It Will Be Hard for Democrats to Replace Graham Platner

If there is one thing savvy consumers of political news should have learned over the years, it’s to never take news about political candidates — or the responses of people in the political arena to that news — at face value without considering when it is released and who benefits from it. That’s not to say that it’s all lies and conspiracies; most campaign-season stories are at least partially true. But journalists are often fed information by people with agendas, and the journalists and their editors often have agendas, too. Both of those things affect when and where stories get published. It’s usually not hard to see who would want a particular story, or poll, out at a particular time.

That observation informed how I read the Eric Swalwell stories and Democrats’ response to them: People who had been allies and supporters of Swalwell for years turned on him at precisely the moment when the Democrats needed to narrow their primary field for the California governor’s race, and when Democrats were worried that waiting on the stories would give Republicans the chance to hit Swalwell once it was too late to replace him as the Democrats’ nominee. When a problematic candidate is a Republican, by contrast, we tend to see partisan pollsters put out favorable general election polls for them at critical junctures of the primary, which just happen to aid their partisans in arguing that the candidate should be nominated. I noted this dynamic over a decade ago, contrasting two polls by left-leaning pollster Public Policy Polling: one that talked up self-destructive Missouri Republican Todd Akin before the 2012 primary, helping him win, and one that promoted independent Kansas candidate Greg Orman while there was still time for the Democratic candidate Chad Taylor to drop out and clear the field for Orman.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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If there is one thing savvy consumers of political news should have learned over the years, it’s to never take news about political candidates — or the responses of people in the political arena to that news — at face value without considering when it is released and who benefits from it. That’s not to say that it’s all lies and conspiracies; most campaign-season stories are at least partially true. But journalists are often fed information by people with agendas, and the journalists and their editors often have agendas, too. Both of those things affect when and where stories get published. It’s usually not hard to see who would want a particular story, or poll, out at a particular time.

That observation informed how I read the Eric Swalwell stories and Democrats’ response to them: People who had been allies and supporters of Swalwell for years turned on him at precisely the moment when the Democrats needed to narrow their primary field for the California governor’s race, and when Democrats were worried that waiting on the stories would give Republicans the chance to hit Swalwell once it was too late to replace him as the Democrats’ nominee. When a problematic candidate is a Republican, by contrast, we tend to see partisan pollsters put out favorable general election polls for them at critical junctures of the primary, which just happen to aid their partisans in arguing that the candidate should be nominated. I noted this dynamic over a decade ago, contrasting two polls by left-leaning pollster Public Policy Polling: one that talked up self-destructive Missouri Republican Todd Akin before the 2012 primary, helping him win, and one that promoted independent Kansas candidate Greg Orman while there was still time for the Democratic candidate Chad Taylor to drop out and clear the field for Orman.