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

But even as Haley has moved into second place, a new Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll indicates her support may be based on “shaky ground,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, who conducted the poll.

The Iowa Poll shows 48% of likely Republican caucusgoers pick Trump as their first choice for president — a slight dip from the 51% who said the same in December. [...]

Selzer, who is president of the nationally recognized firm Selzer & Co., said Saturday’s results bring to mind those of the final Iowa Poll before the 2016 Republican caucus. [...]

The poll shows troubling signs around likely caucusgoers’ enthusiasm for Haley, which could become particularly important as Iowa faces what is expected to be a historically cold caucus night following a blizzard that dumped a foot of snow across much of the state.

While Haley has surpassed DeSantis, Selzer said, “most of the rest of the data here is not good news.”

I’m reminded of a term that I know from the college football message boards and blogs called a “sad touchdown.”

It’s when a team that is being totally blown out in a game manages to score a touchdown, usually in the last 5 minutes of a game when the opposing team’s defense has second and even third-stringers in the game. Nevertheless, the game is still a blowout.

That’s what Nikki Haley’s second place polling finish in Iowa reminds me of: a sad touchdown.

And Ron DeSantis has become like Florida State in the Orange Bowl.

Judd Legum writes for his “Popular Information” Substack that Twitter/X owner Elon Musk has been trafficking in a lot of misinformation about various aspects of voting.

This week, Elon Musk has repeatedly promoted false and misleading claims about voting to his 168 million followers on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. Musk then used these erroneous claims to justify massive restrictions on voting in the United States, including eliminating early voting, abolishing most mail-in voting, and imposing new identification requirements.

On January 9, for example, Musk posted that "Arizona clearly states that no proof of citizenship is required for federal elections." This revelation was accompanied by an image posted by an X user named Mark Jeffery, a cryptocurrency investor and self-published author of science fiction novels. A highlighted portion of the image states that individuals who do not provide proof of citizenship will be provided with a “federal only” ballot.

On January 10, Musk posted that he recently learned "illegals are not prevented from voting in federal elections," and that "came as a surprise." That claim is absolutely false. [...]

Musk's alarm about non-citizen voting is not grounded in fact. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice evaluating 23.5 million votes across 12 states in 2016 found 30 incidents of suspected non-citizen voting, 0.0001% of the 2016 vote in those jurisdictions. A 2022 audit of Georgia voting rolls found about 1600 noncitizens attempting to register to vote over a 25-year period, and no non-citizens were actually allowed to register or vote.

Clare Malone of The New Yorker reports on accusations that a CNN reporter working in Gaza faces has pro-Israeli bias. (Note that the catalyzing event bringing about this specific accusation against this specific reporter is more trafficking in misinformation by Elon Musk.)

On December 12th, the CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward became the first Western reporter to enter Gaza without an I.D.F. escort since the war began. Crammed into the back seat of a car, she and her crew captured images of the bombed-out buildings and streets of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza which shares a border with Egypt. According to one recent U.N. estimate, eighty-five per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents had fled there. Crowds milled outside a bakery, and parents walked hand in hand with their children past mountains of rubble. “The Israeli military says it has hit Gaza with more than twenty-two thousand strikes,” Ward said during the ride. “That by far surpasses anything we’ve seen in modern warfare in terms of intensity and ferocity, and we really, honestly, are just getting a glimpse of it here.” [...]

Ward told me that she had never been in direct contact with the I.D.F. about getting into Gaza. When I asked whether she was opposed to entering Gaza with a military escort, she took a long pause before answering. “I personally felt for me it will be difficult to do the type of reporting that I typically do under those circumstances,” Ward said. “The embeds that I have seen with the I.D.F.—it’s very difficult to have conversations with ordinary people.”

But that stance hasn’t shielded Ward from criticism. Two days after the October 7th attacks, she and her crew were on the ground in Israel, covering the aftermath, when rocket fire from Gaza started to crackle through the air. Ward and the others ran to a roadside ditch, where Ward, lying on the ground, caught her breath and delivered into the camera a composed synopsis of the situation. The segment was good television—and plainly captured the fear and anxiety that existed along the border following the Hamas attacks. But, soon after it aired, a right-wing YouTube channel called TheQuartering overlaid a satirical voice-over on the footage, making it seem as if Ward and her team had exaggerated the danger of the episode. The video got five million views on Twitter—Elon Musk replied to the post—and misinformation quickly spread, jumping from Twitter to TikTok and Instagram. In a matter of days, Ward’s report became an emblem to some of the Western media’s supposed willingness to prop up sympathies for the Israeli side.

Heather Cox Richardson writes for her “Letters of an American” Substack about a face-off and the U.S.-Mexican border between U.S. Border Patrol agents and the Texas National Guard that resulted in the deaths of a women and two children.

Last night a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande that marks the border between the U.S. and Mexico near Eagle Pass, Texas.

U.S. Border Patrol agents knew that a group of six migrants were in distress in the river but could not try to save them, as they normally would, because troops from the Texas National Guard and the Texas Military Department prevented the Border Patrol agents from entering the area where they were struggling: Shelby Park, a 47-acre public park that offers access to a frequently traveled part of the river and is a place where Border Patrol agents often encounter migrants crossing the border illegally.

They could not enter because two days ago, on Thursday, Texas governor Greg Abbott sent armed Texas National Guard soldiers and soldiers from the Texas Military Department to take control of Shelby Park. Rolando Salinas, the mayor of Eagle Pass, posted a video on Facebook showing the troops and saying that a state official had told him that state troops were taking “full control” over Shelby Park “indefinitely.” Salinas made it clear that “[t]his is not something that we wanted. This is not something that we asked for as a city.” [...]

Abbott and MAGA Republicans are teeing up the issue of immigration as a key line of attack on President Joe Biden in 2024, but while they are insisting the issue is so important they will not agree to fund Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s 2022 invasion until it is solved, they are also unwilling to participate in discussions to fund more border officers or immigration courts. Today, once again, Biden reminded reporters that he has asked Congress to pass new border measures since he took office, but rather than pass new laws, Republicans appear to be doubling down on pushing the idea that migrants threaten American society and that an individual state—Texas, in this case—can override federal authority.

Rogé Karma of The Atlantic looks at the relationship between the media and public opinion as it relates to the economy.

Journalists have long gravitated toward calling out problems rather than highlighting feel-good stories. Exposing wrongdoing and injustice is, after all, part of the job description. (More cynical readers will point out that audiences have long rewarded the press for doomerism.) But according to new research from the Brookings Institution, when it comes to economic news, this proclivity for negativity has lately gotten even more pronounced. For the study, the economists Ben Harris and Aaron Sojourner compared an index of the “sentiment” of economic coverage in a set of mainstream newspapers with what is actually happening in the economy. They found that, from 1988 to 2016, changes in the two tracked closely together: The sentiment of economic stories tended to become more positive when measures such as inflation, employment, and the stock market were looking good, and more negative when they were looking bad. At the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency, however, the relationship began to break down; coverage became more negative than the economic fundamentals would predict. After Joe Biden took office, the gulf widened even more. In an email, Harris and Sojourner told me that they found that from 2017 to 2023, the media’s “negativity gap” was nearly five times larger than it was during the previous three decades. [...]

For their analysis, Harris and Sojourner didn’t look at Fox News or other partisan media. Instead, they used the San Francisco Fed’s Daily News Sentiment Index, which tracks the degree of positive and negative language in economics coverage in a set of 24 newspapers, including The New York Timesand The Wall Street Journal. (This sort of text-based sentiment analysis has its limitations but is helpful for tracking directional shifts over time.) They found that something changed over the past seven years: Even controlling for the underlying indicators, economic coverage has gotten sharply more negative overall. The authors stress that they can’t prove that this shift caused the drop in consumer sentiment. But if people are influenced by what they read, then it would stand to reason that the shift in coverage has played a role. [...]

We also can’t rule out the possibility that, when it comes to the relationship between the media and public opinion, the causal arrow runs in the opposite direction: Maybe the vibes are driving the coverage, not the other way around. Journalists are people, after all—in fact, we’re people who are paid to be attuned to what other people are experiencing. In a forthcoming paper, the political scientist Christopher Wlezien analyzes the relationship between consumer sentiment and media tone from 1980 to 2013. He concludes that although the influence runs in both directions, public attitudes toward the economy tend to shape economic coverage far more than the coverage shapes people’s attitudes. Could this explain the divergence of the past few years? If history is any guide, few forces can tank public perceptions of the economy as dramatically as bouts of high inflation can. The media might simply be doing their job well, picking up on already terrible economic sentiment. “When I was working for the Biden administration, we were terrified of saying anything too good about the economy, because we didn’t want to seem insensitive to how people were feeling,” Harris, who previously served as the assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy, told me. “I think journalists are under similar pressure.”

Amy Hawkins and Helen Davidson of the Guardian report that Beijing is mad that Western leaders have been calling and congratulating Lai Ching-te on his win in Taiwan’s elections.

Lai won an unprecedented third term in power for the pro-sovereignty Democratic Progressive party (DPP) in Saturday’s election, with more than 40% of the vote. Lai is taking over from the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen, who has been president since 2016, promising to continue her foreign policy efforts in resisting China’s plans to annex Taiwan.

A spokesperson for the US state department congratulated the Taiwanese people “for once again demonstrating the strength of their robust democratic system and electoral process”.


Speaking to reporters shortly after the result, US president Joe Biden, who plans to send an unofficial delegation to Taiwan next week, reiterated that the US does not support Taiwanese independence.

Nonetheless, China’s foreign ministry said on Sunday that the US state department statement “seriously violated US promises that it would only maintain cultural, economic and other non-official ties with Taiwan”. The Chinese ministry said it had lodged “solemn representations” with the US over the comments.

The US, the UK, the European Union and Canada also offered their congratulations to the DPP. The UK’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, said the result was “testament to Taiwan’s vibrant democracy”.

Finally today, The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer about another issue that conservatives had with former Harvard President Claudine Gay.

Grammatical hysteria was just the thing to inflame the base.

“Elite University Scrubs Multiple Web Pages About ‘Identity Recognitions,’ Pronouns,” screamed the headline on Dec. 18 in the ultraconservative Daily Caller, whose story then reverberated in the right-wing echo chamber of the Tennessee Star, the Ohio Star, the Virginia Star, the Florida Capital Star, the Michigan Star, and possibly some other, more originally named publications. (Possibly not.) [...]

Sometime shortly after publication, however, the Daily Caller discovered that the pages weren’t “scrubbed” after all — just temporarily down. So it added to the article the ungrammatical, “the links to both pages are now been restored.” The conspiracy unraveled quickly, but the nonstory remained on the site.

Things looked different in the Star galaxy. On those news sites mirroring Poulter’s original story, the text was never updated. It still erroneously states, “Both links now route directly to the Diversity and Inclusion homepage.” That might have been the case for a minute, but it’s no longer true.

True or not, it took just a few weeks for the Harvard non-controversy over pronouns to snowball along with a host of other allegations about plagiarism and qualifications and antisemitism. The resulting din led Gay to resign on Jan. 2, while MAGA claimed victory over an elite Ivy League institution.

Try to have the best possible day everyone!