The Media’s Last-Ditch Effort to Teach Voters What They Should Care About

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at journalistic efforts to absolve Democrats of their economic sins and convict Republicans of imagined racial ones.

Are Democrats out of Touch?

As the midterms approach and Democrats resign themselves to the rebuke their majorities face, some partisans in the press are growing increasingly frustrated with those members of their class who dare to report on the condition of the country.

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, for example, received an invitation to a reeducation class taught by the New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones after he made the the mistake of acknowledging that the economy is at the forefront of Americans’ minds heading into November’s midterm elections.

Replying to the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, who asserted that “the United States is facing the greatest danger to its constitutional system since at least the 1950s, if not the *18*50s, and millions of people are like: Yeah, but gas, man,” Kacyznski noted that “it’s a midterm year and the party in power typically loses seats and people are more concerned right now about crime, inflation, the economy.”

“Dismissing people’s real concerns isn’t a way to win them over,” he argued.

That was intolerable for Hannah-Jones, who characterized Kacyznski’s explanation as “highly problematic, if you think anything that is happening right now with more than 200 election deniers on the ballot and candidates openly say no they will challenge election results if they don’t win is just typical politics.”

“This tweet really exemplifies why I’m holding a Democracy Summit for journalists next month. I hope you will sign up,” she offered. Notably, a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week showed that a greater number of voters consider Democrats a threat to democracy than they do Republicans.

Nichols took a similarly pedantic tack in responding to Kacyznski, telling him that “what you’re really saying is: the way to win the voters is to be as irrational as the voters and pander specifically to things they believe (such as “Congress can fix global inflation”).

If Nichols is using “pander” to refer to the argument that Democratic congressional candidates should propose solutions to — or at least promise not to take further action to exacerbate — inflation, I suspect that is in fact what Kacyznski means.

In order to maintain the same standard of living that could be afforded at $71,000 (roughly the median American household income) in January 2021, a family would need to be making over $80,500 today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And voters, if not Nichols, recall that Democrats just spent over $700 billion on the “Inflation Reduction Act.” They’ve used those same powers of recollection to reach back to their high school economics lessons and conclude that the bill would do more to drive up prices than to bring them down.

As they watch their 401(k)s depreciate and weekly expenses skyrocket, voters might also remember the $1.9 trillion spent on a “coronavirus relief package,” or the $500 billion on student-debt cancellation that left lower-income Americans with the bill for the source of higher-income Americans’ economic advantage.

Meanwhile, Democrats’ focus throughout this campaign cycle has been on defending a maximalist position on abortion that would allow unborn children to be terminated at any stage of pregnancy, and the Biden administration is further signaling the party’s priorities by aggressively prosecuting peaceful pro-life protesters.

White House chief of staff Ron Klain also piled on Kacyznski, retweeting a reply to the CNN reporter submitting that “it really takes some gall for the media to tell us that an economy with 3.5 percent unemployment is a disaster.”

For stating the obvious reasons for the political reality we find ourselves in, Kacyznski himself is condemned as sinking Democrats — and offered lessons on how to do better. In truth, though, there are more than a few Democrats who would have thanked the president and others in party leadership for recognizing ten months ago what Kacyznski has just called attention to.

Headline Fail of the Week

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait chides conservatives for noting that the election-reform bill Georgia Republicans passed in 2021 was not, as the president of the United States argued, “Jim Crow on steroids.”

“Don’t Congratulate Republicans If Voter Suppression Fails,” Chait implored readers.

But Georgia — a purple state — is setting records for early turnout after the bill in question extended the early-voting term. The governor who signed the bill into law, Brian Kemp, is set to comfortably defeat Stacey Abrams, who doubled down on the president’s inflammatory rhetoric on the legislation. Forget acclamation, Republicans would settle for an apology.

Media Misses

• Newsweek insists that the aforementioned Abrams wasn’t suggesting abortion as an inflation fix even though she submitted that “having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas, it’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs,” after specifically being asked to talk about which of her would-be actions as governor would help Georgians cope with rising prices.

• Ted Cruz joined The View on Monday morning, where he quickly and effortlessly extracted an admission from Whoopi Goldberg that she thinks the 2016 presidential election was stolen from Hillary Clinton and the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was stolen from Abrams.

• President Biden bragged on Twitter that in 2022, the deficit had been reduced from 2020, Donald Trump’s last year in office. But the deficit increased by nearly $400 billion from 2019, the last pre-pandemic year of the Trump presidency.

• Chinese dictator Xi Jinping had his predecessor perp-walked out of the Communist Party’s 20th Congress over the weekend and some political operatives saw it as the perfect opportunity to . . . hit Florida governor Ron DeSantis.