Ill start with the more pleasant side of accountability. In hindsight, I feel good about pieces explaining why Trump was unlikely to win re-election, why Democrats should hope Joe Biden would run for president and why the U.S. would struggle to contain the coronavirus.
I feel less good about largely writing off Biden after he lost New Hampshire and Iowa and about treating the 2020 polls credulously. The common thread: Politics is less predictable than we journalists sometimes imagine. Ill try to do a better job of remembering that.
That idea also helps to explain the misperceptions on voter turnout. In 2020, turnout soared, yet Democrats did worse than expected. Yes, they defeated Trump, but they failed to retake the Senate (for now) and lost ground in the House and in state legislatures.
How could this be, when the big demographic groups with low voter turnout Millennials, Latinos and Asian-Americans lean left?
Because the infrequent voters in these groups are less liberal than the frequent voters. Latino nonvoters, for example, seem to have a higher opinion of Trump than Latino voters, Yanna Krupnikov, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, told me. Over all, nonvoters split roughly evenly between Democratic leaners and Republican ones, a recent Knight Foundation study found.read more
Pundit Accountability
